The Little Match Girl: what Frank Moon did next

Frank Moon: now there's a name to conjure with. This alumnus of The Urban Folk Quartet has done loads of good work on the folk scene, having also been integral to The Destroyers. So it was a curious pleasure to see him on stage at the Lilian Baylis studio at Sadler's Wells last night in The Little Match Girl, having broken out, so to speak.

Looking at his CV, I realise now that this a somewhat partial, folk-orientated perspective. But still...

I wasn't quite sure how he got there. So after watching this blissfully realised - but appallingly sad - story, I asked him.

"Why, why does the little match girl have to die?" I pleaded first, my thoughts already halfway to Syria and the refugee crisis. The traces of my new year's hangover might also have had a hand in it.

"I know, it's awful, isn't it?"

However, as he'd been working on the show with its choreographer, Arthur Pita, on and off for more than three years the misery of The Little Match Girl's existence must have long been a secondary concern: you just wouldn't be able to get any work done otherwise.

So how did it happen?

"I met Arthur through The Destroyers at the Birmingham Dance Festival over five years ago. The band was asked to write some music for him and they nominated me to do the composing, which became Utopia.

"Then a little while later I had a call from him, saying that he'd found it very easy working with me and had a commission from the Royal Opera House to do Metamorphosis, based on the Kafka novel. Would I be interested?"

Nice. This what they call "the big time".

"So I said yes! And the Little Match Girl has been our third collaboration: this is the third Christmas in a row that it's been on. It's just that the first year it was on in Ipswich and didn't get reviewed until it came to London."

The show is primarily a dance piece, as you would expect given the venue. So the music is integral to the show: Moon composed and performs it, on stage, surrounded by a panoply of musical instruments, including a fiddle, oud, theramin and ocarina, making layers of sound. The theramin creates the difference between the faintly Dickensian tone of the first half of the show and the dreamlike sequence, set on the moon, that follows the little match girl's unnecessary death from cold, brought on by poverty and having no adults to take care of her. Excuse me while I struggle to compose myself again...

Moon, brilliantly, wears a motorcycle helmet with an aerial on top when he plays the theramin. Because yes.

The scraps of dialogue in the show are in Italian. "Because Arthur - who is Portuguese himself - didn't want the thing to feel exactly like Dickens. I worked on the words with a couple of the cast members, who are from Italy."

Since then Moon and Pita have done something else for the Royal Ballet called Whelan Watson: other stories and on the night I saw him, Moon was recovering from the disappointment of hearing that the show's transfer to New York had been postponed, despite tickets already having been on sale.

So he's doing OK, Frank Moon. You can catch The Little Match Girl in Manchester, at The Lowry, and in Ipswich at Dance East before the end of this run. And then he's off to Taipei with it for a while.

As I left the theatre the full extent of what this means came home when I looked at the three production posters on the wall outside the Lilian Baylis studio.

There was The Little Match Girl, with Moon's name on the poster.

 There was this one, which we all know, with music by Howard Blake.

 And then there was this one.

 You might just be able to read who did the music for that one: Tchaikovsky.  Moon's in good company.



* If you liked this post you might be moved by the final picture to read an earlier blog called A Gallery of Folk Musicians Lying in Foliage. Or this one about another of the folk scene's successful theatrical composers, John Tams, who wrote the music for War Horse.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your interests. This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Musicians get police escort to Isle of Wight festival 'disaster zone'

Frank Moon (below, looking very much as he must have felt by late yesterday), also of The Urban Folk Quartet and the Bev Lee Harling band, unexpectedly ended up opening the Isle of Wight festival's main stage with Cerys Matthews last night after one of the most stressful experiences of his career trying to get to the festival site.

'The festival is a disaster zone," he told me on the telephone. "I can't see how on earth they're going to get everyone on site. Last night - Thursday - was the opening night and it's supposed to be going on until Sunday but the whole experience was a farcical adventure.

"We got on the ferry at Portsmouth at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon and spent four hours going in circles on the Solent. After a while we heard it was because the ferry wouldn't be able to unload cars because they were backed up right to the ferry port and traffic wasn't moving.

