Jimmy Blades

[poliphilo]

David Hemmings was talking about the first night of Britten's Turn of The Screw, and how it didn't get any better than to be lying in the arms of the principal singer as the percussionist Jimmy Blades wound things up with a whumph whumph on the drums and I thought "Jimmy Blades! He came to our school once and gave a talk!"

It was a fabulous talk. There was something deliciously wicked and conspiratorial about James Blades (I know nothing about his personal life- I'm talking about his manner) and he left such an impression on me that decades later I put him in a poem....

BARBAROUS CLANGOUR

                  

The great percussionist James Blades

Lightly beat  his tiny gong

And the throb went round the panelled hall,

Building up to an all but unbearable

Yeatsian boom. “Now that’s what I did

On the soundtrack for Rank. The gong they show you-

Six foot across- which were it real

Would have had your brain draining out your nose-

Was actually made of papier- mache.”

Comments

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

He came to my college once - and talked and played - and I was delighted, being old enough to remember when percussion band was a school subject -

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Apparently he was famous for his talks. And for his books. I must have sat through a great number of talks as a child and his is one of the very small number of which I have any memory.

Field Marshal Montgomery came and gave us a talk on Leadership once. What did he say? I haven't a clue.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

Great Something! He was over 60 then! No wonder that the younger students were less enthusiastic than I was - and I now wonder if he was the inspiration for the school percussion bands in the 1950s