Bringing happiness to Alzheimer's sufferers and their carers

The garden party in full swing

It's been three months since I last updated this blog, but I never truly abandoned it, I always intended to come back. Seeing Thoughts was set up during a time in my life when I needed something new and different, and simple but involving, to concentrate on. It did its job, and has evolved since, but I could never abandon it for good... it's a mouthpiece for my inner thoughts, rather than my professional scribblings.

I've been prompted to update Seeing Thoughts after being involved with something wonderful yesterday. My good friend Erika asked if I would help out at a summer garden party she was holding at her house for members of the Alzheimer's Disease support group she is involved with. Every week Erika meets up with the group and they have a good singalong and gossip, which helps both the carers to kick back a bit, and the sufferers, who often come alive or reconnect through the power of music.

Yesterday was a glorious, sun-drenched, cloudless summer's day and the setting was perfect. Erika's house lies in the shadow of a beautiful mountain, boasts a sizeable and well-tended garden, and has the space to accommodate the 60-70 people who came along. The video below shows the set-up, with the many chairs and marquees, before people arrived. Sadly, uploading videos to Blogspot means they get compressed quite severely, and the picture quality is quite poor compared to the actual crystal clear videos I took. Still, you get the idea...

I was enlisted to help with the refreshments, and spent much of my time pouring out orange and apple juice and making sure everybody had what they wanted. There were other volunteer helpers too dealing with the hot drinks and the food.

What cheered me most was seeing the Alzheimer's sufferers so happy. Right there and then, that sunny August afternoon, they were smiling and happy and joyous, the live band stirring something inside them and bringing them closer to the world they have sadly become more and more disconnected from. It must be so joyful for the carers to see this happen, to see their loved ones re-emerge from the smog of confusion and upset they must go through every day. They say music, as well as pets and old photographs, serves as a trigger for many people suffering with memory problems. Music is something we all have in common - we grow up with it as a learning tool, we are immersed in the music we hear around us as we develop, and we adopt our own favourites. So to hear those old favourites, or to simply feel moved by the rhythm of a song, must enliven their spirits. Here's a snatch of them singing Steeleye Span's All Around My Hat...

It's crushingly sad to see what Alzheimer's does to people. It's the cruellest of all fates, the way your very self is eaten away until all that is left is a shell that looks like you, but the real you inside is gone. We are the sum of our memories, so to have those memories taken away from us is a living nightmare. And it's even harder to witness, to see your loved one gradually leave, but also stay behind. It's like leaving a room but forgetting to walk through the door...

And so I was humbled by the people who attended the party. I was honoured to help out, and I was privileged to have chatted to people who, to me, are among the bravest people I've ever met, having to both live with Alzheimer's, and come to the terrifying conclusion that there is no going back.

Another of my heroes is Erika herself. She puts her heart and soul into these events, and does it for the love and respect she has for them all. She asks nothing in return, just their happiness and their smiles. So well done Erika. Bringing light into the fading lives of those suffering with Alzheimer's is an honourable, admirable thing to do. You should be proud of yourself, as everybody who knows you is proud of you too.

My favourite video, of everybody singing Travellin' Light, by Cliff Richard and the Shadows...

How to get involved in Erika's High Notes group...

High Notes is a voluntary singing and support group for people with memory problems, their carers, families and friends, and others who may feel isolated, vulnerable or lonely. Established in 2006, the weekly sessions are informal and run on an entirely voluntary basis, offering music, fun, friendship and support. Participants come from all over Conwy county in North Wales, and some neighbouring counties. Sessions are held every Wednesday, 1.45pm-3.45pm, at Mochdre Village Hall, opposite the Mountain View Hotel, Old Colwyn Road, Mochdre, LL28 5HU.

High Notes is self-funding. A nominal charge of £1.50 per person per session and money from a raffle go towards refreshments, hall hire, raffle prizes, an annual garden party in August, a theatre trip or an appropriate outing where possible, and Christmas lunch. Contact Erika on 07583 089248.

Alzheimer's Society: http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/index.php

My Top 6 Favourite Brit Awards Blunders

Thursday, February 26th, 2015

It's almost traditional now for the annual BRIT Awards ceremony to have some sort of controversy or mishap surrounding it. It's getting to the point where they really ought to consider a new award for Best Blunder just to make sure every skill-set is covered. And after last night's Fallen Madonna mishap I thought I'd look back over some of my favourite BRIT Award blunders of the last 25 years or so (the awards have actually been going since 1977, as a way of marking the Queen's silver jubilee - there, you didn't know that, did you?). Right, on with the show...

