Mr Solo – the premiere show

Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 07/07/2006

The Re-birth. He came dressed in black, like a phoenix out of fire flames. A gothic Elvis swooped onto stage with a flourished swirl of his high-collared black cloak, and thus the reincarnation began. Mr Solo is now with us. Sense the presence.

Mikey Georgeson was always a star. At once a magician, artist actor, dancer, singer and channel for a string of eloquently worded and intelligently observed songs, there is no doubt that he is a polymath. When performing under his alter-ego as The Vessel of David Devant and his Spirit Wife we were impressed and charmed, finding ourselves singing along with the cheeky chorus in a manner most un-natural for the standard style-conscious/self-conscious British audience. We’d gasp with the delight of a small child at the circus at the props and the way that artefacts and signs would appear and disappear, punctuating each number with such spellbinding precision that the attention was well and truly grabbed. (It has been rumoured that once even the chattering classes at the bar were seen to raise an eyebrow, put their drinks down, shut up and wander over for a closer butcher’s.)   With such a passionate underground following it seems strange that Mikey G didn’t “go Solo” sooner. His first song here perhaps explains it, and admitting that it should have been earlier it seems it all boiled down to the fact that he was a bit scared. We love him all the more for his candid confession; he is a luminary, yet human at the same time. Everything we want a star to be, yet within our reach in terms of human relation. Every home should have one. You could keep him in the sideboard for rainy Sunday afternoons.

The cloak comes off and Mr Solo paces the stage. He is into his stride now and the flash guns are showering him with light, trying to catch diamonds in the cornucopia of vogues. Gone are the vintage-styled stage-accessories, and now we have arty digital projections. There are stills and footage of Mr Solo with guitar in an incongruous concrete location looking slightly uncomfortable and as lost as The Man Who Fell to Earth. The new medium allows for further creative fl