Sun equals fun
Jim Davis and Andrew Hughes. Sun Equals Fun
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Sun equals fun
Jim Davis and Andrew Hughes. Sun Equals Fun
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gone bankrupt for one tour
You get a strong sense of the character and behaviour of a great star by smelling the mood of those around them. The assistants who popped in from time to time to apologise for the late-running of the afternoon (she was busy doing back-to-back TV interviews in another suite) all seemed relaxed, cheerful and unforced in their manner. They certainly didn’t have the cowed look of crushed hirelings fresh from a verbal bitch-slapping who were attempting to prepare me for sulky moods and obstreperous huffiness.
“After The Graham Norton Show I went to Annabel’s and I performed…” (I was lucky enough to be there myself: it was a magnificent acoustic show, one Nat King Cole song and three of her own and it was all over, but never in the long, louche history of Annabel’s can there have been many evenings to match it) “…and then yesterday I watched the Graham Norton performance when it aired. And I watched it over and over and over and over and over. And I looked at all the parts that I liked and all the parts that I didn’t like … and I said, ‘OK, maybe this part, if your breath control was different, and here, maybe you should try this step…’ I study everything that I do to become better all the time at my craft. The beauty for me about being an artist is that the dream will never die, because I’m not obsessed with material things and don’t care about the money and don’t care about the attention of the public, but only the love of my fans, so for me it’s about how much more devoted, how much better an artist can I become.”
Whether you call Gaga a pop star or a performance artist is irrelevant; she has created her own category and she works at every element of the discipline that contributes to her persona. The music and lyric writing, the dancing, the costuming, the whole schmear. With her famous team, “Haus of Gaga”, she plans every detail of every video, every album, every tour and the timing of every record release.
I counter with another quote about writing from Thomas Mann: “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” She gets the point of it straightaway.
I don’t know what I expected from this global phenomenon, but it wasn’t the endearing mixture of warmth, wit, intelligence and larky self-knowledge that I found. There were comments she made about her work that I have no doubt she has come out with before – goodness knows, in my own small way I’ve had to do the publicity treadmill and I know how wearing it can be and how the same lines can easily be trotted out. But I was, silly old fool that I am, flattered by the attention she paid to each question and by the cheerful energy, after a long day, that she continued to exhibit.
And it didn’t end there. “Let’s call the photographer back in,” she said, and then proceeded to art-direct the shoot like a professional production designer.
===
By Stephen Fry
Published: May 27 2011 22:12 | Last updated: May 27 2011 22:12
The Lanesborough Hotel
Saturday evening, May 14 2011
It takes quite a bit to excite the staff of The Lanesborough Hotel, one of London’s more self-consciously luxurious five-star residences. Princes, sultans, presidents, oligarchs and film stars have been coming here ever since the grand but oddly anonymous building on the corner of Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge arose from the ruins of Belgravia’s old St George’s Hospital some 20 years ago.
I arrive there by taxi one Saturday night and find myself bundled through a tunnel of polite but harassed doormen into a lobby that, for all the discretion and professional sangfroid of the front-of-house staff, fails to suppress a crackle of excitement that fizzes around the interior like electricity. This, I imagine, must have been how the Goring Hotel felt when Kate Middleton came to stay the night before she was transformed into a royal duchess.
I approach the desk, cough politely and murmur, as if it were the kind of remark I might drop into the ears of a concierge every day, “Hello. I’m here to see Lady Gaga.”
As I am sure you know, it is a matter of pride among Hollywood stars that they check into hotels under elaborate and often preposterous aliases. Only those in the know are therefore able to call their rooms or ask to be shown up to see them. Lady Gaga’s people had alerted me to no such code system, and somehow I instinctively knew that the lady was simply too big and too … well … too Gaga, to bother with such nonsense.
Either side of me, as I had hurried through, many in the huge gathering outside the hotel had raised their voices in screams of excitement and their right hands into a kind of frozen claw, a gesture that I had inexpertly attempted to return. The crowd must have guessed why I had come to The Lanesborough and it was only polite for me to acknowledge this by returning their salute. This upraised claw is the worldwide identifier of Gaga fans, or Little Monsters, as they style themselves. I am not embarrassed to call myself – grotesquely over-aged and oversized as I may be – some kind of Little Monster too.
I do not write newspaper profile pieces for a living and Lady Gaga is currently the only person about whom I would do such a thing. With the exception that is, of Steve Jobs, whom I interviewed last year for Time magazine. I am not claiming that Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs are the most important figures in the world and that everyone else can go hang, it is just that … well, some people light your fire in a very special way and I am past the age of caring how good or bad that might look in the eyes of the world.
On Madonna
‘I genuinely love her so much. I think she is so amazing. She could never be replicated and, yes, I’m Italian, I’m from New York, and not for nothing, it’s not my fault that I kind of look like her, right? So if anything it’s more annoying to me that people would insinuate that I don’t like to be compared to her’
I had already been introduced to Gaga by a mutual friend on the roof terrace of the newly opened West Hollywood Soho House in April 2010. She had lifted the veil she was wearing that evening and I had kissed her on each cheek. In that stylish private members’ club whose dining tables were peopled by what looked like an exaggerated magazine photo mock-up of every Hollywood A-lister you had ever heard of, this 24-year-old girl had caused a stunned silence to fall as she had entered.
This had been around the time that “Bad Romance” played on every radio station and was blaring from every hair salon in the world. (“Rah-rah, ah-ah-ah, Roma-Roma-ma-ma, Gaga ooh-la-la … I want your ugly, I want your disease…” That one.) For sheer ear-worm tuneful, addictive, toe-tappy tunefulness it was a number impossible to ignore, although for me it was the acoustic versions of her songs “Paparazzi” and “Poker Face” that had convinced me that here was a musician worth paying attention to. The real thing.
All these memories were buzzing about inside my head as I found myself escorted up the lift and through a series of darkly panelled corridors and into the suite in which the interview was to take place. The photographer, Shamil, had been there with his assistant for some time, setting up their lamps and trying out angles: before long a convoy of waiters arrived with an awe-inspiringly grand selection of tea-trays and cake-stands.
