50 years on; The Clarkston Disaster

Fifty years ago, on 21st of October in 1971, Scotland’s deadliest peacetime disaster happened. A gas explosion in a busy shopping area of Clarkston Toll, an area in the southside of Glasgow, it claimed 22 lives and injured over a hundred other people.

It was an unremarkable dreich October day, autumn leaves everywhere and a dampness in the air. The city was still in mourning from the Ibrox disaster which had occurred on the 2nd of January, during an Old Firm. The collapse of stairway 13 killed sixty-six people and injured over two hundred. My dad knew many of the injured. The south side of Glasgow, where I was born, is really a collection of many small towns. And in those days, everybody still worked in the shipyards. There was a sense that everybody knew everybody.

To give you an idea, there’s 1.1 miles between Govan Shipyard (as it was called then) and Ibrox stadium. There’s 6.3 miles from Ibrox Stadium to Clarkston Toll.

The Clarkston toll explosion is just on the verge of my living memory. I can recall everybody talking about it. We didn’t have a phone in those days – we didn’t have a phone in the house until 1976 or thereabouts! And I know my dad went out to our neighbours who was about 90 and her son had paid for her to have a phone in the house. I’m sure my dad was going out to check on my auntie Ella, who lived in Clarkston at the time, and did her shopping at the toll. As women did in those days, they’d go out to the shops every day, with their message bags and have a good natter with whomsoever they’d bump into.

Auntie Ella was okay. She had already gone out and come back by the time of the explosion. What I don’t understand is that Ella didn’t have a phone either, but there’s nobody left of that generation that I can ask. I image anybody who had a phone had a lot of visitors that might.

The explosion was caused when a 4-inch gas main laid six years earlier had ruptured. That allowed the gas to accumulate in void space underneath the row of shops. The void was totally unventilated, so the pressure continued to build. There had been complaints from shop staff and customers about a strong smell of gas, and that the smell was getting stronger.  Engineers from Scottish Gas had come out and tried to isolate and identify a leak but couldn’t.

The leak went remained undetected until it ignited with the force equivalent to 500 pounds of TNT.  Shops were blown to bits, vehicles that had been left on the roof top carpark were rocketed into the air to land back onto the wreckage of the shops below. The sound was heard ten miles away. So, from where I am I typing this, I’d have heard it and looked out the window. The dog, no doubt would have woken up.

20 women and 2 men were killed, over a 100 were injured. It happened at 2.52pm so the shopping centre was busy, just normal folk going about their normal business. Engineers from the gas board were still in attendance, still trying to isolate the source of the smell.

The public inquiry lasted for 19 days, ending in February 1972. It revealed that gas had built up in a hidden space beneath the shops in an area unknown to the Scottish Gas Board. Lots of criticism was levelled at many organisations, including Renfrew County Council as it was then, but no individual or organization has ever been held legally responsible.

 What has come out in the 50-year memorials has been the kindness and sacrifice shown by the local community. People involved, even tentatively, are talking on social media and sharing stories.

On the afternoon of the disaster the emergency services, aided by volunteers, worked through the night to rescue survivors trapped in the rubble. Many were pulled out hours later, thanks to the efforts of both professional rescue response and local residents.

The emergency services were stretched to their limit. Twenty-two ambulances were dispatched to the area. Medical staff were weeping at the sight of the injuries that were arriving in the hospital from the incident.

Local busses helped the first responders, getting people out the area and ferrying them to the nearby Redhurst Hotel (where Alan’s brother was to be married 15 years later) which was being used as a temporary hospital.

And the tales of the day, the cops who had to man switchboards into the early hours, the wait to hear who had lost their lives. No police, ambulance or rescue responder went home at the end of their shift that night. The next shift came in early. People getting onto buses and going into the city centre to try to get some news.

So different to nowadays

Scrolling through the messages, there was an interesting one from a local dentist who used his practice fridges to store unattached fingers until the ambulances became available to transport them to hospital.

