Mozart on Thursday evening with supper in a garden with 60 gentle meditative souls, Rodriguez, (Searching for Sugarman) on Friday at the Apollo, Hammersmith with 2000+others, not apparently meditative. But maybe not.
Have you seen Searching for Sugarman? What a wonderful and inspirational film about surprise success. A musician from Detroit makes an album, it fails to sell but a copy goes to South Africa and becomes the iconic sound for the young South African anti apartheid movement. He knows nothing, goes back to work on a building site and 20+ years later, some music journalist teams up with a record company executive and they find him. They bring him to South Africa where he plays to sell out audiences, he is bigger than Elvis! and in between these visits he simply goes back to his house in Detroit and work and gives his money to family and friends. The journalists make a film about the story and now the whole world knows about him, knows his songs and is at his feet.
He is 70 and tired tired tired but his performance last night had an intimacy and kindness to it which somehow quietened the audience who were waiting to go wild for him. At the end, he collapsed with sheer effort but it was hard to know who might have seen that. I wondered if Mozart would have applauded; I think he might. Both lives are thought-provoking and each show in some way, that the energy flowing through the music is extra-ordinary and that the lives of the musicians are part of the requirement of the music to find expression.
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