Light Fantastic – the Rink Revival Ballroom project

BEGIN THE BEGUINE

Given that a few arrangements fell through this week, I still seem to have been pretty busy. I have been, shaping my strategy… Ha! That sounds like a crass corporate slogan.

The task in hand is really for me to get a handle on how to put together this increasing treasure trove of material.

I have begun by defining what it must NOT be; confirming to myself that it mustn’t look like some worthy presentation of local history. Instead, I want to develop a vehicle that somehow denies the hierarchy of linear time. Although it uses the Rink Ballroom as a starting point, it isn’t just about the building, and it’s not just about THE people involved.. it’s about ‘people’ in general – and what it is to be a person – all considered through a very discriminating lens (mine).

“Big canvas” you may well say.. and I would agree. It will get more specific.

Over the period of the project I have defined what I’m trying to do in many different ways for various people. As we all do, I explain the work differently depending upon what I perceive the listeners potential level of understanding, or sympathy with my cause, might be. But of course it’s all just musings on the head of a pin ultimately.. if I could write it down then there would be no need to make the installation at all.

So I found myself yesterday experimenting with a little video projector – projecting some of my footage onto cylinders I made out of paper; re-videoing the result and then laying that footage back over the top of the original footage. What I’m after is a way of saying, visually, that we are watching an illusion of linear time. Like most things, less is often more. My distorted projection ‘echoes’ are interesting but to be handled with caution. I’m not after a surrealistic chaotic soup, just gentle interventions.

Whilst it’s exciting to jump into the more expressive elements, I am also aware that I have a great wodge of material that needs to be logged and then cherry picked. This is no small task, and I can’t give shape to anything without that is done first, so I am officially starting that process NOW.

In my mind, what will make this into a work of ART (as distinct from a multimedia documentary) is that I am allowing myself to decide what constitutes ‘truth’ by more than simply re-ordering it. I was thinking about how to weave myself or others into the plot… or maybe to make a composite ‘everyman’ who could represent ideas I want to explore; ideas that aren’t necessarily obvious in what people have said directly to me.

In fact the manipulation of fact is no stranger to many of the musicians I have come across. Some have changed their names more than once; their stage names becoming their real names eventually. I like that; it allows me to re-invent some of my material. Fabrication in pursuit of truthfulness. Fabrication as a enabler of integrity.

Back on planet earth, a couple of cancelled meetings mean I’m a bit behind and the week has been taken up with various practicals. One of these more enjoyable tasks was picking a number of images that might represent the project. You could loosely describe them as ‘publicity’. With the first show still 8 months away it might seem a long way off but the PR machine needs feeding. Deciding on any one image is an interesting dilemma given the scope of this piece. I have decided on the one posted here. It’s an informal, almost throwaway shot that I didn’t even have in my initial go-to pile but, on re-trawling, it just seemed right. Suitably of ‘the moment’.

Signing the exhibition contract also made me focus on what the final name would be, as ‘Light Fantastic’ was always just a working title. ‘Send three and fourpence’ seems to be in the spirit of the piece… being that it deals with the idea of a message re-interpreted by repetition…

Google it if you’re not familiar with the reference :)



DONTCHA JUST LOVE DOLLIES?

Maybe not the first thing I would have thought might come out of the Rink project but it’s an idea I fleetingly mentioned way back, which is now about to happen. I am having a doll made.

First time for everything… and in the spirit of nurturing my feminine side who can say I shouldn’t? When I was a boy they came up with the idea of Action Man – tough, camouflage clothing on a body that owed a lot to Barbie, just swapping boobs for pectorals. Didn’t do it for me as I was an Airfix Army boy myself, preferring to arrange a rematch of the 8th Army versus the Afrika Corp or some similar ‘true to life’ conflict.

