Carradine’s Cockney Sing-a-long 
Wilton’s Music Hall, London 
★★★★

 
CURRENTLY staging a series of performances across London and the south east, pianist and singer Tom Carradine has been running nostalgic evenings such as this for eight years now – and they appear to be attracting a growing following among easy-listening enthusiasts.  
 
As you’d perhaps expect, many of the punters are over 60, but there’s also a significant smattering of younger folks in the audience, with a buzz around the place as if this is something new and fresh rather than old and stale. Many had clearly been to one of Carradine’s singalongs before, and had every intention of going again. 
 
Wilton’s is a genuine old East End music hall, and is therefore the perfect setting for songs that have captured the hearts of Londoners since Victorian times.  
 
All the old knees-up favourites are there, from Mother Kelly’s Doorstep and My Old Man Said Follow the Van to Roll Out the Barrel and Boiled Beef and Carrots. With the lyrics to each projected above the stage, the extravagantly moustachioed Carradine’s modus operandi is to give them to us thick and fast, with crowd participation the watchword. 
 
While there’s plenty of good humoured and informative chat between songs, mostly they are rattled off in themed batches so that the audience can get into full swing at every opportunity. 

Apart from the classic cockney ballads we get a selection from London-based musicals, including Oliver and My Fair Lady  a smattering of Patriotic Songs (including Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again) and even some relatively “modern” songs that will have been familiar to TV viewers of the 1970s, such as Max Bygraves’s All you Need is Hands and Bring Me Sunshine by Morecambe and Wise – the latter complete with an extra, little known second verse. 

There’s even a medley of what Carridine believes will be pub singalong classics of the future – including Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, Neil Sedaka’s Amarillo and Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. 

Although he’s not from the big smoke himself (he jokes that he’s from the East End – of Coventry), Carradine is an enthusiastic and well informed historian of the music hall tradition with a store of information at his fingertips, much of which enhances the songs with context and an element of pathos, given that so many reflect the travails of poverty-stricken Londoners.

The only real quibble is that he sits at his “joanna” at the foot of the stage rather than on it, presumably to replicate that old pub singalong feeling. It’s a curious choice, as with no rake to the hall’s seating, he’s cut off from the people at the back, who have to crane their necks to see him. 

Nonetheless, the interaction between performer and crowd could hardly be more animated, and it’s easy to see why the format is catching on.

On tour. Tickets and dates: www.carradinescockneysingalong.co.uk/events