29 Aug 2011

The Correspondents

I went to see a band last night, in a room above a pub in Islington. Not the ideal place to see a band. Especially if you’re in your late 40s and the room is crammed from wall to wall with boisterous teens and ‘twenty something’ art students, pogoing, squeezing past each other, falling into each other, boys showing off their dance moves, girls knocking back bottles of Becks. 

Twenty years ago it would’ve been me jumping up and down in a Camden Market hand made tee-shirt, Great Gear Market jewellery, hair freshly dyed, totally immersed in the underground Gothic look. But now...

So, feeling out-of-place, I squeezed through the throng of nubile young bodies and made my way to the bar so that I could watch from a safer distance.

Then something strange happened. Just as I was preparing to edge my way back downstairs to join my friends, the warm up band left the stage and a lean, bespectacled young man wearing a floor length black cloak took their place. He surveyed the crowd with a wry smile, prowling the stage like a stadium rock star and the crowd roared back. It was like something exciting was about to happen. Then the music started, he threw off his cloak, revealing a pierrot doll inspired black and white ruffled jacket and he was off; dancing like a whirling dervish; part Freddie, part Ziggy, with a touch of Joel Grey from Cabaret. His voice, one minute it was a fast-spoken incomprehensible babble, the next, a soaring confident roar. I was, unexpectedly, mesmerised.

It was the first singer I’d seen for many years that made me want to find out more about him. And the name of the group; The Correspondents.