Tag Archives: music

Ealing Jazz Festival 2015

On Saturday 1 August I attended the Ealing Jazz Festival (http://www.ealingsummerfestivals.com/events/jazz-festival/). Although jazz is not, in truth my favourite cup of tea, the music made for pleasant background listening and, most importantly the festival afforded me the opportunity to catch up with close friends. The beer drunk while sitting on the grass was, of course purely incidental to proceedings …!

Being blind I have always enjoyed employing my sense of touch to explore objects. I was pleased therefore to come across a stall selling carved wooden objects. I was particularly taken with a wooden stool with elephant carvings and fleetingly considered purchasing it. However I live in Crystal Pallace/Upper Norwood and the thought of conveying this beautiful object on the tube followed by the train caused me to reject the idea. I love hand carved objects as the craftsman imparts some of their essence. One can see or, in my case touch objects from centuries past and forge a connection with those who have gone before. The craftsman has long since departed but their essence remains solidified in wood.

One of the stalls which had a strong effect on me and those of my friends who accompanied me to it was Love146 (https://love146.org/), a charity which works to highlight and challenge child trafficking. The information on the organisation’s website makes for harrowing reading, particularly that pertaining to the exploitation of young children in brothels.

All in all I enjoyed my trip to the Ealing Jazz Festival and fell in to bed after midnight tired but content.

A Girl Singing

A young woman sings quietly.
What has been done can not be undone, yet her song continues, words floating on the crisp morning air.
Barely out of girlhood, she sings the song of a man who beats women, her mind filled with dreams of street gangs, “power flows from the barrel of a gun”.
What has been done can not be undone.
Just a girl, late teens, heading somewhere, singing.

Even Rock and Roll has Fairy Tales: The Flight of the Sherry Fairy

Thank you to author Sherry Carroll for the below guest post about her book ‘Even Rock and Roll has Fairy Tales: The Flight of the Sherry Fairy‘. I must confess to not knowing a great deal about the subject!

Hi there, thanks for checking me out. I’m Sherry Carroll the Author of “Even Rock and Roll has Fairy Tales: The Flight of the Sherry Fairy” (and more)

You can check me out on Amazon .com or find out more at http://www.evenrockandrollhasfairytales.com and http://www.sherrycarrollbooks.com

Now my Kind of- Sort of a serious Bio. Or, at least, as close as I am ever going to get to making one. L So you want to know about little ole me? Aw, thank you ever so much. So without further ado, my story

Hmmmm… well, If you were to take Janis Joplin, Scarlet O Hara, Bette Midler , Mary Poppins , Carrie Fisher, Gracie Allen , W.C. Fields, and  all four of the Marx Brothers and put them in a giant blender you would get… a really terrible mess and most likely, some fairly serious criminal charges! However, I am the kind of gal, who would help bury the pieces, have the place spotless before the cops arrived, and come up with an airtight alibi, a great excuse or at least a fairly decent justification. Failing that, rent a white bronco, cheap false beard and mustache, a fake passport passes out plenty of funny money and gets you across the border. If the worst should happen (as it surely must) and we don’t make it I promise I will write you a fantastic confession and then defend you to (your) death on Judge Judy.

I am currently trapped in a keyboard cage somewhere in in the suburbs of suburban soccer mom Maryland in the U.S of A pretending to be a mild mannered homemaker (with a not –so secret identity) and mother to four wretched and ungrateful offspring that are a never –ending source of despair and delight. These so called children of mine are Jordan 28, IT expert, Jayme 25, who ran away to Hollywood to become a movie star and is actually well on his way to doing just that! My Adorable Daughter is 22 and working on masters in psychology, and “little” Ian at 14 is twice my size. He’s got Asperger’s but seems to have grown out of or learned coping skills to accommodate his autism spectrum disorder symptoms and now he’s just suffering from typical teenage boy pain- in- the- butt- ski.  I am constantly thrilled and horrified at the tales of growing up in the internet/ information age and their high-spirited antics!

I have no idea how they became so eccentric. I blame their father’s side of the family.

Despite my protests they insist on continuing to grow up and move out leaving me with no other option but collecting really cool creepy dolls as replacements and spending every waking moment at the keyboard . I wish that were a joke!  I frequently wake up on the couch with no blanket after a three day writing/ Facebook/twitter binge/marathon with an open laptop on my chest, ferrets attacking my toes and birds searching my hair for stray birdseed, which they find, to my great dismay, much more than I would care to admit to anyone.

I owned and operated my own private pre-school out of my home for twenty years until I retired about 17 years ago to become useless and dissatisfied on a full –time basis which I was remarkably successful at until about three years ago when I received the unfortunate news that yes, the verdict was in, I was a writer! Just as I always feared and suspected. 

