Albert Speaks! Capturing 150 Years of Performance

I went to a lot of wrestling and boxing at the Albert Hall… Whilst I was at the Royal College I used to go with my sketch book and sit in the gods. I enjoyed the theatre of the sport and the wrestlers themselves…Quasimodo, the Wildmen, Sky High Lee, Billy Rivers, Little Beaver, Ivan the Terrible and Kendo Nagasaki.

One night we had John Lennon with Yoko. It was a hippy night… Do you remember peace and love? They got in a bag and started rolling around on the stage. After they were finished, I picked up that sack and threw it in the bin! I could have held on to that, god knows what I would have got for it!

The opening night of Swan Lake was extremely nerve-wracking! There was a real sense of something momentous happening… ballet in the round was new and different. I remember that night, the response from the audience gave me goose-bumps… There was no barrier between us and the audience

Of the many hundreds of companies we brought from Russia during the Cold War we never had any problems, with one exception; The Red Army Ensemble. It was 1968 and the Russians had just invaded Czechoslovakia. We had booked the Red Army Ensemble for the Royal Albert Hall during this time. We had already advertised the event and someone came along and wrote on our poster ‘Now appearing in Prague!