The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown at The Lexington

My list of "must see" bands is sadly reducing as we all get older so I was delighted to have another opportunity to see The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. 

The venue this  time was The Lexington in Islington, a place I had walked past many many times but had never visited before, so that was something to look forward to too.

Another bonus was that despite having walked all around that area when working by Kings Cross there were a few roads that I had not ticked off on my CityStrides Life Map, either because they are dead-ends or simply because I was not mapping my walk when I had been that way, so I spent an hour or so before the gig filling the gaps. That was another fifteen streets completed.

I even had time to grab a coffee and a sandwich from the local Pret before heading to the pub and in the pub I had time for a pint of Black Sheep Bitter before heading upstairs for the music.

I was quick enough upstairs to get to stand right next to the stage, something I had not managed to do with Arthur Brown for a little while. That let me take a few close-up pictures like this one.

The performance was much like the ones I had first seen in Lewes in 2023 snd twice since then. It had a lot of songs that I did not know, as well as several classic that I did, all of which were presented very theatrically. Obviously Time Captives was my stand-out song as it was entry into the crazy world of Arthur Brown way back in 1973.

It was another great evening and to cap it all off it finished in time for me to get back to the Grey Horse in Kingston for a couple of pints of The Naked Ladies.

I have walked 20% of Greater London

I used MapMyWalk to record each of my exploratory walks and CityStrides to summarise them all in one place. 

CityStrides also tracks the number of roads that I have walked on each town or city. Of most interest to me are the totals for each of the London Boroughs (I have walked every street in three of them) and the total for Greater London overall.

I have just completed 20% of Greater London. This is in terms of the number of roads walked (7,964 of 39,362) rather than, say, total distance.

The map below shows where I have walked and, more depressingly, those I have yet to do with some large areas hardly touched (there are a few gaps where I did not map my walks, such as the top section of London Loop).

My vague plans is to keep plugging away and to use every opportunity to walk new roads. For example, I have been to Royal London Hospital a few times recently and have walked quite a few new roads around Whitechapel and Stepney,

While walking 20% of London is some achievement iy is only fair to point out that I am only 4th in the CityStrides leaderboard and those ahead of me have managed 27%, 31% and an astonishing 68%. I do not expect to catch any of them.

I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again)

My claim back in May that  I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames got a slight setback this week. Not that unexpected but unwelcome none the less.

The app I use to keep a record of everywhere I have walked, CityStrides, is based on OpenStreetMap which is maintained by a community of users, including myself (much as Wikipedia is) and it gets updated both with changes to the physical world, e.g. new streets, and by clarifications, e.g. marking streets with locked gates as private.

These changes get uploaded to CityStrides periodically and when these changes create unwalked roads (or parts of roads) the unwalked sections appear as red dots.

The latest update for Kingston upon Thames created a few red dots for me, as shown here.

Frustratingly none of these were new roads, just roads newly marked s walkable, and I would have walked them when in those areas had they been marked as walkable at that time. Still, things are what they are and so I set out to walk them all.

More frustratingly, some of the dots were at the very southern tip of the Borough (I live on the northern boundary) so it was a longish ride on two buses to get me to Malden Rushett. 

From there is was a pretty dreary walk up A243 all the way to the large junction with A3, an even drearier walk along both sides of A3 to the border with Surrey and back then further along A3 to Tolworth and just beyond. That accounted for three of the four groups of red dots.

Then I was lucky. I was expecting to continue along A3 to the final group when I learned that I could directly there on a 265 bus, so I did.

The final group was a little bit more of annoying A3 but the final two streets in my quest were in an exclusive private estate so I had lots of impressive houses to look at while tracking the final dots.

And that was it, I have now walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again).

Gold Rush at The Half Moon (19 Oct 25)

I was always going to see Gold Rush on their latest return to The Half Moon Putney and this time I made something of an afternoon of it by tackling some location-based challenges in two phone Apps.

I collect Gold Gyms in PokemonGo (I have 750) and this means making repeated visits to specific locations to battle the gyms there, gaining more points each time until you read Gold level. I had a few targets in Putney and Wandsworth that I wanted to revisit, two of them in particular. Over the afternoon I got points at seven gyms and went Gold at two!

The other target was walking new (unwalked) streets for my CityStrides LifeMap. I had already walked most of Putney but there were plenty of gaps heading towards and into Wandsworth. It is a non trivial task to walk out the best route to cover new streets, I had to walk down and back a few dead-ends, but in the end I was pleased to tick-off 19 streets. This raised my total for LB Wandsworth to 975 streets which is just a midge shy of 60%.

I had to look after myself too and that started very well with an All Day Vegetarian Breakfast at Sweet Tooth in Putney, continued reasonably with a coffee in Black Sheep Coffee Wandsworth and finished correctly with another coffee and a cake at Nlack Sheep Coffee Putney.

I had not forgotten the main purpose of my trip and I duly arrived at Half Moon Putney around 6:30pm, in good time for a rest and a pint before the music started.

I do not have a lot to say about the Gold Rush concert that I have not said several times before, so I will mention Tom's guitars instead!

Tom have half a dozen or so guitars on stage and he surprised us on one song with a bright yellow one. He explained that he had been doing something else during the day (he is a co-founder of charity Electric Umbrella) and a helper had put the wrong guitar in the wrong bag.

He also had issues with his black guitar, pictured above, and had to swap it for a less iconic one for the last few songs.

Every Gold Rush concert is different, just as every Neil Young concert is, and my mood is different each time too, so different songs strike me harder each time. On this occasion my stand-out performances were Down by the River, Cortez the Killer (loved the keyboard intro) and Cowgirl in the Sand.

The night ended something over two hours after it started with some good news, Gold Rush had booked to play the The Half Moon four times next year. I will be there.

