Old Iron, Old Wine
STAGE AND SCREEN
You don't admire the English music-hall. You enjoy it. It doesn't worry about uplift or catharsis : its purpose is to amuse. There are ninety nine reasons why no one should patronise it any more. And people still do patronise it.
Nowhere else but in England does the music-hall, as we know it, flourish. It differs from the French " music-hall," from the American " burlesque," which rely greatly upon nr_kedness. The English music-hall is vulgar ; it revels in
• T.unkenness, adultery, visits to Southend—the simple pleasures of the poor, not of the voyeur. It cares little for strip-tease. The stewed, the rude, the crude, but never the nude.
It is English : it is urban. You can't imagine it in a village hall. It doesn't really belong in the West End. You find the real thing not in St. Martin's Lane, not near Oxford Circus, but in High Street, Poplar, in Mare Street, Hackney, on Islington Green. The music-hall is popular, vulgar.
Finsbury Park Empire and Collins's, Islington Green, gave me a pleasing contrast this week. Seats and show are better upholstered at Finsbury Park. But you have more fun at " the little church on the Green." Fats Waller, vast negro syncopated pianist, is the Empire magnet. I saw him last at the Apollo in Harlem, and the sight of him again brought back the atmo- sphere of that place, its stench of gum and sweat, the frenzied gruntings of its audience as Fats " got hot." But I felt that it was here in North London that Waller really belonged. He becomes, after a mere month in London, a part of the English music-hall, whose powers of assimilation shame the ostrich.
Waller stands out a mile from other syncopated pianists. He played in New York with a band combination. Sometimes here he would be accompanied by the theatre orchestra—after a polite " Take it away, professor " or " Turn it loose " to the conductor. As a soloist he is more effective. His sense of rhythm is immense and he sees to it that his stuff shall be animal, savage, " jungular," as negro music should be. Waller's act is supported—buttressed—by that of three enormous negresses, the Peters Sisters (total weight, I believe, 65 stone). They sing well, but I couldn't help feeling that their size was their main asset. Personal misfortunes receive no sympathy on our halls : they receive applause.
The Empire was a trifle Monday-nightish. Not too good a house. Collins's was different. At nine, ten minutes after we should have begun, there were still great queues, buying song- albums and pea-nuts. The curtain rose at 9.20, half an hour late. Here again were fat women, singing, rather seriously, a strange song, " Keep Fit, Keep Fit For England." They went down well. The parishioners of "the little church on the Green" lap up patriotic songs, and, like John Ruskin, they cannot resist martial music.
But it was not these things that had brought the queues. It was little old Harry Champion, who was a star of the halls forty years back. When Champion came on, he was given something like a greeting.
He sang us " Father's Name Was. Brown," " We Don't 'Ave a Beano Ev'ry Day " (about Mrs. McIntyre at Southend : she set her bustle on fire sliding down the helter-skelter without a mat), and he sang us . . . " Any Old Iron." He went on for a long time (his songs are not short), but, though we screamed for " 'Enery the Eighth " and " The End of Me Old Cigar " and " Robin Redbreast," it was simply too late. He gave a little dance and went. The tears ran down his cheeks.
Champion and Waller have both been recently in the West End, but they belong farther out. Both go to make up our music-hall system. Every house the country over has its own peculiarities. Finsbury Park cares for novelties, while Collins's doesn't mind how old they are. But if it loves the old, it hates the bad, and I have heard the genuine bird only in Islington.
Five years back we all thought that the talkies had killed the music-hall. But the halls have stood well up to the competition. The standard of minor acts has, I think, improved : the tap-dancer knows that he must compete not only with other dancers on the halls but also with Fred Astaire. And the Harry Champions know that no one can compete
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