Saatchi Gallery, Pomegranates Restaurant and Newsnight Review

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PARSLEY'S COMMLOCK

Art Review : The Revolution Continues, Saatchi Gallery
Over 10 years ago, my band The Adventures of Parsley, were invited to play at a wedding reception at an army barracks near Sloane Square. My most enduring memory of the day was the elder family members holding their ears in pain as we began our performance, and my distress at the thought that we were ruining the wedding couples’ special day. We really weren’t that loud and I couldn’t believe how the family members were expressing their contempt for our efforts.

My drummer Ravi, a.k.a. Pashana Bedhi, remembers running down the street after me at some point, which I suspect was just me trying to conceal my distress. All ended happily with an appreciated second set, after which the couple took great trouble to re-assure me that they’d really enjoyed our performance.

Stroll on to this week and I found myself occupying the same space, now transformed into the very swish, and somehow free, Saatchi Gallery. Having watched Newsnight Extra take this exhibition frighteningly seriously, I urge you to just come along and have a relaxed look, because as long as you don’t get dragged into the serious intents of artists and their critics it’s quite fun.

Down in the basement there is a selection of lifelike full size dummies of elderly world leaders playing automated bumper cars with their electric wheelchairs. No one stops you from playing with them or getting some photos. Upstairs you can stand under dummies of naked bodies hanging from the ceiling. I laid on the floor imitating a dummy opposite me that was licking it. Elsewhere a dummy winged angel had apparently ‘crashed’.

But modern Chinese art isn’t all about dummies. There are also enormous painted front pages of New York newspapers, and some comical paintings of major historic photographs as if Chairman Mao had been there. A particularly cool one is Mao sitting at the same desk with McCarthy as he conducts his ‘witch hunt’ into communism in America. There’s a giant naked woman, a big blob of metal, and pictures of big scary soulless faces, as well as some psychedelic ones.

All in all, a fun day out, and don’t forget to have a gander at the rather rich, well dressed types that hang around places like this. My visit was only slightly spoiled by the media people, obviously setting up for some filming, possibly for Newsnight Extra, and behaving like the world revolves around them. It may do, but it still put me off enjoying the show. Couldn’t honestly say the show provoked any thoughtfulness about China in me, but there was some cool stuff to look at.

Restaurant Review : Pomegranates, 94 Grosvenor Road, Pimlico
Visited this restaurant using the Times ‘lunch for a tenner’ special offer. The décor was loaded with character, as was the welcoming committee and proprietor Patrick Gwynn-Jones MBE. Apparently his mate Peter Sellers was a committed regular visitor. I enjoyed some extremely pleasant Cumberland sausages and Parsley mash, followed by a very generous helping of delicious mango sorbet. Shame I couldn’t afford to come more regularly, but it was certainly fun to visit a restaurant of character, at a time when eating out is at best a gamble. Hope this place can ride out the downturn amongst its richer clientele.

TV Review : Newsnight Extra, Friday 10/10/08
I’m not a regular watcher of this, but I was tempted in by its review of the Saatchi Gallery referred to above. In their comments about it the panel, which included Paul Morley and Germaine Greer, seemed to be frighteningly up their own backsides, as much as the artists apparently were in their discussion of their own work. Mercifully I didn’t get the show guide where they apparently discussed all their thoughts in excruciating detail.

I remember a programme that deconstructed the lyrics of early Madonna songs, but they were positively Nobel-Prize-For-Literature-winning compared to the bizarre elliptical meaningless ramblings that seem to be on offer when artists try to describe their own work.

Also covered in their reviewing was what sounds like a rather good re-working of a Pinter play, and the new Oasis album. Germaine Greer was quite nicely ticklish in her comments. I’m still holding a grudge against Paul Morley for his ridiculing of my letter in defence of The Psychedelic Furs 2nd album ‘Dumb Waiters’, after a fairly bizarre review of it in the early eighties. Anyway here he managed not to annoy me.

From the little I heard (and saw in video) of the new Oasis album it sounds like a veritable Beatles-pastiche tour de force, and it should surely see them ‘up there’ with Paul Weller, in terms of extending a career by sounding like other people. In fact they may just have become a Dukes Of Stratosphear for the 21st Century.

parsley@gardenrecords.com [www.gardenrecords.com]