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Colin Towns Mask Orchestra
Drama (Provocateur Records PVC 1044)
When I was a teenager in the early 1960s I found myself growing up in the mind of the London theatre. Living near the end of the District Line and stuck on literature in sixth form, I would spend all my pocket money on cheap gallery and upper-circle seats for productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the fledgling National Theatre at the Old Vic, and — most earnestly — at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Stratford, east London.
So late in the evenings my Tube train would rumble home through East End stations, passing through the West Ham birthplace of the composer and creator of the marvellous Mask Orchestra, Colin Towns. Born in 1948, he would have been a piano-playing 14-year-old then, and now I wonder if he was at his keys as my early evening train tracked near his parents’ place.
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