Up until then I  had been going to the University of Maryland part- time and wasted thousands of hours exploring the internet and flying over to see my best friend in London two or three times a year so I practically lived there as much as possible until  the last of my friends there got fed up with my sleeping on their floors and couches, complaining they ate no meat, drinking everything in the flat, and whining about how boring Maryland was and physically forced me on a plane out of their country for a few months.  Back to a place so dull I thought I would lose my mind, as I am a girl accustomed to adventures! Before I was a respectable teacher and housewife I had become a Superstar Teen Queen on the rock and roll backstage scene, with my best friend Shari, the other half of “The Infamous Sherry and Shari.”

When I took my first creative writing class in the fall of 2011 my professor was convinced I should turn my stories of those days would make a great novel.  So, lacking anything better to do the next 18 months I sat down and worked 24/7 until I had written one, much to both of our shock, delight and disbelief!

The results were my memoir “Even Rock and Roll has Fairy Tales: the Flight of the Sherry Fairy.”www.evenrockandrollhasfairytales.com

 I It’s a true story about the good old days backstage and my 20 plus year relationship with Rock god, living legend and international sex symbol Eric Burdon, the charismatic, notorious bad boy and  front man of The Animals and War with an impressive solo career , and not just in music, over the last sixty years. Who quite unexpectedly, at 72 years old came out of a 20 year retirement and had one of the biggest comebacks in history at the same time I finished my book! He’s one of the hottest acts in the business right now still going strong. WOW! Thank you Eric! But it’s the least you could do after…

Well; it’s kind of a long story! That’s why I had to write a book LOL

I have done nothing but write non-stop ever since. And now, even living in Maryland isn’t so bad. Especially if you sleep all day and write all night and never leave the house. I have to! I have more stories than I have years left to tell them in. Here is one of the reviews http://pennreviews.com/2013/10/11/even-rock-and-roll-has-fairy-tales/ and an interview on Eric and about my memoir http://indiemirror.com/2014/02/18/interview-with-sherry-carroll-even-rock-and-roll-has-fairy-tales/

I’m finishing my next book “Saving Amazing Gracelynn” any day now. Part one in a series of new-ish, true-ish so –called “fictional” epic rock and roll novels, which basically means all the stories are true, the names have just been changed to protect the guilty.  How thinly you will be disguised is entirely dependent on how much I liked you and how decent a person you were, so if you were a proper villain you better watch out!  Some of you big stars very nervous right now, and for good reason. You know who you are!  It’s the first in a series that covers dozens of big bands and huge stars plus the adventures of our intrepid heroine Gracelynn, spanning well over forty years. I can’t wait for all of you to meet her!

 Everything I write and publish is available on Amazon.com at my Author Page http://www.amazon.com/Sherry-Carroll 

You can frequently  (read always) find me at a little thing called Facebook, maybe you’ve heard of it?

I run a page full of writing tips I want to use, remember and share https://www.facebook.com/SherryCarrollBooks and a page for Eric Burdon, vintage music and my first book called Eric Burdon knows Even Rock and Roll has Fairy Tales https://www.facebook.com/evenrockandrollhasfairytalesSherryCarroll and a silly social group, The House of the Redheads Fun, https://www.facebook.com/groups/HouseofTheRedheadsFun/

I also am learning twitter @thesherryfairy   and just started seriously blogging now that I am trying to get out of the house more and have a life again once the new book is  done. In order to get some long over-due exercise, get healthy and fit and hopefully lose my “writers spread” and to have more adventures so I have something exciting to say worth blogging about!

Well, that’s about it, the rest is all in my stories. I hope you enjoyed this one. Thanks for your time, Sherry

Abandoned

Rain sodden corpse, in a churchyard. Abandoned, unclaimed, slowly decay setting in.

Once you wowed audiences. Your music had couples dancing, romancing. Many a love was born as you filled the air with melodies sweet.

Now your heart is still. No more tunes will eminate from your once mighty chest.

An old piano, your notes immovable, choked with rain water, you stand by the church, sadly waiting to be taken away.

 

(On Thursday 2 October my mum, her partner and I came across an abandoned piano, in the church close to my home. When first discovered it still worked. However due to heavy rain the piano’s notes are now immovable. How the instrument came to be in the churchyard I have no idea but, at time of writing it remains there).

Turn Off Your Mobiles

A good piece in yesterday’s Guardian (20 August 2014) about the mania for using smart phones at concerts and other similar events to record and/or photograph proceedings rather than, as in times gone by simply immersing oneself in the activity. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far and people have lost the capacity to simply enjoy an activity without feeling the need to photograph and record it to death. I, sadly have my doubts but, as is so often said only time will tell. For the article please go to http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/kate-bush-transcendence-v-smartphones