This is a significant moment: it’s not often that Alt make jokes

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Ballet Shoes Center.com

Published: July 25, 2010

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This is a significant moment: it’s not often that Alt make jokes. “We’re not virtuosos, but the way Cream combine loose jamming and pop, I feel very akin to that, more than to the mateship and laddishness of Little Village and the Wilburys.”
Andy then rejects all my reference points, deciding instead that the group relate most of all to Abba, because that name is an acronym of its members’ initials too. So with which other supergroup do they most identify: Cream, Little Village, or the Traveling Wilburys? Tim opts for Cream. It not only means “old” in German, and “something like an elbow joint” in Irish, it also allows puns like the title of their debut album, Altitude (Parlophone) It remains, for all that, a pretty duff name for a band. But Alt are no ordinary group, they’re a supergroup – ie, three independently successful artists joining together. Sitting next to him at a beer-tent trestle table, backstage at the Glastonbury Festival, are two of his friends: the Hothouse Flower, Liam O’Maonlai, and the former Split Enz leader and sometime inhabitant of Crowded House, Tim Finn.

Put the first letters of their Christian names together and you get their band, Alt. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it? It’s essential that we call ourselves Alt. Although we have considered Lat.” So says Andy White, the Irish singer-songwriter. “CAN YOU imagine if Abba were called Baab or Baba. The singers lined up to perform over the two nights – including Jessye Norman – are probably the most illustrious gathering the Wigmore has ever housed; the battery of pianists (let no one forget them) is impressive too; and the tickets are sold out But if you’re persistent, the number is 0171 935 2141 !. These things can be uncomfortable; but Geoffrey was someone who really enjoyed life and liked to share his enjoyment – of food, restaurants, places to visit, things to see He turned the drudgery of touring into pleasure.

And now he is gone – what can I say except that he leaves a hole that can’t be filled.”Although there will never be another Geoffrey Parsons, it is hoped that the Wigmore concerts on Thursday and Friday will encourage future generations of pianists in his example, with the launch of a memorial trust fund. Olaf Bar, one of the singers Parsons effectively steered into prominence through his first major recitals and 11 recordings, testifies to how much he learnt in the process: “Geoffrey was incredibly disciplined and taught me a lot – but never like a teacher He was a friend. Especially when we were on tour and spending so much time together on and off the platform. He even drew in the odd promising young critic – me – and for better or worse my life as a music journalist began in Geoffrey Parsons’ sitting room, hatching a plan to tag along with him and Thomas Allen on a concert trip to Paris that would maybe make a magazine piece.One of the things I remember from that trip was the discovery that artistic collaborations depend as much on companionship as anything else.

Several years later, when her regular accompanist Gerald Moore was thinking of retirement, she approached Parsons to take his place. Then, as word spread of his painstaking concert preparation, fail-safe technique and encyclopaedic knowledge of the song repertory, he began to attract other star voices. And through his partner Erich Vietheer, a singing teacher who shared the house in Iverson Road, he drew into his circle promising young artists like Ann Murray and Felicity Lott who would become the next generation of stars. Born in Australia in 1929, he first came to Britain in 1950 on tour with the then-famous Variety baritone Peter Dawson.


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