The doll will be a scale model of Marion Keene – the glamorous singer who first sang with the resident band at the Rink when she was 14 and very quickly became a face on television after being signed by Oscar Rabin. I have written before about Marion, and still chat to her on the phone now and again. She calls a spade a spade and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Somehow I have slipped under this radar and she says she enjoys talking to me, so I have felt able to take the liberty of making her into an icon in a quite literal way.

Marion lives on the south coast now, and I had thought I might go and film her one day, but as the months slipped by it began to feel more appropriate to represent her in a way that was more remote. A Marion doll, resplendent in shimmering fish tail dress, is the essence of what she is to me. Marion laughs at the idea but I think she secretly rather likes it.

Having trawled the internet, it was surprisingly difficult to find someone who makes dolls like this. I settled on a lady in the States who specialises in personalised dolls with accurate features. It might be a bit spooky – I won’t be sure until I see the finished article, but I can’t wait. The lady in question has been busy with other dolls up until now and has just written to me to say she is now able to take on my commission. Not sure that she is used to people commissioning her dolls for such purposes… but I’m sure she’ll make a good job as it seems to be a passion rather than a job to her.

Hanging in on the fashion theme…I just finished talking to Nancy O’Connor this afternoon.

“You know when you asked to talk to me on the phone today” she says “I thought it would take about ten minutes… no I don’t mean anything by that Neil… I’ve loved every minute of it”

I look at the timer on the phone and we are just nudging 2 hours. Not once did it seem like she was struggling for words. It was a flood of memories, interspersed with hearty laughter and some sad, funny and surprising stories. She had written to me about being the first girl to wear a polo neck sweater to the Rink and I wanted to get her to talk directly to me about that and other stuff. Her family lived in a 2 up, one down terrace house. She says, whenever she came home you might ask where’s dad?… or where is my sister? or whoever…but she can never remember having to ask where her mother was. Her mother was always in the house. Her mother presided over the most immaculate oven range in the street. It shone.

If her mother was a social recluse, Nancy made up for it by going to the Rink as many nights as she could afford – and the fact that the polo neck cost 29 shillings and eleven pence is etched clearly in her mind. It was more than her weekly wage, but Nancy’s mother paid for it. Some people didn’t even have glass in the windows on their street, they put carpet up instead, but Nancy had a polo neck.

How’s that for designer prices.



THE SEA THE SEA

On my last visit to the faded seaside frontage that is Seaton Carew, I dropped off a photo I had been lent to scan. It is a black and white picture of the outside of the Rink, looking quite depressing really, with a car parked outside, a lone passerby and what looks like boarded up windows. It’s the only pic I’ve ever seen showing the entire frontage and it doesn’t immediately occur to me that this would make an ideal 40th wedding anniversary gift. But that, complete with biro inscription on the envelope is what Nancy O’Connor’s husband gave her as a memento of happy times.

He has passed away now and she’s very protective of the photo – asking her cousin John to ring me to make sure I will be returning it forthwith. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder and memories more powerful than mere actuality.

I have heard this from other people; it seems the Rink was a magical place that didn’t display its secrets obviously. I am put in mind of some sort of fairytale environment…like the stories I read when I was a child where there was something to be revealed behind a forbidding door, or perhaps treasure stored in a room which can only be accessed via a secret passage hidden in the roots of a forbidding tree (as in the Tinderbox by Hans Andersen).

Having delivered the photo back – waking John from an impromptu kip in his armchair – I ask him if he thinks Nancy might be up for a telephone interview.

“Ask her yourself” he says…and hands me the phone

“mmmm” says I…”I would rather you spoke to her first as I know she doesn’t like strangers bothering her.”

“I’ll show you the secret code” says John. He dials and lets the phone ring twice then hangs up. Then rings again. Nancy answers.

“I’ve got Neil Armstrong here” says John “he wants to ask you something.” He thrusts the phone into my hand and makes an aside to me…

“nothing like doing these things when they occur to you” he says with a wry smile. I don’t think John was ever backwards in coming forwards.