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‘This is one smart cookie’ |
“Ho, ho,” I thought to myself. “Someone has had the idea that it would be amusing for the ‘quintessentially English’ Mr Fry to be seen ‘taking afternoon tea’ with a broad from the Bowery. Oh well, one plays these games and the scones did look rather delicious. I readied my iPhone for recording, sat on the sofa and consulted the notebook in which I had jotted down my questions.
On feminism
‘You all have an opinion about pop singers or public figures, that ... we only care about ourselves, and how could it be possible that a woman like me who loves theatre and loves fantasy and loves magic, how could it be possible that I could really mean what I’m saying? I would say that’s quite anti-feminism, isn’t it, to say that a woman based on the way that she wears her hair and her shoes would not be sincere’
The main elements of the Lady Gaga story are too well known for me to have much need of repeating them here. Even if you are an FT reader whose only real interest in the pink pages lies in lists of share indices, oil and gold price movements and the excitements of the Baltic Exchange, it is surely certain that you will be familiar with the girl from the Lower East Side who in a few short years transformed herself from Stefani Germanotta into one of the world’s best-known musical performers. You will, if nothing else, have seen or heard of the meat dress, the towering Alexander McQueen shoes and the astonishing hats that make Philip Treacy’s creation for Princess Beatrice look like something Ena Sharples might wear at the Rovers Return.
The jokes, then, are easy. Gaga dresses outrageously, at such an extreme edge of fashion as to be ridiculous. It’s a publicity gimmick. It’s pretention. It’s silly. It’s a postmodern Emperor’s New Clothes. We’re imbeciles and pretentious gibbons to be taken in.
. . .
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‘I live halfway between reality … and fantasy, at all times’ |
You get a strong sense of the character and behaviour of a great star by smelling the mood of those around them. The assistants who popped in from time to time to apologise for the late-running of the afternoon (she was busy doing back-to-back TV interviews in another suite) all seemed relaxed, cheerful and unforced in their manner. They certainly didn’t have the cowed look of crushed hirelings fresh from a verbal bitch-slapping who were attempting to prepare me for sulky moods and obstreperous huffiness.
On performance
‘What are you looking for? I’m sitting right here, I’ve got my legs spread with my feet up on the couch, what is it more that you want to see? It’s an interesting fight, the performance of my life, every day reminding people that the curtain has not closed and that if they don’t want to sit in the audience, that’s fine’
Then, just as I was wondering whether or not my teapot ought to be replenished with hot water, there she was, in the room.
I cannot claim that the overtly Wagnerian headpiece she wore had been chosen in my honour, but it certainly put me at my ease, as did the easygoing, “Hello again!” and proffering of a soft cheek.
She sat in a chair, threw her legs casually over the arm of the sofa on which I was sitting and the interview got under way, Shamil gratefully clicking away as we chatted.
“You know what?” she said after a while, “why don’t we get on with our talk and then we can do more pictures later?” Nervously, Shamil and assistant backed out. I could sense the photographer’s fear that maybe Lady Gaga would forget this promise and that he would find himself with far too few pictures and be roundly ticked off by the paper’s picture editor as a result.
Now that we were alone, I thought it best to begin with a rumour that I had heard from the hotel staff earlier.
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‘I am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission’ |
“I gather that last night you sent out some drinks to all the fans gathered outside?”
“Well actually, I sent them hot chocolate yesterday, and macaroons, and then today I had press all day and I felt a bit bad because I wouldn’t have much of a chance to go down and say hello. But I did manage to go down and brought them some fresh cookies and flowers.”
Any popular musician, like any film star or any footballer for that matter, can tell you that “it’s all about the fans” but there is something very different about Lady Gaga and her relationship with the Little Monsters. Once again, of course, a determined detractor could interpret such an action in one of two ways. They could damn her for such self-conscious publicity-seeking saintliness or, if she were to do nothing, for being an aloof ice-queen safely locked in the fastness of a luxury palace while her fans froze through the night below.
“Are your fans different here in England?” I ask. “Or is there a commonality around the world?”
“Yes, there is. Little Monsters are a community. It’s kind of nice that wherever I go they create a little home for me.”
On magic and artifice
‘I live halfway between reality and fantasy at all times because I choose to, and anyone can choose that, and I believe everybody has something so magical about themselves and why, as a society, are we so afraid of magic? Why is magic synonymous with artifice? Why is the fantastic synonymous with a lie? If art is a lie, then I will tell that lie every day until it’s f****** true’
“You seem quite happy to be a self-conscious spokesman for the dispossessed, the marginal, the freakish, the outsider, the one who doesn’t fit in, the one who feels outside the tribe, if you like…”
“It could be anybody…”
“Yes…” I venture, “I suppose we’re all outsiders really. It’s just that some of us are better at hiding it.”
“Some of us can wear the mask. And this new album [Born This Way] is about being able to be reborn, over and over again throughout your life.”
“Oh?” This surprised me. “I thought the meaning of the title track was that ‘I was born this way – gay, straight, bi, lesbian, transgender, whatever,’ and that you were affirming that…”
“No, in fact, sexuality is just one very small part of it … it’s so interesting to see how people latch on to words. You say the word ‘gay’ in a song and suddenly all the other words float away. I’m happy people did focus on that word, though, it’s an important word to liberate. But the album is about rebirth in every sense. It’s about being reborn again and again until you find the identity inside yourself that defines you best for who you are and that makes you most feel like a champion of life.”
Camille Paglia, the American writer, in a recent article for The Sunday Times, saw nothing but fraudulence and a manufactured, calculating falsity behind such claims, and I was delighted to discover that Lady Gaga had not read or even heard about Paglia’s latest charmless (and physically insulting) broadside, which is almost a masterclass in how to miss the point and come over as resentful and more out of touch with reality than even the remotest star.
I was annoyed with myself for having brought up Paglia’s article in the first place, but greatly cheered by the clear evidence that Gaga would never read it. I moved on therefore to Lady Gaga’s latest album, advance tracks of which I had been authorised to hear. A number called “Hair” wittily summons up the scenario of the mother who won’t let the daughter go out “like that” – an issue teenagers and their parents have fought over for years.
