Tea and Biscuits

"Heyla, heyla... c'mon, you know it now!"

"Heyla, heyla." The chant echoes back and forth, from the bedisked and furrowed ceiling of the Enmore Theatre, to the luminous blue stage. Row upon row of partially lit heads sway and sound, else glance around them with twitchy shoulders, as three layers of drumming abrades the third wall.

"Heyla... Heyla... you're doing voodo!" Never ceasing to drum, the central figure seems to smile with his entire body. "You're doing voodoo now!"

I came to The Tea Party so recently that I completely missed their reunion tour. I won't apologise for this: I spent my adolescence in a wasteland when it came to contemporary music, listening to Bach on cassette tape and attending the opera with my Nanna. When they toured last year upon the release of The Ocean at the End, I was in Europe, but now you may picture me travelling through Tuscany with Interzone Mantras playing as loud as my earbuds will permit in order to drown out the rest of the coach party.

But this is why I was so impressed with the T-shirt on the fellow standing two ahead of David and myself in the queue outside. It was the kind of grey that was originally black and the seams were splitting. Following a long list of locations and dates, it read THE EDGE OF TWILIGHT 1996. We were here, in the considerable humidity, to celebrate this album's 20^th anniversary. Had this man really bought his T-shirt on that first tour, treasured it in some bottom drawer and resurrected it for the occasion? I might have tapped his fraying shoulder, and asked, except that the line started moving and I am besides, still shy.

The Tea Party are one of the most dazzlingly competent live acts that I have ever seen (which includes three different productions of The Magic Flute). How to explain what I mean? Perhaps I can cast it in literary terms. This trio are such superb co-writers, with such an eclectic vocabulary, that they can slip effortlessly from conventional, if evocative, third person perspective to omniscient narration, then quote relevant classics while engaging in intimate first person, and never once losing or confusing the reader: all this, in Jeff Martin's thrilling, dark-honey voice.

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