77: Early spring bits and bobs, and a loud alarm
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #77.
I hope you’re well.
Thank you very much for reading Border Crossing (and music obsessed sibling Double Chorus if you get those emails too). It means a lot for me that you still give your time.
Heads up, in the next three to six months there will be a couple of decent new freebies for paying subscribers (who haven’t had anything special for a while). So if you’re considering upgrading to support my writing work with money, I reckon sign up before, say, May. No pressure though, babe.
It’s six months til I turn fifty. Yes, that is screwing with my head.
Couple of quick things —
Working with Slack City Radio I’m plotting a one-off talk show event for May as part of their Slack City Social series in front of a small real-world audience. If it goes well, one plan is the viable regular Border Crossing Live show that I’ve wanted to do for ages. I’ll firm up details for the next issue, so watch this space.
In unexpected music-making news, early this month I (gasp) co-wrote a new song with Roxanne de Bastion, and even (double gasp) performed it with her, at her Brighton ‘new material’ show. This was a very intimate gig, with an audience already primed for unfamiliar songs, so I felt safe stepping up — and have to admit I enjoyed it. Roxanne is the real deal, a major talent, but she’s also super chill to work with and made it easy wading back into those choppy waters. Even in my pop singer life, I hardly ever co-wrote anything, so this was a fresh feeling. Watch out for Roxanne’s extraordinary book The Piano Player of Budapest about her refugee musician grandfather, which is due in June and will likely get a big push. And if anything else happens with our song, you’ll be the first to know.
Also, if the gods will it, Refigure podcast (Apple link / Spotify link) the regular arts review show I make with Rifa, will return for season seven in a couple of weeks. If you haven’t listened to previous seasons maybe give it a go, then if you like them, follow/subscribe now to get new episodes as they drop. Just search ‘refigure’ and you’ll find us.
My god, whatever alarm that is, bleeping away nearby, is very loud.
gems
1
Elsa Monteith’s terrific article for UD Music analysing and foregrounding the unheralded women who run the UK’s drill scene.
2
Kate Wagner’s fascinating, epic investigation into Formula 1 racing, Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain, was published on the Road And Track website and then retroactively spiked, unpublished and disappeared by the website. Luckily you can still read it via WebArchive.org. Road And Track have downplayed what happened and been fairly cagey about why the piece was vanished. But Wagner’s under-the-skin reportage and insight into this deeply corrupt sport of global billionaires must’ve ruffled feathers.
3
Joel Morris’ new book Be Funny Or Die is out now. I’m just over halfway through and it’s genuinely brilliant on comedy — and funny in its own right.
4
Naomi Klein’s piece in The Guardian on Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone Of Interest and his courageous reference to Gaza at the Oscars.
5
This week we saw Olga Koch’s standup show Prawn Cocktail, which I absolutely loved. It turns out her earlier full-length special Just Friends is on YouTube as a freebie. Olga is getting exponentially better each show (by which I mean Just Friends isn’t quite as great as Prawn Cocktail but it’s still super-intelligent slutty fun). And if you’re in/near Cambridge, one of her final UK performances of Prawn Cocktail is this weekend.
6
Charlotte Church has come under heavy, vicious, personal attack for her support of the Palestinian cause. Here’s what she wrote about this experience on Mother’s Day.
7
I rarely put an arena show or major theatre production in the gems. Partly I’m conscious of plugging something pricey, or requiring travel, and partly (for those same reasons) we almost never go to them ourselves. But last week, with my sister Anna and her boyfriend Tom, we went to Sam Holcroft’s play A Mirror at the Trafalgar Theatre (I think that counts as a proper West End show) with Jonny Lee Miller and Tanya Reynolds from Sex Education. Back in January you may remember we spent over 120 hours with JLM’s awesome take on Sherlock Holmes, binge-ing our way through every episode of his series with Lucy Liu, Elementary. So we felt quite obliged to see him on a theatre stage as soon as we got the chance — and he’s bloody great in it, as is the whole cast. There are some small interactive elements (we, the audience, are guests at a wedding) but I won’t write anything else, because anything after about three minutes is a spoiler.
If you’ve got the wallet and stomach for a conventional play (a very play-ish play, if that makes sense, a non-musical) at West End prices, I think A Mirror is supremely worth your evening. As well as hanging with Anna and Tom, we combined the trip with a go at Yoko Ono’s Tate Modern retrospective, which I loved far more than I’d espected, while Rifa didn’t like it at all. But we’ll chat (fight) about that show when Refigure podcast comes back.
Urgh. Whatever this alarm is, it’s still blaring and seems to be triggering other alarms. Maybe people are setting their own alarms off in protest. Urban life. I can’t think.
potato gems
The art magazine Apollo has a new columnist-at-large called ‘Rakewell’ and they opened their tenure with a thing on potatoes in art.
•
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey @doublechorus
Bluesky: @christt
Twitter/X: @christt | @doublechorus
always there
Try my music newsletter The Double Chorus
My annotated lyrics book Buried in the English Earth is still (just about) available via the Border Crossing shop.
Jim Bob UK tour 2024: Margate, Norwich, Southampton, Sunderland, Birmingham, Cambridge, Glasgow, Manchester and Bearded Theory.
My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag too.
Look after yourself and your people.
I just stepped outside to try to source the horrific alarm and it’s surprisingly far down the street — I reckon close by, it must be not far off police siren volume, although it’s an even note pules. It’s gone on for more than twenty minutes now. Absolute nightmare. Factoid: back in the day, the singer Laura Marling’s secret DJ name was More Alarming. Clever.
All my love. Have an excellent week.
Christopher
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