THE PHONE IS SET ON SUCH A HIGH VOLUME…

“HELLO NANCY” I SAY “I WAS JUST WONDERING IF YOU WOULD BE SO KIND AS TO CHAT WITH ME ON THE PHONE SOMETIME SO I CAN RECORD IT? NOT NOW BUT WE CAN ARRANGE A TIME THAT SUITS?”

Nancy sounds hale and hearty and laughs a lot – again not the impression I had gleaned of a lady who ‘doesn’t get out much these days’. I think of the room beneath the tree…and that Nancy lives in a similar place in my imagination. I guess ,as I probably won’t ever meet her face to face, that this is where she will remain for me; an illustration with a voice, in some ways more potent precisely because of that.

When I left John’s house my next stop was an opening at Hartlepool gallery, but the light was so impressive, so theatrical, that I had to park the car and take a wander along the sea front. That seemed a wasted opportunity, so I returned to the car, got out my camera gear and took some beautiful footage of the sea, with Teesside in the distance, and also, looking North, back to the Headland of Hartlepool. Long shadows, lone figures; a timeless atmosphere.

I have recently visited Mark Wallinger’s installation in the Baltic and, staring through my lens, I was reminded of his 2011 film ‘construction site’ where a group of men erect scaffolding on a beach, framing the seas foreshortened height, and almost touching the horizon line. I was seeing that view through my own lens but this time a small figure of a man running backwards on the sand in silhouette entered my canvas; three similarly sketched children apparently chasing him, as if part of a deliberately contrived, poignant, cinematic panorama.

He was in fact filming them as he ran backwards, unaware that I was also filming him, filming them…

I was glad I brought my camera .



FOOLS RUSH IN, WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO GO……but wise men never fall in love so how are they to know?

So goes the lyric written by Johnny Mercer in 1940, later sung by Frank Sinatra, Rick Nelson and Doris Day to name but a few; and in the spirit of this project that sort of fits the sentiment this week.

Last week, just after I published my post on here, I managed to speak to what I thought was going to be Kip Heron’s son, though I must admit to a slight nagging in the back of my brain that something might not be quite right. With a name like Jacky Arrowsmith…hmm well, could be male or female, but if he is a man why then has he changed his surname? When I finally got through on the phone the first thing I said was (I so hate calling people for the first time)

“hello, is that Jacky?”

“Do I sound like a woman?” came the reply

“erm no I guess not!… sorry it’s Neil here, the artist interested in Kip Heron” (now forever to be known as ‘total dipstick’).

Well in my defence I was only going off what I had been told. Turns out Kip never had a son, but had two daughters, and to further confuse matters I was talking to her husband.

“Hey, in the North East ‘wor Jacky’ is as common as whippets” I offer up… ho hum.

And yes I admit, 30 minutes after I published last week’s update, I did a tiny tweak. I changed all references to Jacky from ‘him’ into ‘her’. I should probably have left it, as it sits interestingly within the framework of this work, as in, ‘misinformation passed on and digested into assumption and fact’. For some reason I decided not to leave it; I think because I had so recently published the piece and felt if I had the ability to quickly revise it then I should.

A friend of mine had commented this week that the story of ‘my story’ is probably what the piece should be about. I certainly seem to be uncovering, or at least piecing together, a jigsaw of forgotten things that hitherto hasn’t been assembled so rigorously. When I did finally speak to Jacky she expressed a similar sentiment; that so much is passing away with a generation that came through the wars and experienced the most rapid change of any previous century.

More foolishly it turns out, I was very wrong about Kip not having travelled much. It seems he spent quite some time in London playing and touring with big bands of the day before returning to his native town to form his own band. There is another wonderful link here, as he was a member of the big band Musicians Unlimited, right up until his death in 1997. If you have read my previous posts you may recall this is the band who will be playing the song I’ve written for the installation.

Overall – progress may be a little ad hoc but I am both concerned to be sensitive to their stories whilst remaining deliberately ‘open agenda’ in style. In truth; none of this would get done unless I did jump right in there and started splashing about a bit.

