Where Worlds Collide

Don’t know if it’s the time of year, or it’s something in the water, but a number of small prog bands’ web forums have turned rather toxic lately, and worse still, the discord has spilled from one forum to another.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve read some quite spiteful and mean-spirited attacks against one or two bands, followed up by complaints that the band’s fans are unable to handle criticism. And of course you find some of the very same people will be up in arms if anyone says a word against their band. Too much of it has got very unpleasantly personal.

I am really sick of these “My band is better than your band” pissing contests. Why is it that some people seem incapable of praising one band without simultaneously bad-mouthing another band who are perceived to be competitors? I’m thinking here particularly of a scene of interrelated bands where many of the regular forum posters know band members personally, and have a natural instinct to be defensive when they’re subject to what can easily be seen as unfair criticism.

I recognise that it should it’s perfectly OK to say you didn’t enjoy a particular album or gig, and to explain why. But I really wish people would at least try to be a little bit more gracious about it. I don’t think it’s on to imply that if someone else did enjoy a gig that their judgement must have been impaired. All these bands put their heart and soul their music. If you don’t care for a particular band, just leave them to people who do like them, and don’t keep carping on about how much you think they suck.

And I don’t think it’s OK to post jibes at other forum members who saw things differently, then claim it was only “witty banter between friends” when you find that they take offence. If you don’t know someone well enough to know what you can get away with saying, then don’t say it! And if they do take offence, then it can’t have been just ‘witty banter’. Is that really that difficult to understand?

And before people accuse me of hypocrisy because of some of the things I say about overrated indie bands on places like The Guardian Music Blog, I think completely different rules apply when it comes to big corporate rock acts or currently fashionable bands who have been ridiculously hyped by certain sections of the media – think of it as putting the boot into the hype as much as the act themselves.

Is a little bit more civility and mutual respect too much to ask for?

The Cambridge Rock Festival is one of the many small rock festivals held up and down the country.  The CRF specialises in classic rock, blues and prog, and as I’ve said before it’s like visiting an alternate universe where punk never happened.  You won’t find much NME-friendly corporate landfill indie on the bill here.

This was my third CRF, and my second spending the full weekend under canvas.

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I travelled up with my mate Andy, a fellow Mostly Autumn and Breathing Space fan, and we soon met up with fellow-fans Colin, Helen and Chris (a.k.a. The Cider Monster) on the campsite. Of course, we were to meet many, many more old friends over the course of the weekend,

For the early part of Thursday evening we decided to avoid the tribute bands on the main stage and check out some of the young bands on the second stage, such as Rowse, JoanovArc, The Treatment and The Virginmarys, before heading for the main stage for the headliners, Danny Vaughn’s The 80s Rocked.  They were billed as “an all-star band playing classic 80s rock hits”, and more or less did what they said on the tin, as cheesy as a very cheesy thing, but thoughoughly entertaining nevertheless.  Name an 80s rock hit, and they probably played it.  Eye of the Tiger?  You Give Love a Bad Name?  The Final Countdown? Of course!

The Classic Rock Society sponsored the second stage on Friday, with a bill made up of prog and metal. So we decided to stay in the smaller tent for most of the day then move to the main stage for the last 2-3 acts. The CRS stage opened with the acoustic four-piece Flaming June, whose red-headed singer reminded me more than a bit of a female version of Chris Johnson both in style and lyrics.  Best bands on the CRS stage were Winter In Eden, a British take on the European female-fronted symphonic metal genre, and Crimson Sky, who play female-fronted prog but with a quite punky/new wave style singer that sets them apart from other bands in the genre.  Final Conflict and The Dreaming Tree also played some entertaining progressive rock.  I didn’t see much of the main stage in the early part of the day, although I did catch some of UXL and Newman during intervals on the CRS stage, the latter of whom I heard described worryingly accurately as sounding “like filler tracks on Journey albums”.  At the end of The Dreaming Tree’s set I headed over to the main stage and caught the bulk of Danny Bryant’s Redeye Band, the excellent blues power trio who’d played the exact same slot the previous year.

