The Gritterman: Live from Islington Union Chapel
It had been snowing for two days in England.
Even the capital had seen it settle. It was a reminder that there was still magic in this world, gentle in nature but wild in its distribution. It spread itself generously around the four corners of the country. Thick, cold, white. Picture-book perfect and pretty. Untrodden, untouched, unrivalled.
The morning it arrived, it found many places to rest. Back gardens, the top of bus shelters and previously spiritless and unvarnished roads. It found comfort in cherry trees, swept itself over winter leaves and probably covered car keys.
It fell softly in the night and by morning had left us a wonderland. Unannounced in its arrival and graciously received by those of us who had nowhere to be that day. Christmas felt like Christmas and we all prayed that it would stay for a fortnight and make it a white one.
There were unmoving motorways. Slip roads were slippier than usual. Commuters needed someone to clear the snow so they and a thousand others could get on with their day. They needed a Gritterman.
I had found refuge in a Christmas tale, a new favourite - Orlando Weeks’ “The Gritterman”; a detailed account of a widower’s routine the night before Christmas as he prepares to go out into the night and grit the roads for one last time, having just discovered he’s been laid off by the council. Poignant, heart-breaking, beautiful and to be performed in one stand alone concert at the Union Chapel in the heart of Islington, with narration from Paul Whitehouse bedded deeply into Orlando’s accompanying soundtrack.
Evening drew in and the frost and chill of the day gave way to the black and blue of night. The last of the snowfall turning to ice. Inside the Chapel, a twelve-foot Christmas tree stood twinkling side of stage and fairy lights snaked their way across walls and draped themselves over wooden balconies. Here I was, in the belly of the beast, and yet the familiar stench of warm sweat and beer didn’t hang in the air like some stale, pubescent fragrant. In its place, a dignified hush and a hundred murmurs all at once as people took their seats, reminding me of all those church ceremonies I’d been dragged to when I was a kid. The polite reserve and the gothic architecture, except this time I wasn’t wishing to be somewhere else. My mind didn’t flick to the TV I could’ve been sat in front of at home as another Easter Sunday or Christingle service got underway.
The lights drop down low and nothing remains but the glow of decoration and the distant shuffle of late arrivals finding their seat. And then silence.
It’s broken by the wonky, jingling, Christmassy notes of ‘The Gritterman’s’ opening piano score which rings out and echoes around the four walls of the Union Chapel. It bounces off stained glass windows, building all the time as the four-piece choir of angels and the rest of the band join in and elevate the piece into a huge spell-binding wall of sound and festive good-will.
Before the performance, Orlando had emerged on stage to request that the audience save any clapping until the end. This was a request never in any danger of being broken such was the mesmeric nature of everything before our eyes and ears. At times he played the conductor, guiding his merry men and women through soaring piano numbers or hushing them in time for his humble ballads. Paul Whitehouse surveyed the proceedings from the lectern, delivering the story in his folksy, every-man tones.
The music and story-telling take turns in a sort of you go, I go routine. The stunned atmosphere in which these two leading men are afforded to perform their heart-wrenching tales suggests a room close to tears throughout. These are late-night accounts of a man about to give up his only real love since the passing of his wife, and the sentiment is at no point lost on anyone inside the chapel.
An hour that you’ve never felt more warm and safe in draws to a crescendo and we’re played out by the choir and the last few towering chords of the story which are looped and looped, dizzying and dream-like, swirling and swooping around us, pulling us in and spitting us out simultaneously. And then it’s all over. A shy ‘Thank You’ and we’re all on our feet in immediate unison, grinning and crying, knowing we’ve witnessed something irreplaceable.
The whole world is solid froze once again as the chapel spills out and the last chimes of a new-age Christmas tale rings in my ears and stays with me all the way home. Tube ride, frost-bitten toes walk and front door open…home. Merry and then out like a light.