February 13th, 1989 - Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood do Ant and Dec (badly)

In 1989 the BRITS were inexplicably co-hosted by Page 3 Stunna Samantha Fox and Gandalf lookalike Mick Fleetwood. Whoever thought to put those two together deserves the first ever BRIT Blunder Award because it was just an embarrassment of under-rehearsed announcements, failing autocues and some poorly organised backstage shenanigans (for instance, a pre-recorded acceptance message from Michael Jackson was never transmitted, and when the hosts welcomed the Four Tops onto the stage, Boy George walked out instead - never a satisfactory replacement). Plus, the vast difference in height between Samantha (5ft 1in) and Mick (6ft 4in) made even camera movements tricky. Oh, and then there was that pink hair...

February 12th, 1992 - The KLF retire live on stage to a deafening soundtrack

In 1992 there was the BRITS' first ever "artistic rebellion". We've come to expect frank speeches and arresting hand signals from some of the sozzled singers over the years, but the first time an act actually hijacked the ceremony was when the ever controversial KLF opened the show with a death metal version of their hit 3am Eternal. The performance ended with Bill Drummond firing blanks over the heads of the audience from a vintage machine gun alongside the announcement that "Ladies and gentlemen, The KLF have now left the music business". And they pretty much did. Within weeks the biggest selling band of 1991 announced they were packing it all in and deleted their entire back catalogue, their last artistic effort being the dumping of a dead sheep at the entrance to the BRITS after-party, tied up with the words "I died for ewe (bon appetit)". In hindsight, The KLF might have been pushed into all this by the fact they had to share the Best British Group Award with Simply Red.

February 19th, 1996 - Jarvis Cocker waggles his bum at Michael Jackson fans

The most memorable BRITS boob has to be 1996's stage invasion by Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker during an extravagant performance of Earth Song by Michael Jackson. While MJ is up on a cherry-picker asking why humanity doesn't care about forest trails and crying whales (how can he tell they're crying?), Jarvis wandered onto stage to drunkenly protest against what he saw as the indulgence of an over-inflated egotist. His protest is actually pretty pathetic when you watch it back, as he seems to arrive on stage and then have no idea what to do, and proceeds to simply pose in a very Cocker-like way, and waggle his bum at the crowd. The fact he was waggling his bum at a bunch of crazed Michael Jackson fans in the mosh pit probably didn't get help his cause. But still, it provided a memorable BRIT moment which has passed into legend.

February 9th, 1998 - John Prescott is drenched by Chumbawamba

Politics should never interfere with music, in my opinion. But in 1998 the BRITS decided it would be a good idea, seeing as the Labour Party had so magnificently swept to power in the previous year's General Election, to have Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott sitting in the audience with his wife, watching the ceremony, among the Britpop glitterati. This didn't go down too well with the Scottish dance group Chumbawamba, who decided to hurl a bucket of iced water over him, stating: "If John Prescott has the nerve to turn up at events like the BRIT Awards in a vain attempt to make Labour seem cool and trendy, then he deserves all we can throw at him." Despite apologies from EMI Europe, Chumbawamba have been unrepentant about their watery assault of Two-Jags ever since.

March 3rd, 2000 - Non-entity invades stage and insults rock legend

(Go to 2 minutes 20 seconds in to see the blunder begin)
In the year 2000 the BRITS were to be the scene of an artistic showdown between the waning Spice Girls and the newly solo Geri Halliwell, but it wasn't this girly cat fight that made the headlines. Nobody had ever heard of DJ Brandon Block before March 3rd, 2000, and even 15 years later you'd be hard pushed to think of any other reason to recognise Mr Block other than for his BRIT blunder. He had drunk so much that when his joshing mates claimed Brandon had won an award and ought to get up on stage to accept it, the inebriated DJ stumbled into action, interrupting the announcement by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood and actress Thora Birch of the Best Soundtrack Album. Block was pulled off stage by security and an exchange of fruity insults went on between the Stones guitarist and the non-entity DJ, before Block charged back onto stage only to be met with Ronnie's half-pint of beer in the face. In case you were wondering, Notting Hill won.

February 25th, 2015 - Minotaur assaults Madonna

Finally, it's got to be 2015's BRITS blunder (no, not the incessant but welcome muting of Kanye West). Madonna's unceremonious fall backwards downstairs while singing Living for Love was unintentionally hilarious. A dancer dressed as a minotaur yanked the cape Madonna had wrapped around her neck and it was meant to come off with ease, but it seems the cape was wrapped around her neck rather too securely by good old Velcro and the whole lot went at once. Cue international megastar slumped in an undignified heap on the floor before millions of TV viewers. But you know what? The thing is, rather like Michael Jackson all those years ago, Madonna just got back up and carried on with the performance, through to the end, like a true professional. People might have had Cocker-like objections to Jackson's Earth Song performance, and others might secretly enjoy the bursting of the Queen of Pop's bulging bubble, but when it came down to it, they both showed their experience and professionalism by not letting the audience down. And you've gotta give them credit for that.

