Pierre Bastien
Fertilizer Festival, The Horse Hospital, London
THE fanfare and trumpeting has subsided, thousands of laudatory column inches have been filled and a renovated Victorian station in central London has just reopened. Hooray. St Pancras International and High Speed One will finally bring rail travellers in the UK up to speed with continental Europe while one of the capital’s architectural landmarks has been reconfigured for the 21st century. At last, a British engineering infrastructure project of which we can all be proud.
While that is certainly one perspective, Tribune readers are likely to need no reminding of the small matter of the £5.8 billion required for construction in order to shorten transcontinental journey time by a mere 20 minutes and complete a project started by the previous Conservative Government. Why has Labour not completed a single major infrastructure project in 10 years? Even the Jubilee Line extension on the London Underground was initiated by the Tories. There’s something just a little vainglorious in spending nigh on £6 billion to save a third of an hour when our national rail infrastructure is so bereft of vision and investment.
Nonetheless, the dawn of Eurostar at St Pancras and the pending regeneration of King’s Cross was greeted by the aptly titled Arrivals Festival – a series of community and artistic events which included organised walks around the area’s many notable sites of industrial history, a Creatmosphere show on the Regent’s Canal by light artist Lauren Louyer, and Fertilizer – a festival within a festival.
The fourth Fertilizer Festival’s Gallic flavour deliberately chimed with the prevailing mood – previous incarnations have been of Germanic and Nordic persuasions, among others – and events included Le Grand Mix, an evening with chanteuses Barbara Carlotti and Emilie Simon who combined the influences of greats such as Edith Piaf and Juliette Greco with contemporary electronics and effects.
Perhaps one of London’s most unusual venues, the Horse Hospital – complete with horse ramp to enter, cobbled floor and tethering rings – was an appropriate venue for the iconoclastic musician and composer Pierre Bastien and his Meccano orchestra. George Gilbert Scott would have appreciated the deft structure of his equipment – a seemingly tatty old turntable, amid robot legs and arms with a video camera aimed at the centre of the machinery simultaneously projecting the footage onto the large screen behind.
Driven by a revolving camshaft the turntable’s arm elevated and thumped down in a grunting rhythm as amplified breezes whirred through tubes. Another camshaft pressed nursery rhyme like-patterns into a harmonium while Bastien improvised on his pocket trumpet evoking an emotive, childlike and, at times, sinister soundscape.
The seamlessness of the ambience was its essence, as each piece evolved from its predecessor. A veritable Victorian engine room was transposed to the modern era. It could have been a metaphor for St Pancras station itself.
James McGowan