Deborah Bonham, the late John Bonham’s younger sister, took Friday’s special guest spot, and even though I knew none of the songs, she was probably the best artist of the day. She played a set of raw and rootsy blues-rock with more than a hint of Led Zeppelin about it. Certainly she can reach the high notes that Robert Plant can’t get to any more.  After her set came The Tygers of Pan Tang, who I thought were a bit out of their depth as headliners, and suffered from an appalling sound mix that rendered the vocals all but inaudible in the early part of the set. Still I enjoyed their set quite a bit, and I seemed to get shown on the big screen rather a lot.  This is what happens when you’re with mates who drag you to the front row!

I spent most of Saturday in the main tent, kicking off with some no-nonsense rock’n'roll from Wolf Law, which was just the sort of thing we needed to wake us up first thing in the morning. The real sensation of the day was second on the bill, the young blues guitarist Chantal McGregor, who simply blew us all away. How on earth does someone that young get to play guitar like that?

After that it was over to the smaller tent to catch Emerald Sky’s set. Perhaps because I’d mentally confused them with Crimson Sky.  I was expecting a prog band, but they turned out to be an all-female metal power trio.  After that I spent the rest of the day back in the main stage tent.  Stray were as entertaining as they were last year, but another high spot was blues guitarist Larry Miller. If you remember, he (along with Karnataka) got bounced from the main stage due to the PA snafu last year – and on the strength of his performance on Saturday I think I’d have preferred those two to Focus and Asia!  His solo on the slow number (don’t remember the title) was utterly brain-melting.

Saturday’s special guests were the Oliver Dawson Saxon, who turned out to be the only real disappointment of the whole festival. They’re basically trading as a Saxon tribute band in competition with Biff Byford’s official Saxon, yet they played a whole load of mediocre new songs instead of many of the hits.  And their singer was awful.  Every festival must have it’s dud (it’s a rule, it seems), and they were that dud.

Saturday’s headliners were the Monsters of British Rock, originally billed as The Moody Murray Whitesnake until the intervention of David Coverdale’s lawyers forced a change of name.  As well as Micky Moody and Neil Murray from the original British incarnation of Whitesnake the band also included Laurie Wisefield of Wishbone Ash fame as the second guitarist, and Harry James of Thunder and Magnum fame on drums. While they weren’t perfect, they could have done with a better singer, and a bit more keys in the mix, I still enjoyed their set a lot.  Part of that was down to the company I was with (what’s better than listening to whole load of Whitesnake songs in the company of three extremely beautiful women?), and part of it was because the pre-hair metal Whitesnake songbook is absolutely full of classic tunes.  My one quibble is that it’s “Hobo”, not “Drifter”. Band and audience sang the wrong version!

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On to Sunday, the day I was looking forward to the most, with Mostly Autumn, Panic Room and Breathing Space on the bill.

Opener IO Earth divided opinions; some loved genre-bending mix of female-fronted prog, jazz, dance and Joe Satriani-style guitar pyrotechnics, while they left others scratching their heads. While their guitarist was very good indeed, they came over to me as something of work in progress, just too many differing styles to sit comfortably in one band.  We’ll have to see how they develop.

Next up, Panic Room, who played an absolute blinder of a set. As readers of this blog will know, I’ve seen them a lot of times over the past couple of years, and that was at least as good a performance I’ve ever seen them do.  Apart from the surprise cover of ELP’s “Bitches Crystal” the whole set came from the most recent album “Satellite”, ending with a soaring rendition of the title track.  Just a pity they were on so early that many people missed them; on the strength of that set, if they come back they’ll be much higher up the bill.

I’d seen Kyrbgrinder last year on the smaller Radio Caroline stage, this year they returned on the main stage. Certainly the most in-your-face metal band of the whole festival. Like last year, frontman drummer Joannes James is still very much the visual focus of the band, but this we also had some amazing guitar shredding from their new guitarist Tom Caris.

In April in Gloucester I witnessed the rebirth of Mostly Autumn with Breathing Space’s former singer Olivia Sparnenn taking over lead vocals.  At Cambridge we witnessed a similar  rebirth as the new-look Breathing Space took the stage with new members Heidi Widdop on lead vocals and Adam Dawson on guitar. It’s never easy for a new singer to sing often quite personal material written by the previous singer, but Heidi took songs like “Searching For My Shadow” and made them hers. She has a rawer, bluesier vocal style compared with Livvy, which completely transforms the sound of the band.  You’d never have known that she’s suffered from throat problems that forced the cancellation of a warm-up gig a couple of days earlier. Adam Dawson also impressed, completely nailing the solos.  This is a band who have landed on their feet after some enforced changes, and the two news songs premiered promise some exciting times ahead.

