Tuesday 15 December 2009

Yesterday included a much-needed hour of helpless laughter, at the Òran Mór panto, a suitably ridiculous tour-de-force, much of which defies analysis. Seeing a panto veteran like Andy Gray at close range working a small audience while playing five parts simultaneously, some of them in drag, is quite breathtaking, even if Tiny Tim's lines were mostly 'Bastard!'. And his performance as Scrooge explains why Dave Anderson was sporting sideburns when he said hello in the Western Baths last week.

Alison brought Johannes Pramsohler over to play some Bach in the kitchen this morning: if music happened in the kitchen more often, I'd probably never leave the house. Then they went off to buy me a bottle of whisky while I cycled into town for a lunchtime meeting with Chrissy Pritchard: that seemed like a fair division of labour to me.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, I had a phone call from a certain public funding body suggesting we weren't proposing to pay our musicians enough? Well, they've given us some money for the recording project (hooray), but the accompanying letter, signed by the same person who rang me that day, tells us that they think we're paying our musicians too much, and have reduced the amount accordingly. What this suggests to me is that public funding bodies shouldn't decide what musicians get paid. To be honest, I agree with the very sensible assertion made by Brian Morton in print a while ago, that the only real way to support artists is to commission work. Anything else is a distraction, and also generates expensive bureaucracy.