Wondermentalist

This is my review of the night.

The performers did us proud. They were all so very, very good.

Jerri Hart couldn’t be there. He’d lost his voice. Really lost it. We missed him, and the audience chanted his name. Then, at my request ‘just the women’ – I felt it’s what he’d have wanted. A warm and generous audience, as Dean and I were to prove (in the sense of ‘test’) at the end.

Leonie and Asha from Rae were wonderful, I hope we’ll have them back before too long. They reminded me of why I love Radio 3’s Late Junction. They’ll now be lending Traydio that warm, eclectic, exotic Late Junction feel. Next up was Liv Torc, brilliant winner of the Vibraphonic Slam in Exeter, with her personal superhero, Anxiety Girl, and she was followed by what I think was the best Dead Poets’ Slam so far, won by Dean Parkin reading Kenneth Koch’s To Kidding Around.

The audience poem was fantastic, again, and you must read it. They chose the theme of eggs. Eggs – what are you like?  [Read it here.] And Empath Man, without the promised theme tune (get well soon, Jerri) managed to get very cross with a crowd of people before being lured up the ladder and into the basket of Scorpio Rising’s hot air balloon.

Nomad Shuffle, still expanding, with percussionist Dan adding texture and zest, did a beautiful moving self-penned number dedicated to a friend. Then Beryl the Feral, who’d put together the Eggs poem in the interval, stepped up to deliver an utterly delightful short set that removed any possible traces of cynicism that may have been lurking in the room.

Dean Parkin delivered a delightful set, including the best audience participation cheek popping I’ve ever heard – then stepped into the breach, the unfillable Jerri Hart-shaped space, performing Shingles of your Mind with me, Matt, at the end, on a blue guitar purchased that afternoon. He played the Bobby Shaftoe version and, as debacles go, it was one of the most enjoyable and best received I’ve ever been part of.

But this is all just my opinion, and I’m about as biased as you can be. Where you there? Tell us what you think. How was it for you…?

March’s Wondermentalist is looking good from the performance side, with Leonie Evans and Asha McCarthy of Rae booked to play, and Mr Dean Parkin, of Lowestoft, Suffolk, author of the collections Irresistible to Women and, imminently, Just My Luck, filling the sought-after headline slot.

That’s definitely a positive to take us forward with a spring in our step. On the other hand…I’m not too sure how the audience is going to get to hear of it, unless of course you all (audience) are regularly coming to this site, avidly reading everything then slipping off again, scrupulously leaving no trace. Maybe that’s it, you’re treading lightly upon the blog, leaving no cyber-footprint, conflating cyber with carbon and, because the thought of cyber-offsetting is too vague and upsetting, opting to make no mark whatsoever upon the pristine comments sections of the posts. Well, if that’s the case, and I’m sure it is, I salute you. I respect where you’re coming from. But there’s no need to hold back. Do not tread gently upon this good blog/Rage, rage against the drivel that I write.

So, why might the audience not hear of it? Because I managed to lose the wondermentalist mailing list. Or wondermentamailinglist as it should be known. At first I suspected random key-strokes from either me or Tom and Finn (my sons, age 4) but Chris of Macwyse – for all your mac needs – reckons it’s a hard drive anomaly. He also recommends an external hard-drive to back everything up. He recommended this calmly and philosophically, without the hint of a spec of a trace of how-many-times-do-people-need-to-be-told-to-back-everything-up-for-crying-out-loud. This was much appreciated. My own mailing list also disappeared. Posters are up, flyers are out, I’m sure the word on the street is buzzing, literally buzzing, like a swarm of bees trapped in a warm fridge.

But it remains to be seen whether we can pull the usual full house without e-mail publicity…