The Poltergeist at Arcola Theatre

My mission to watch every performance of a Philip Ridley play in London (and easily accessible places beyond) continued with The Poltergeist at Arcola Theatre, were I had first seen it almost exactly two years earlier.

This time it was on downstairs in Studio 2 where front row seat A12 was a sound investment at £25.

I planned the day to give me a little time in Dalston beforehand and I did a little exploring while also looking for somewhere to eat. 

It struck me that gentrification had failed to stick and the posh places that I had eaten at previously were all gone. And so I found myself, yet again, at The Speakeasy which despite being little more than a marquee is a friendly place and serves reasonable beer with good food; it was a pint of Camden Pale Ale and some veggie tacos this time. 

I remembered the gist of The Poltergeist but, as with all Philip Ridley plays, there is so much going on in the dialogue  that I knew I would be surprised, stimulated and entertained.

This was a solo performance (monologue seems inappropriate) and the heavy duties were given to Louis Davison who played the narrator, Sasha, and a host of other people. Incidentally, Sasha is a deliberate unisex name and many of Ridley's solo plays can be performed by a woman or man.

The stage was empty and the only props Davison had to play were his clothes and in his simple outfit in which he strode the length and breadth of the stage assuredly telling Sasha's story for eighty minutes.

On one level it was a simple story with Sasha and his partner attending a family child's birthday party which Sasha found difficult for reasons that gradually became clearer. Through the many conversations with the many party attendees, all played by Davison, we learned that Sasha had once been a promising artist until he had some sort of breakdown, the causes of which also emerge. 

The richness of the plau is in the dialogue, not the plot, and I was totally engaged for the full eighty minutes as I desperately tried to catch each quickly delivered word. And despite the core subject matter, a mental breakdown, the mood was often light and I laughed out loud quite a few times.

Philip Ridley has a distinctive style and voice which appeals to me immensely and The Poltergeist was yet another great example of why that is.

Entertaining Mr Sloane at Young Vic

There was a time when I was a fairly regular visitor to Young Vic but for various reasons (my changes in employment, their change in artistic directors) I had not been there since 2017 but a Joe Orton play was a good reason to go back.

It was a slow return and it took some good reviews to finally nudge me into booking and that was a non-trivial process due to my poor memory of the seating plan there. 

In the end I went for row P entirely missing that this is the front tow of the Balcony which I would have gone for automatically if I had noticed it. There seat Balcony P35 cost me £57.

The view from there was excellent and the first impression of the set was good too, this was clearly a production with some strong stylish thinking behind it.

Entertaining Mr Sloane has a simple concept, young exuberant Mr. Sloane starts renting a room with lonely middle-aged Kath who is regularly visited by her wheeler-dealer brother Ed. Their elderly father also lived with Kath.

The rich comedy came from the dialogues between the three main characters and the way that Orton wrote their words. The speech comes thick and fast with lots of short sentences that followed each other erratically, much like jokes work but with more natural language.

The stylish staging continued throughout with, for example, Mr Sloane remaining a centre of attention even when not in the scene by posing spotlight off-stage. The ending was equally stylish.

The Joe Orton script gave the play a solid base which the cast and staging enhanced. It was a marvellous return to Young Vic. I suspect it will not be another eight years before I go back.

Emma at Rose Theatre

There are obvious attractions for a play based on Jane Austen's novel Emma but for me the main one was simply that it was on at Rose Theatre where I have to have a good reason not to go and see a play.

Quick booking got me a seat in the very centre of the Circle, A35, for £41.5 with Senior Citizen Concession.

My only recollection of Emma, from a radio drama adaptation, was that she interfered unsuccessfully in other people's relationships while ignoring her own; not much of a plot but a sound basis for some character comedy.

The only comments I read about the production beforehand said that it was a complete reworking set in current times, so I had even less idea on what to expect.

Not knowing the original story that well I cannot comment on how close this version was and all I can do is comment on the play in its own right.

This Emma was a very entertaining character comedy. Emma, the character, was a fairly normal young woman surrounded by several exaggerated characters, notably her soon to me married self-centred sister who was fully into all the modern tropes from Instagram to Love Island.

Other notable characters included her frantic father, a boisterous hairdresser, a surly parcel delivery man and her sister's timid fiancee. A rich source for comedy indeed.

Given that the richness and success of the play relies so much on the strength of the cast, some of them with notable tv exposure, I think that it is something of a shame that the poster shows just the relatively unknown Emma.

This Emma was an unashamed rom-com and hit all the right buttons providing plenty of lives as the various couples eventually came together as they should and as we all expected.

The Truth About Blayds at Finborough Theatre

It was nice to have a good excuse to go back to Finborough Theatre and a play by A A Milne was certainly a good excuse.It also helped that it included William Gaunt who I have fond memories of from The Champions in the late 60's.

All that was easily worth £28.

Visits to Finborough have a routine and that started with a pint in Courtfield, opposite Earls Court Station, then a small meal in Cafe du Coin before walking down the incredibly busy, and fast, Redcliffe Gardens to the theatre.

That routine got me to the theatre early enough to claim a seat in the front row somewhere close to the middle.

The stage was set as a period study and this is where everything happened.

The titular Blayds was an elderly man and a famous poet. He lived in a fairly grand house with several members of his immediate family, one of who acted as his carer and another who managed his affairs.

The first half of the play covered the preparation and execution of Blayds' birthday and the second half covered the aftermath of his death soon after and the deathbed revelation (the truth) he made.

It was an interesting, if simple, plot whose real purpose was to be the framework for the interactions between the family members who were very different people and had very different perspectives on the situation. The truth was elusive, disputed and modified.

It was the mix of characters and their viewpoints that made the play interesting and entertaining while the truth in question raised a few points to ponder over. An entertaining play that makes you think is always good.