What’s that they’re singing? Sounds like “never ever stick a firework up your nose”. Whatever happened to “whiskers on kittens”?
The Songbook of Unsingable Songs is your answer: a gloriously improbable collision of talents, ideas and aspirations that gladdened the heart and the ear – and judging by the gusto of the performance, was a blast for those on stage.
Now madcap ideas are something of a speciality with Stephen Deazley, especially when he gets together with the energies of his occasional band, Music at the Brewhouse. The logistics of this adventure, a children’s song cycle combining the singers of Edinburgh’s Voice Academy and Glasgow’s Voice Factory, would have sent lesser mortals to lie down in a darkened room. If the poet Matt Harvey had any qualms, he probably diverted himself by looking for mischievous rhymes – the results go well beyond any doubts he, Deazley or the funders, might have had.
These are juicy, clever, renegade songs that tap into the delights of bizarre imaginings and ricketty-racketty wordplay. Naughty round the edges, with soprano Kimberley Myers voicing adult disapproval in That’s Not the Way, but touching deep into the soul of childhood, as in This Very Very Song.
When young Eleanor Kane’s solo voice soared in the reasons for singing, I wasn’t the only one moved to tears.
Star rating: *****
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