Professor Tim Connell had no idea what he was unleashing when he asked me to produce a party piece for the nascent Gresham Society Soirée.
I had no idea what sort of audience we might have, although Tim suggested that he was encouraging Gresham Society members to bring youngsters with them to give the event an age-diverse, party feel. That year, there were a few youngsters in the end.
Unaccustomed as I was to putting on party pieces at that time…a dozen or more years later I am far more seasoned at it…I fell back on material I had prepared or used in the past.
As a youngster myself, I had often used Any Old Iron as a party piece for entertaining old folk, as the old folk at the time that I was a young person were steeped in music hall material.
I had prepared a version of Any Old Iron with a rap break a couple of years earlier…for the life of me I cannot remember quite why…I think I had intended to use it at a Long Finance conference, as Brian Eno had been recommending that we break up the serious s*** with some musical audience participation. Hilariously predictable results ensued, not least a roasting in the Evening Standard…
…but I digress, other than to clarify that my Any Old Iron with a rap break (aka a vocal cadenza) remained on the e-jotter unused in 2009, until the Gresham Society Soirée of 2011. Here’s the very piece:
I decided to dress up in my most spivy outfit (see headline picture from the Lingfield races a few months earlier), including a Rolex-like watch and chain which I had given to my father in the 1990s and then re-inherited on his passing.
I also took a clutch of old pennies from my childhood old pennies collection, as I figured that the youngsters present wouldn’t appreciate what a weighty and princely-looking sum “tuppence” might seem unless they received some coin of the appropriate era.
I also decided, with the benefit of hindsight, unwisely, to involve the pianist, David Jones, not only in playing the piece for me (which of course he was able to do with ease and aplomb). Unbeknown to me at the time, David is a master of the party piece in which you sing faster and faster – in his case the far more difficult Elements Song by Tom Lehrer…
…I am digressing again…
…anyway, I asked David also to join in some business, which occurred to me as we practiced ahead of the show, where I would approach the piano and say:
Hit me!
…in the time honoured fashion to encourage a musician to play. The joke was that David was to feign misunderstanding the entreaty and pretend to throw a punch at me.
We practiced the manoeuvre a couple of times. My final note to David was that he would need to put more effort into the fake-punch and I would have to put more motion into the fake receipt of the punch to make the device look realistic.
But in the heat of show, as it were, David possibly over-enthused…or I under-dodged…such that I really did receive a punch from David, which made me stop for a moment and say:
Ow, that really did hurt
…before carrying on. I think the audience thought it was all part of the show, so they laughed just as we had wanted them to. The song went down well. The bruise wasn’t too bad. David is still talking to me…just about…but perhaps not so open to my last minute bright ideas for performance tweaks any more.