One witness was on a bus on the street, just missing the epicentre of the explosion. She remembered the bang, the double decker rocking, and the smoke clearing to reveal devastation. And the noise of crying and screaming, everybody got off the bus to help.

One reader said that she swapped her day at the hairdresser, and the girl who took her place survived. Another sixteen-year-old was sent to another branch to work that day, her replacement was caught up in the explosion but survived with minor injuries after being knocked unconscious.

Casual chats at a bus stops, the forecast for the rain to get heavier stopped some women from going out. One bus was running late or would have been in the epicentre.

Because most of those killed had been women out doing the shopping, as opposed to working men, there was minimal compensation paid out. The majority of victims at Clarkston Toll that day had been female shoppers, as opposed to working men.

The toll was the heartbeat of that community, and the response was one of courage and compassion.  The small town of Clarkston was left grieving.

 The aftermath of the explosion (Image: Courtesy of East Renfrewshire Council)

Point of view

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

An author has some big decisions to make when starting a novel. For example, it can be written in the present tense or in the past tense i.e. the reader can be told what happened or see it happening in “real time”. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Present tense is more immediate. You see what’s happening at this instant so the future remains undetermined. You are in the moment. Past tense is more usual and some readers expect stories to be told that way. Someone telling a story aloud is unlikely to do it in the present tense. The narrator knows the whole story and so tells it in the past tense. It can be easier to develop backstory also.

Then there’s point of view (POV). In writing-speak point of view refers both to the mode of writing the author chooses for the novel, and to the focus on a character whose perspective holds within a particular chapter or section.

An omniscient POV is when the narrator is all knowing. The author can tell us what’s happening inside any character’s head at any time, knows where everything is going. Although it’s hackneyed, the narrator could say, “If only she’d known…” The problem here is that the reader can feel disconnected from the protagonist, and the author must be careful not to flip from the inside of one head to another and then to another, which can be irritating and confusing.

If all the focus is to be on the protagonist, let her tell the story in first person. The reader is in her head all the time. That’s great for her character development. She tells us not only what she thinks but how she thinks. We see all other characters from her perspective, so they are really just reflections in her mind. It’s a wonderful way of making the book entirely about her. There is, of course, one big snag especially for a mystery or a thriller. The reader can only see what she sees and know what she knows. The reader can’t see the bad guy sneak up behind her with a gun. Not until she swings around and faces him.

Then there’s third person POV. Now the story is told in third person. It may be third person close, in which case most of the time it will be from the protagonist’s POV but narrated in third person. However, it may be more relaxed. Chapters may be from different character’s POVs. It allows one to see the bad guys plotting, the protagonist thoughts in action, some straight story narration for background, and so on. I think it’s true that most novels are written in this flexible style of third person. It’s the way we write the Kubu books, and it works particularly well for police procedurals because it allows the reader to see things that Kubu does not to add tension and interest in how Kubu discovers them.

When we started writing our stand-alone thriller Dead of Night, we decided on a challenge. We would have a female protagonist (who eventually ended up as a woman of Vietnamese ancestry to make still harder), we would write it in the present tense for the immediacy, and we would use first person POV. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot as it turned out. We struggled with the main character, but that’s another story. We found present tense hard to manage – maybe because we were so used to the past tense model. Once we settled on the plot and the character and felt comfortable with that, we dropped the present tense and reverted to the past tense that made us more comfortable. But we stuck it out with the first person POV. We wanted all the focus on Crystal, and we felt that her perspective throughout helped with tension.

The book took us much longer than we’d expected, and when we sent it to our editor, it was with considerable trepidation.

He was not thrilled. I think he felt that Crystal was still narrating the story rather than living it. We went through multiple iterations, and at times it felt that there were now three of us writing the book instead of two of us. In the end, the editor called for the “nuclear option”. The book would be rewritten in third person close i.e. it would be almost entirely from Crystals POV, but we would be telling the story not her. It called for a total rewrite of the book, but it seemed to work.

