📅 Thought for today:
‘I’m more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren’t waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.’
— David Edelstein
#thoughtfortoday #music #livemusic #gigs #eivor #musicians #UnionChapel
Live music has been a key component of a fulfilling life for me for a very long time. From watching pub rock bands in Manchester pub basements in the early 1970s as a teenager through working as a stagehand and roadie, to managing and now just watching bands.
As a professional stagehand I worked for the bands I was told to work for. Don’t like The Osmonds? Off you go son, enjoy yourself. Then you discover what good musicians they are, how professional, how brilliant their kit. The Osmonds toured with Pink Floyd’s lasers. So my musical tastes broadened – musical travel broadens the mind.
My first post-lockdown gig should have been Genesis at the soulless shed that is the O2 at Greenwich – great capacity, but it is still a shed. So I’m secretly pleased that it got postponed to next Spring the week before it was due to take place.
Instead, my first live music event since March 14th 2020 was at Union Chapel, that magnificent gothic revival late-Victorian listed building in Islington (London). It has a fascinating history and a rare, superb, church organ hidden behind screens. There is something fitting about a live music event on consecrated ground in a congregational church.
The artist was Eivør Pálsdóttir, known mononymously as Eivør, a Faroese singer-songwriter and actress. Her vocal range is extraordinary and her style varies from A Cappella native Faroese folk to hard rock. It was so nice to be back watching a band. Over the next two months, I have 10 live events – mostly gigs and plays – as all the deferred events start piling up – and in some cases clashing.
I wouldn’t have it any other way – we need our live events for our own health.