So, there I was, in the fab Hartlepool maritime museum, wearing rubber gloves and handling the well worn, nay, beaten up, brass tubes and three valves that comprise the object we call ‘a trumpet’. A passing punter happened to ask;

“is that Kip Heron’s trumpet?.. it has a link to the Beatles you know – he used to play in George Martin’s band”

No I didn’t know that – but thus far I can’t confirm or deny it, though I know a man who can, as in the cabinet there is a biog. about Kip, written by a gentleman called Gavin Smith, whose name I recognised. I have in fact met Gavin before, but despite that didn’t know he used to play in a band with Kip.

It really is all about asking the right questions.

But knowing what the right questions are is the ultimate trick.



KIP’S TRUMPET

Having set a precedent with the Hartbeat’s drum kit last week, I am now on a roll with Kip Heron’s trumpet. Finally I have permission to take it out of the glass case in Hartlepool museum and spend an afternoon with the little instrument of joy.

As a child I always wanted to play the trumpet, but my school only had one and some older boy apparently had loan of it for the duration, so my aspiration was never fulfilled. Didn’t really consider it at the time, but I’m thinking now that the trumpet was a forerunner to the electric guitar in the ‘sexy instrument’ stakes. Singular and difficult to ignore, it could be considered the centre forward of my fab fantasy musical squad.

People still recall Kip in Hartlepool; he is one of their musical legends even though (or possibly because) he didn’t travel far afield.

The trouble with recall going back to the 50’s or beyond is it can get a little sketchy. Right at the beginning of this project I met a lady whose husband played in Kip Heron’s band. At that time his name didn’t mean anything to me; it was only later, after many more mentions, that I realised Kip was a bit of guy. People in their eighties and nineties understandably project backwards with a high degree of selectivity and a little grease on the lens. Some details are clear but often the same things are repeated and it can be difficult to get a more complex picture. So it was a real coup to discover that someone at the museum had the email address of Kip Heron’s daughter.

I don’t know why but I always assume that generations have remained geographically faithful to this insular town. Sending off emails to Jacky I wasn’t hopeful of a reply, but amazingly, having beaten the spam filter (you never know with an address like [email protected]) two days later I had a response. Seems Jacky in fact lives in Chester but, as serendipity would have it, they are due to holiday in Seahouses…further north and up the coast. Whenever they get up north apparently they go visit the trumpet.

I like that – a bit of a pilgrimage – a musical instrument as a vessel of history; a tangible extension of a loved one.

I wonder why his sibling didn’t take it up. I’ll ask her; tho I could just as well ask the same question of myself. None of my three children play music (except via iplayer ha ha) even though music has been central to my own life. I am unable to answer why myself. We’ll see if she can…

Piecing together tangential links and following ad hoc leads had me pondering the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory; the idea that everyone is, on average, only six steps away from an introduction to another person on earth. I’ve written about my Rink photo of the Manfred Mann group previously and also mentioned Ray Minhinnett (son of Hartlepool made good as a renowned blues guitarist). I mentioned to him that I will be interviewing the Manfred’s in November and he tell me he knows them well. Connection number one. Later this week, at a friend’s mother’s funeral, I am chatting to my ex-drummer’s son Dominic. He tells me that his band, the Narrators have just played a blues festival in Lancashire. We chat a bit more and I tell Dominic about the Rink project. Turns out the Manfred’s were playing the same festival on the same night as Dom’s band…it feels a bit like ‘step on board a train to anywhere – this train departs to all stations!’

Been logging my archive footage too – in particular one film called ‘Holidays at Home’ made just after world war two. A park full of people ballroom dancing on the open grass…children…servicemen and servicewomen in various uniforms; teenage girls; hopeful boys; dancing into night…laughing into the night. What amazing times; somewhat surreal and yet not that long ago; and yet long ago…and my video installation somehow needs to capture all of this mystery whilst being a coherent whole in its own right. Dancing into the night.