Aireya 51 were by far the weakest band on Sunday’s bill; we’d seen a lot of people doing the singer-guitarist thing over the weekend and doing it far better. That was up to the point where Don Airey joined them on stage on Hammond organ and showed us the difference between an anonymous session muso and a Rock Star.  That last 20 minutes was great, and more than made up for the rest of the set.

Praying Mantis were another of the revelations of the festival. I’d seen them at one of the early 80s Reading Festivals, and they’d seemed one of the also-rans of the NWOBHM scene.  Fast-forward 30 years and what we have now is an absolutely superb melodic rock band, awesomely tight, great vocals and some wonderful twin-guitar harmonies.

Hazel O’Connor and the Subterraneans seemed a bit out of place on the bill; an 80s new-wave pop act in a sea of classic rock and prog. But the enthusiasm of her performance soon won over the crowd, aided by a tight band featuring some superb sax playing from Claire Hurst.  After a weekend of axe heroes seeing a band where the lead instrument isn’t a guitar made a welcome change. Apart from the big hit “Eighth Day” and a cover of The Stranglers’ “Hanging Around” I didn’t know any of the songs, but it didn’t matter. And I wasn’t the only person to note the Irish-themed song played as an encore bore more than a passing resemblance to Mostly Autumn’s “Out of the Inn”.

Prog veterans The Enid took the special guest spot. I know a few people I spoke to afterwards just didn’t get what they do, but down the front it was a different matter and their unique brand of largely-instrumental symphonic rock had the audience absolutely mesmerised, the festival crowd stunned into silence. While I didn’t recognise everything they played, the set included faves like “In the Region of the Summer Stars”, a big chunk of the new album, finished with a spellbinding “Dark Hydraulic”.

After that, only my favourite band could possibly end things, and they didn’t disappoint. Their 80-minute set might not quite have been up to the standard of their very best performances on the spring tour, but given the constraints of a festival it was still a very good performance, far, far better than the gremlin-plagued set from last year’s festival. No surprises in the setlist, but given the fact they band have been busy in studio writing and recording the new album we didn’t really expect any.  Highlights were a great version of “The Last Bright Light”, one that hasn’t always worked for me live, the former Breathing Space song “Questioning Eyes”, and a very powerful “Heroes Never Die”.

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While this year’s festival may have lacked any of the sort of bigger name headliners who’s played in previous years, it nevertheless gave us four days of excellent music, some spellbinding performances, some great company, and last but not least, some great beer. (If you find a pub selling Leo Zodiac, buy a pint or two, it’s excellent!).  The whole thing had such a wonderful vibe that I was still on a high more than a week later.  Great credit to the organisers, and to the stage and PA crews who made the whole thing run as smoothly as it didn’t last year. Overall I found I enjoyed it far more than the far bigger High Voltage festival in London too weeks earlier.

Been complaints that I haven’t updated this blog for ages – for various reasons, the most significant being an impending house move due to a forced relocation because of work.

Anyway, inspired by a Guardian Blog Post about a piece of software designed to name bands (Which has apparently come up with such gems as “One Second Darkens the Dream”, “Silence Fears the Morning” and “Farewell Says December” (I’m not making these up!), here’s my much simpler method for naming third-rate indie bands.

• Take a book at random from your bookshelf
• Open a page at random
• Read down the page until you find the first plural noun
• Put “The” in front of it.

What could be simpler?

The first time I tried it (sample book was Vol 3 of the H.P.Lovecraft Omnibus), the name was “The Grants”, which is already taken.

So picking up another book at random (Ken MacLeod’s “The Night Sessions”), we get

• The Traces
• The Forensics
• The Ambulances (Crispy ones, by any chance?)
• The Leaflets

Any advance on those?  I guess you get different indie sub-genres depending on the genre of the book.

Posted on the Karnataka forum this morning

Dear Karnataka fans and friends…..

Karnataka is set to begin a new chapter following the announcement that Lisa, Ian Harris and Gonzalo will be leaving the band.

We look forward to bringing you further news and line up announcements in the near future.

We also look forward to seeing you on the road!

Thank you for your wonderful support!

