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

The UFQ and 650 kids blow the lid off the Albert Hall

The mind boggled. The project sounded like fun though: most of The Urban Folk Quartet and several hundred kids were going to be making a helluva racket in the Albert Hall. Now I love The UFQ, who deserve a much wider audience than they currently command. And I love the Albert Hall - for that moment when you enter the sonic cathedral and your head involuntarily flicks backwards while your pupils widen; it's a space that produces a physiological reaction. Plus kids in great numbers cease to be kids really and simply become a super-impressionable crowd, something to be bent to one's will. At least, that's what a totalitarian dictator would say and all my favourite teachers had a touch of Stalin about them.

That's Joe Broughton, though, for the sake of clarity.

So it was pretty exciting that this particular group of 650 kids from the Bradford area had been roped in to take part in the Music For Youth Schools' Prom. Not that much corralling had been necessary, judging by the alacrity with which they were throwing themselves into the proceedings, their purple and orange T-shirts a riot of pointillism in secondary colours - and that was before the music even started.

The concept was familiar to me because I'd seen Broughton, Paloma Trigas (above) and Tom Chapman with The Stamp Collective at the Vortex in Dalston about two years ago - although that stage of this idea's evolution there were about 30 music students involved, instead of 650 11 to 21-year-olds.

"Yes," said Broughton. "This is the biggest group we've ever worked with. And lots of them had never played a musical instrument before - that's why we're a bit drum-heavy."

The concept was born back in 1997, when Broughton (above) left the Birmingham Conservatoire to join the Albion Band - but was invited back to the college that autumn to run The Folk Ensemble, a group that performed by ear, its numbers expanding and contracting depending on who was available. The results impressed - try and imagine the level of energy required to organise 30 musicians using only your voice and your body, let alone 650 - and a similar invitation followed from the Barbican; then a series of commissions including The Stamp Collective, Wildfire Folk and Music for Youth. Alumni have included Jim Moray, The Old Dance School and McNeill and Heys.

Here's a short video explaining what was going on in Bradford that also catches, in some small measure, the excitement of Monday's prom, which was the only performance by the Vivendi Sounds Bradford Massed Ensemble.

Though the logistics of getting so many people from one end of the country to the other for a one-off gig were daunting, the result was jaw-dropping.

Around 250 of the kids were also in two of the evening's featured orchestras - the Vivendi Youth Orchestra or the Kirklees Youth Symphony Orchestra -  and therefore had cellos to swirl on the spot where they stood or flutes to wave in the air, like a field of silver reeds.

There were also a surprising number of electric guitars, which made me suspect the influence of the Wii game Guitar Hero: I've never seen massed electric guitars before. But there were also a great many young people involved who had never had a musical experience. It was a heady combination of melody, rhythm, dance and atmospherics and I particularly liked the serious-faced young ladies in their saris twirling in unison at the beginning of the show. Those are their shoes (the photographer, David Firn, and I were invited to attend a dress rehearsal, as well as the show).

Broughton explained that the approach had been entirely predicated on the strengths of the kids, that it had taken nine months to pull together - 20 hours rehearsal for each participant, bringing it to a total of 13,000 hours - and that none of the performers had used written-down music. "What a lot of people would do in this situation is say 'Well, you need to get some tabla players and and some English folk players and that'll do the trick. But what you'd end up with would not be fusion, just a lot of things happening simultaneously. We didn't audition anyone and my 'composition' was the result of collaboration and finding tunes that were memorable and simple but which would allow us to build around them."

"It was totally inclusive," explained Paloma. 'We had some people who don't usually get that level of attention or support, including some with concentration issues. But it was all about a burst of positivity." Something she's uniquely suited to. "We saw some people literally switch on and lots of them are talking about what they're going to do next musically."

Tom Chapman - one of the subtlest percussionists I've seen - was highly visible at the front of the stage, on this occasion keeping the hundreds of tabla and other drummers pinned to the rhythm through the use of a cow bell (with Tom, above) and exaggerated arm movements. But, boy, did it work. "I'm now known by Music For Youth as Cowbell Tom," he grinned. "For months they had no idea I did anything else - they thought I was a professional cow bell player. Then the other day some of the organisers came to an Urban Folk Quartet gig and realised that I play other stuff as well... The triangle, for instance."

