The Trial and Execution of Thomas F Wilson
Bands! Burlesque! Criminal prosecution! Telling the story of a fictional 19th century outlaw, the one-off show The Trial And Execution Of Thomas F Wilson uses live music and burlesque dancers to bring to life a story of sex, drugs, downfall and resurrection. Andrew P Street speaks to creator Russall Beattie
How many people are involved in this? There's about 30 people. I got The Vanguard to rip up the tables for the night because I want people dancing. I don't want people to sit down. It's such a beautiful venue.
So it's not a sit-there-and-watch kind of a show? No, it's all about getting into it, feeling the sweat, smelling the sounds - all that kind of good stuff. It's not going to be the most polished show, but the excitement's going to be there. It's going to be a fun night.
It seems as though this is a ridiculously broad concept. Yeah, it often is with my shows. I've previously put on a bunch of burlesque shows around the country. And with the bands [performing on the night], they're concept bands: I put one of them, The Snowdroppers, together for this. They're all part of that new brand of band that's coming out with a lot of people from punk or rock backgrounds and they're taking on the more roots-style stuff: you know, like Wagons or The Kill Devil Hills who are obviously very influenced, but also have a lot of originality in them. So we just wanted to create a platform for the lesser-known ones.
Understood - but it's still insanely ambitious. It's one of the things that lead off from the burlesque scene. A lot of my audience have come out of the burlesque stuff and into this, which hasn't really got a name yet. Interesting nights, one-off shows. We're taking a traditional music platform and borrowing little narrative elements and linking the bands and creating an atmosphere.
So there's a narrative throughline? There is - it's a very loose narrative. We wrote the narrative listening to the music. The narrative on the night will be told through the court readings and proceedings, through the prosecutor and defender and so on. It's one character playing all these different roles and he'll be coming out when we switch the bands over, as a distraction away from the stage. He'll be telling the story about this character called Thomas F Wilson, and also we're chopping up all these 1920s cowboy films and kind of telling the story through that. Some of the burlesque acts will be acting out the narrative as well.
And the musical element? I've chosen the bands quite carefully. We've got two two-pieces, and one guy I could kill but I love him to death. He's the drummer from Zombie Ghost Train, Azza T: I said, ‘Create a live spaghetti western composition to the films we'll be playing' and he went ‘Yeah, no problems, there'll be four people' and I said ‘Yeah, fine'. And then he said. ‘There'll be eight!'. And now we're up to 13: there's a string quartet, a choir, guitarists, everything. But the music is amazing.
The Trial And Execution Of Thomas F. Wilson is on Sat 23 Aug at the Vanguard.