I know of many writers who have successfully written from multiple POVs – even within a single series. The first Reacher novel was in first person, and then Child switched to third person. Why was it so hard for us? Stanley has suggested—and I think he’s right—that first person is very, well, personal. You are inside the protagonist’s head all the time. Everything happens inside that head. But we are two heads. Although we think we are both inside the same head, perhaps we have slightly different perspectives and that slightly blurs the character.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s probably that you should write in the way that feels comfortable to you. Don’t be afraid to change, but don’t assume it’ll be easy!   

 

From London With Love

 Sujata Massey

Reporting live from the UK! I left Baltimore in mid-October for a little more than a month of travel, experiencing autumn season through a few countries in Europe. First stop: London, England. Tony and I stayed in an inner-ring neighborhood called Marylebone (pronounced Marly-bone). The neighborhood began as a medieval village and slowly developed into an urban Georgian community with streets laid out in a grid and terraced houses. 

Halloween anticipated in Marylebone

Everywhere is classical architecture

Marylebone Road was laid out in the late 1700s as a direct route into the heart of the city. Later, handsome Victorian mansion flats were built up, a train station followed, and in the 1930s BBC opened its broadcasting house here. London’s top physicians set up practices on Harley Street, further establishing its importance. But a large number of vacancies along the Marylebone High Street was troubling; not until the 1990s did the community activively recruit retailers to come in—and blessedly, this was done for quality, not the ability to rent. Hence, it’s a neighborhood of bookshops (even carrying my work, hooray!) small restaurants and coffee shops, and lovely household goods and clothing. We plenty of embassies and an international school, so the air rang with the soft accents of many nations.

Daunt specializes in travel and foreign-set books

I’m a huge fan of neighborhoods where one can walk to everything, including three nearby tube stops (Baker St, Edgware and Marylebone). We were near Holland Park, another posh neighborhood that has a significant history of artists. In the late Victorian period, and estimated 1500 artists had studio/residences in London, a fact that seemed staggering given what we generally think about artist earnings, and the high price of terrace houses in London.

Leighton House

I’ve longed to visit Leighton House, the home of Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896), an artist who painted portraits of many nobles and was on faculty at the Royal Academy of Arts. The artist grew up on the Continent, a fact that engendered lifelong suspicion of his nationality and religion. He ignored the snobs and threw himself into frequent travel to the Middle East and North Africa, where he gathered inspiration for painting and his home. Leighton, a lifelong bachelor, collected tiles, antiquities and textiles, mostly from Syria and Algeria, and also had British craftsmen replicate designs when he began furnishing his extroardinary, custom-built residence in the 1870s. 

The home’s stunning center is called Arab Hall, a vibrant, turquoise room covered in medieval tiles from Damascus although the original inspiration was a 12th-century Sicilian palace room. Leighton’s friends and fellow artists working on his interior included the potter William DeMorgan and artist-illustrator Randolph Caldecott.  This cross-pollination of friends and cultures is an idea that has fueled my own writing so I felt at home as I slowly toured the grand residence, which also features an addition holding modern art from the Near East and North Africa donated or loaned recently. In the original house rooms we can admire paintings by Leighton and his friends, who included John Singer Sargent, John Everett Millais and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Frederick Leighton was held in high esteem by Queen Victoria, who awarded him a baronetcy the day before his death. Having seen his work, read some words and experienced his house, I feel as if I’ve been in the lost world of a high Victorian aesthete who played a formative role introducing the arts of the East into Western society.

Sambourne House

A few minutes’ walk away lay Sambourne House, another Holland Park artist home that had the benefit of original furniture and artwork by its former owner, Edward Linley Sambourne, a cartoonist for Punch Magazine. The house in the midst of a terrace group was part of a respectable middle class neighborhood, a step down from the grandeur of Leighton House, but all the more interesting to me because of its original wallpapers, pens, dishes, and every sort of bric-a-brac imaginable.

