For those who are interested in hearing some alternative (i.e. other) settings of In Darkness Let Me Dwell, here are some decent recordings from the public domain:
Firstly, John Cooper/Copario/Coperario’s 1606 setting of the verse, performed by Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani.
https://youtu.be/JDPc8PtLJVc
Next up, a rather beautiful rendition of the John Dowland 1610 version of In Darkness Let Me Dwell, sung by Andreas Scholl, accompanied by Edin Karamazow:
https://youtu.be/Ym1kWj1TwkU
Finally, you might enjoy Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones. Please note how very similar the lyrical content is to the verse In Darkness Let Me Dwell, in meaning, albeit not the exact words.
The original idea had been to meet up at Lord’s late afternoon and venture on for food from there. But I had mixed up the dates and thought that this was Day Three of a match but it was in fact Day Four, so that idea was never likely to have worked.
In any case, John’s commitments ran a bit later than originally planned so we ended up gathering at my place early evening, which enabled me to torture John with my latest musical mash-ups and masterpieces, while John caught up with his e-mails.
We also got our “intense disappointment with politics/Brexit” conversation out of the way at my place before dinner, so as not to put ourselves and each other off our food.
Downstairs at Yauatcha this time – for the first time. I think on balance we decided that upstairs works better for us at Yauatcha. Quieter and more airy.
But the food remains absolutely superb – well remembered, John.
Unusually for us, we plugged for a set menu, not least because those seemed to have such an interesting and varied selection of dim sum, it would have been hard to better those choices by calling from the card.
The presentation is beautiful, especially the dim sum course, but for some reason we both neglected to take “food porn” pictures at that juncture.
So I have borrowed a couple of pictures from the Yauatcha site, guessing that, as long as the pictures are credited and linked to their site, the Yauatcha folk won’t mind:
Yauatcha Shui MaiYauatcha So (Puffs)
For some reason, when I did decide to take a couple of photos, John decided that he wanted to look wacky and insisted on maintaining a crazed expression. I can report that John was stone cold sober on this particular evening, as he is trying to get fit for some sort of marathon cycle thingie.
You’d be mistaken in thinking that John doesn’t get out much
Those main dishes were:
黑菌花腩骨 Truffle pork belly rib
老乾媽雙鮮 Stir-fry pepper chilli seafood with asparagus
白菜苗 Baby pak choi
豆角蛋炒飯 Egg fried rice with long bean
So there.
John and I discussed, amongst many other things, our days writing for the Keele student newspaper, Concourse, not least because Dave Lee (seasoned Concourse journalist and one-time editor) had recently got in touch with me about that. Dave is pulling together a charity book about the Keele gigs of that era etc. John’s diaries might help Dave to fill gaps that mine can’t fill.
Watch this space.
Amusingly, John related that he had found several old copies of Concourse when clearing his parents’ house, all of which had his masterpieces carefully cut from them…but the file in which he must have meticulously preserved his own ouvre is lost for all time.
Anyway, as always it was a very enjoyable evening with John, which flew by all too quickly. Roll on the next one.
