The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast – a review

A long time ago, in 1974, Roger Glover put together an album with a whole host of musicians that had songs written around a children’s book that itself was based on a poem. I had been a big Deep Purple fan for several years by then and in 1975 the music was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in what was to become a one off concert. A good friend and Deep Purple fan of mine decided that we had to go. It was truly an amazing concert. The music was very different to the sort of stuff that we were listening to at the time but importantly the songs touched the subjects of the environment and inequality. Part of my upbringing and teaching. There you have it, forty five years later and we are still fighting for the environment and for a more equitable world.

It’s definitely worth a listen, even out of curiosity. I understand that a film was made of the concert but that some say it’s appalling and I certainly don’t want to endanger my fond memories of that evening.

The Butterfly Ball – youtube

 

Barren Ground – Bruce Hornsby and the Range

This song from the album A Night on the Town was released in 1990 and two things that year that were special for me were that I started my mature student’s Environmental Science degree course at Birkbeck College in London and the image that came to be named Pale Blue Dot was taken by Voyager 1.

The song is very emotive for anyone who is an environmentalist and talks about how we were back then creating all sorts of problems for people in the future for the sake of unsustainable wealth. Here we are thirty years later and nothing has changed. Humanity is living beyond the means of the planet to support it as a species. The current locust plague sweeping across parts of Africa will eat itself to death by consuming everything in its path or it will fall to numbers where the remaining vegetation can support its population numbers. Humans don’t like to think of themselves being similar to a plague of locusts but we are, in fact we are worse.

There are many songs, books, poems and other forms of words and media out there depicting what we human locusts have done and are doing to the world but few are acting on them. Worse still, our elected leaders are not acting on them or the scientific evidence of our effect as a species on the planet we live on.

Time to listen to the song and act upon it.

Barren Ground

Music review – Salut Salon

We actually saw this group on the 24th of March 2018 in Paris. When I received their latest email today about the cancelling of the start of their new tour I thought at first how we had seen them last year. Time flies. Anyway, just to say that this group are great to listen to and watch, even on a screen. They unfortunately only seem to play in Europe most of the time and only at small to medium size venues. They bring fun to playing classical instruments and their interpretation of classic songs. We saw their show Liebe, Love, Amour. Their new show that they will start performing later this year when they can is called The Magic of Dreams. The musicians have supported musical projects with children living in poverty through their foundation so they are worthy of our support as well as our appreciation. Take a look as they are very entertaining and very accomplished musicians.