We wish Lisa, Gonzalo and Ian Harris all the best.

As one door closes another opens…

This came as a complete shock. They’d just released a stunning album, were getting better and better as a live act, and one got the impression they were well on the road to bigger and better things.

As the statement says, it’s not the end. Ian Jones and guitarist Enrico Pinna plan to regroup and promise to be back with a new singer, drummer and keyboard player.

As announced on his website, Ronnie Dio passed away this morning.

There were premature rumours about his death circulating yesterday, but it’s now confirmed he died early this morning, after a long battle with cancer.

The little man with the big voice, he was perhaps one of the greatest hard rock/metal singers of all time, fronting Rainbow, putting his own mark on Black Sabbath, and followed this with a lengthy and successful solo career. Few people have managed to produce all time classic albums with three completely different bands, but with “Rainbow Rising”, “Heaven and Hell” and “Holy Diver”, Dio is one of those few. He was a true legend, one of my biggest heroes in my formative years.

It’s worth noting that 90% of the Facebook updates in my timeline tonight are about Dio. That says something about how much he was loved.

Anyone who’s not being going to Mostly Autumn gigs since Heather Findlay left the band in April really doesn’t know what they’re missing. Admittedly a lot of people had reason to be sceptical; few bands manage to survive the loss of a singer, and those that manage the transition the best are those that use it as an opportunity to re-invent themselves.

At Olivia Sparnenn’s first gig as lead singer, in Gloucester, just over a week since Heather’s tearful farewell gig, we saw the new-look Mostly Autumn hit the ground running. Manchester a couple of weeks later saw a great (if very loud) gig. And Saturday’s performance at Bury Met was better still. Livvy has grown in confidence as the tour has progressed.

Although nothing from the forthcoming album “Go Well-Diamond Heart” has been premièred live yet, we’ve still seen a major shakeup of the setlist. Gone are most of Heather’s deeply personal songs such as “Shrinking Violet” and “Unoriginal Sin”. We’ve seen the welcome return of some oldies such as “Out of the Green Sky”, which I’d always thought would suit Livvy’s voice, and a great new arrangement of “Dreaming”. They’ve also brought in a couple of Livvy’s own songs originally recorded with Breathing Space, including a version of “Questioning Eyes”, which fits the MA set far better that I expected, as well as “Slow Down” from Bryan’s solo album. It’s also great to see the return of Liam Davidson’s effects-drenched solo spot, particularly good at Bury; it makes you realise how great a guitarist he can be.

The end result is a rawer, rockier sound that sounds like the beginning of a completely new band. It’s now making me really look forward to the album, to see what the new-look band is capable of doing in the studio.

It’s been one of those bank holiday weekends – four gigs in four days, which I think is the greatest amount of music in the shortest time I’ve ever done outside of a festival!

Thursday was The Reasoning ably supported by Morpheus Rising at Bury Met. Morpheus Rising are a five piece band shamelessly citing the 1980s NWOBHM as a principle influence, now reclassified as hard rock following boundary changes. Entertaining high energy stuff, and I’m sure I’ve seen their bass player before somewhere – he looked naggingly familiar!

I’d seen The Reasoning a week earlier in London, where a very poor sound mix really hadn’t done the music justice, and the performance suffered badly as a result. Tonight was far, far better. Bury Met is always a great gig whoever is playing, and The Reasoning I know and love were back with a vengeance, now expanded to a seven-piece with new members Jake Bradford-Sharp on drums, ex-Fish keyboard player Tony Turrell and vocalist Maria Owen. The new album “Adverse Camber” features heavily, which takes a slight step back from prog-metal in favour of some elements of the atmospheric melodic music that Rachel did with Karnataka. Not that the twin guitar attack of Dylan Thompson and Owain Roberts doesn’t still rock hard plenty of times, but the overall effect is to make their live set a lot more varied and multi-dimensional, which cannot be anything other than a good thing.

On Friday I travelled down to Cardiff to see Hawkwind supported by Panic Room at St David’s Hall. I’ve seen Panic Room many times before at their own shows, here they made the most of their five-song 30 minute slot, naturally including a great version of “Apocalypstick”. Blessed with a good sound mix for a support, they seemed to go down well with Hawkwind’s audience, and told me they sold a lot of albums after the gig.