“At just 25,” I say, “you’re close enough in age for it not to appear patronising to be taking the side of the teenager against the parent, but perhaps in 10 years’ time you might have a child of your own. Do you think that will alter your perspective, or are you happy to wait and see?”
“I don’t know, I suppose I’ll wait and see. And perhaps it is patronising to some people, some people don’t feel the need to be liberated. And that’s OK. It’s just that I have a message and will fight to the death for it.”
That message, “Find out who you are and be it,” clearly means a great deal to her. Like any simple aphorism it can be made to sound naive or profound according to one’s point of view. I think I’m old enough to know when I’m being fobbed off, bullshitted, lied to or deceived. There was in Lady Gaga’s eyes and voice enough to tell me that whatever else she is, she is no fraud. The “messages” in her songs and albums, the calls to freedom and self-actualisation, the addresses she has made to the American military on the subject of their fatuous and hypocritical “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the support she has shown for the dispossessed and marginalised in society may cause many to roll their eyes and make the obvious cynical observation that being a friend to the friendless is damned good business. Just look at the figures. Number one after number one, record-breaking releases of singles and albums, record-breaking YouTube visits, record-breaking numbers of Twitter followers. Oh, sure, this is one smart cookie. There’s money to be had in self-publicity and the championing of the lonely ones out there.
On being Brechtian
‘There is an element of fantasy, there is an element of theatre but you can see right through it ... It doesn’t ruin the integrity or the fantasy of the theatre and, in fact, it is an overarching statement about the corruption of the government and the need for transparency … So if you were to tell the world anything, tell them she is the Bertolt Brecht of pop music’
Well, of course, all that can be said. But against such arid cynicism it should be pointed out that Lady Gaga did herself few financial favours during her last major world tour, The Monster Ball, which she began in 2009 to promote her album The Fame Monster. One of the most successful promotional tours ever, it quite literally bankrupted her. Her habit of redesigning, reformatting and revising it from the ground up, all of which experiments and changes she paid for out of her own pocket, certainly made the tour one of the most extraordinarily varied and unpredictable in history, but also one of the least profitable. Or so I had read and so legend insists to this day. I ask her if the stories are true.
“It’s honestly true that money means nothing to me. The only big things I’ve purchased are my dad’s heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga licence plate on our old car and it was making me crazy because he was getting followed everywhere, so I bought him a new car. Other than that I put everything in the show, and I actually went bankrupt after the first extension of The Monster Ball. And it was funny because I didn’t know! And I remember I called everybody and said, “Why is everyone saying I have no money? This is ridiculous, I have five number one singles – and they said, ‘Well, you’re $3m in debt.’”
The sheer quality and popularity of the work, then being picked up by Live Nation for extended stadium shows and by HBO for a TV special, allowed the money to flow back in but I don’t suppose one could ever guarantee that such a state of affairs will never occur again.
The detractors call her an extreme reinvention of Madonna – same Italian New York background, similar personality reinventions, a similar sense of extreme and often shocking fashion accoutrements, the same propensity to appropriate and distort, to the point of blasphemy, the language and iconography of the Roman Catholic church in which they were both brought up. They can point to other influences: Freddie Mercury (it was from the Queen song “Radio Gaga” that she took her name), David Bowie, Debbie Harry – there are plenty of tributaries that have flowed into River Gaga and she is the first to acknowledge her debt to them all and, yes, most certainly to Madonna. The only thing that annoys her about that question, she confides, is that people seem to think she is annoyed by being asked it.
“I genuinely love her so much. I think she is so amazing. She could never be replicated and, yes, I’m Italian, I’m from New York, and not for nothing, it’s not my fault that I kind of look like her, right? So, look, if anything, it’s more annoying to me that people would insinuate that I don’t like to be compared to her … She’s wonderful and inspiring and liberating, and she’s certainly inspired my album, as did David Bowie, as did Prince, as did Michael Jackson, as did Grace Jones, and I would never take that away.”
I may be no expert in pop music but I do know enough to be sure that The Rolling Stones were accused of copying the rhythm and blues of their predecessors, as were The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who and Led Zeppelin and all the way up.
. . .
Gaga now tells me something that astonishes me and gives a strong indication of her remarkable perfectionism.
Two evenings before she had appeared on BBC TV’s The Graham Norton Show. Norton is certainly the leading talk show host in Britain, but for a star of Gaga’s stature one cannot imagine that featuring on it can have been that big a deal. She puts me right on this straightaway.
“After The Graham Norton Show I went to Annabel’s and I performed…” (I was lucky enough to be there myself: it was a magnificent acoustic show, one Nat King Cole song and three of her own and it was all over, but never in the long, louche history of Annabel’s can there have been many evenings to match it) “…and then yesterday I watched the Graham Norton performance when it aired. And I watched it over and over and over and over and over. And I looked at all the parts that I liked and all the parts that I didn’t like … and I said, ‘OK, maybe this part, if your breath control was different, and here, maybe you should try this step…’ I study everything that I do to become better all the time at my craft. The beauty for me about being an artist is that the dream will never die, because I’m not obsessed with material things and don’t care about the money and don’t care about the attention of the public, but only the love of my fans, so for me it’s about how much more devoted, how much better an artist can I become.”
On the meat dress
‘The meat dress. You saw the prime rib of America speech so you knew it was about equality, but nobody else knew that … Everyone just saw pork. It wasn’t pork! It was prime rib and plain steak’
I gulped back my own feelings of inadequacy. I almost never watch myself back on anything. And I suppose it shows.
Whether you call Gaga a pop star or a performance artist is irrelevant; she has created her own category and she works at every element of the discipline that contributes to her persona. The music and lyric writing, the dancing, the costuming, the whole schmear. With her famous team, “Haus of Gaga”, she plans every detail of every video, every album, every tour and the timing of every record release.
I ask if this is why she has in fact created Gaga, so that she can have a grandiose alter ego to absorb all the attention, criticism, adulation and insanity while the quiet, steady, industrious Stefani Germanotta gets on anonymously with the professional nuts and bolts in the background. I couldn’t be more wrong.
“I actually don’t identify myself as two separate people and I don’t view Lady Gaga, me, as the protector of Stefani … I do see myself to be in an endless transformative state in the way that those performers you’ve mentioned were. I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.”
