More roadworks everywhere. Tourists delaying buses always asking for the way to Harrods. Children out of school chowing down on chips or ice lollies.
And, finally, the Proms, the wonderfully eclectic mix of concerts curated by the BBC and held mainly at the Royal Albert Hall.
One of my favourite books as a child was The Great Jelly of London, where we learnt that the hall is actually a huge jelly mould. London has to deal with the consequences.
The Proms are the closest thing we have to musical jelly; they are a London version of Meet Me In St Louis.
The greatest music festival in the world is happening right here in our backyard, and we don’t know it. And if we don’t, we should.
What the Prommers do for the rest of the year is a big mystery, but during the summer months, they are out in force in my part of London.
The demeanour of the average Prommer is somewhere between a heavy metal fan and a backroom introvert. More men than women and sandals with socks are de rigeur.
Kensington Gardens is besieged by people with picnic baskets, bright floral frocks, comfortable shoes and well-thumbed Prom Guides.
After the best that Marks and Spencer has to offer, they form long queues for the cheap £8 standing tickets available every day.
This is followed by their gladiatorial seizure of the Arena, which becomes a separate state with its own rules under their unique form of martial musical law.
This year’s First Night of the Proms was a glittering occasion, starting with Handel’s spectacular Music for the Royal Fireworks, conducted by Elim Chan. Summer had finally arrived.
The British soprano Sophie Bevan sang the rather heavy Psalm 150 by Anton Bruckner.
This was a highly emotional moment because just last year, Bevan had been seriously ill with a rare form of cancer, and there she was singing as beautifully as always, visibly pregnant with her third child.
Psalm 150 was followed by Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, played by Isata Kanneh-Mason, who wore the most amazing golden dress – the dress that launched a thousand Proms.
Kanneh-Mason’s Gershwin encore brought the house down.
On Saturday night, I got a ticket to Prom Two – the disco prom at the Royal Albert Hall.
I’m not a huge fan of hybrid proms designed to attract an audience that doesn’t do classical. I’m bored by the notion of a CBeebies or a Dr Who Prom, though now the Doctor has found his mojo sexually speaking and uses the Tardis as his Bat Cave for extracurricular Time-Lord activities.
I may have to revise that prejudice.
After all, a sexed-up intergalactic traveller is a whole new kind of fantasy that even that stellar beefcake Captain James T. Kirk never really managed.
Anyway, enough of cybersex and back to planet reality.
I love disco. There, I have said it. I don’t care if it makes me old, sad, or a joke. Since the waltz was invented, it has been the most joyous and complete experience for the body and soul.
When I worked as a journalist in the former Yugoslavia, there were a number of us, including Kofi Annan, Chris Gunness, the official UN spokesman and other less august colleagues, including me, who would meet every Sunday afternoon when possible at Nana from Ghana’s apartment in beautiful downtown Zagreb for a much-needed disco jump.
War is awful and relentless even if you are a lowly correspondent, and it is not your fight. After a while, seeing the complete devastation of a people and a culture becomes too much to handle.
So, for a few hours a week, escaping into the disco was a necessary relief to keep body and soul together. Much more potent than alcohol or drugs or meaningless sex.
Nothing is better than a boogie with a force commander or UN High Representative.
My top favourites were Anita Ward’s “You Can Ring My Bell” and “Anything” by Earth, Wind & Fire. There were no inhibitions, shame, worries, and, for the briefest of times, warring factions.
At the end of the day, we all returned to the horror surrounding us, but those precious moments of exile refreshed us.
The Disco Prom was a must, but it was sold out, so it was touch-and-go if I would get a press ticket. Sitting in the nearby Institut Francais library, I eventually received a call that I had got the golden ticket.
The BBC press office gave me no time to go back home and change out of my crumpled raincoat, blue cotton Oxford shirt and slightly grubby chinos and into my red sequin hot pants and Day-Glo boob tube.
So, looking like Lt. Columbo on a bad day, I wandered over to the Royal Albert Hall and was confronted with a whole mess of people in sparkles and rhinestones.
There were countless Olivia Newton Johns in spandex, John Travoltas in his Grease or Saturday Night Fever mode and enough Weather Girls to reverse climate change.
They were all shapes and sizes and all ages. Statuesque middle-aged women in gold shifts with disco-fabulous capes and skinny women in black bustiers and nosebleed-inducing high heels.
One 80-year-old bloke proudly sported a vintage Studio 54 silver satin baseball jacket with a matching Zimmer frame, and there was a blind guy and his guide dog in coordinating plaid.
And that was just outside. Inside, it was Regine’s, the Embassy Club, and Heaven all rolled into one.
I admit that I rocked up thinking this would be so naff and so awful that finally, I could let my poison pen persona loose and rip the Proms a new one. A cynic in LL Bean chic minus the whale belt and the plastic duck shoes.
