‘The only complaint was that I didn’t play any songs by Cliff Richard’
Singer-songwriter Anthony Toner (55), originally from Coleraine, is in lockdown with his wife Andrea, a theatre director, in east Belfast. His daughter Sian lives nearby on Belmont Road and is mum to seven-month-old Jude. He recently put on an outdoor concert at Sydenham Court. He says:
My father is in a care home up in Coleraine and they’ve had a couple of cases of coronavirus — none fatal but we’re into fingers-crossed territory.
Like anybody else in the creative sector, I’ve found the diary completely emptied out. I’m a singer-songwriter and for the last 10-12 years I’ve been releasing CDS, touring and doing live gigs and that has completely ground to a halt.
Eastside Arts have a tradition of working in care homes — for example, Eastside Arts festival would put on afternoon gigs in care homes and I’ve done a couple of those.
I think one of the care homes had got in touch with Eastside Arts (after lockdown) to say the residents were really quite depressed because they are kind of housebound and asked if they knew anybody that could do anything.
Eastside Arts mentioned it to me and it was literally just round the corner from me here at Sydenham Court.
Luckily I have a little amplifier that is almost like a PA system and it fits into a space that’s 4ft square. We worked out what to do in the car park at the back — I would be set up outside the kitchen window and could put an electricity supply in there.
The residents all walked past me at a distance of 15ft, and staff had set up 18 or 19 seats 20ft away from me.
I sat outside in the sunshine and played for about an hour and it was lovely.
I’m 54 and these people are maybe only 20 years older than me, so I was able to play a lot of old stuff — Elvis, country music like Jim Reeves and Glen Campbell.
There were a few waving their arms and a couple of them got up and had a dance.
The only complaint was from a lady who said I didn’t do Cliff Richard, so if I ever come back I’ll learn some Cliff Richard songs.
Who knows, when we get into summer proper, they might do a series of these. One of the things I was slightly conscious of was that it was an outdoor gig and if there were members of the public going past, there was a danger of people congregating to watch.
But we were okay — we were right at the back of the care home and it wasn’t a very busy street so we were all okay. They seemed to really enjoy it.
The manager said to me they were very excited about it — it’s all they’d talked about since they knew this was going to happen.
We take it for granted that people like you and me can nip round the corner, go into a local shop and buy an ice cream. But it’s not that easy for people in a situation like that, especially if they’ve had a regular series of activities, and that suddenly stops.”