We talk about masks and Oscar Wilde and the nature of performance and the need of artists to pursue their vocations. She quotes to me the line of Rilke that she had famously tattooed on to her left arm: “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?” It’s quite a big tattoo…’ she confesses.
I counter with another quote about writing from Thomas Mann: “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” She gets the point of it straightaway.
I don’t know what I expected from this global phenomenon, but it wasn’t the endearing mixture of warmth, wit, intelligence and larky self-knowledge that I found. There were comments she made about her work that I have no doubt she has come out with before – goodness knows, in my own small way I’ve had to do the publicity treadmill and I know how wearing it can be and how the same lines can easily be trotted out. But I was, silly old fool that I am, flattered by the attention she paid to each question and by the cheerful energy, after a long day, that she continued to exhibit.
And it didn’t end there. “Let’s call the photographer back in,” she said, and then proceeded to art-direct the shoot like a professional production designer.
She took a rose from a vase on the table and said gravely to Shamil: “Start shooting after the count of three, OK?”
She sat down on the sofa next to me, tore the petals from the rose, cast them up in the air above us and called out “Three!”
And there we were, Lady Gaga and me, rose petals floating down in front of us.
Who knows what the future will bring to a star who has risen so high, so fast and who burns so brightly in the world? What it can bring those without song-writing ability, self-awareness, good friends and sound judgment we know all too well. This bright star appears well armed in all those attributes and more, so this Little Monster, for one, is confident that the world will be gaga about Gaga for many years to come.
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See also:
Audio: the full Stephen Fry and Lady Gaga interview
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
July 05, 2011 at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
THE Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Nafa) was started in 1938 by a group of Chinese arts education enthusiasts and was the first art school in Singapore.
In its early days, the Society of Chinese Artists helped to bring in famous Chinese artists to teach at the school.
Founding leaders and teachers include prominent Chinese artists like Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee and Chen Wen Hsi.
The school was modelled after the Xiamen art school, offering courses in sculpture, applied arts and Western arts.
Over the years, it has carved out a unique niche for itself by blending Western modernist concepts and eastern traditional techniques.
Among its notable alumni are 11 Cultural Medallion recipients, including oil painter Tan Choh Tee and print-maker Chng Seok Tin, and 10 Young Artist Award winners.
It has also received generous donations from many philanthropic individuals and groups, including Ngee Ann Kongsi and the Lee Foundation, to ensure that deserving students can afford an education at the school.
CITIZENS who are talented in music will be able to work towards a degree in music from the prestigious Royal College of Music, London (RCM) from this year without leaving Singapore.
The Government will throw in a subsidy for the fee for its two-year Bachelor of Music course too, bringing tuition down from $56,000 to $18,500. Permanent residents get a smaller subsidy. They pay $23,400.
Savings on tuition aside, doing the programme here will also mean huge savings on London's high living costs.
To get into the RCM from August, applicants will need to first have a music diploma from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Nafa) or its equivalent.
Nafa is the first institution in the world outside the United Kingdom to offer the music degree course from this leading music conservatory.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who was at the official signing ceremony between Nafa and RCM yesterday, said the Government wants to give Singaporeans all the opportunities to excel, each according to his different ability.
He said: 'We have invested in arts education, as well as in science and technology and sports. Our aim is to create a mountain range with many peaks of excellence; within the arts itself, we are building a mini mountain range.'
His analogy was a reference to the Education Ministry's push in recent years to beat out multiple pathways for the different interests and talents of students.
As a result of this, primary and secondary schools now offer more talent development opportunities in sports, the arts and music; further upstream, the Government has set up arts institutions in recent years, such as the National University of Singapore's Yong Siew Toh Conservatory and the School of the Arts (Sota).
Education Minister Ng Eng Hen, who was also at the signing of the Nafa-RCM tie-up, said the programme, besides creating a new pathway for Singaporeans with talent in music, will build up the pool of qualified music teachers who will do their bit to deliver a holistic education.
Nafa president Choo Thiam Siew said it is an honour for Nafa to become the world's first institution outside the UK to run the RCM programme. He announced that Nafa will expand its Bencoolen Street campus to meet the rising demand for education in the arts.
PM Lee pledged that the Government will continue strengthening the arts institutions here by continuing to fund them; there will also be more undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships in the arts.
In his speech yesterday, PM Lee pointed out that public funding alone was not enough for the arts to thrive; Nafa had the support of the Chinese community in nurturing the arts.
Its founding teachers included prominent artists like Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee and Chen Wen Hsi; the Society of Chinese Artists brought in well- known Chinese artists to teach there, and the work of the school was further buoyed by donations from philanthropic individuals and groups such as Ngee Ann Kongsi and the Lee Foundation.
Improving arts education will nurture talents for creative and arts-related jobs in the new economy, he said, and also 'deepen the soul of our society'.
Nafa music student Eugene Toh, 28, who hopes to get into the RCM degree course, said the generous tuition subsidy will put a world-class music education within the means of students like him.
Saying he was heartened by the Government's support for young people with talents in different fields, he said: 'The full fee of $56,000 is quite a big sum for the average Singaporean family.'
April 27, 2011 at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Think Balestier Road and late-night eateries offering bak kut teh (pork ribs in tea soup) and zi char (cooked dishes) come to mind.
But visitors to the nondescript Balestier Complex are in for a surprise. Amid the food joints is a bustling Indian-themed nightclub, Jeanz Live. The club, on the first level next to a gaming centre and several dingy watering holes that attract the less fashionable, stands out effortlessly with its hip party crowd.
Jeanz Live features a modern contemporary interior accentuated by revolving disco lights and is among several heartland nightspots offering an alternative nightlife scene.
Unlike big-name clubs downtown, they feature Indian music and dangdut - popular Indonesian bands - and some social dancing nights.
Once the haunt of babyboomers in their 50s and 60s, such nightspots are seeing an increase in the number of partygoers in their 30s.
Take Jeanz Live. From midnight, people mainly in their 20s and 30s start streaming in. The main attraction is a 10-piece resident band from Chennai, India, that plays Tamil and Bollywood hits.