Boys and girls, I’m ashamed to admit that it was the best fun you can have as an adult with your clothes on. I ran into a few friends who were better attired than me but also did not know what to expect.
Were the orchestra going to be disco-dressed up?
Who was the conductor?
And most importantly, who were the divas?
We noticed a few huge and not-so-huge disco balls hanging from the ceiling, along with a reassuringly large collection of spotlights. The Royal Albert Hall was packed and ready.
I even spotted 81-year-old BBC DJ Tony Blackburn looking very dapper.
The orchestra wore the usual black civvies. The conductor looked more like George Benson than Sylvester, and the concert started with “Disco Inferno.”
We sat on the red velvet, being excessively British, slightly shifting our feet and swaying not quite perceptively to the beat but with a fair amount of undisguised embarrassment.
Chic classics “Everybody Dance” and “Le Freak, C’est Chic” got played.
The middle-aged Indian woman in front of me turned around and said, “I am sorry, but would you mind if I stood up because I just have to dance?” I replied, “I love that you asked me; I am about to do the same thing.”
Then, thousands of us spent two magnificent hours strutting in the jelly mould to end all jelly moulds.
The light show was spectacular. The disco balls threw out sparkles across the breadth of the Hall. A screen projected the lyrics to such 70s disco classics as “Rasputin”, “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real”, and of course “Night Fever”.
An entire Albert Hall dancing, singing along, and beaming with pleasure is quite something to behold.
The singers loved the effect they had on us.
Cedric Neal gyrated his hips like the pro he is and was dressed in ruby slippers like a disco Judy Garland. Vula Malings dragged her fake fox fur onto the stage behind her like Bette Davis in All About Eve and sang a fabulous “I Will Survive”.
Elizabeth Troy and Vanessa Haynes looked unbelievably beautiful in outfits that Gloria Gaynor or Gladys Knight would have been happy to wear.
After all we have been through over the past few years, being in a crowd of happy and excited people was amazing. I even found myself singing out loud on the 52 bus home.
Listen up, BBC—this has to be an annual event. It is much more fun than the ultrasquare jingoistic Last Night of the Proms.
However, a few nights later, Prom 7 was an entirely different matter.
On paper, it looked much more like my kind of Prom – a countertenor singing Monteverdi. The Late Nighters start at 10:15 pm with no interval.
I hate intervals, so I am always relieved that it is a straight run, but it is a bit of an ordeal. You leave the house exactly when you start thinking about putting on pyjamas.
One option was to go to the prom before, but as it was Verdi’s Requiem, it was out of the question.
I have terrible memories of singing it in my university choir when the nicotine-stained, crabby, male American conductor looked directly at me and said, “Would the fat girl in the alto section care to sing the correct line on her own to prove that she can just for the rest of us?”
He meant me. After turning an unbecoming shade of deep scarlet, I ran into the night, never to return.
I did have an unexpected one-night stand singing backup vocals in a student feminist punk band called The Blue Period, and yes, as history of art majors or minors, we did indeed mean that kind of period.
Our own personal flow had come to town.
Dressed in the finest PVC that Snot or Was it Nasty had to offer, we were more than ready for stardom. We shared the bill with what we thought was going to be a true hardcore punk sensation from the London suburbs called Ted Turd & The Toolsheds.
After a meaningful rendition of our signature song, “All Men Are Rapists”, we ceded the stage to Ted and his Tools.
Imagine our surprise and disappointment when four elderly men appeared wearing promotional Marlboro cigarette jackets to highlight the oily rags they were (Cockney slang for cigarettes.) And they were smoking.
When I say smoking, I mean Woodbines. Not cool.
Yes, they turned out to be a Chas & Dave appreciation group. After a few choruses of “Rabbit”, “Gertcha”, and “Ain’t No Pleasin’ You”, we left as quickly as our brothel creepers let us.
The Libertines may have warmed up to Chas & Dave, but we were never that hip.
Back in the Hall, the lights went down. Il Pomo d’Oro crept onto the stage, and under the baton of Maxim Emelyanychev, they started tuning up.
Tuning period instruments is always an ordeal, but I was more than ready for a spiritual, meditative concert.
Then, a strange figure slid onto the stage in a full-length black satin cape with lurex silver trim. He looked like the Phantom of the Paradise and somewhat out of place. Had he confused the Hall with the 02 Centre?
The lights went up, and we were face to face with the countertenor, Jakub Józef Orliński. I had run into various acquaintances on my way in who asked me:
Is this was my first time with Jakub?
Yes!
Was I a Jakub virgin?
Yes!
Did I know what to expect?
Yes – a gentle early music concert! 17th-century music at its finest and most pure.
Er, no – I had entered a cult, and Orliński was their high priest.