"Eventually we got off the ferry and sat on the ramp for another two and a half hours, by which time we'd missed our stage slot. We couldn't get hold of anyone to talk to so we decided to turn around and go home. We'd just convinced everyone in the car park to let us turn around when we managed to get hold of someone on site, who said they had no bands and they'd like us to turn up if possible.

"The police got us an escort, which was great. But then someone from the festival - the police said it was a man called John Giddings - told them that all the bands had already arrived, which set us back again. We had to get hold of the festival organiser and ask him to ring the police to put things straight.

"The police were forced to take us all the way around the island to find a route into the festival site and - when we finally got there - the guy running the stage we were supposed to be playing on, said 'I'm sorry. You're too late. We can't put you on'.

"Mysteriously, Howard Jones was already there. He was still in Portsmouth the last time we'd seen him, so he was obviously better at hustling than we were. But he took ages to set up, there was supposed to be a Pink Floyd band on and between these two things they decided that there wasn't space for us. Then someone said 'We could get you on the main stage if you go there right now'.

"When we got there The Stranglers had already set up and we couldn't use a lot of their stuff. Plus there were only four channels available and we needed five. The crowd was baying for blood because the show was running so late and they wanted The Stranglers.

"Cerys's guitar had gone missing somewhere between the two stages and The Stranglers wouldn't lend her one, despite having racks of them, which I thought was a bit much. So I had to play some guitar parts I didn't really know. Plus we had this amazing African musician with us called Tunde Jegede, who didn't get to play a note because they didn't have enough channels.

"We only did three songs. We opened with a Hugh Cornwell song called Chardonnay, which went down quite well, and then did a Woodie Guthrie song and Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. But we had to stop before Cerys could do her show-stopper - Road Rage - because they said there wasn't time.

"The Stranglers were about to go on when the tent shifted - the whole stage was inside an enormous tent - and they had to evacuate the area. We went to get some dinner in a Portakabin somewhere - which was something at least - and, memorably, Primal Scream were in there too.

"On the way back to the ferry we saw the car that had been in front of us when we got off the boat and it had only moved 500 yards down the road. The road from Fishbourne, where you disembark, to the site is five miles and we were pretty much the only people on the ferry coming back.

"The people in charge of the festival were not really with it. It was just so stressful - farcical. I think what happened was that some heavy lorries had got stuck in the mud at the festival entrance because there weren't good enough tracks for them and it stopped everything else.

"If I'd been running things I would have sent someone down to the ferry port to find out if there were any bands stuck in traffic. There was just no communication between the back of the queue and the festival. One of the festival organisers actually said to us on the telephone 'Well, everyone's in the same boat' as if that was good enough.

"It's not as if the situation was impossible to anticipate either. It was raining, but not in any unusual quantities. It was just typical British summertime weather.

"But the police were brilliant. It was them who made it happen for us. In particular I'd like to say thank you to  Martin Norman - policeman 1908 - and Stuart Woods (I think), who was number 14411. Policeman 1908 was the one who got us out of our mess, he was also at the main tent evacuating it later on, and then when we got back to the ferry terminal he was there as well. I reckon there must only be about three policemen on the island but they were doing great work."

Frank will be having a little lie down today.

Here's Cerys Matthews singing Road Rage, which seems appropriate.

* You might also enjoy this post about how to get yourself on Later with Jools Holland. Or this one, which is a silly picture gallery of folk musicians lying in foliage.

* If you'd like to get posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed you could *like* its Facebook page. Or follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Bev Lee Harling wants you to buy her

Bev Lee Harling's cheeky, cabaret-style show has had me transfixed twice now.

First of all she supported The Destroyers at Wilton's marvellous Music Hall before Christmas, where she wandered into the middle of the auditorium playing a fiddle before clambering on stage to chop vegetables suggestively and treat a number of kitchen implements, a power drill and a typewriter as if they had been designed with percussion in mind. I couldn't help noticing that on stage with her as one of her Kitchen Sink Band was Frank Moon, who's also in one of my favourite outfits, The Urban Folk Quartet.

