Yay, a proper sleep-in with no fire alarms, got nearly 9 hours of wonderful sleep!

This meant that breakfast was more like brunch, but man did we pick a good brunch spot! “Compton Libanais” – a Lebanese restaurant, serving delicious delicious good. I opted for “The Beiruty” – falafel tzatziki and hummus, oh my! And coffee that rated at least an 8 on the iScott Coffee Scale. When you see Flat White on the menu you can be pretty sure you’re in for a good time.

The only downside to the start of the day was I mustn’t have plugged my phone in properly so it didn’t charge. Only 29%? Quelle horreur! With a bit of judicious phone use and a recharge here and there I’ll survive the most of terrible of First World Problems.

Post-breakfast we wandered past some nice buildings to the south-west end of Kensington Gardens, to see what we could see before out 1:30pm appointment at the Royal Albert Hall. Being a park, there were lots of trees, lots of pathways, one awful racist guy on a bike, and since it had a pond, heaps of ducks and swans and other birds. The pleasant very much outweighed the unpleasant. As we were almost out of the park, things got even better. Squirrels!

We were at the Royal Albert Hall for a tour, it was nice to be back. We learnt a whole bunch of history, most of which I don’t remember but settle back, get comfortable, here’s the (possibly inaccurate) history lesson. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, came from a town in Germany where art museums and education was free, so he wasn’t too pleased when he saw the average person’s lot in life in London. The result of this was what’s now known as “Albertopolis” – the Natural History Museum, the Victoria & ALbert museum, Royal College of Art, ROyal College of Music, and more – all free institutions to allow the average Londoner to educate and better themselves. This was also to include the Royal Albert Hall, which he had cleverly self-funded by holding a huge International Trade Exhibition. Trouble is, he died before it was even started.

Here’s the controversy – Queen Victoria had all the money, and instead of building the Royal Albert Hall, spent the whole lot on building a monument to Prince Albert instead. The same Prince Albert who apparently absolutely hated the thought of being memorialised in statue form – but I guess Queen Victoria didn’t get the memo and there he is, in solid bronze, covered in real gold.

So how did it get built? To cut a long story short, some very important person whose name I can’t’ remember ( I should have been taking notes!) sold seats in the to-be-constructed hall, on a 999 year lease, for a suitably extravagant sum. Who says kickstarter or gofundme were the start of crowdfunding? Of all the seats purchased, 5 percents are still with the families who initially purchased them their name. The rest have been sold off over the years. Should you be interested in buying one now, there is unsurprisingly a considerable waiting list. You have to apply though Harrods who act as the agent for the hall. Last time one of the boxes of 10 seats was sold, in 2018, it changed hands for about 3.5 million pounds. This also entitles you to become a member of the governing body of the hall – you have a right to some free shows, but a responsibility to contribute to the running of the hall as a going concern.

There are also two boxes reserved for Queen Victoria, which of course are now reserved for the use of the King. There was initially a custom entrance made leading up to near the Royal Box, made wide enough for two people to walk side by side with their big Victorian-era skirts, and handrails low enough to be just perfect for Queen Victoria. Due to security concerns the entrance was changed in around the 1950s I think. The Royals now have their own more private staircase entrance. The cool thing was that we got to take a look. There’s also a ‘retirement room’ just across from the Royal box as well. One of the nice things about this room is it has portraits of all the monarchs from Queen Victoria onward. Queen Victoria signed her one around the time the hall was opened in 1871. Then, 100 years later, down to the minute, Queen Elizabeth signed her own portrait as well. When any Royals are using the Royal Box, the standard furniture is removed and replaced by chairs that come from Buckingham Palace, fresh flowers are placed, and a large tapestry is hung. They are, of course, entitled to visit any show they want at any time, apparently the young William and Harry were at Cirque du Soleil almost every night it was playing. Can’t blame ‘em, for the price!

OK back to the hall. It’s quite tall. The floor isn’t always the floor. Back in the day, quite often the ‘Great Floor’ was installed – which brought the floor up to the level of the first row of boxes. From where we were looking way down to the stage, if the Great Floor was installed, we were told we could ‘pat the performers on their heads’. Must have been quite a thing in the day. These are photos from the ‘box’ we were allowed in to, look how far down the stage is currently.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some stage they build a considerable basement underneath. By not directly touching the building, they avoided all the heritage listing concerns. It was necessary because the hall usually has a different show on every single day, and so for pretty much 24 hours a day the entire place used to be completely surrounded by trucks, earning it the name of “Britain’s worst neighbour”. With the basement, the trucks could get out of the way and posh neighbours could get back to parking their Bentleys and Range Rovers on the street in full view of the neighbours 🙂

Due to the flexibility of the hall particular at ground level (ie all the chairs that there the other night for our Zimmer vs Williams show were all gone today) there is an alarming number of things they can do with it. In 2011, for a performance of Madame Butterfly, they installed water tanks in the basement and created a ‘water garden’ in the whole arena area, which during Act 3 was drained leaving a rock garden – must have been quite an effect.

In the 60s and 70s, certain performances were banned. Rock music, Pop music, and poetry (of all things). The powers that be decided that young people would not adequately value and protect the fixtures and fittings of the hall, so those no-good scruffy young tear-aways were effectively banned from the hall lest they commit their terrible young-person crimes. I can’t help but think the real crime was perpetrated by the governing body. Officer, I’d like to report a snobbery!

