Sunday 17 October 2004

Went to the first night of the instal festival last night with Sushil K. Charlemagne Palestine was fantastic: at a Bösendorfer covered in soft toys he made fascinating resonances for 35 minutes and then sang/chanted a version of 'Loch Lomond' accompanying himself with his finger on the rim of a huge brandy glass. Great.

Unfortunately, Baby Dee (who came across as a Broadway acid casualty) and Current 93 (unspeakably bad student poetry intoned over a grade 6 piano lesson) were both pretentious toss. When a performance poet delivers the line 'what monsters we have become' the only valid response is to shout 'I don't know, what monsters have we become? Shrek? Loch Ness?' We left and headed for Tchai-Ovna for a sublime pot of tea. Derek Bailey has cancelled tomorrow, so I think I'll give the second night a miss. And for a festival that was supposed to be radical and up-to-the-minute, I didn't see anything that couldn't have happened in 1967.

But I did invent a theatre piece, based on my experience of the queue in the gents. You need 30 male volunteers who drink 4 pints of beer each. Then on stage you have 5 urinals, and the volunteers form an orderly queue to relieve themselves. The urinals are fitted with devices that use the liquid flow rate to modulate the output of some analogue synthesisers. The piece ends when the last man in the queue is finished and the music stops as a result. It's called 'Piece of Piss' and it's © D McGuinness 2004. If there are any gallery owners or theatre managers out there who'd like to stage it, get in touch.