|
by Manos Angelakis
Mike Absalom
It only took Mike Absalom 5 years to be considered the new sensation in Ireland’s art scene. For those that know the name Mike Absalom as a guitar or harp strumming, song writing, folk singing musical entertainer, be assured that yes  he is one and the same. Mike is a multifaceted and multitalented artist that expresses his thoughts, emotions and experiences through music, poetry, printmaking, and now painting. He has traveled the world, living by his wits and live music performances for audiences as far apart as London and Athens, Belfast and Teheran, Gothenburg and the Costa Brava. The list goes on for forty plus years: England, Greece, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Vancouver, the Yukon Territory, Tierra Del Fuego, Paraguay, France, Montana, Nova Scotia, Chile, Newfoundland, and California. Mike Absalom has performed in such varied locations as the Royal Albert Hall, London, the Grand Municipal Theatre, Punta Arenas, Chile, the Rochas Harp Festival in Paraguay, the BBC TV's Old Grey Whistle Test, and practically every university and polytechnic school in the British Isles. He also wrote newspaper articles, did performance poetry and toured North  and South America as the male member of an all-girl harp group. After September 11, 2001, he finally returned to his Celtic roots and settled in Ireland.
In 2004 he was named Artist in Residence, Heinrich Böll Cottage, Achill Island, County Mayo, and since then he participated in a considerable number of exhibitions and one-man shows in the British Isles and Northern Ireland as well as in Shanghai. He toured China in 2007.
I met Mike the autumn of 1964 in an Athenian boîte, in the Plaka (the Left Bank of Athens), where he was singing folk songs and, late in the evenings, backroom ballads to an audience of English-speaking counterculture Greeks and expat Brits and Americans. He was young, had a great voice, and the girls were drawn to him like bees to a flower. The next spring Mike, another English friend Giles Rushton, and I rented a house in Hydra and we spent the summer swimming, singing, getting drunk on retsina, and chasing the good life.
I have to thank Mike for my vast collection of limericks, all the verses of the “Bastard King of England”, and 25 of the 38 verses of “The Ball of Ballynoor”, as well as for contributing to one of the most memorable years in my wayward and thoroughly enjoyable youth.
© September 2007 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
|