It comprises four singers, two keyboardists, a bassist, a drummer and a percussionist, with 55-year-old Anand Amalnathan as the band leader.
Partygoer James S., a 28-year-old sales executive, says: 'Although the club is off the beaten track, the party vibe is fun and unpretentious. It's a good change from the mainstream club scene in town.'
Over at Jest D'Place in Choa Chu Kang Centre, young and old partygoers jive to pop-inspired and nostalgic dangdut music by the six-piece Kalahari band from Singapore every Friday.
Nostalgia is also big at Scarlet City in AMK Hub in Ang Mo Kio, where you can cha-cha, rhumba and swing to Mandarin and Hokkien songs performed by five Chinese singers in a minus-one set.
NTUC Club runs both Jest D'Place and Scarlet City, while local businessman V. Ramu owns Jeanz Live.
Jeanz Live operations manager George Matthew says the club moved to Balestier Complex due to the intense competition among Indian-themed clubs in Circular Road. And to draw young working adults, it raised the age limit from 18 to 23.
Band leader Anand, who has been performing in Singapore for 18 years, says: 'In the 1990s, the band played an equal mix of old and new songs. Now the younger crowd prefers to listen to recent hits such as Vaada Vaada Paiya and Kacheri Kacheri. My band members change into different outfits during the sets, which we didn't do before.'
And it is the repertoire and musical arrangement that is also drawing the younger set to Jest D'Place. Its Dangdut Night on Fridays is a popular draw.
Kalahari band leader Roseli Mahmood says: 'Besides dangdut, we also play a mix of English ballads and rock numbers from Deep Purple. This way, it appeals to both the young and old.'
Kalahari have been on the music scene since 1988. Roseli, 44, adds: 'Younger people prefer the new dangdut songs as they have rock, samba and salsa influences, such as the song Goyang Inul by Indonesian artist Inul Daratista.'
These days, partygoers are heading to Scarlet City to show off their dance moves since their former hangout, Happy Days nightspot in Bishan Street 13, moved to Princess Theatre Building in Bedok last year.
The move saw Happy Days morph from a social dance venue to a chill-out pub and wine bar.
Scarlet City club manager Zann Sulaiman says: 'The weekends draw about 200 people a night and a large percentage are former Happy Days patrons.'
The 47-year-old, who ran Happy Days in Bishan for seven years, adds: 'The profiles of customers have also changed as Scarlet City now draws 30 per cent of those in their 30s, many of whom are new walk-in customers.'
In a sign of the times, she adds: 'We used to see many customers in their 60s. Now, most of our patrons are in their 40s and 50s.'
On the dance floor that day, 51-year-old retail assistant Christina Quek is showing off her flamboyant moves. She is dressed in a pretty, low-cut blouse and a short skirt.
She says her 54-year-old husband, an assistant engineer, is an introvert who prefers to spend time on the computer at home. They have two children.
Her dance partner is family friend, Mr Moses Quek, 54, who works at the National Parks Board.
Madam Quek, who has been dancing for nine years, jokes: 'I was among the youngest when I first danced in Happy Days. I still feel youthful and energetic. Dancing has kept me fit and trim.'
Asked if she feels she is upstaged by younger dancers, the grandmother of two says: 'I have just as much stamina. I can boogie up to two hours on the dancefloor each time.'
WHERE TO FIND THE NIGHTSPOTS
JEST D'PLACE
Where: Choa Chu Kang Centre, Choa Chu Kang Avenue 4, 03-01, tel: 6765-9433
What: Dangdut band, Kalahari, play on Fridays. Various Chinese acts perform Mandarin and Hokkien hits on Saturdays and Sundays, and from Tuesdays to Thursdays
Entry: Pay for first drink at the door
Opens: Tuesdays to Thursdays, and Sundays (6pm to 1am), Fridays and Saturdays (6pm to 3am), closed on Mondays
Nearest MRT: Choa Chu Kang
SCARLET CITY
Where: AMK Hub, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, 04-02, tel: 6582-4145
What: Chinese acts perform throughout the week: Nostalgic hits on Mondays, Chinese love songs on Tuesdays, Mandopop night on Wednesdays, Canto night on Thursdays, Popular Top 40s hits on Fridays, and social dancing on Saturdays and Sundays
Entry: Pay for first drink at the door
Opens: Daily, Sundays to Fridays (6pm to 2am) and Saturdays (6pm to 3am). Karaoke rooms open at 2pm
Nearest MRT: Ang Mo Kio
JEANZ LIVE
Where: Balestier Complex, 262 Balestier Road, 01-17, tel: 6256-6569
What: A 10-piece live band from India plays Tamil and Bollywood hits. A DJ spins between live sets
Entry: $30 (women) and $35 (men) on Fridays and Saturdays. Women get free entry and drinks on Wednesdays, men pay $35. Free entry on other days. Cover charge includes one drink
Opens: Daily, Sundays to Fridays (9pm to 3am) and Saturdays (9pm to 4am)
Nearest MRT: Novena. Walk to the bus stop at Revival Centre Church in Moulmein Road and take bus number 124. Alight at Balestier Towers and walk to Balestier Complex
Think Balestier Road and late-night eateries offering bak kut teh (pork ribs in tea soup) and zi char (cooked dishes) come to mind.
But visitors to the nondescript Balestier Complex are in for a surprise. Amid the food joints is a bustling Indian-themed nightclub, Jeanz Live. The club, on the first level next to a gaming centre and several dingy watering holes that attract the less fashionable, stands out effortlessly with its hip party crowd.
Jeanz Live features a modern contemporary interior accentuated by revolving disco lights and is among several heartland nightspots offering an alternative nightlife scene.
Unlike big-name clubs downtown, they feature Indian music and dangdut - popular Indonesian bands - and some social dancing nights.
Once the haunt of babyboomers in their 50s and 60s, such nightspots are seeing an increase in the number of partygoers in their 30s.
Take Jeanz Live. From midnight, people mainly in their 20s and 30s start streaming in. The main attraction is a 10-piece resident band from Chennai, India, that plays Tamil and Bollywood hits.
