What Is This Thing Called Love?
When words are enough, we speak. When they aren’t, we sing.
David McAlmont returns to Circle & Star with a seasonal treat — the Great American Songbook, and the personal story of a lifelong fascination with the country that created it.
Travelling backwards through almost sixty years of American influence, McAlmont sets Songbook classics he has never performed before alongside memories of film, history, music and television. In the year America turns two hundred and fifty, he asks what all of that has meant to someone who grew up watching it from somewhere else.
Part concert, part storytelling, What Is This Thing Called Love? explores what happens when childhood enchantment collides with adult knowledge.
Stories and songs, one night only.
This is Field Notes — the thinking salon at Circle & Star. This time the idea is sung as well as spoken.
You’ll leave still humming it.
David McAlmont
Singer, writer and art historian, David McAlmont has one of the most distinctive voices in British music — the voice of Yes, McAlmont & Butler’s 1995 landmark. In this room, there is nothing between it and you.
McAlmont
David McAlmont was…
In residence.
Three Saturday nights. Three bodies of work. One of Britain's most extraordinary voices, returning each month to a room of fifty-five.
Voice · Song · Story
Each evening a distinct show — a different lens, a different catalogue, the same extraordinary artist. Not a tribute. Not impersonation. McAlmont making a personal case for the music that shaped him — and reshaping how you hear it.
All three evenings found their fifty-five. Thank you to everyone who came up. The list below is for when David returns.
A personal map of discovery. How one artist comes to another's work late, slowly, and then all at once. From The Laughing Gnome to Diamond Dogs and beyond.
The artist turns the lens on himself. A career spent navigating soul, pop, jazz, art and academia. The songs, the collaborations, the questions that never quite resolve.
A challenge to the lazy consensus. Madonna's catalogue reclaimed as bold, emotionally complex, intelligent songwriting. Stripped of spectacle. Recentred around voice.
Three months. Three shows. One voice.
The room remembers.
Step in. Come up. Be part of the story.
Circle & Star Theatre, Hampstead
28 Heath Street, London NW3 6TE
Hampstead Station · Northern Line