HW: Exeter Astoria and beyond

[Jill Strobridge]

10 moments of forever..

 1 - put the staff payroll onto automatic payment for Monday (hope
this has worked - I'm dead if it hasn't!)

 2 - leave the work's office Christmas dinner party early (Thank
goodness!)

 3 - wake up and catch plane flight from Edinburgh to Exeter (I
recommend this - 1.5 hours by plane rather than 9 hours train
journey - cheap since they are trying to promote it - excellent
journey)

 4 - phone sister (who has forgotten I was coming down!) to come
and pick me up from the airport.   Enjoy family day out.

 5 - Check into hotel.   Another recommendation here - Park View
Hotel in Howell Road, Exeter - slightly overpriced for a single
room en-suite at £40 but well situated - very comfortable - a dozen
or so bedrooms - smallish rooms but well organised and a very
friendly and laid back owner who turned out to be a Hawkwind fan.
He accepted me phoning up from the Phoenix to make another booking
for someone we met there even knowing we wouldn't be 'til after
midnight and then gave us a reduced rate for the single room.
Great place - I'm definitely going back there!

 6 - get to venue early and have a enjoyable meeting up with Arin
and Richard - eat dinner (enormous helpings!) - watch Hawkwind
show.   Slightly disappointing in some ways - possibly spoiled by
the fact that I'd seen the set at Newcastle and not helped by the
intense smoke that was drifting in hazy layers throughout the hall
and inhaling this lot on top of a large dinner left me feeling
surprisingly unwell.   However once that passed - the show:    no
dancers - which was interesting because you could focus on
Hawkwind's music without distractions and the light show was much
more visible on a large backdrop.    It was good but took me a
while to enjoy it - too many breaks between songs - the segue flow
wasn't there - Digital Nation coming after the instrumental track
seemed to really slow everything down (although both are good
tracks) and Angels of Death was another slow number coming after
the excitement of Hassan-i-Sahba -  but from Ode to a Timeflower I
felt everything come to life and even a young lass in front of me
in a short black dress suddenly decided this was a great gig and
started dancing enthusiastically so the show ended powerfully and
everyone seemed to go away really happy - except that it was
chucking down waterfalls of rain outside and all the taxis were
booked up until 2.45am!   So we got somewhat wet walking back to
the hotel which thankfully was quite close by.

7 - take a train - travel through some astonishingly flooded bits
of the countryside then through snow covered countryside into a
cold London.   Find hotel - have dinner and a bath  - find the pub
and meet up with some really nice people most of whom (to my great
embarrassment and shame) I could not remember the names of - I am
definitely losing the memory battle here - I recognise all the
faces but never a name to go with them.    So apologies to everyone
I spoke to but didn't know by name!

8 - wait in pub until the queue is no longer twice round the
block - go along to venue and don't even get searched!   Follow
Mike Holmes and friends into a brilliant position on the balcony
area with an excellent view - good sound and enjoy the show.
This was brilliant - even the dancers were good - somehow what they
were doing on this occasion was far more related to what the band
were playing and felt natural without detracting from either the
music or the lightshow.

Matthew Wright did the readings (he does look menacing with no hair
and a lab coat!) and I thought did them well - where Dibs has
sonorous power in his voice Matthew Wright has feeling and emotion
and I preferred that.   10 Seconds of Forever (IMO!!) needs
emotion - rather than threat - the danger is already implied in the
countdown but the countdown isn't important until right at the
end - it's only a background to the intense images and these are
the really important bits.     (Digression 1: - My feeling about
Calvert's poetry is that he wrote video poems - almost as if he saw
a kalaidoscope of images flashing past him and then wrote them down
to create a sequence of moving images (Mike Holmes cites the first
verse of Quark Strangeness and Charm to show that this isn't always
the case - but almost all his other writing seems to me to be
intensely visual and vivid).       Anyhow it's only right at the
end of 10 Seconds of Forever - when time runs out that the
countdown and the images become one and the same i.e. Oblivion
(never, never, never...).

I loved Digital Nation this time - because there seemed to be an
element of threat in the background music to this that hadn't been
present before and that extra dimension made the song so much more
compelling (Digression 2: - also there was a story on the BBC Web
site that a Gamer has just spent $26,500 - real money! - to buy an
island that only exists in a computer role playing game and he will
be able to recoup that money by charging other gamers real money to
purchase mineral rights or to buy house plots so they can build
virtual houses).   All the tracks flowed beautifully into each
other and the reason for the odd electronic pause in the middle of
Brainstorm was completely explained when Dumpy came in and did a
storming guitar session in that section and he seemed to be
enjoying every second of it!     (Digression 3: - the only previous
occasion I've ever seen Dumpy was on stage at a small Edinburgh
venue in the 1990s and he took his trousers off.... mooning I think
it's called!).   Angela Android was a masterly track and To Love A
Machine had returned to a more guitar sounding keyboard rather than
the piano it was in Exeter.   The house lights were stunning - at
one stage in Hassan i'Sahba the band was playing behind a wash of
yellow light that transformed the whole stage into a desert
coloured scene - astonishingly effective.    By Brainstorm the
stobes were so intense you were looking through a haze of light
onto a stage that almost seemed to float disconnected behind this
visual veil.    And the long white strip of nylon that the dancers
played with across the front of the stage had shimmering coloured
light patterns reflecting off it that twisted and danced
beautifully.   Excellent show.

9 - follow friends back to the hotel and mellow out over sandwiches
and beer, meet up with Merrick and Julie, Rik and Val (glad you
liked Edinburgh!) say hi and goodbye to Arin and Richard again
(these brief meetings are never long enough!)

10 - go to bed - wake up and catch train home reflecting on the
astonishing way that the band have, even in the course of this one
tour, taken new tracks and developed them so effectively that I
have been unable (even though I don't know the words yet!) to stop
singing the flipping things!     They are familar tracks now.

So thank you to Hawkwind and Happy Solstice and other Seasonal
greetings to one and all.

jill

PS: I'm sure there was a quotation from Hamlet ("taking arms
against a sea of troubles") during the show at Exeter but it had
gone again by Astoria so I can't for the life of me remember where
it fitted in!

======================================
Jill Strobridge <jill.strobridge at blueyonder.co.uk>
======================================