Now, roll on BRITS 2016. I can't wait to see what blunders it has up its sleeve.

Review: Kate Bush - Before the Dawn

Sunday, August 31st, 2014

Me outside the Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, before Before the Dawn.
Notice that the words "Kate Bush" do not appear on the sign: it was all
about the show, as far as Kate was concerned. For the audience, it was
certainly about the star!

The last time Kate Bush performed an entire concert live on stage was May 14th, 1979, although something the media tends to overlook is that it certainly was not the last time Kate performed live.
She has made sporadic appearances live on stage in the intervening 35 years, most recently in 2002 with her long-time champion Dave Gilmour (of Pink Floyd) when she sang Comfortably Numb at the Royal Festival Hall. Kate Bush does do live, just not very often.

Kate singing live on
stage in 2002

So to see Kate Bush live on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo this last week was a real privilege. I managed to see her on two dates - her second show on Wednesday, August 27th, and her third on Friday, August 29th. In years - decades - to come, people will talk about being one of the lucky ones to have seen Before the Dawn, and others will be just as jealous as those today who never saw Kate's Tour of Life in 1979.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD...
So, what exactly is Before the Dawn? For a start, you certainly get good value for money - the show kicks off at 7.45pm and you don't get out until just shy of 11pm, with only a 20-minute interval in between.
The first half kicks off with a set list of six songs, which Kate performs as if it's a run-of-the-mill rock concert. This was surprising in itself, as most people were expecting a magnificent spectacle of eye-popping proportions, an expectation no doubt fuelled by the media build-up and the deafening silence and secrecy surrounding the show before it debuted.
The six songs were a mix of hits - Running Up That Hill and Hounds of Love - and lesser known album tracks, but great fan crowd-pleasers - the rocky Lily and Top of the City from her 1993 album The Red Shoes, along with the ethereal Joanni from 2005's Aerial. Joanni is not an obvious choice, and is perhaps the weakest aspect of Before the Dawn as the band rather drowns out Kate's voice, which for this track needs to be in her lower register. Still, the fact fans would never expect her to perform Joanni live makes it all the more pleasing.
Song six is the overlooked classic King of the Mountain, Kate's 2005 comeback single which sports a memorable ululating melody and soaring chorus. And as the song reaches its climax, Kate sings about the wind whistling through the house and that a storm is rising.
And that's where everything goes bonkers. There is an explosion of wind and sound, a thunderous change of scenery, and the auditorium is transformed into an epic, filmic visualisation of The Ninth Wave, the exemplary second half song suite from 1985's Hounds of Love album, something Kate has always wanted to visualise - and this is her chance.

The suite is about the sinking of a ship called the Celtic Deep and how all but one of the passengers are rescued - that one being a lone female, played by Kate. The Ninth Wave is made up of seven tracks which tell the story of the drowning woman, and Kate's live interpretation of it is inspired, spectacular and predictably eccentric.
She manages to portray the ocean on the stage using billowing sheets, and the props and effects come thick and fast - there's video footage of Kate in the ocean wearing a life jacket singing the beautiful And Dream of Sheep, there are sea creatures with skull-like heads, there is a helicopter which trains its blinding searchlight across the audience, an entire sitting room floats onto stage for Watching You Without Me, and the skeletal remains of a ship frame the entire movement.
Even if you've never heard The Ninth Wave before, the story it tells - and Kate's visual interpretation of it before your very eyes - is a sight to be savoured, and the product of a truly unique, eccentric imagination.
After the interval we get a just as visually splendid tour de force for an interpretation of A Sky of Honey, the song suite from the second half of Kate's Aerial album.
A Sky of Honey is, in itself, a triumph of atmosphere as it depicts the passage of time from a summer's afternoon to the following day's dawn, via the dusk "somewhere in between" and the twilight of the witching hour.

