LOROS Grand Charity Concert

Steve Tilston, Martha Tilston, Molly Boyle & Maggie Boyle

Saturday, 6th October, Phoenix Arts, Leicester

A special musical fundraiser in support of LOROS, the Leicestershire and Rutland Hospice.

In memory of Tom "Gramps" Tilston, there was a unique evening of contemporary & traditional music by Steve, Martha & Maggie along with Steve and Maggie's daughter Molly.  All three performers have accrued enviable plaudits for their solo work, both here and abroad, and this was the first ever (and possibly the only) opportunity to catch them performing together on the same bill.

The event was hosted by the gracious and dashing Mr. Neil Dalton, and was a celebratory, veritable feast of song, raising £2680 for Loros. Here follows an enlightening glimpse backstage into the glamourous world of the folk performer observed by the aforesaid Mr Dalton.

When I arrived, I pulled into the car park at the back of the Arts Centre and went inside to see about parking. They said they would make space for me at the front of the venue and to slip back onto the one way system and come around again. By the time I had returned there was a dark green saloon car in the way with the occupants talking to the Centre Manager and being ushered onto the front area. There were some metal security obstructions, some other cars and a couple of kerbs to negotiate and it wasn’t the easiest of manoeuvres to have to make and I said to Jane, who was with me in the car, “I think I’ll hang back a moment, I’m not sure that driver is in full control.” Anyway, who should get out of the green car but Maggie, Molly and Bill – I think Maggie was driving, ‘not in full control’ would I dare suggest such a thing? Bill and Molly immediately went off in search of a whistle, as if that was what you always did when you arrived in Leicester from Yorkshire, while Maggie came inside, said hello to all the staff, checked out the backstage arrangements and then had a cup of tea. Jane and I were already ahead of her there.

Steve had arrived a little earlier and had gone off with Martha and Robin to a Chinese for some food. They arrived back and said their hellos and then Steve nervily ushered Maggie, Martha, Mollie (to be known henceforth as Emenemanem) down stairs to work out where they would all be standing for the performance. I joined the sound check a bit later and while it was going smoothly enough, there were moments of tension. This was, of course, nothing compared to the back stage discussion over the content of the concert. I think it was Steve who first ventured the tentative suggestion, “Well, do we all know what we are doing?” This was not, as it turned out, a general philosophical observation on the nature of life and the universe, but an opening gambit to narrow down the possible musical programme for the evening. Everyone rushed around for a moment making noises, which wasn’t easy in a room designed to accommodate three people and which, at that moment, was housing six of us plus an ironing board. Robin had been trying to get the iron hot so that Martha could iron her dress for the evening but the iron, a bit like the Tilston family, was clearly on its own time frame. Martha , who at that moment was wearing the dress in question - a very fashionable dress with large prints of some forties movie star like Rita Heyworth on it, said, “Do you think I need to iron my dress?” She gave a quick twirl and Steve ventured the ambitious comment, “Well, the front anyway!” Martha issued instructions for us all not to look and whipped off the dress and proceeded to iron it. I wasn’t sure if we weren’t supposed to look because Martha had changed her clothes in a flash – if that’s the right phrase - or whether we weren’t supposed to witness her in the dangerous act of ironing. Perhaps it was a secret she’d kept from the family for years – “What, you can do your own ironing, why didn’t you say before?” Maggie was somehow silently and instinctively promoted to the status of scribe and chairperson and then the process of selecting who did what and when took place. Song titles were thrown in the air, some were caught others just lay where they fell. “So I’m doing three there and then ...”, “You’ll come on after ....”, “We’ll all do ......”, “You’ve got to do that one”. From the good natured melee, emerged a hand written piece of paper with a few biro scribbles on it that became ‘the plan’. At one point, Maggie foolishly attempted to leave the room before ‘the plan’ had been completely agreed only to be prevented by the other girls. “You can’t leave yet – you’ve got the paper and the biro, we don’t know what we are doing!” And then it all seemed to be agreed. It had all seemed a little like herding sheep but it was never quite clear who was doing the herding and who the sheeping, but, to be fair, no one at any stage did any bleating.

Chris arrived back stage to say hello and to check that everyone was ok. His greeting with Steve was typically brother to brother. I’m not sure either said anything like hello but Steve suddenly said, “Is Mum here?” It appeared to be a straightforward and innocent enough question but, for those skilled in brother to brother politics, it was fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. Chris said something like ‘Not yet,” in what I thought was a successful, if tentative, verbal side-step. “We can’t start without mother!” said Steve, although, clearly, in the whole business of brothers, it was Steve and Chris’s Mum and Dad who had started it all years ago! Chris disappeared momentarily but returned, not with his Mum under his arm, but clutching a box containing several bottles of red wine. It seemed like a successful delaying tactic until Betty herself entered the theatre, which, of course, she did, in plenty of time.

With about thirty seconds to go, Steve enquired cheerfully what I was going to say when I started the concert. I replied, “If you’ll hang on a minute you’ll hear, because I’m just about to go on stage,” whereupon, he muttered some mild expletive and disappeared in the direction of the toilets. When I introduced Steve to the audience after my opening chat, he came on stage and immediately and effortlessly slipped into a tune he calls The Tetsi-Fly Shuffle. It’s a nice, comfortable sounding, noodling, folk guitar riff of a tune accompanied by a descending bass line; shades of Davy Graham’s tune Anji, coupled with a little parlour jazz. He then allowed the whole thing to slip smoothly into a version of the standard Blue Skies. He followed this by Here Comes The Night. His opening set of about three songs brought about one of those small, magical moments you are occasionally allowed in life. While Steve played and sang his songs alone on stage for the audience, Maggie, Martha and Molly, standing hidden in the wings, sang along quietly, different voices adding a harmony line here and there, three figures in the dark, three heads at different heights, lots of dark hair, three voices sprinkling a little gold dust on the air and no one else in the audience to hear them. Frankly, it was worth coming for that moment alone.

There were many notable moments throughout the evening; Steve introducing Maggie when it was Martha’s turn to go on, Martha’s easy, sexy, confidently voiced seduction of the audience every time she sang, her battles and momentary defeat with and by an oncoming cold and cough, Molly’s half glamorous, half waifish on stage moments, the time when Martha and Molly looked mischievously at one another in the wings and urged the other to slip on stage to help Steve and Maggie finish the first half, a wonderfully eerie and strangely unsettling version of Lady Margaret from Maggie (I do like that song), Robin’s understated and judicious percussion and oboe playing, always supportive, always unobtrusive. During the interval, while Maggie, Martha and Molly went outside to weigh up the delights of tobacco, of which only Molly ironically enough seemed to have a decent enough stash, I was chatting with Steve in the dressing room. At one moment, through the window at the back of the theatre, came three female voices in harmony, the three Ems trying out a song they might do later, music snatched on the wind. Like the moments in the wings, it was a little piece of unlooked for joy. I said to Steve, “Surely, it’s a little early for carol singers?” Although, maybe, with £2600 in their Christmas stockings, Loros wouldn’t think so.

photos: Jane Dalton