Bowie Songs One album launch

Obviously I was exhausted after the Funeral and the last few weeks but I really wanted to be a part of this event, I am so glad I made the effort because it was amazing!

I am part of this incredible album available on i-tunes here, an album of stripped down versions of Bowie Songs, a labour of love by my old friend a brilliant pianist Clifford Slapper. I was delighted to finally meet his parents last night who are in the collage.

The venue is exquisite, St Giles in the Fields is a historic church in the heart of the city with ties to many great artists and poets such as Shelley and Blake. It was a thrill to be in there let alone to sing. Photos by Max Ellis.

Here is a tiny clip of me singing.

Here is what David Mcalmont had to say about it...

Clifford Slapper and Friends, Bowie Songs One Live, St Giles in Fields (June 2017)
She says, "Hello David McAlmont" and pecks me on the cheek. It is one of those moments where I know that I am speaking to a woman that I have met before, but in a distant context that I can't recall. And then she soundchecks and spontaneous whoos erupt from my throat. I don't know how she and Clifford have done it, but they have taken Bowie's Can You Hear Me and made it the stuff of Bacharach and Warwick. I incline towards Marcella Puppini and say, "Well that's the show stolen. We can relax now."
We laugh. Funmi sees us. We are not laughing at her: we are in pleasurable awe. After which, Marcella does her soundcheck and forgets the first line of the second verse and swears. I bound over to Des de Moor and say, did she just say the F word in a church? Snigger snigger again. In the verses, she is sashaying glamorously through Christopher Isherwood's Berlin; in the choruses, she is wistfully alone with tear glossed irises. We're in the clouds with her.
Bowie's poetry is an illustrious bequest: the places that we are able to take it within the stripped back diktat of Clifford's virtuosic arrangements for piano and voice are veritably Shakespearean. This is going to be a fantastic evening. Clifford's parents arrive. Cliff pauses to say that his mum and dad are here; Marcella, uses the amplification of the mic to announce "Mr and Mrs Slapper to the stage please." Cliff's sister is at the back of the nave, serving free water - still and sparkling, red wine and fizz. This is a family affair. There are crisps, nuts and pastries. A man asks me if I would like to moisten the back of my throat. Matron!
By seven there is a chatty crowd mulling around the grounds of St Giles in the Fields. Cliff has been busying himself like a hot whore - this is Bowie we're talking about - to get people to the show. He has done well. At about 1945hrs he walks onto the stage to welcome the audience, and explain why he had the idea in 2014: to strip Bowie back to his melodic and chordal essentials. He shows a Super Eight movie taken by a man who was furtively filming his future wife, as Bowie in mod garb sauntered by. And then Marcella opens. If somebody dropped a pin...
Cliff introduces each artist to illuminate how the collaborations are cross-genre. Ian Shaw is the decorated lord of British jazz. The vocally dexterous justice he does to Drive Ibn Saturday is breath halting. Later, I explain to a friend that he is the smoothest falsetto beneath the passagio I have ever heard. It is bloody difficult to use falsetto unless you absolutely have to. Green envy. I am seventh on the bill, becoming more and more nervous by the second.
These multi-collaborative sets are good natured but competitive. Every individual has to raise their game because they can't let the project and the material down, and there are some damn fine contributors. Dance diva, Katherine Ellis, takes the stage. Where is this performance coming from? She converts Oh You Pretty Things into a plea to recognise and rethink the hapless doting of concerned parents. Each note is an agonised paean to parental forgiveness. She weeps and burns with each powered note. She stops and apologises. At the conclusion the crowd rises in ovation. And then Clifford tearfully explains that she buried her mother the day before.Wow!
Ray Burmiston follows with an irreverent punk reading of Always Crashing the Same Car. He knocks the mic stand over and yanks the mic from its chord. It's wonderful. I run to the bathroom because I will follow Ian Shaw's exclusive for Bowie Songs Two, and I've been consuming the water. I decide that the only way to perform Sweet Thing is like a leering Soho tart. It works. Phew. And then Funmi comes on and fells the crowd the way she did the fellow performers in the soundcheck.
Then Des comes on to sing Slip Away. It is perfect. He fulfils Clifford's introduction, where he mentions that Des once recorded an album of Bowie covers, which the great man himself said made him hear his songs as if for the first time. If nobody ever heard Bowie they would be busily rifling through his catalogue after this set. I close with another exclusive from Bowie Songs Two. The show ends and the audience is abuzz. Bowie lives. Well done Cliff. DM


Afterwards some of us went to the Phoenix arts club for drinks, i was asked to sign copies of the album and met some really lovely people. Lovely to spend time with friends Michelle and Pete too.

Fleetingly saw the Meeks, Sam O, Iain M, Rachael, Sally, Trudi and Cam, it was a lovely evening.

Earlier in the day I printed up all the speeches from the funeral and wrote Norman a letter and packaged them up with an order of service and dropped it off at the Nursing Home for him, I didn't feel up to visiting but wanted him to have it. More on lovely Norman Here.