For this suite the stage is dressed with a forest of beech trees, a spinning full moon, a pair of giant double doors, and a painter's canvas the size of a building. As Kate sings and harmonises her way through the nine tracks of A Sky of Honey - imitating birdsong along the way - her 16-year-old son Bertie portrays an artist trying to capture the beauty of the ever-shifting landscape as day moves into night, before the dawn.
I wouldn't say he has the best singing voice, but one thing's for sure - he's a promising young performer and has obviously got his mother's theatrical genes. He even gets his own song, a new composition called Tawny Moon, which is enjoyable enough but I couldn't help wanting to hear his mother sing it instead.
Another star of the Aerial section is a little wooden man, like those used by artists to capture human posture, operated as a puppet and who interacts with the band and Kate as the music plays. He is given personality by the expert puppeteer, who manages to portray the inanimate object's curiosity, timidity, fear and, at one surprising point, depravity so well. And there's a surprise in store for the audience when the puppet comes magically to life.
A Sky of Honey's style takes in ballad, soundscape, pop song and even trippy dance music and by the end of it you really do feel like you've experienced the passing of day to night to day, through the uplifting lens of Mother Nature. This is the product of a woman in touch with who she is, her own femininity, and her place in the grand scheme of things. Kate Bush is nowadays a true Earth Mother.
Kate brings the show to a close with an encore of the delicate Among Angels from 2011's 50 Words for Snow (which lets the audience experience the simple but beautiful coupling of just Kate's voice and a piano) and the rousing Hounds of Love single Cloudbusting, complete with its refrain "I just know that something good is going to happen", famously sampled by Utah Saints in 1992.
Before the Dawn is more like theatre than a concert. Sure, it's musical, but Kate has managed to fuse drama with audiovisuals, stage effects with dance, props with mime to produce a truly unique experience, which is what makes her as an artist so special. You won't have seen anything like Before the Dawn before, and in this day and age, that is pretty rare.
As for the naysayers who reckon she should have just come on, sung Wuthering Heights, Babooshka and Wow, well... anyone can do that. The Kate Bush impersonator who was entertaining the queueing crowds outside the Apollo can do that. Heck, even Noel Fielding can do that.
And yes, while it might have been nice to see the actual Kate Bush sing them, it wouldn't leave you with the same sense that you've seen something unique, something enriching or entertaining as Before the Dawn does.
I don't want to see Kate Bush cavorting about in a white flowing dress or flailing her arms around like a human helicopter. She did that 35 years ago. I want to see Kate Bush now, in 2014, not a tribute act.
Before the Dawn certainly raises the benchmark for any other musical artists with an ambition to interpret their music live, and I predict that we'll see more shows like Before the Dawn from other, lesser performers, inspired by Kate Bush's astounding vision. And that can be no bad thing.
Let's just hope Kate doesn't leave it too long to surprise and inspire us all again.

Gone Too Soon: Remembering Michael Jackson

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014

Michael Jackson on stage during his Dangerous world tour (1992)

Today is the fifth anniversary of Michael Jackson's death. I find it hard to believe it's been five whole years since that happened: time really does fly when you're not looking.
Jackson's death is one of those events that you remember where you were when you heard, like I imagine John Lennon, Elvis and JFK were for previous generations.
There were - and still are - fewer people more famous than Michael Jackson, and when our children and our children's children grow up, they will not be able to understand the level of fame Jackson reached.
Today's biggest stars are the likes of Katy Perry (53.96 million Twitter followers), Justin Bieber (52.48 million) and Lady GaGa (41.55 million), but if each one of their followers bought one copy of one of their albums, then they would begin to reach the height and breadth of Jackson's impact.
His 1982 album Thriller has sold 42.4 million certified copies worldwide to date: that's just one of his albums. If Katy Perry sold 54 million albums, then she'd be a superstar. To date, she's sold fewer than 15 million copies of her three albums combined.
People of my generation - and my parents' generation - were lucky to live in a time which witnessed such global superstardom. I am always envious when I see and hear about the sheer excitement and insane hysteria which surrounded Beatlemania in the 1960s, because no amount of flickering monochrome TV footage or talking heads with "people who were there" can reproduce what it was really like.
It was similar with Jackson. In the 1980s - particularly the mid-1980s to mid-1990s - Jackson was one of the most famous, and probably one of the most loved, human beings on the planet, orbited by satellite superstars such as Madonna, Prince, Tina Turner and Whitney Houston.