Eddward Linley Sambourne’s drawings

The artist, who went by the name Linley, was born in 1844 and was an apprentice marine engineer who made caricatures and studied art for pleasure. He was discovered by an editor at Punch in the 1860s and thereafter had a booming career making finely detailed, satirical illustrations. His wife, Mary Ann, and two children, lived a happy and creative life. 

It was elating to travel through this house of a commercial artist and feel a kinship in design style. Both Mary Ann and Linley passionately decorated, occasionally having differing views of wallpaper and a room’s best use: who doesn’t live this way? Sambourne House is an epic example of the Aesthetic and Arts&Crafts movements. The home displays rich, deep colors that speak of cozy autumn and has timeless William Morris wallpapers in so many rooms, even that of the home’s maidservant. I loved seeing Sambourne’s drawing table and the photographs he’d made of friends poised in dramatic positions that he’d then work with to make his dynamic cartoons with charming Victorian flourishes.

London has always been a place of fashion—from the Regency architects making houses with grand rooms, to today’s international stylemakers wearing the perfect flowing raincoats and barrel jeans as they tread along Marylebone High Street. In just five days, I had adjusted not only to Greenwich time, but tippled down a historic rabbit hole. In fact, we went for the Alice in Wonderland tea at Sanderson’s Hotel the very next day.

Alice of Wonderland tea at Sanderson’s Hotel

Terminating Tembusu and Tiny Candles

Ovidia--every other Tuesday

It's Deepavali, the Festival of Lights, in Singapore. And tonight (or last night, by the time this comes out) I'll be lighting my little sandlewood, spruce and lemon scented candles to celebrate a final draft finally submitted as well as new stories to come.

For many, lighting lamps and candles and creating diyas symbolises welcoming Goddess Lakshmi and her blessings of wealth and prosperity into their homes.

But another figure I like to remember at this time is Aravan, who is celebrated in rituals, particularly the fire-walking of Theemithi, leading up to Deepavali. :

This is early 20th century image of Aravan is in the National Museum of Singapore.

In the Mahabharata, Aravan allowed himself to be sacrificed to the goddess Kali to ensure victory for his people and he is associated with continuity and regeneration.

I believe all writers are familiar with these feelings of commitment, sacrifice, walking on nails and through fire and then committing to doing it all again despite knowing what's to come!

But the candles tonight mark more than the submission of my final draft of The Tembusu Tree Mystery. This will possibly be the last of my tree history mysteries--I have so many ideas that I can't explore while I'm committed to writing a book a year for this series.

My cover sketch for the Tembusu Tree Mystery

I know I'm going to miss this series and its trees and characters so much, but right now I'm just glad I've sent it off!

And I suddenly have a free week (ten days in fact) before November begins. November is going to be a month full of upheavals (furniture--including bookshelves--removed for parquet polishing, furniture--including bookshelves--replaced) and, even more upheavaling, dealing with editorial comments & feedback & rewrites.
So now I'm thinking of taking on a mini 10 day project to occupy myself so I don't brood endlessly about how much my editor might be hating what she's reading!

So far my main options are:
1. Learning enough about self publishing to put out a book on Kindle Direct Publishing (I'm not hoping for a bestseller--I just want to learn how the system works because it scares me!)
Or
2. Downloading Minecraft and figuring out how to access The Uncensored Library, the virtual library built in Minecraft by Reporters Without Borders to provide access to censored journalism. Again it's an area I'm unfamiliar with that I find scary.

Maybe I'll start both and see what happens. Maybe that’s the lesson Deepavali brings: you can’t control what grows, but you can still put your seeds in the soil and light your lamps.

For now I will at least be:
3. Lighting a candle and sitting quietly with the glow and some celebratory sweets.

Happy Deepavali everyone! May your week and and your life be safe and full of light!

Why Crime?

Annamaria on Monday

A few months ago, I wrote about why people write and why they read crime fiction. In researching for that post, I found quite a number of articles purporting to explain why.  One of them goes back as far as 1957. The reasons writers gave were sometimes interesting, some a bit far fetched, and one case, strange.

