TEN GIGS - CHAPTER THREE

The Piazza

Before I ever performed at Covent Garden, before I did my audition, I went there to do a little recce. To feel it out and see if it felt like somewhere I could fit in. Then and now, there are two main performance areas, or as buskers know them, pitches. The West Piazza, which is the huge cobblestoned square in front of the portico of St. Pauls church. As featured in the video for Ultravox’s “Vienna”, and recreated on a soundstage in Burbank for the movie “My Fair Lady”. I make this point because a couple of decades of hearing tour guides lie to their customers about how the movie was “shot right here” leaves a scar. The piazza has been a site for street performing for a little while – Samuel Pepys watched a Punch & Judy show here in 1662. Bearing in mind the first West End theatre didn’t open until a year later, there’s an argument to be made that were it not for buskers bringing the crowds into that end of town, there would be no Andrew Lloyd Webber. Something for which we apologise …