DAVE SEALEY - Review

I have to confess to never having heard or seen Dave Sealey before, and to his many fans this probably disqualifies me from making any useful comment.

I'd been told to expect old time variety: entertainment with a touch of vaudeville, plush red velvet with a saucy brocade, something that reached back even before the likes of Tommies Trinder or Handley. I'd heard something of the history; the sad loss of a much loved brother and partner – now single cream, not double – and I really didn't know if I was going to see The Great Cosmo or The Incredible Theka.

Of course I'd been wilfully confused from the start. John Worker, a long time fan who helps run The Brew Town Folk Club, had told me that Cosmotheka was a magical act. I had been told to expect a set full of music hall songs and there I wasn't disappointed. But I hadn't been prepared for a man with such a fine tenor voice singing his heart out.

The songs may all have been sung many times before – to many more people – but Dave sang them as if they had just been written, as if to an audience that was hearing them for the first time and, in my case of course, that was true. He sang with a passion and a love for every word and phrase. He sang of a world where antimacassars were still being laundered against attack from Brylcreemed heads, where garden design meant keeping an aspidistra dusted and polished in the parlour, where there was still just a whiff of wild woodbines in the air and where, if you closed your eyes, you could still hear the hiss from the gaslights.

You know, if “folk” music is about an oral tradition, songs of working life and the songs of ordinary people, then Dave must have realised long ago that his songs are probably the greatest missing link in this process. If we value the call and response of the work songs or revere the pagan cycle of agricultural ballads, then Dave has long seen that his songs, the songs of the music hall, are just as important and, in their own way, just as valuable: they are joyful songs, rich in social comment but mercifully free from politics; they are the music and the entertainment of ordinary people from a generation now gone.

There were times when Dave may have missed having a partner with him to share the stage, a few occasions when he would have liked someone else to share the task; a slight slip over a lyric of quite mind-bending complexity or the telling of a joke a little rushed, as if silence was a luxury he could no longer afford when it was just him and the audience. He need not worry, for what may have passed for a long silence for Dave on stage was no more than a pause for breath for the rest of us mere mortals in the audience. I think John Worker had it about right – no smoke, no mirrors, no rabbit, not even a top hat but, nevertheless, a magical act!

Neil Dalton

Real Music Club, Willington, Derbyshire

9th June 2005