Change came about in the 70s when ABBA were hoping to perform. They got around the issue – by ‘offering spaces’ rather than ‘selling tickets’. If your wrote to the Albert Hall and promised them you were a person of good character, then would let. You purchase a space to attend the concert. For a hall that holds around 6 to 8000 people, apparently they received some 3 million letters from dedicated ABBA fans.

Mysteriously, the ban went away shortly after that.

OK what other details. When it first build the entire thing was gas-lit – and quite incredibly the whole place could be lit up in 10 seconds flat, still not sure how but it’s gift impressive for the era. Electric lighting was fitted around 1888.

Suitably educated, we left the Hall and went back to the hotel. Perry went for a nap, I headed back out to unleash my inner Nerdy McTube-Face, which I’ll talk about in a seperate post so (a) you can skip it and (b) so I can hopefully finish this blog entry before 1am without having to write some stuff about trains. (It’s quarter past 12 already)

Tonight we headed out to Leicester Square for the Queen jukebox musical, We Will Rock You. It’s playing at the ridiculously beautiful Coliseum theatre. The show was first launched about 20 years ago, derided by the critics as a flop, but it sold and sold and sold and was extremely popular. It has just been relaunched, it opened on June 2nd so it’s quite new for everyone.

The trouble is, you can really tell. The show got off to pretty uninspiring start, with a troupe of dancers on stage all singing, with oddly hand-based choreography, in front a stage that was just a wall of video screen. Not a stellar introduction to be honest, it felt a little bit cheap and amateurish. The dancers were all hitting their marks and making their moves, it was very tight, but the cheap pink video screen background and uninspiring costumes didn’t make a great impression.

I guess one thing i should point out even before that happened, the first person on stage doing a bit of establishing narration. Is it, hang on, could it be? Why yes, yes it’s Ben Elton himself, author of the show, playing the part of aging hippy ‘Pops’. So that was nice unexpected surprise. Then he sung a bit, that was a surprise, but a bit less nice.

It took around 30 minutes for the show to find it feet and get into its groove, I think. (And mercifully ditch the excess of hand-ography) Though there were a number times throughout the show where lighting cues were missed, microphones weren’t turned on in time, and large doors at the back that make up part of the giant video screen, would bounce off each other instead of close properly. They might be little things, but hey theatre goers are a picky bunch when paying for good seats.

At first the sound was awesome, the drums giving a real thump you could feel in your chest, sounding like it was going to be a great sounds system for a great rock show. Unfortunately, a lot of the time the singers couldn’t be heard over the music – which made things especially challenging when they were singing songs that moved the story forward, but you couldn’t hear what was going on. The singers, the ladies in particular, were phenomenal, when you could hear then properly. The “Dreamer” character – effectively our Freddie Mercury proxy … if only he’d brought his finale energy to the start of the show it would have been killer. Toward the end he totally nailed it. For the rest of show, I could be rude say he failed it just it makes a nice rhyme but that’s not true. It’s just that we never knew he could do a decent job of channeling Freddie Mercury until right at the end.

At interval I had time for the traditional ice-cream, despite waiting for front-of-house staff to finish their personal conversations first before looking at the long line of customers before them, then I returned to me seat. Unlike my seat-neighbour who must have been so impressed he walked out after the first half. Post-interval, the handography was back, but mercifully only for one song before we got back in the show proper.

Also Ben Elton sang a whole song. One where, perhaps regrettably, the vocals were quite clear. I don’t mean to sound so mean, he knows he’s not a singer and sang to his limits, so it wasn’t as bad as I might like to pretend.

The premise of the show was that in the future, real music is banned and people will only listen to music from the global companies that are beamed to everyone’s personal devices. And a few years after the show came out, the iPhone was release, then Apple Music, so it all kinda came true, only not with the restrictions that the story said it would. So in quite a few ways it feels very a show “of its time” even though its time was only 20 years ago – it gives off strong ‘early days of the internet’ vibes. For example, these days, renaming the Earth to “the iPlanet” might have been hip in 2003 but in 2023, it’s super-cringe.

They rattled through so many Queen songs as part of the story (not a tragic love story, we’re on a roll), but they left out the most obvious one. After the show proper had finished and performers had left the stage (and some people were already bolting for the exit), the big video screen said “So, do you want Bohemian Rhapsody?” The crowd went suitably wild, and everybody got the song they wanted. Then …

HOLY CRAP! IT’S BRIAN MAY!

Yes indeed, rising from the floor like the rock god he is, guitar in hand, the real actual proper Brian May, he of the big hair, guitarist of Queen, joined in for the big Bohemian Rhapsody solo, which lets face it was just amazing. The crowd went bonkers (yours truly included) and it really, genuinely, was A Bit Of A Moment. What an amazing surprise, very unexpected, talking about pulling out all the stops to get a show over the line. It definitely finished on a high, almost enough to make us all forget the issues in the two hours the preceded it.

As always, it was then straight on to the tube (Piccadilly line, straight to Gloucester Road) – yet again there was a train waiting for us the moment we got there, and back to the hotel to finish off my homework. Nighty night!