Ben Godwin - New World City

“Come away with me and we’ll have ourselves a life!” Imagine Kurt Weill moving to New Orleans and working for 20 years in a nightclub before moving out to LA where a film producer asks him to write a musical about New York that gets rejected by the film industry but opens to wild crowds on Broadway. If you can imagine that, then you have a good picture of Ben's music. “Trade the stubborn farmland for a million neon lights!” Picture 100 dancers behind the singer onstage. “We’ll look away while the violence carries on.” The pianist is keeping the bass player and drummer busy pumping rhythm to a holy beat. “We’ll make a new religion out of rusty cars.” The break has a six ring circus of dancers doing different moves – a taste for the inner eyes of my mind. As you can expect, I’ll have to listen 100 times to catch all the action. And I will. Willingly.

A shout-out for the title tune, Skin And Bone, complete with oompa cabaret flavors: “Poverty’s a crime in the poorhouse and the punishment is life. The lucky ones work in the slaughterhouse and the rest go under the knife. Hunger is a crime in the madhouse where the gunners are running with that, and liberty runs on consumption – is anything wrong with that?” A dance filled night of musical theatre coming to a stage near you soon. In the meantime, check out this cool record. Ben Godwin