The interest in crime stories has been intense for eons, and their popularity has never wained.  Nowadays, it is rampant, not just in books, but even more so in films and television. There are seres that go on for a decade, and TV detectives' names have become household words.  Not just Poirot, but Morse and Foyle and Monk, etc!  Why?

Why is always a an interesting question for me.  One of the things that fascinates me about it is how we humans seems to always hope there will be a uniform answer - one reason that explains how come and applies to all people everywhere.  To me anyway, there is never only one answer. So for now, with today's question, let's just look a few answers that I uncovered.

The weirdest answer I came across was the oldest, found in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1957, by one Charles Rycroft who questioned the validity of an explanation by a psychologist named Geraldine Pederson-Krag.  He wrote, "According to her the murder is  a symbolic representation of parental intercourse and 'the victim is the parent for whom the reader (the child) had negative Oedipal feelings. The clues in the story, disconnected, inexplicable, and trifling, represent the child's growing awareness of details it had never understood, such as the family sleeping arrangements, nocturnal sounds, stains, incomprehensible adult jokes and remarks... The reader addicted to mystery stories tries actively to relive and master, traumatic infantile experiences he once had to endure passively. Becoming the detective, he gratifies his infantile curiosity with impunity, redressing, completely the helpless inadequacy, and anxious guilt unconsciously remembered from childhood.'"

Charles goes on to debunk Geraldine's thesis because she does not produce specific clinical evidence from mystery writers'/fans' experiences.  He also implies that detective stories' failure to appeal at such a deep psychological level explains "...why the detective story so rarely achieves the status of a work of art…"  

 Okay, if you say so, Charles.

My research also included an article by a contemporary forensic psychologist who seeks to explain why he decided to become a forensic psychologist, in his words "instead of remaining safely within the confines of my consulting room, just me and my non-criminal patients."

Among other lesser reasons he says  that women read/watch crime stories because they "want to absorb tips on how to survive dangerous encounters with predatory men.  For men, watching shows about crime and murder, seems to stir feelings of manliness."

Okay, if you say so, Richard

For the most part, people who bother to answer the question of why stick with the generally accepted answer: that we love crime stories because while justice is not guaranteed in the real world in which we live, fiction allows us to spend time in places where real justice is a possibility,

As for me, here is why I write mysteries.

When I was first crossing over from writing non-fiction to fiction, my then agent said, "If you're going to be a novelist, you have to hang around with other novelist. The most collegial group of fiction writers in New York is the Mystery Writers of America – New York Chapter." He told me that one of his other clients, let's call him Jim was a member and that he would introduce me to the group.

  

 

In those days, MWA-NY had their monthly dinner meetings at the National Arts Club. My agent's client was supposed to meet me there at six pm when the group would be gathering for drinks and schmoozing before dinner and a talk, that day by in New York City police detective.

I was intimidated by the grandeur of the location, so I tentatively approached the ballroom entrance to see if I could spot Jim. He wasn't there. Just inside the door there was a man sitting at a table who was checking people in. Then a woman, wearing a name tag that just said "Mary," came to me and invited me in. "You're new. Let me introduce you to some people."  And she did.

She got me checked in.  Jim failed to show up, but the folks I met were just as collegial and warm and friendly as my agent had told me to expect. By 7 o'clock, that Jim had still not arrived, so Mary came back to me and took me to the table with her and her friends, keeping a spot open for Jim who finally got there halfway through dinner. When it came to MWA-NY I was sold.

A month or two later, I had given my agent about 10 pages of the beginning of a story. He told me that it seemed like the beginning a woman-in-jeopardy novel, just the kind he thought I should be writing. He said,"You have to read the work of the best in that field." He recommended a book called Where Are the Children? He told me it was out of print, so I went to the great Strand Bookstore. The book was on an upper shelf in the used book section for mysteries.  I climbed up the ladder and as I pulled it off the shelf, there on the back cover was a picture of that woman wearing the name tag "Mary": Mary Higgins Clark!