It comprises four singers, two keyboardists, a bassist, a drummer and a percussionist, with 55-year-old Anand Amalnathan as the band leader.
Partygoer James S., a 28-year-old sales executive, says: 'Although the club is off the beaten track, the party vibe is fun and unpretentious. It's a good change from the mainstream club scene in town.'
Over at Jest D'Place in Choa Chu Kang Centre, young and old partygoers jive to pop-inspired and nostalgic dangdut music by the six-piece Kalahari band from Singapore every Friday.
Nostalgia is also big at Scarlet City in AMK Hub in Ang Mo Kio, where you can cha-cha, rhumba and swing to Mandarin and Hokkien songs performed by five Chinese singers in a minus-one set.
NTUC Club runs both Jest D'Place and Scarlet City, while local businessman V. Ramu owns Jeanz Live.
Jeanz Live operations manager George Matthew says the club moved to Balestier Complex due to the intense competition among Indian-themed clubs in Circular Road. And to draw young working adults, it raised the age limit from 18 to 23.
Band leader Anand, who has been performing in Singapore for 18 years, says: 'In the 1990s, the band played an equal mix of old and new songs. Now the younger crowd prefers to listen to recent hits such as Vaada Vaada Paiya and Kacheri Kacheri. My band members change into different outfits during the sets, which we didn't do before.'
And it is the repertoire and musical arrangement that is also drawing the younger set to Jest D'Place. Its Dangdut Night on Fridays is a popular draw.
Kalahari band leader Roseli Mahmood says: 'Besides dangdut, we also play a mix of English ballads and rock numbers from Deep Purple. This way, it appeals to both the young and old.'
Kalahari have been on the music scene since 1988. Roseli, 44, adds: 'Younger people prefer the new dangdut songs as they have rock, samba and salsa influences, such as the song Goyang Inul by Indonesian artist Inul Daratista.'
These days, partygoers are heading to Scarlet City to show off their dance moves since their former hangout, Happy Days nightspot in Bishan Street 13, moved to Princess Theatre Building in Bedok last year.
The move saw Happy Days morph from a social dance venue to a chill-out pub and wine bar.
Scarlet City club manager Zann Sulaiman says: 'The weekends draw about 200 people a night and a large percentage are former Happy Days patrons.'
The 47-year-old, who ran Happy Days in Bishan for seven years, adds: 'The profiles of customers have also changed as Scarlet City now draws 30 per cent of those in their 30s, many of whom are new walk-in customers.'
In a sign of the times, she adds: 'We used to see many customers in their 60s. Now, most of our patrons are in their 40s and 50s.'
On the dance floor that day, 51-year-old retail assistant Christina Quek is showing off her flamboyant moves. She is dressed in a pretty, low-cut blouse and a short skirt.
She says her 54-year-old husband, an assistant engineer, is an introvert who prefers to spend time on the computer at home. They have two children.
Her dance partner is family friend, Mr Moses Quek, 54, who works at the National Parks Board.
Madam Quek, who has been dancing for nine years, jokes: 'I was among the youngest when I first danced in Happy Days. I still feel youthful and energetic. Dancing has kept me fit and trim.'
Asked if she feels she is upstaged by younger dancers, the grandmother of two says: 'I have just as much stamina. I can boogie up to two hours on the dancefloor each time.'
JEST D'PLACE
Where: Choa Chu Kang Centre, Choa Chu Kang Avenue 4, 03-01, tel: 6765-9433
What: Dangdut band, Kalahari, play on Fridays. Various Chinese acts perform Mandarin and Hokkien hits on Saturdays and Sundays, and from Tuesdays to Thursdays
Entry: Pay for first drink at the door
Opens: Tuesdays to Thursdays, and Sundays (6pm to 1am), Fridays and Saturdays (6pm to 3am), closed on Mondays
Nearest MRT: Choa Chu Kang
SCARLET CITY
Where: AMK Hub, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, 04-02, tel: 6582-4145
What: Chinese acts perform throughout the week: Nostalgic hits on Mondays, Chinese love songs on Tuesdays, Mandopop night on Wednesdays, Canto night on Thursdays, Popular Top 40s hits on Fridays, and social dancing on Saturdays and Sundays
Entry: Pay for first drink at the door
Opens: Daily, Sundays to Fridays (6pm to 2am) and Saturdays (6pm to 3am). Karaoke rooms open at 2pm
Nearest MRT: Ang Mo Kio
JEANZ LIVE
Where: Balestier Complex, 262 Balestier Road, 01-17, tel: 6256-6569
What: A 10-piece live band from India plays Tamil and Bollywood hits. A DJ spins between live sets
Entry: $30 (women) and $35 (men) on Fridays and Saturdays. Women get free entry and drinks on Wednesdays, men pay $35. Free entry on other days. Cover charge includes one drink
Opens: Daily, Sundays to Fridays (9pm to 3am) and Saturdays (9pm to 4am)
Nearest MRT: Novena. Walk to the bus stop at Revival Centre Church in Moulmein Road and take bus number 124. Alight at Balestier Towers and walk to Balestier Complex
January 31, 2011 at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
review: concert
RETROLICIOUS
Fort Canning Park
Last Saturday
Never Gonna Give You Up.
That was the reassuring message when more than 6,500 fans of all ages turned up at Fort Canning to remind Johnny Hates Jazz, Debbie Gibson and Rick Astley that they were not faded and long-forgotten 1980s acts.
Not when the crowd were up on their feet grooving all night long at the retro-fest which had kicked off before 9pm with Johnny Hates Jazz.
Two local acts - breakdance and beatbox - had earlier provided the distractions as the venue began to fill up.
But even if you arrived late, there was little to worry about as the excellent sound system and snazzy-coloured spotlights made sure that what Johnny Hates Jazz did on stage could be seen and heard even from afar.
The threesome Johnny Hates Jazz opened with I Don't Want To Be A Hero, a 1987 dance track with anti-war sentiments.
They rolled out the must-hears such as Turn Back The Clock from their hit 1988 album of the same name, Different Seasons, as well as new songs such as You Belong To You, which all sounded richer compared to the synthesised sounds of before.
It could also be due to the fact that frontman Clark Datchler's voice and musical style have matured over the decades, giving him a deeper tone.
