Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson
GET DOWN IN LOCKDOWN
Another lifetime ago, I went to moleskin magnate Johnnie Boden's 50th-birthday party in Dorset.
Just writing that intro fills me with achy nostalgia for a time when there was music and moonlight and love and romance. Now we must face the music and dance to another tune, and a slower beat, as the future is a foreign country, and we will do things differently there.
During dinner and speeches, we were told there was a surprise act later. Would it be Jools Holland? Squeeze? The Wurzels?
The dancing began and then there was a sudden surge of drunk super-sloanes, in jolly party wear, into a mini-marquee where a leggy brunette with china-white skin writhed in a fringed mini-dress onstage. ‘It's murder on the daaaance floooor,' she sang, in Cheltenham Ladies' College tones.
I dived in, mum-dancing like a madwoman, and there I stayed till the small hours. Sophie Ellis-bextor did a private set and it remains one of the musical highlights of my middle-middle age.
The reason I bring this up now is because, eight years later, Sophie Ellis-bextor is owning lockdown with her Friday-night kitchen discos. Looking not a day older, she puts on her glad rags (lurex romper, mini-dress) and livestreams from – guess where? – her kitchen, complete with bay window, planked floor and at least four adorable kids who join in, occasionally putting on masks and kidding about.
It is a measure of how low my expectations of fun are these days (I hyperventilated at the prospect of being able to go to the tip again) that EllisBextor's domestic gigs make me almost weep with joy and praise.
She also invites everyone to come to the ‘after-show party' at 7pm, where she sings an encore that ‘isn't disco'. She did Favourite Things by Julie Andrews in a voice of pure sweetness.
It is impossible not to feel cheered up by this. Music has had to go online, rather than outside. We've had musicians playing from their front rooms for the One World: Together at Home event, curated by Lady Gaga – headlined, if that's the right word, by Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Paul Mccartney and the Stones, who have also released their first single in eight years, ‘reflecting life in lockdown', called Living in a Ghost Town.
I can't say the concert designed to ‘promote the practice of social distancing' did it for me. Didn't light my fire.
I commend Sophie Ellis-bextor on Instagram and Twitter to Oldie readers; as if mainlining good vibrations straight into the old jugular, she is just the ticket these drear times.
She has joined Johnnie Boden as one of my favourite things. See you at her Friday-night disco!