Skip to main content

Quick

Wurlitzer organ

Yesterday, I attended part of a concert on the country's biggest Wurlitzer organ. This took place in what is the second biggest cinema ever built in the UK (the biggest one was located in Scotland). The former Gaumont State cinema in Kilburn, north London could sit 4000.

The cinema was opened in 1937 but has now been turned into a bingo hall which was also its life line.

I can't say I was particularly impressed by the music. The organist was obviously very good but the instrument seemed to flatten everything, making the melody almost undistinguishable from the rest of the music. The characteristic sound of the instrument seemed also incredibly melancholy (even when playing up-beat numbers); although this was probably quite appropriate in the corrupted and compromised grandeur of the remnants of the cinema's past glories.

I, of course, took pictures, a selection of which is available here.

After the concert, my companion and I, took advantage of the lovely weather and walked all the way back to Oxford Circus where we said goodbye. I kept on walking across Soho to Covent Garden, crossed the Thames at Waterloo Bridge and meandered throught the back streets to the St George's Circus end of Blackfriars Road. And then home to dinner.

-----

In completely unrelated news, today marks the first day of the smoking ban in enclosed public places in Wales. Three months to go before the same happens in England!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
19 comments
Read more

Welcome to Towleroad Readers

On Wednesday, Towleroad , the top gay blog, who win all the awards, were kind enough to link to and quote from my post on Football and Homophobia . This has generated quite a bit a traffic in this otherwise desolate region of the blogosphere. So much so that Wednesday was my highest day ever with 132 hits (previous one was 97), this week is already my highest ever with 317 hits so far (previous one was 287) and this month is the highest month ever with already 865 hits (previous one, last month, was 739, thanks to the posts on the Danish cartoons). So thank you again to Towleroad and welcome to their readers. I hope they like what they see and will be back from time to time.
Post a Comment
Read more

As Grace

Another picture reconstruction. This time the victim is Grace Jones and her picture by Jean Paul Goude (explained here ) which was used for the cover of her 1985 compilation album, Island Life . Unlike Ms Jones, though, this is all me posing. No reconstruction other than adding the original background and props in Photoshop. See the making-of picture of my version here . Below is another, more elaborate reconstruction of the pic done with the help of photographers Jasmin Teer (photography) and Dan Bosworth (Photoshop) in July 2009. This pic was "The Awesome" in The Goude, The Bad and The Awesome (March 2010).
10 comments
Read more