Steppin' out on the steppes

I have a few itches that need scratching and one dates back to the eighties when I first started listening to The Waterboys, and fell in love with "Red Army Blues" (which Mike Scott got so sick of he once stormed off the stage after the crowd demanded it; how silly is that?).  I've always had THAT song in my head, lovely harmonious army boys singing their great Russian souls out - and what I wanted to know was, do the boys in the Red Army really, really, REALLY sing that song?

Last night I got my musical itch scratched. I went with my pals to the Auditorium in Milan to hear... YES!  The Red Army!  Them, the very ones, the boys themselves!  There they all were (well not all of them, just the ones that made it into the choir).  I'm sitting there in my red plush velvet seat looking down at thirty Russians in immaculate uniform, half of them land army and half of them with those gorgeous sailor tops and the hats with the ribbons on the back, and I'm thinking "they could sing baa baa black sheep for all I care, this is UNIFORM HEAVEN baby!". 

And then, quite without warning, without giving me a moment to prepare or get myself into the necessary awed emotional framework..

THEY DID THAT SONG!!!

Beautiful, perfect, immaculate.  Oh...  And I'm just sitting there with my respiratory and cardiac systems in complete suspension, swimming through a perfect sound soup.  This is it, this is the moment I've waited almost twenty years for.. the boys themselves, the Soviets, the Ruskies, doing THAT SONG!   This is what Joyce called an epiphany.  This is what I call fucking brilliant.

So was the rest of the concert a pleasant afterthought?  Was it hell!  It just got better and better.  Every single voice in that choir is a soloist, one after the other the boys (and men, a couple of these guys were probably old hands in the army when Brehznev was still on for a game of tennis..) came out and stunned with the most unexpected voices.  A big heavy old guy with the purest, most crystal tenor voice, a lad who looked 12 with a bass that made my seat (and more) tremble...  They have your heart breaking with unbridled homesickness for the steppes, for your babushka and her samovar, when you were born in a Victorian hospital in Edinburgh and haven't been near Russia in your life. 

And I haven't even got to the dancers yet...  This is the Red Army, anything less than perfection and you're farming parsnips in Siberia.  Did one single dancer at any single point put so much as a thumb wrong?  Are we joking?  We're talking Russia in movement: we're talking all the best and brightest images we have in our heads - is this art imitating life or do these guys really do this stuff?  We're talking birling swirling girls, we're talking ribbons and gold head dresses, we're talking striped skirts and flowery shawls, we're talking red boots (a personal fetish I won't go into) moving faster than several members of a certain royal family towards a bottle of gin. 

And men.. They really DO THAT STUFF!  We're talking legs over heads, backflips like they were picking their noses, big grown-up blokes being picked up and thrown about like they were newborns (I'm not suggesting you throw newborns about, they don't like it).  We're talking legs kicked out while the rest of the man's body appears to be sitting on nothing more than thin air..  We're talking thighs I last saw in a zoo on the back legs of a rhino.

These are men.  These guys can wear purple satin Cossack shirts that would have had Liberace weeping with desire, do things with tambourines and still look more macho than a bunch of Masai warriors on the huntdown in the Serengeti. 

And of course the audience wanted an encore - you don't know the meaning of interactive theatre till you've been in the middle of an Italian audience.  Forget ice poles with carrots up their arses, this is the land of football stadiums and Christians being thrown to the lions while people picnic on olives and wine at the Colesseum and exchange tips on how to set their toga drapery off to the best advantage.

So what did they do for an encore? Hey these are the ex-Soviets, these guys do their homework.  They did "Va Pensiero" from Verdi's Nabucco, only just the unofficial national anthem..  Did we really fight a cold war with these people?  How come suddenly they're all waving to us from the stage?  How come everyone's waving back? 

Ah well, this is the Red Army, they sang "Kalinka", they sang THAT song, they wore red boots. It really doesn't get any better.