Musicals, Movies and More …

An evening of classic songs and instrumental themes was promised with vocalist Amy Cockett (a busy working mother with a young family who is also a qualified vet with her own practice near Leyburn) and Mal Carruthers (an accomplished and experienced organist with a previous career in the centralized UK music industry). The interest of the audience numbering in the mid-30s was immediately piqued as we entered the church to a darkened auditorium with considerable additional sound equipment, an electronic keyboard, a large video screen with projector, and the chancel area tantalisingly illuminated in a silvery-blue and white wintry light with various poppies on the Remembrance Sunday fall glowing redder than others.

There followed an eclectic and disparate selection of colourful slides and videos, organ renditions, and vocal or electronic renderings, with a pithy and apposite video commentary from Mal, all projected through a powerful sound system which the team had brought with them. Was there a linking theme, we questioned, as we moved from the 007 James Bond theme to Love Actually, The Mission, John Williams’s Ode to the Fallen, a Riverdance line-dance, Ave Maria, Kate Bush, and the 633 Squadron’s theme for a raid on a Nazi V2 rocket launch pad on a Norwegian fiord?  Amy’s voice was powerful and tuneful, Mal’s artistry on the organ superb, the additional sound effects from a side drum were riveting, and the slides full of colour and memories of our cinematic past.

The second half of the programme continued with increased variety: more of John Williams, Ennio Morricone’s wild themes using harmonica and güiro, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 version of Sunset Boulevard, Gladiator, Highland Cathedral (played on the organ rather than bagpipes), Judy Garland’s theme song from The Wizard of Oz (1938), The Magnificent Seven and an encore of My Fair Lady as Amy crooned that she “could have danced all night”.

Amy sang, Mal played, the slides flashed, the amplifiers amplified, all in a seemingly wild frenzy – and then the metaphorical penny dropped. There was no over-arching theme except a serious and deep-rooted love for music and the cinema and a realization that many various arts were now, as a matter of course, combining to stimulate and please an audience’s senses. There is electronic music, themes and tunes are borrowed and developed from others, music made in different ways, ideas spread and changed internationally – we saw how The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner was a take on a Japanese The Seven Samurai, and Lloyd Webber’s 1993 Sunset Boulevard was openly billed as “based on the Billy Wilder (1950) film”.

So, thank you to both the artistes and their wonderful sound and visual supporter Mike,  for a sensually stimulating evening.  We wish them “Good Luck” on their forthcoming tour of other church venues.