Smooth Criminal

But nobody ever quite attracted the hysteria and excitement that Jackson did in his prime, as any "child of the 80s" will tell you. Thriller, Beat It, Billie Jean, We Are The World, Bad, Smooth Criminal, Moonwalker... The excitement he generated was exhilarating, frightening even.
And regardless of What Happened Next - the allegations, the drugs, the court cases, the surgery - he was still Michael Jackson, the biggest star in the world, even when his shine had faded.
His latter years - really, his final decade - were troubled times, plagued with misfortune and controversy, and it is sad to look back at the inexorable decline of such a huge star. It is both tragic and humbling, and certainly a lesson for anybody else seeking fortune and fame without the necessary equipment to survive it (Mr Bieber take note).
Anybody who enjoyed music in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 00s cannot fail to have been touched in some way by the talent of Michael Jackson, whether they are a fan, an admirer or just a begrudging observer.
I remember where I was when I heard Michael Jackson had died. I was lying in bed in a hotel room in Manchester. A BBC newsflash came on between programmes - which is never, ever a good thing - and there it was, the caption scrolling across the screen, defying my disbelief.
The next morning, while out shopping in the city centre, the impact of Jackson's death was everywhere. His music echoed out of every shop doorway, the headlines paid tribute to him on the cover of every newspaper and on every news billboard, and it was all people seemed to be talking about as I caught snatches of conversations in the street.
It will be some time before another celebrity death has quite the same impact in as many countries, in as many cultures, as Michael Jackson's.
Bieber and Perry and GaGa may be famous, but Jackson was a superstar. And they are rare to find in our skies.

Michael Joseph Jackson: 1958 - 2009

Music is my radar

Thursday, April 3rd, 2014

I don't go and see live music too often - most of the music artists I like are either dead or retired! But just recently things have changed, and some of the most prominent musicians in my life have re-emerged, either from obscurity or the grave!

Kate Bush... back on stage after 35 years

The biggest musical news of 2014 so far surely has to be the fact Kate Bush has announced her first live dates since 1979, and the media furore that surrounded people's difficulty in securing tickets to see this seldom seen genius.
Kate isn't to all tastes, but it's hard to deny that she has a towering songwriting talent and a totally unique voice. When her Before the Dawn live dates at London's Hammersmith Odeon went on sale last week, there was a mad scramble from fans across the globe to snap them up. She may be doing 15 dates, but that'll probably be it, so this is by and large a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see her live.
Luckily, I managed to get some, and I do feel ridiculously lucky to have got them when I see on social media so many heartbroken people who didn't. It was first come first served, and I was lucky enough to be served while they still had some stock in.
And so hubby and I will be off to Hammersmith in August to see the lady herself, and I really don't care what she sings, because it's Kate Bush! She could sing the Phone Book and it'd be beautiful (in fact she almost did just that on her 2005 track Pi, most of the lyrics for which are simply, well... pi! But done so beautifully!).
I'm secretly hoping for This Woman's Work (one of the most heartrending sad songs of all time), Running Up That Hill, Hammer Horror and Somewhere In Between - but really, she can sing what the heck she likes, because I'll be there listening!

Tori Amos... unrepentant

The other major live gig we're seeing this year is Tori Amos, too often cited as a poor man's Kate Bush but actually a prodigious talent who deserves much better classification than that. Tori has been going since the early 1990s as a solo artist but has evolved so much musically over the decades, in recent years even embracing classical scores and writing her own musical.
But it is the cheeky, daring raw emotion she pours into her music which marks her out, alongside her peerless talents at the piano and her soaring, ethereal vocals. We're seeing Tori in Manchester in May, and I'm looking forward to reconnecting with her after a few years drifting apart.
Album-wise, I'm looking forward to Blur frontman Damon Albarn's first ever solo album, Everyday Robots, later this month. I've followed Damon's career ever since the early days of the Britpop kings, Blur being my favourite band of all time, and while I've enjoyed his side projects such as Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad and the Queen, it is his individual songwriting talent, an ear for melody, which I gravitate towards.

Damon Albarn... solo after 25 years

His solo album sounds to be quite a sombre, understated affair, but I am still looking forward to what must be one of the most keenly awaited solo projects of recent years.
And then earlier this week they announced a "new" album by Michael Jackson. Well, I say new, but obviously he's been dead five years so these tracks are from the vaults.
I've always been a fan of Michael, ever since the 1980s (what child of the 80s wasn't?). He is a controversial figure, but at the heart of all the gossip and calumny was a clearly defined prodigy with a near unique talent for performance, and it's great that we can enjoy slices of that talent long after he's left us.
The album of eight "contemporised" songs is called Xscape and is out the same day as Tori's new album, Unrepentant Geraldines, so that'll be quite a big week!
My other musical mainstay is David Bowie, but he stole a lead on all the others last year when he made a comeback after 10 years with his fantastic album The Next Day. I look forward to more from him this year too, but there's no sign of that just yet. Live gigs, David...?
But if Kate Bush can come out of live performance retirement after 35 years and Damon Albarn can release his first solo album 25 years after his music career began, surely anything can happen!

Michael Jackson... Best not to ask.