It turned out that Bev is Frank's missus, loosely speaking, which was interesting in a kind of Do all the good bands know each other? kind of a way. (I'd also discovered that evening that Frank's played with The Destroyers.)

Then, a few days later with a sense of growing disorientation that partly abated when I remembered that I'd been invited to The Mediaeval Baebes' gig at The Destroyers one by a PR, it materialised that Bev was also in The Mediaeval Baebes. She also began that show, walking down the aisle of a beautiful Christmassy church in the City wearing flowers in her hair and playing She Moved Through the Fair on her fiddle.

What these two performances had in common was certain kittenish theatricality.

So when she launched her first album, Barefoot in your Kitchen, slightly over a week ago in a noisy Friday-evening restaurant in Shoreditch I went along, mainly to see what would happen next? Would it turn out that Bev was also the long lost, non-identical twin sister of Josienne Clarke or that her album was being produced by someone from Smooth Operations, in which case I might be able to sell the rights to my blog as a kind of long-running soap opera for daytime TV.

In the event, nothing more improbable than a rather fine gig occurred, although it seemed a minor miracle that the incredibly noisy restaurant simmered down nearly entirely during the course of the set until by the end every head seemed to be turned Bev's way.

For the album is sheer delight.

I mean how could you not fall head over heels for musician who's written a song called Buy Me, to avoid having to point to the table with the CDs on it at gigs?

The songs are light, well-crafted, teasing fun that wouldn't be out of place in a burlesque environment. Bev's fine taste has been turned to producing something highly distinctive, beautifully musical and sexily theatrical. Buy Me is hilariously knowing and I also particularly enjoy Robots and Angels for it "zip boom" chorus, Tired of the City for the cameo of the child's voice and the wonderful stripped down cover of The Police's  Every little thing she does (is magic) on which Bev accompanies herself solo and pizzicato on the fiddle.

I can imagine seeing her on the telly and would love to see her festival gig list fill up for this summer because live she's enchanting, something that could only improve in the sunshine with a glass of cider. I hope you get a chance to see what I mean.

Love, love, love this album. It's just so much fun.

* Listen, buy, embed or download it here.

* Read another Bev Lee Harling related post here.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed you could *like* its Facebook page.

The Urban Folk Quartet's secret weapon

Slightly over a year ago I stood in an upstairs room of a crumbling old printworks in Dalston and watched a large number of people jump up and down in a tiny space to a band I'd never seen before. They were fabulous but I really thought the building might fall down.

The band was The Urban Folk Quartet.

Perhaps I'm biased. It was a heady first experience, then due to the magic of Facebook (I was contacted by the band when they saw I was coincidentally in Asturias at the same time as them) I also saw them in Spain, a few months later while I was on holiday. They played in the small hours of the morning with the moonlit Mediterranean behind them and that kind of thing can turn a girl's head.

They were my top musical pick at Cropredy this year by a long way. I also really liked Lau, Moore Moss and Rutter and The Travelling Band. But The UFQ's sense of performance was more finely honed than anything else I've seen for a very long time and the joy that blasted from the stage while they were occupying it was pandemic-ly infectious.

For they have a secret weapon.

Paloma Trigas's smile. She was subsequently referred to as Paloma Smiley Face in my neck of the field whenever the subject came up.

Joe Broughton, who is her partner as well as her fellow fiddler on stage, has a sense of humour that is dry almost to the point of sarcasm. "You know what the best thing about that smile is?" he asked. "It's already on her face when she wakes up at 6am in the morning. Try and imagine what that's like."

Here's a taste. They launched their second album on Friday.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed you could *like* its Facebook page.

My other Cropredy posts are

John Tams on Steven Spielberg and Richard Curtis

Fairport's line on The FLK hardens, a bit

ahab's Four Weddings and a Funeral moment

John Tams to Bellowhead: what are your politics?