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Belters and bohemians: Opera Locos @Sadlers_wells

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At the start of the Opera Locos performance, the announcement says that they really are singing. You could be forgiven for wondering that, given the amplification turns up the backing track and the voices so loud that you can't always tell what's real. But this is a mostly harmless and slightly eccentric blend of opera classics fused with the occasional pop classic. However, recognising the pop tunes would help if you were over a certain age. The most recent of them dates back twenty years. It's currently playing at the Peacock Theatre .  Five performers play out a variety of archetype opera characters. There's the worn-out tenor (Jesús Álvarez), the macho baritone (Enrique Sánchez-Ramos), the eccentric counter-tenor (Michaël Kone), the dreamy soprano (María Rey-Joly) and the wild mezzo-soprano (Mayca Teba). Since my singing days, I haven't recognised these types of performers. However, once, I recall a conductor saying he wanted no mezzo-sopranos singing with the s

Scenes from Barcode Vauxhall Sunday 22:41

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It was bank holiday weekend so it was the time to be dancing yeah (and to be dazzled by dem pretty lights)...

Scenes from Clapham South Tube Sunday 21:36

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Beer and chips that didn't make it... Forks complimentary...

Scenes from a Soho Bar Saturday 20:48

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DSC02766 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . There was this little wooden man...

Scenes from Clapham Common Saturday 17:19

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The common is a little busier this weekend with the 2-day Metro Weekender on. Punters without a ticket to the event (which sold out) could sort of pick up the music just outside the fenced off area... If the amount of news space devoted on the subject are any measure, the locals seem to get very excited about the noise that is generated from the handful of concerts staged every year on the common. Depending on how the wind blows, it seems to be either muffled noise or nothing at all... One unintented consequence of these concerts is some very good looking people descend upon SW4 and that can only be a good thing surely...?

Scenes from a Brixton Bar Friday 19:42

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Scenes from a Brixton Bar Friday 19:42 Originally uploaded by Pauly_ . Cocktail hour...

Catch phrase of the week...

I miss you like tiramisu.

Film: A Scanner Darkly

I caught the movie A Scanner Darkly on Wednesday evening. Based on Phillip K Dick's novel and set seven years in the future in California where the war on terror and the war on drugs seem to have merged as the same threat. The film was a trippy sort of story full of paranoia and hallucinations. It was probably deliberate that it all didn't make sense until the last half hour or so. It was also a film that was shot normally and then animated using a process called interpolated rotoscoping which added to the dreamlike feel to it… In the end I kind of liked it as it was like a graphic novel. The only problem I really had with it was that it was a bit hard to take a movie about drugs featuring Robert Downey Jr and Winnona Ryder… It felt like watching a sensitive documentary on the holocaust narrated by Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise doing a community awareness spot on depression: just all wrong and a distraction. The author acknowledges at the end of the film all the people who have do

News: Poppy seed cake is popular nowadays...

All the news today is about the 420,000 Eastern European migrants who have come to the UK since enlargement of the EU in May 2004. This number does not include self-employed individuals. They didn't all try to settle in London (after all it is the antipodeans that have 18 people living in a bed-sit in Dollis Hill), the migration patterns appear to have covered all over the UK – with a particular focus on the Anglia region…