Hawkwind themselves I hadn’t seen since 1980, and had lost track of what they’ve been doing since the mid-80s, so I really didn’t know what to expect. They turned out to be amazingly good – they played a great mix of 70s classics like “Lord of Light”, “Magnu” and “Lighthouse” with more recent material. And there plenty of Theramin courtesy of Tim Blake. Nowadays they seem to be the missing link between metal, prog and rave/techno culture – Their music ranges from heavier songs atmospheric floydian bits, and several moments where they all started playing laptops and looked and sounded like Orbital. On quite a few songs they had two bass players, with guitarist Niall Hone playing ‘lead bass’ and Mr Dibs playing ‘rhythm bass’, strumming chords like Lemmy used to do, producing a sound with an awful lot of bottom-end. And hats off to drummer Richard Chadwick for getting Simon King’s very distinctive drumming style off to a tee. Amazingly Dave Brock looks no different from how he looked 30 years ago. The first encore of Hasan-I-Sabah with a lengthy techno middle section was amazing, and I really wasn’t expecting them to finish with Silver Machine.

Saturday was Veteran Welsh proggers Man at The Garage in Swansea. There were two supports ,the first being a bluesy-rock trio who all looked about 15, some meaty riffs and good songwriting let down by poor vocals, but their youth must show long term promise. Next up was a truly dire landfill indie band. There might have been a few flourishes from the guitarist, clearly a frustrated rocker, but the tuneless songs did nothing for me at all, not helped by the fact they were louder than Hawkwind.

Man themselves were great, even if, like so many veteran bands, they only had a couple of original members left, Martin Ace on vocals and bass, and Phil Ryan on keys. Without knowing any of their songs, I found the most enjoyable moments were when when they went off into extended jams, with the rhythm section saying down a solid groove with Hammond organ soloing over the top. Proof that grey-haired wrinkly rockers can still do it.

As for Sunday, I’ve always meant to step out of my comfort zone of prog, metal and classic rock and investigate genres like jazz and folk, so spending a weekend in Swansea at the same time as The Mumbles Jazz festival seemed like a opportunity not to be missed. From the programme, the most attractive sounding one seemed to be Sunday night’s double bill, even though I’d never heard of either act. First on was the Mark Nightingale All Star British Jazz Quintet. With trombone, sax, electric piano, bass and drums, it was pretty muso stuff, with 13/8 time signatures (7/8 and 9/8 favoured by prog is for wimps!) and many, many bass solos. Still very entertaining even if they occasionally strayed into easy listening territory.

The second act, Protect The Beat, were billed as “seriously funky jazz/groove from five top UK session musicians”. Their session credit CV read like a who’s who of rock and pop with artists like Massive Attack, Sting, Chaka Khan and, er, take that. Led by sax player Derek Nash they were both awesomely tight and completely on fire, and clearly enjoying every minute of their two hours on stage. One of those nights when you realise that recorded music on CD is just a pale imitation of live music; there really is nothing like being in the same room as a bunch of great musicians giving it all they’ve got. Not that anyone reading this needs to be reminded.

In The Costs of a Terrible Mistake, Doug Richard expresses all the same concerns as in my previous post. Only rather better-articulated. And he doesn’t mince his words in the conclusion.

There was no need to rush this legislation through except that someone, somewhere wanted to get passed under the wire. Someone wanted a bad law in place, and in the wrapping up of parliament it happened.

That is devastating.

And people think I’m overreacting when I call for a boycott of the “Big four” record companies (Sony, EMI, Warners and Universal). While I’m sure there are other vested interests in play, especially the cynically calculated evil of Rupert Murdoch, there does seem to be smoking gun incriminating the major labels, who may have given us some great music in the past, but are now dinosaurs willing to trash the future in order to postpone the extinction they so richly deserve.

There are many lifetimes’ worth of great music released by smaller labels and independent artists – we don’t need the majors any more, and a boycott is far less than they deserve. Not as dismissal of ‘mainstream’ music as an act of musical snobbery, but a refusal to give any of my money to businesses who act in such a disgraceful way.

So the government has railroaded through the deeply-flawed Digital Economy Bill in the dying days of a Parliament with completely inadequate discussion or consultation. It’s being sold as an urgently-needed measure to tackle widespread internet piracy, but I see it as a massive power-grab by old-media giants who want to destroy those parts of the Internet they don’t like.

