The unseen Power of Music

Today I am in Germany. I would have said Rudolstadt but we are staying in a hotel in a different town. Saalfeld. I am definitely whacked having got up at 4am and yet I don’t feel like I want to sleep. So I thought I’d get my Wednesday blog done as I wanted to tell you a little more about Italy last weekend.

The photo at the top of the blog is a picture of one of the dishes served daily at the festival in Viafre, Piedmont, Italy. I meant to take a photo for you as behind the bar they had about six waffle machines round and the size of a dinner plate. They were for making a local Piedmont waffle called Gofri. Fillings could be sweet or savoury and it was like the equivalent of a crepe stall at a festival. I never got to try one though although I meant to but they fed us so well I simply wouldn’t have had room for it. This blog tells you how to make them….I haven’t read it so it may we’ll be in Italian. Translation could make for some interesting variations ha ha. https://cucinapiemontese.blogspot.com/2010/07/gofri.html

The other extraordinary image I wanted to photograph for you was the phone charge station. This was near the entrance and people just pluged in their phones, wandered off and come back and got them a while later when they were charged. No body was manning this station, you didn’t need to sign them in or out and no ones phone was stolen…Isn’t that amazing. The whole place was like that. Once inside the grounds people left their bags lying about and obviously felt perfectly safe doing so. Andy did leave his phone in a taxi though but that’s another story…had his boarding pass on it too!

The Grand Bal Trad was an extraordinary experience . The festival has five marquees and they are all for dancing. Marquee or ‘Falco 1’ was the largest and that’s the one we played in all the time. How extraordinary though to run those stages almost always simultaneously and have enough people to fill them for dancing, Jewish dancing, Swedish, Italian regional dances, Sicilian dances, Tango, Québécois etc etc…. In the day times there were three lots of two hour workshops, all different and in all the marquees and then at least two bands on in each marquee in the evening. Heaven for dancers apart from one thing. Mosiquitos. It’s in a rice field region and my god are they monstrous. They’re not particularly large but viscous. A friend told me they had treated the site before the festival was due to start….well if that was treated I would hate to have been there when it wasn’t. I developed a form of Tourette’s where every time they cam near my face and mouth I was blowing and swearing at the same time , ‘Ffffffffffhaaack..orff’. My lovely pal Anna had supplied me with spray and a coolant thing for after they bite. Despite being covered in that I am still scratching some of the bites now.

The other thing that was a little hard to deal with was dust. The earth had turned to dust due to the dry heat and the combination of that and your body being quite hot and sweaty was unpleasant. If you then factor in being lathered with chemicals to ward off the beasties you can imagine those horrible moments where you pop your fingers near your mouth without thinking. It made everything taste disgusting.

But having said all that would I go again ? Oh yes. The response to Blowzabella was magical. I think some of you saw the Facebook posts about the emotional way people responded weeping at the music and then when the band changed tunes they whooped and cheered. By the last night the mosh pit in front of the stage were all singing along too. It started with my tune, ‘Kesteven ‘ which seems to be in the right key for singing as it first happened at Halsway and then it happened at Viafre…and then they were singing along with most tunes by the last night. There is no doubt that the Italians do love singing and practically every band had singing as part of their dance music. That really pleased me. But I want to tell you about another extraordinary moment.

We were sat, after the big gig , at a table , winding down and having a few beers. A young woman comes to the table and in faltering English said I just wanted to thank you all for your extraordinary music. Then she turned to me and said may I talk to you for a moment . I said,’please do’.

The story she told was almost unbelievable only because you just can’t imagine something like this unless it happens to you. It’s usually the sort of thing you see in a drama on TV. I think some of the subtleties of the story will be missing because she was telling me this in English.

She said a year ago she had had a boyfriend who had had mental health problems. She had been trying to help him through and she was a bee keeper leading a peaceful life and hoping that would help him. She said that he turned out to be far more ill than she had previously thought. The result was that he tried to kill her. He slashed her throat with a knife. She said her will to live was strong and she survived but he killed himself. She is left with a large scar on her throat. After he had tried to kill her she had struggled coming to terms with things and mending particularly psychologically . She said the main things that had helped her was the music of Blowzabella and in particular my singing . She had listened to it constantly over the course of the year and it had really helped. I was very moved and could barely speak for fear of bursting in to tears. I thanked and said how lovely it was to have helped and I hoped she would continue to go from strength to strength . She said oh yes I will.

Isn’t it extraordinary the way our music can touch people’s lives quite profoundly and without us knowing it. I know music can have a profound impact on me and take me instantly to certain places and times and memories of people etc It can also make me laugh and cry and feel excited. But I just don’t expect to be part of something that has that depth of impact on others.

Years ago Token Women used to do a dance in Exeter on a Saturday night and to bump up the fee we would do a concert in Exeter Art centre on the Friday. Programming courtesy of the lovely Andy Morley at the time and hospitality usual at the Morley’s with Ros too. This was effectively their Christmas ceilidh and so our concerts always had a Christmas tinge to them. At that time Kathryn Locke was in the band and she and I used to do a version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’. Just cello and voice . It seems to go down well the first time we tried it and so we did it again the following year. In the interval a man came up to me and said, ‘you changed my life when you sang that song last year so thank you’. That was all he said. He didn’t say what had changed or in what way and I am left wondering to this day …..I obviously didn’t change his life but something about that rendition of that song at that time did something to make him change his own. Wow. You don’t forget comments like that.