Backbeat is the new Beatles musical which covers the early period of teh Beatles success story, mostly in Hamburg where John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe entertained the nightclub goers in the Reeperbahn district. The main focus of the show is Stuart Sutcliffe, the “lost” Beatle, who played incompetent bass guitar but was an art school friend of John’s and an ambitious young painter. The show follows Sutcliffe’s relationship with the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr – who was responsible for the Beatles’ mop-top haircuts and some superb early images of the group. It also depicts Lennon’s angry feelings of rejection, and McCartney’s relief that he has got John back.

This article titled “Backbeat – review” was written by Lyn Gardner, for The Guardian on Tuesday 11th October 2011 18.08 UTC Does London need another jukebox bio musical? No, and it doesn’t get one either in this intelligent, multilayered and often touching account of the Beatles’ early days in Hamburg and Liverpool and the “lost” Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe. The epitome of cool, Sutcliffe was John Lennon‘s art-school buddy and a gifted young painter who abandoned the group for art and the love of Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer who took some famous moody shots of the band and originally styled their mop-headed, collarless look. Sutcliffe died aged 21 of a brain haemorrhage, just as the Beatles were on the brink of success. Based on Iain Softley’s 1994 movie, Backbeat is – despite all its raucous energy and high levels of amplification – often quite downbeat. It’s all the better for it. More a play with songs than a fully fledged musical, this is not a show threaded through with familiar Beatles’ hits: a brief glimpse of John improving on Paul’s faltering attempts to write Love Me Do is about the closest we get. Instead we see the boys in their Hamburg days when they were essentially a covers band playing in a seedy nightclub, perfecting their sound and skills on hits such as Twist and Shout and Please Mr Postman. The music is delivered with some panache that does eventually lead to the inevitable dancing in the aisles, but it’s a mistake to think that Backbeat is about the music or is indeed the verifiably true story of the early days of the Fab Four. In David Leveaux‘s moody, often painterly production it is much more about art and ways of seeing. There is a small, quiet scene where Sutcliffe contemplates the changes wrought by a lighthouse beam. Oh and it’s about love, in particular the love between Andrew Knott’s arsey antagonistic Lennon, who claims that all art is “dick”, and Nick Blood’s charismatic Stuart, who sees the band as a diversion and is forced to make the hard choices about who he should be with and what he should do with his life. “You’ve got to let me go,” he tells John, and it’s as if he is trying to disengage tenderly from a lover. It’s a small show wrapped up big for a West End theatre, and there are moments of clunkiness in the handling of the ensemble in the Hamburg scenes. But it’s always visually arresting and, finally, a little bit heartbreaking too.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

The Wreckers’ Prayer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo88PSQV3Gc

Andy Roberts Podcast 48 is out http://andyroberts.me/havering-folk-club/podcast-48-opening-night-at-haverfolk

Peter Townsend of The Who has written anther rock musical. This one isn’t about growing up but rather about growing old. The musical is called Floss and tells the story of an ageing pub rocker and relationship with his wife. Songs from the show will appear on the next Who album. Townsend is said to be in talks for a US opening in 2011. He says he wants to tackle the issues the Baby Boomers are facing as they realise they didn’t die before they got old. The music will reflect the anger and disillusionment of this newly retired generation. Meanwhile that other Townsend offering, Quadrophenia continues its UK tour.

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One of the best London breaks in summer is to go and see Dirty Dancing with a bunch of mates. The music is just perrenial, the dancing sensational and you just know you’re going to have the time of your life. Here’s a couple from the London cast performing at West End Live recently, Click here to view the embedded video. video by theatre breaks

30th June – 1st August 2009 Stephanie Abrahams, a brilliant concert violinist, who seemingly has it all, is forced to re-evaluate her life when struck down by an unforeseen tragedy. Faced with a truth too difficult to comprehend she consults psychiatrist Dr Feldmann and through a series of highly charged encounters is led to examine her deepest emotions and finally to consider a future without music. Matthew Lloyd’s production stars Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman.

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Musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd-Webber has railed against the internet broadband suppliers in the House of Lords for profiting from customers who share digital music - so called internet piracy, and urged the government to clamp down hard. What I Think I don’t mind a bit of eccentricity but LLoyd Webber is braying like a dinosaur at the small and furry ones. He’s desperate to preserve something called “The music Industry” at a time when the number of people who have access to the means to create music and reach new audiences has massively multiplied. But these are not the kind of ‘creatives’ he’s interested in, only the industrial megastars with their sanitised overproduced market segment targeted version of music. His argument that without the contrived scarcity of monopolistic media industry giants generating profits for shareholders and large numbers of managers and marketers, then creative people would simply stop creating is clearly nonsense.
Lloyd-Webber said investment in higher speed broadband networks should be delayed until “there is a sustainable commercial arrangement for those creative works on which these new networks depend”, suggesting unregulated higher bandwidth would mean the film industry would suffer the same fate as the record business. He wants to maintain a system which means that a very small number of manufactured “Stars” generate the lion’s share of the income so that the old fashioned media industries and all their hangers-on can continue to enjoy their lifestyles off the back of a restricted set of safe and successful artists. He’s using his position in the unelected House of Lords to urge The government to put try to put the internet genie back into a bottle, to stop a whole generation of people who have grown up with technology, from applying their own innovations and using the social media freely as a they have become accustomed to do so.
He might as well have been speaking at the annual dinner of the flat earth society. The record industry has contracted largely due to its own inability to adapt to the changes in business model which the new media enables. Trying to slap government restrictions onto the digital peer to peer channels is like trying to prop up the hot metal print industry long after digital desktop publishing has been invented. Did the art of creative writing die and all the writers stop writing when the old system was replaced? No, they adapted and prospered and so will the songwriters, musicians and creative entertainers find new and different ways to earn a living in the digital age, it’s just that the shape of the pyramid structure that grew around the old system might have to change somewhat.

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terminal orbit has added a photo to the pool:

Penguins are just so cool. My first dream profession in life was to be a penguin warden. It didn't work out. But I still like penguins a lot. [DSC_4340a]