One could see Datchler enjoying himself as he gyrated his hips to the songs and teased the audience by feigning ignorance of Shattered Dreams: 'What's that song again? I've heard of it and I really don't know.'
After a half-hour break, 1980s teen queen Gibson came on and shook things up again as she shimmied to Shake Your Love in a mini shiny skirt.
Extremely comfortable with the audience, she kicked off her heels after Foolish Beat (1988), let her hair down and was amusingly self-deprecating about turning 40 next month and wearing shoulder pads 'that would have caused an international backlash'.
She also got everyone dancing to her bubblegum pop hit, Electric Youth. And when the audience sang the first few lines of Lost In Your Eyes, she said: 'I'm gonna redo this song. I wanna hear you guys sing it because you sound so good.'
But the highlight of the night was arguably English singer Rick Astley. He was in his 1980s party element as he flirted with the audience, asking whether it was 'the natural temperature here or the sexual tension' that he was feeling.
He even removed his jacket in response to calls by screaming fans.
Belting out hits such as Together Forever, When I Fall In Love and his recent single Lights Out, his rich and deep voice was never in danger of being crowded out by the music of his band.
And when he unleashed the infectious monster hit, Never Gonna Give You Up, he sounded exactly as he did in his 1987 music video - youthful and energetic.
He even stuck to the same dance moves while the audience went about their own Mambo moves honed from nights partying at Zouk.
Retrolicious? You bet.
October 15, 2010 at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Review by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Published: February 22 2010 05:00 | Last updated: February 22 2010 05:00
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It
By Philip Ball
Bodley Head £20 452 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16
Music takes many forms. It can soothe, rouse, prompt deep introspection, manifest itself as football fans chanting about the referee’s parentage, and so on. One person’s music is someone else’s appalling racket. Aristotle lauded its morally ennobling qualities; the CIA have used it as torture.
How can something so elusive be tied down in words? But music doesn’t exist in some celestial realm of its own. Rather it is a human creation, “the most remarkable blend of art and science, logic and emotion, physics and psychology, known to us”, as Philip Ball writes in this fascinating book.
A consultant editor for the science journal Nature, Ball is the author of a range of popular science books and his encyclopaedic scope is evident here. He moves from Bach and Bartók to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Led Zeppelin, and proves as comfortable discussing the science of music as its cultural and artistic dimensions.
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker argued, in his celebrated book The Language Instinct, that language is biologically innate to humans, wired into our brains by evolution. Music is different: in Pinker’s view it is “auditory cheesecake”, a luxury of life, not essential to it. Here Ball grumbles about the cheesecake metaphor but doesn’t fundamentally dispute the point. Instead he modifies it: music may not have an evolutionary function, but our brains have evolved in such a way as to make us naturally musical.
“We are pattern seekers, clue-solvers, unravellers of sensory data, and also communicators and storytellers. Within the auditory domain, those things are going to make us musical beings, come what may.” Music is “the aural equivalent of fireworks” and “a gymnasium for the mind”, both an extraordinary aesthetic experience and a mental work-out.
Mainly drawing on western traditions, the book takes us painstakingly through the tools of composition and the way “our brains must work some clever magic” to make sense of them. Even if you don’t know your diatonic scales from your bathroom scales, you display a sophisticated degree of musical understanding simply by hearing a series of sounds as music. “Experiencing music is an active affair, no matter how idly we are listening,” says Ball.
Despite Ball’s fluent writing, and the argument that we all in a sense know how to read music, there are times when the book resembles a particularly tricky Schoenberg concerto. Statements such as “Relative to the original C, this new note has a frequency greater by a factor 3/2 x 3/2, or 9/4, and it corresponds to the note D” left me feeling like Spinal Tap’s clueless guitarist Nigel Tufnel. (Ball, musical omnivore, mentions him too.) Yet the effort is handsomely rewarded.
One small cavil: I would have liked more discussion about artificial intelligence and music. Can a machine be programmed to compose? What implications would that have for Ball’s description of music as “a direct route to the core of our shared humanity”? This thought-provoking book answers many questions, and leaves a few hanging tantalisingly behind as well.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic
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March 29, 2010 at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Published: March 24 2010 23:24 | Last updated: March 24 2010 23:24
There was dog food in the gift bags at this year’s Grammy Awards, and a dead man has just struck the biggest record deal in history. A decade after Napster began demolishing its profit margins, the music industry is still struggling to adjust to more straitened times. Its online missteps, from suing downloaders to letting Apple’s dominant iTunes store dictate pricing, are so well charted that few outsiders would look to the music business for case studies in how to market their products in the digital economy.
Last year’s charts again spelled out record labels’ dependence on television talent show winners such as Susan Boyle and stars of a more lucrative era such as Michael Jackson, whose estate just signed a $200m-plus deal with Sony Music.
In the past year, however, two acts have emerged that are giving label executives hope that they have not lost the ability to break new talent, and that also offer broader lessons about the power of digital marketing.
Lady Gaga, signed to Universal Music, and Ke$ha, on Sony’s RCA Records label, are vying to be the heirs to a pop throne not yet vacated by Madonna, while firing up digital communities of fans in a way that was impossible 20 years ago.
There are differences between the aloof artistry of Stefani Germanotta, Lady Gaga’s real name, and the raunchy and boozy lyrics of Kesha Rose Sebert, but both have achieved global, digital fame thanks in large part to online word-of-mouth of which brand managers dream.
“Eight months ago no-one knew who this girl was. Now she’s the hottest star in the world,” says Barry Weiss, who last year signed Ke$ha, a 23-year-old who grew up in Nashville. “Ke$ha’s going to be this year’s Halloween dress-up [costume]. Last year it was Gaga. Ten years ago it was Britney [Spears]. That’s how big this feels.”
Music videos make a comeback
Long before the YouTube generation usurped the MTV generation, the music video had become known as a loss-making luxury. Now, thanks to the internet, the music video is coming back into its own.
Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” and the elaborately produced video for OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” have become viral hits, with 11m and 9.5m views respectively on YouTube. The “official explicit version” of “Telephone”, Lady Gaga’s controversial nine-minute production, has notched up 22.6m views so far on Vevo, the site launched by Sony Music and Universal Music with YouTube to provide a premium destination for their videos.
