Liverpool's hardworking buskers

Smiling Roma men with their sand sculptures vie with Liverpool’s city centre buskers for a few coins. 

While London promises to beef up its busking sites, Liverpool puts it to shame with half a dozen top performers putting the hours in on the street.

Too many to talk to but check out www.wetheundersigned.co.uk (left) for starters.

Beach singers?

Let’s get this right.

“There is an old verb, to busk, meaning to improvise and it is from this word that busker is derived, to describe a street performer or beach singer or performer.” So says Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.  (What's a beach singer?)

 1931 New [sic] Gresham Dictionary offers: “busk to get one’s self ready, to prepare, equip, dress.” The busk was also a piece of flexible steel, whalebone or wood worn by women in the front of their stays.

Clearly just as this jongleur, braving the spring streets of Ludlow on Sunday and, forgive the expression, dropping his balls, needs more practise, so the term busking needs a little more research.

Warming the streets

Too cold, too cold. 
I try Ludlow for the first time this year, but my fingers freeze. I fail to raise the cost of parking the car. 
Never mind, as spring approaches there's more and more street musicians out and about, like these two guys (left) busking in Hereford the other day.

First World War busker

Munition girls: Their badges read: Speed up guns and ammunition

I’m researching Canary Girls, the story of the million or so sassy munition workers in Britain, Canada, Australia and India whose wartime contribution was never recognised.

One, Mabel Lethbridge, had her leg blown off by a faulty machine at an armaments factory in Hayes, Middlesex in 1917. “I saw my leg had gone . . . I wasn’t blind then,” she writes in Fortune Grass.

A year later “Peg-leg” Mabel is hiring a barrel organ from Pasquali’s, Clerkenwell, London (two bob a day) and busking for a living.

She busked around the city with this sign pinned to her jacket: “Lost a leg and sustained numerous other wounds in a munition explosion in 1917. You needed my help then! I need yours now!” Seems she did all right. 

El Cielo Canta

At last a Friday morning session in Monmouth. It’s good: I haven’t been able to busk for a couple of months.

This morning on BBC R4 top violinist Tasmin Little talks of a time when a newspaper persuaded her to take to the streets: “To put yourself in that situation, you've got to come out and attract your audience's attention.” 

She’d do a skip and a dance. I manage only to blow, experimenting with an arrangement of an Argentinian  choral number, El Cielo Canta. ‘Fraid the soprano sax has radically altered it as you can hear below. (Background music to a dash across the allotments).

But one lady stops in a wheelchair and listens attentively. And an older lady in blue comes up close to show me her twenty pence before she drops it in my bag.

Slip up in church

We’re midway through this pagan festival with Christmas caroling out of the way and twelfth night still to come.  (Both caroling and wassailing once constituted a form of busking and usually included a request for alms or some form of refreshment.)

At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in Hoarwithy Church, Herefordshire our village quire erefordshire our village quire sang an unusual version of While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night. Unfortunately one of the basses (me) forgets to repeat the chorus and the whole performance grinds briefly to a halt. Tut-tut from the congregation.

Where's London's street music?

Took a couple of long walks through the city last week, Lambeth to Kings Cross, Kings Cross to South Kensington, maybe ten miles of the city pavements.

Admiring the architecture especially the Michelin building in Fulham Road with the pneumatic Bibendum and car chase tiles like this.
Savouring the Christmas air in St James and Hyde Parks.
But where are the street musicians? There was ghastly canned music playing on the South Bank Christmas Market. But that was about it.
Tut tut.