Mystery Writers are like that!  And Mary was ESPECIALLY!

I had really wanted to tell historical stories, not necessarily mysteries. But once I started hanging out with mystery writers and found some to form a critique group, writing a mystery seemed the natural thing. In the process, I discovered something really important to me.  Like a lot of historical fiction writers, I want to weave the history into the story in such a way that it seems natural. Some historical novels give the reader a few pages of story followed by a few pages of history, followed by some more story, followed by more history. Yuck!

I want to write historical novels where the history is woven in. "Killing" the right person makes a big difference.  I choose a

person whose death cannot be investigated without understanding what's going on historically in that time in that place. If a historical novelist starts with the right dead body, the people who are trying to solve the crime have to talk to each other about what's happening socially, politically, etc.  And the reader who is also, of course, trying to work out who-done-it wants to understand the possible motivation of the murderer. 

Bingo!

That's my WHY!

How about you?

Writes Of Way

 

I’ve been asked to do a weeklong residency of workshops at the Writers Center at Moniack Mhor in Inverness next year. We have two writers, a guest speaker, about twenty students with plenty of cake. And wine.

The money is lovely, but it was the cake that sealed the deal.

My fellow resident person, Michael Malone and I are discussing how we want to run it. I’m happy to read things in advance, happy to do one-to-ones about pieces of work.

I have a few workshops up my sleeve; my favourite one is called - The Accountant.

To cultivate a sense of mystery, I’m saying no more about that.

 

Someone in our writers’ group sent their novel off to the association of people who writes the genre she writes for a critique. It came back - Does not have legs to carry the story, quite liked main character but nothing else.

That person did not write for long time after that. 

How horrible.

 

I think I’m going to start off my first talk with that story.

 

No critique should ever do that. Surely the editor should have said ‘Story not strong enough at the moment, but let’s think of ways to stick your main character further up the tree that they are desperately trying to climb down. How can we twist it. And twist it again. Get the pattern of the story more complex.  A single woman in pursuit a single man?  What’s the story?

 

How do we make the story more engaging?

                                 

Apart from The Accountant, I like to talk the attendees through the nuts and bolts of writing. The Writer’s Tool Kit.

 

Plotting is the logical sequencing of information. That’s a lot more simple than it sounds.

 

I use the word wombat a lot. A word that will only ever appear in print in the last novel I write.  I use it as a marker. I don’t stop to look back.  What was their dog called? What colour was that car?  “Wombat the spaniel sat in the front seat of the green, 25 plate wombat, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, looking like the idiot he was.”

 

At the end, I just search and find wombats and put in the right word. Walter the spaniel and it was a Dacia Duster.

 

All hints and tips from the MIE squad gladly received, you’ll get a mention and a picture of a bit of cake I will eat in your honour…

 

I’ll also talk about keeping track of versions.  I change font with each edit.  Bookman Antiqua, the Tahoma then the final draft is Times New Roman. Then I can tell what bits of the novel are at what stage.

                                    

I was looking up some literary trivia so I can name drop and sound as though I know what I’m talking about.

 

Truman Capote used 500 pencils very sharp pencils to write: a first draft on yellow paper, the second on white, third on yellow.

Tennessee Williams spoke out loud when he wrote. I live with somebody who does that and it’s good that we have a big house.

Henry Gibson always started writing at 4am, which suggests some circadian issues or adrenal malfunction. Or a dog that always wanted out at that time. Curious.

Anthony Trollop famously wrote seven pages of text per day. He’d end his session at the bottom of page seven, even if it was in the middle of a……

He claimed it made it easier to pick up the next day.

 

Georges Simenon wrote – wait for it - 200 pages in 11 days. That sounds impressive but how big was the paper and did he use 24-point font.

 

Isaac Asimov famously could do fifty pages in a day; he typed at a phenomenal speed. And this would be in the days of mechanical typewriters, clunking keys. Did he have RSI and if not, what was his secret?