According to Barry Weiss, such traffic drives revenues. “It’s penny rates, but the Ke$ha videos will make a lot of money on streams,” he says. Sales of her single got “a big bump” when iTunes featured “Tik Tok” as its free video of the week, he says, but Ke$ha fans have also paid for 100,000 video downloads on Apple’s online store.
Mr Weiss, who runs Sony’s RCA/Jive label group, has watched Ke$ha’s debut single, “Tik Tok”, top the US charts for nine weeks. She has sold 6m iTunes downloads in the US and 2m internationally, and about 1m mobile ringtones and ringbacks round the world. Her debut album, Animal, has sold 1m copies, a “staggering” 50 per cent of them in digital form, says Mr Weiss.
Ke$ha’s appeal is to a hard-partying young crowd more interested in their smartphones than the CDs of Boyle’s older market. As Mr Weiss put it: “18-22-year-old girls and women are getting on the bar in Milwaukee when “Tik Tok” comes on. This is their song.”
Ke$ha came to RCA through Lukasz Gottwalk, or Dr Luke, the pop producer who gave her a break providing vocals for a 2009 hit called “Right Round” by Flo Rida. When RCA began negotiating for a multi-album deal, it was struck by her strong social media following. Once the label had settled on “Tik Tok” as Ke$ha’s first single, it gave it away from July on MySpace as a free stream more than a month before it was due to go on sale on iTunes.
For Mr Weiss, such viral marketing felt familiar. “It was the Britney playbook from 1998-99,” he explains. At that time, the Jive label had been dominated by rap artists but when Spears began her career, Mr Weiss says they “applied street marketing methodology to pop music” by giving out cassette singles of “Baby One More Time” as a young Britney toured shopping malls.
After spreading virally, “Tik Tok” hit iTunes on August 25. Within a week, it had sold 610,000 downloads in the US alone, breaking digital records for a female artist, and soon spread. “We knew “Tik Tok” would be an enormous hit when it broke at number one on iTunes New Zealand with no radio play,” says Mr Weiss.
Radio stations closely watch iTunes, which has sold 10bn songs to date, and calls poured in to Sony from stations round the world, but their interest prompted Mr Weiss to delay his radio launch plans by a month, to mid-October.
Even now, “radio is still the only way you really sell a record”, says Mr Weiss, but his gamble was to heighten the song’s radio impact by letting awareness build online.
Finance executives eager for a hit for the Christmas quarter questioned the decision, and Mr Weiss admits that, when “Tik Tok” was eventually released to stations, “it didn’t explode as the promo guys thought it would”.
The radio play was enough to pave the way for an album release in early January.
“January is dead. There’s no way we would have had the number one album [in the run-up to Christmas]. It would have got lost in the sauce,” admits Mr Weiss.
Other artists, from Lily Allen to Jack Johnson have had viral digital success, but “too often you see their [digital] phenomena pop up and there’s no foresight into how to catch that in a sales net,” says Bill Werde, editorial director of Billboard, the entertainment industry magazine.
In Ke$ha’s case, ”the brilliant part” was Sony’s decision to make her album available for pre-sale on iTunes just after Christmas, when new iPod and iPhone owners want to load up their presents with music or spend iTunes gift cards. “They played it perfectly,” Mr Werde says, ”but it helps that “Tik Tok” is an amazing song.”
Animal instantly bumped Boyle’s record off the top of the US chart and sold 152,000 copies in a week.
Unusually, at a time when many worry whether the album format can survive in the digital era, almost three-quarters of Animal’s sales were via iTunes.
Sony priced the album at just $6.99, before raising the price to $9.99 once it saw the pace of sales. “$7 gets kids interested in the artist, so ultimately [she] can have a 10-year career,” Mr Weiss says.
With fans able to buy only their favourite tracks, however, digital albums help point labels to their next single. At the end of Animal’s first week on iTunes, Sony could see that a track called “Blah Blah Blah” was selling almost as well as “Tik Tok”.
“That picked the single for us,” says Mr Weiss.
Ke$ha is now busily promoting her album, with events ranging from a “secret show” in London sponsored by MySpace to performing on American Idol.
Mr Weiss is already calculating how his new digital phenomenon will compare to Spears, a star from the cassette era. “Britney went on to sell 20m [copies of her first album]. We’re not going to do that... But we’re going to do 5m [sales of the Tik Tok single] in America alone and we’ll probably do 8m-10m worldwide.”
A decade ago Jive made $60m-$75m from Spears’s first album, he estimates. “On Ke$ha hopefully we’ll make $15m-$20m.”
Mr Weiss’s father, Hyman “Hy” Weiss, founded a 1950s doo-wop label. “The business hasn’t changed since my father’s day. It has, but it hasn’t,” he says. “One hit used to cover 10 misses. Now it only covers one.”
Even with such digital success stories, the industry is still a long way from its profitable peak. “You can still make money in the music business with hit content. You’re just not going to make the money you used to make.”
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March 29, 2010 at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Published: March 15 2010 02:00 | Last updated: March 15 2010 02:00
We do two performances each hour at FAO Schwarz , the New York toy store, and these involve dancing on a giant keyboard. One dancer plays the right hand and one plays the left.
We always do "Chopsticks" and "Heart and Soul", and then we do two more from our repertoire of 14 songs.
The idea of piano dancing comes from the film Big . FAO Schwarz started having professionals perform on the keyboard in 2004.
I used to work in a different department as a toy demonstrator when I heard they were looking for piano dancers. I've now been doing it for nearly five years.
My career is theatre by trade - I'm a singer, actor and dancer - so this is a day job. But it's great to get to perform and make some money. It's very flexible, too. If I need to take a couple of months off to travel with a show, then other dancers will take more shifts. You need rhythm and all the dancers are performers of some kind.
It's a real tourist attraction so you meet people from all over the world, and everyone - kids and adults - enjoys it. There aren't many downsides. You sometimes get crying children and when members of the public use the piano, smelly feet are an occasional hazard.
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March 15, 2010 at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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