Lady Chapel

It's going to be a month for seeing sights and meeting and re-meeting people - part of the reason I thought this NaBloPoMo thing was a good idea... So, last night, Anna, Chris and Suzanne and I went over to Ely to see Show of Hands perform.

Yes, I know I've bored anyone who might be reading this about Mr Knightley and Mr Beer (and Ms Sykes) before; but I'm bending you gently to my will here (and that's a Phil Beer anecdote and a half...). And if you have seen them, you'll know why I go on about them...

They were at the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral as part of their Spires and Beams tour.

If you haven't been to the Lady Chapel, it's pretty spectacular. It was also one of those buildings that Cromwell (Richard, not Oliver) knocked about a lot - all the friezes around the edge have figures with no heads, and none of the statues in the niches survive now - and I understand that it was the most vandalised/whatever-they-thought-they-were-doing of any chapel in England, because of the sheer numbers of 'idolatrous' statues in it. There's been some controversy about the new Lady statue (who does, in all fairness, look as if she's about to jump...); but I like her, and it's a beautiful space and I was very curious about what SoH would do with it...

As ever, my pictures of the event are a bit awful. I have a history of bad SoH pictures and this was never going to be any different (I don't like this camera much and didn't manage with success with the previous two!). I spent a lot of time trying to take a picture of Phil Beer who was looking even more than usually like Rosso Fiorentino's Angelo Musicante but it didn't work... So here are two pictures of what happened during the set with the lighting during The Dive

and during Roots

They'd tailored the set to the space, and there were some wonderful moments - Down in Yon Forest was one, the new Steve Knightley song Poppy Day another (drawing parallels between Flanders field, the poppy fields of Afghanistan and small-town heroin-dealing in the West Country in a way that only he could, really). Steve's slightly scary version of Widdecombe Fair (sung from from the back of the chapel) was another, but one I'd seen done acoustically before. But Phil Beer did a solo acoustic combination of an Irish tune blended with a cover of Bruce Springsteen's Factory, from the centre of the chapel, which was wonderful; and everyone had a good singalong to Roots, Cousin Jack and Country Life - all seemed a little subdued because, slightly, we were in church...

The only combination I don't like of SoH's (in the last god-knows-how-many-years), which starts with The Train and improves rapidly thereafter, appeared before the interval, so there was a small 'Oh thank goodness we've got that over with...' factor for me ... I'd have loved to hear The Setting/Mary from Dungloe in that space... But we got The Crow on the Cradle, and blimey, they were good.

I don't think it's the best Show of Hands gig I've ever been to - I think that will have been at a festival. I think that sometimes their respect for the place, and what had happened there, almost overwhelmed their musicianship; although the music was always superb.

It did whet my appetite for their gig at the Junction on November 26; but I'll be at this at the time; and it was a really interesting experience, watching three superb musicians exploring a space; it was certainly everything I'd hoped for from the evening... And I also came out with a copy of Phil Beer's wonderfully titled solo album Rhythm Methodist, which I'm intending to play today...