It's hard to do justice to the scale of what was achieved at the Albert Hall on Monday night. It was in tune, it was in time, it was beautiful and it used the sheer number of people standing on stage to its advantage by combining movement with sound. It was breath-taking in its ambition and awesome in its accomplishment. And that's before you even begin to think what the experience meant for the 650 young people performing on the best stage in the world and how they'll carry it and its ramifications with them for the rest of their lives.

Also, Tom's mum and dad came to see it.

* The Urban Folk Quartet are also - unbelievably - doing a UK tour at the moment and will be playing Kings Place in London on November 30 if you'd like to see the musical equivalent of a contained nuclear explosion. Here's a taste.

* And here's a blog post about their performance at Cropredy last year.

* If you would like to contact David Firn about any of these photos or other projects you think he may be interested in you can do so here.

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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.

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Josienne, Ben and The Urban Folk Quartet at The Slaughtered Lamb

Wednesday night at The Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell felt like folk central.

I went to see The Urban Folk Quartet play their new album and, while standing at the bar trying to order a plate of the fantastic fish and chips they do there - what do they put in that batter? - saw that Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker were the support. At least I assumed Ben would be there - he always is. But for some reason or other, probably connected with someone's modesty, they're always just billed as Josienne Clarke.

There was this poster up behind the bar, you see.

That wasn't it. That's just the best pic I could find of the two of them.

Anyhow, this was great news and rather unexpected. I have loved The UFQ long time, and am coming to love Josienne and Ben too, although in a more piquant and understated fashion. Whereas The UFQ demands jumping up and down and undignified whooping, Ben and Josienne are a delicate, winding and unwinding proposition that requires close attention.  Both bands are brilliant and brilliantly musical, but they're very different and I momentarily loved that they knew each other.

"Actually, we don't," said Joe Broughton . "They were asked at the last minute by Pull up the Roots because Dave Delarre dropped out. But they sound good... we heard them at the sound check."

I hung around a bit upstairs, marvelling at the way a couple of pints can go to your head if you drink them before dinner, and heard stories about The UFQ's recent trip to Estonia. Apparently it was minus 20 degrees and their luggage went missing as they passed through Schipol airport, so Joe and Paloma didn't have any warm clothes to wear. Tom did. He'd evidently been to Schipol before and had worn all his.

"We should have known really. We had to run for the connection. Still, we had this Seat Alhambra fertility wagon to drive around in." So if any of them gets pregnant we'll know they've been sitting on the bonnet.

Apart from the loss of the all-important clothing, which was returned in time to make the journey home with them, the trip was also memorable, they swore, for an evening of vodka that involved a Mahavishnu Orchestra tribute band. I nodded as if I believed them and decided that exposure can play tricks on the mind.

Downstairs in the magnificent venue with the red pentangle on the wall - American Werewolf in London stylee - Josienne was singing a song about being awkward. "I'm a strange girl, An adorable fool, Full to the brim with nothing you need. I'm just too much, But somehow not enough," she sang. And I believed her.

She has this voice that's like a precision tool for making golden, ringing shapes in the air and, in my humble opinion, Ben and Josie deserve huge success. Huge. It's as if they pull in all the energy in the room, concentrate it in some kind of musical alchemy and then spin it into shimmering cathedrals of sound. How's this for original songwriting?

I can imagine Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffiths singing that. Perhaps they will?

Anyhow, shortly afterwards The Urban Folk Quartet rocked as usual and just before they played their final encore - Cajun Bean Curd, for what it's worth - Frank Moon made a rather good and understated joke. "This song has a subtext about arts funding," he said. "Take it away..."

Ta da! :-)

As an aside, I got in touch with Dave Delarre on Twitter when I got home and asked whether he was OK? "Yes thanks. Just got held up at a guitar workshop in Cambridge and couldn't get to London in time," he tweeted back. "They're much better than me anyway!"

Everyone's so modest. It's just as well I'm here to be nice about them really...

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