 

Alexander Dumas could only sit down and write the book when the story was complete in his head and The Clockwork Orange (the nickname for the Glasgow underground train system) was written whilst Anthony Burgess was slightly inebriated. I have no idea if that’s true but it’s a good story, and a good way to write a good story.

Ernest Hemingway stopped writing for the day at the point where he felt he was writing at the top of his game, so that the continuance the next day would also be at the top of his game. I can recognise of I am writing smoothly and easily, but it’s only when I look back that I get any sense of whether what I have on the page is any good or not.

 

And of course, Noel Coward read the obituary column and if he wasn’t in it, he started to write.

Being busy, I am a JK Chesterton writer. I call us Martini writers. Any time, any place anywhere.

                                       

What Life is Like Tending Bar in Mykonos

 

Jeff—Saturday

Current events being what they are these days, I almost feel like going back to drinking.  But I shant. Instead I'll share some secrets I've learned in (many) years past from those in the know who worked one of the foremost Greek Island bars....that's sadly no longer there.  But there's much to be learned from their recollections.  So, here we go.

Mykonos’ legendary Montparnasse Piano Bar closed for the season Friday night, giving all of its fans the chance to say adieu to its proprietors, Jody Duncan and Nikos Hristodulakis.  They’re responsible for bringing Broadway quality singers and pianists to the island, such as Kathy “Babe” Robinson and Mark Hartman who performed on its final night.

All of which inspired me to share insights I’ve gained from years of conversations with its singers and pianists.  Those impressions are incorporated into the story line of my Spring 2019 Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel, but I think they’re worthy of a bit of time in the spotlight on their own.  So, here goes….

Playing piano in a bar requires a certain mindset.  Think of it as trying to gain your balance on a surfboard...while playing a piano.

As the piano player, it’s up to you to read the room, and adjust on the fly to make sure everyone has a good time.  It could be the same crowd as from another night, but this time they show up with a completely different vibe.  The other night might have been their first night on the island, and everyone was up for a hell-raising good time. But when it came to their last night, it’d be all about nostalgia.

Unlike concert-goers, bar patrons show up with a mix of interests and expectations regarding the music: celebrants might come looking for upbeat tunes; friends on a night out might shout out song requests; business people might ignore the music as long as they can hear each other talk; and, of course, any alcohol-fueled seduction requires a background of romantic music.  Then there’s the solitary, glad-handing, over-imbiber who can’t resist trying to transform his evening alone into a communal sing-a-long

.

Whatever the mix of audience members, the piano-bar player faces the ever-present background chatter of customers, waiters, and bartenders exchanging orders and quips, all searching for the right volume at which to conduct their discussions, above or below the rattle of glassware and din of competing conversations.

If you work long enough in piano bars, you develop a mindset to cope with all of that.  Or you go crazy. 

When starting out in the business, some shut their eyes as they play and drift off into the sounds of the room, listening for the evening’s competing tones and rhythms, crescendos and diminuendos, bursts of staccato laughter, trumpeting shouts, and unexpected bits of silence.  Whether working with a singer or alone, they view their job as something like an orchestra conductor’s: to unite all those disparate sounds into a unified, symphonic performance. And ideally to draw the audience into an appreciative, tip-giving state of mind in the process.

As I said, that’s their thinking when they start out in the business.  But, over time, they come to learn their true role in a piano bar, and with that realization achieve a Zen-like understanding of the meaning of their life’s work.  It’s so simple, so obvious, and so intrinsically calming to an artist’s soul:

Their job is to sell drinks. Period, end of story.

I’ll drink to that.  Thank you, David Dyer, Mark Hartman, and Bobby Peaco for all those wonderful tunes.

David

Mark

Bobby

PS. I'd be woefully remiss if I didn't mention the two brilliant vocalists in addition to Babe who bring their Broadway level talents to bear in making The Piano Par the place to be in the Cyclades for high end entertainment--Phyllis Pastore, who's been wowing audiences here for 27 years, and Sara Mucho, the youngest member of the Montparnasse musical crew.  Thank you all!

—Jeff