The crowd went wild as Orliński ripped off his black cape and revealed a tight figure-hugging vanilla cream suit and black chiffon blouse that had a lot more to do with Harry Styles than Andreas Scholl or Philippe Jaroussky.
Was Orliński heavily tattooed like Styles? Would we find out that he was polythelic? Were we in Harry’s House and not Albert’s Hall? Were we about to hear a rendition of “Watermelon Sugar” or “As It Was” rather than Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi?
As the crowd started chanting, I became increasingly perplexed. Was this going to be a night to remember but unlike the disco prom for all the wrong reasons?
I was with my people on Saturday night and left loving all humanity, but on Tuesday, I had no idea who I was or where I was. Other than being surrounded by a cult that also included the fearsome Prommers.
Jakub – no one in the cult uses his other names – required me to do some vital homework, which I should have done before. Shame on me.
He is Polish. When he speaks, and boy does he speak, his English is Polish via Los Angeles, with a touch of Bjork for good measure.
Jakub Jozef Orliński studied at the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, and his last full-length, Beyond, was voted one of the best classical music albums of 2023.
He is also a model, an influencer, an award-winning breakdancer and a skateboarder. Orliński has worked with Louis Vuitton, Nike, Levi’s, Mac Cosmetics, Lacoste and BMW. He sang and breakdanced in the recent Covent Garden production of Theodora.
Last month, in an interview in The Guardian, Orliński said of this concert: “It speaks to anyone, of any age. It’s about purity of emotion. In this early Baroque music, the bass line is really important. It is very groovy, very relevant.”
Okay, this would be the hybrid Prom to end all hybrid Proms.
The show was designed by the dancer and bass baritone Yannis Francois and started with Monteverdi’s aria from l’incoronazione di Poppea “E pur io torno qui” (And here I am again).
One line of the opening aria resonated with me on reflection: “I know full well that, ah, my star does here reside.”
Orliński knew that his star had taken up residence in the Royal Albert Hall for those precious minutes and that his people were surrounding him.
It was a distinctly odd event if one takes away the breakdancing, the flashy costume, and the overwhelming self-confidence.
At one point, Orliński wandered around the stage with a torch as though looking for something. When he could not find it, he escaped into the stalls.
At another point, Orliński dressed up as an old lady, and at another, he was either lying in post-coital bliss in the middle of the stage or perhaps le petit mort had turned into a Chatterton-style death.
I felt like my grip on reality was loosening and utterly lost. I was alone as the hall was once more filled with the enraptured faithful.
The evening ended with Orliński singing four encores to the delight of the audience and the increasing misery of the Albert Hall staff, who, after the fourth one, had to turn the house lights up to get him off the stage.
When Orlinski finally retreated with Il Pomo d’Oro in pursuit, the audience booed and looked like they had expected to remain there until Prom 8.
Orliński left to greater glory to take his place somewhere between Lady Gaga and Celine Dion at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
He was a Baroque courtier singing Rameau and breakdancing in a very wet white doublet and hose, sporting Nike Airs.
When Orliński started his breakdancing routine, the BBC commentator said, “That’s breaking.”
And when he started the Rameau, they remarked, “Oh, something else.”
Jakub Józef Orliński is an artist of all trades – not a particularly fine voice nor indeed a great mover – but a cleverly packaged Klaus Nomi for our digital age.
Just when I thought I would never see another breakdancing baroque hybrid concert – a bit like a number nine bus – another one turned up at the Proms.
Prom 24 was a semi-staged performance of The Fairy-Queen by Henry Purcell with Les Arts Florissants conducted by Paul Agnew.
It is loosely based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and has all the joy of the play without the mechanicals’ sometimes rather exhausting elaborate comic turns. The music is enchanting and exquisite.
Mourad Merzouki, a major hip-hop choreographer for over thirty years, directed the stage. The dancers came from his group, Compagnie Käfig, which means cage in German and Arabic. They were anything but caged.
The performance was a heady mixture of modern dance and classical ballet steps, at times very poetic.
Wisely, the singers retreated into the background when dance dominated the action. They bravely attempted to participate in the dance but relinquished their roles to the sidelines when it became increasingly acrobatic.
There was a scene that opened the second half when they danced in a supposedly freezing midwinter and did the most to keep warm by sharing their jackets and endlessly putting them on and off.
It was a clever way to show icy cold on a hot, steamy night in London.
The singers were equally astonishing and fresh. In fact, the whole evening was young and fresh, not at all Harry Styles, Louis Vuitton, or even Kate Bush.
It was just a new take on a mysterious work. Maybe hybrid is the new normal.
Please support The Battleground. Subscribe to our free newsletter and make a donation to ensure our continued growth and independence.
Photograph courtesy of Amanda Slater. Published under a Creative Commons license.