Nobody apart from the major media cartels and a bunch of corrupt and/or technically-illiterate politicans are actually in favour of this thing as it stands. Even the strongly anti-filesharing Featured Artists Coalition opposes the bill.

I have always maintained that the major labels overstate the losses caused by file-sharing for largely self-serving reasons, and their real agenda has always been about maintaining market share. There are still people who claim that every illicit download represents a lost sale, which is so transparently ridiculous that they deserve to be slapped repeatedly with the proverbial Very Large Haddock until they see sense. They ignore the multiple studies concluding that file-sharers actually spend more money on music and other media than average, and frequently use file-sharing to guide their legitimate purchases.

Even if you believe illicit filesharing is a terrible thing, the whole collective punishment aspect sticks in the throat. This bill targets households, not individuals. I know I’m going to risk Godwin’s law saying this, but from occupied France in World War Two downwards, collective punishment has always been the last resort of the authoritarian thug with no moral authority. So we will see parents losing internet access due to the actitivies of their teenage children, or similar things in shared houses. That lodger you kicked out last month because he didn’t pay the rent? Turns out he’s cost you your internet as well. And that’s before we get into how cafes and libraries providing free wi-fi are now going to be expected to police their customer’s activity. No, small businesses are certainly not exempt, and many people are predicting a sharp decline in free wi-fi facilities.

Then there’s the whole ‘guilty unless proved innocent’ thing. How are they going to determine what’s a legal and what’s an illegal download? What guarantees are there that whatever data-mining or traffic analysis they propose to use isn’t going to generate significant numbers of false positives? What happens if you listen to an Internet radio station or download free songs from a band’s own website, and those sites don’t appear in some major-label approved whitelist? I’ve asked the bill’s apologists about this, and all I get is bland assurances that “it’s only going to be used against a hard core of persistant file sharers”. But there is nothing in the bill that states this.

The bits in the bill about site blocking are just as bad – again the wording is so vague that it can end up being used against virtually anything that the big media companies don’t like – much like Britains hopelessly broken libel laws.

But perhaps the most toxic thing about the entire bill is the way it undermines public support for the notion that creative artists deserve to be paid for their efforts. From the sleazy way it emerged from a meeting between the unelected twice-sacked-for-corruption Peter Mandelson and label boss David Geffen while being wined and dined on Philip Rothschild’s yacht in the Med, to the cynical way the government rammed it through Parliament without proper discussion, the whole thing has the effect of making file-sharing look like a righteous act of civil disobedience. And that will persist even if the DEB fails.

There’s still an outside chance that the House of Lords will see sense and kick the bill out, but I wouldn’t bet on it. In the meantime, if your MP voted in favour of this travesty, be sure not to vote for them in the election.

Photo © Howard Rankin

When Heather Findlay announced that she was leaving Mostly Autumn after thirteen years to embark on a solo career, the band announced there would be one final chance to give her a send-off. The show at Leamington Spa was originally intended to be the launch gig for the new album, but with the need to regroup delaying the album it was the ideal location for a farewell gig.  It’s a superb venue, a central location accessible from all over the country, with a big stage, decent capacity, and far, far nicer than the grungy old Astoria in London.

While one or two people feared the gig might turn into a wake, it wasn’t like that at all.  What we got was a powerful, impassioned performance easily up to the standard of any of the electrifying shows of 2009.  If it was a punctuation mark in Mostly Autumn’s history, this was nothing short of an exclamation mark. Heather sang her heart out for something two and a half hours, pouring her heart and soul into the performance.  Everyone else was on top of their game, of course, but tonight was really Heather’s night.

There were no real surprises in the setlist, which was pretty much the same as the greatest hits set they’d been playing towards the end of last year, combining old favourites such as “Passengers”, “Shrinking Violet” and “Mother Nature” with some of Heather’s most recent songs like “Above the Blue” and “Unoriginal Sin”.  A very bittersweet experience, since we all knew we were probably hearing her sing many of those songs for the last time.

After the final encore of Heather’s signature tune “Evergreen” and the final bow, Heather gave heartfelt hugs to the other seven members of the band, several of whom were visibly in tears by that point.  As were a good proportion of the audience.

The end of an era, indeed.  The next chapter begins in just a week’s time with former backing singer Olivia Sparnenn taking over at the front of the stage.