WANG/LUFT/FÄLT TRIO

WANG/LUFT/FÄLT TRIO AT THE GRASSHOPPER, POOLE – 29/06/23

“I’ve never seen a queue in a pub before,” I say to the old guy in front of me in the queue to get a drink. It’s like the kind of queue you’d get at the tobacco counter in a supermarket. That kind of queue. You don’t normally see tobacco counter queues in pubs, do you? The old guy looks at me with what can only be described as mild surprise. “The English do love to queue,” he says. “Are you here for the music?” I say. It’s an attempt to start a conversation. “No, no,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

They’re a little late opening the doors, so there’s a queue to get in the room too. But I don’t mind. Actually, I quite like it. It gives me a chance to watch people and listen to their conversations. Inside, they’ve printed out everyone’s name and placed them on the chairs, in the order that the tickets were booked. “You’re at the front,” says J___, checking tickets on the door. “You must have been one of the early ones.” I pick up the piece of paper with my name on it and sit down. Later, I wish that I’d taken a photograph of all the printed names sitting on the seats. It’s just something I’ve never seen before. 

Then N_____ arrives. “Hello N_____,” says J___. The room is warm and smells like old people. Then K____ arrives. “Hello K____.” 

N_____ comes to sit next to me. “I’ve been told to sit here,” he says. I take my name off the seat (I’d booked two tickets but in the end wife, who I’d booked the other ticket for, couldn’t make it, and D___ just point-blank refused to come) and he sits down. N_____ has just got back from Turkey where he’s been on holiday. He’s eighty, a walker and a climber, so he tells me, and goes somewhere different every month. “Good for you,” I say.

The WANG/LUFT/FÄLT TRIO play gentle and intricate music that reminds me of swimming, for some reason. Not that I’m really much of a swimmer. I just kind of splash around and throw myself about when I’m in water. You wouldn’t call it swimming. But it reminds me of what swimming might be like if you were a dolphin or a mermaid or something like that. It’s such intimate music as well, so that the title of their LP – CLOSENESS – seems really apt. This is the last night of a UK tour and they look like they really enjoy playing together, and I think about the connection you must feel to someone you’ve been travelling around with playing such beautiful tender music, and I wonder if maybe that is the point of music, or at least one of them, to bring people closer together, or at least make them feel less apart. It’s a kind of magic, I think, as my eyes fall on the picture of Paul Daniels, hanging on the wall.

Magic

“That was lovely,” I tell ELLEN ANDREA WANG in the interval. “I’ve listened to your record a lot,” I say. “It’s a really special record.” She smiles politely. I’m sweating profusely. I’m really good at sweating, I’m ready to say, if anyone comments on how sweaty I am.

While we’re waiting for the second set to start N_____ tells me about the “boy band” he used to play drums in in the fifties, and about how his doctor told him he had to stop playing because of something to do with his thumb, and about how quitting the band was the best thing he ever did, because now he’s eighty and happy and most of the band are dead, apart from the guitarist who’s still playing, and played on a cruise ship not so long ago, and they were also quite immoral, he tells me. They took drugs.

The second set is a bit looser than the first, as second sets often are. I rise for a standing ovation after the encore. I don’t look around but I think I’m the only one. I don’t care. I think when people have put such love and thought and craft into their performance, the very least you can flipping do is stand up to applaud them. Jeez, what the hell.

Jeez, what the hell

N_____’s off to Mexico next month. “That’s fantastic,” I say. “I’d love to go to Mexico,” I say. But, actually, I don’t know if I would. I don’t know, actually, if I’d rather just stay at home. He tells me that he listens to music all the time, whatever he is doing, even when he’s writing letters. I tell him I’m the same. “I’m the same,” I say, my eyes falling on a picture of Houdini hanging on the wall. “I think music’s a form of magic,” I say, and N_____ nods in agreement.