Stewart Lane
Stewart Lane Music
Composer Performer Cultural Activist
BAL 1989 - 96
BAL was an alternative cabaret group founded by Stewart Lane in 1989 to explore broad and eclectic music possibilities, alongside themes of personal quest, layers of reality and agency. The group had a variety of different line-ups and configurations during its lifetime including string quartet and electronica. BAL's first performance was at The Kings Head Theatre, Islington on a set of Hedda Gabler. In performance, characters from Commedia dell'arte were given a contemporary twist as Lane morphed his way through various social types. BAL went on to play at many prestigious venues including Ronnie Scott's, The Purcell Rooms and Festival Hall, Southbank, London, The Barbican and Riverside Studios, Acoustic Music Centre, Edinburgh and The Third Eye Centre, Glasgow. They won An Edinburgh Fringe award at the 1992 Fringe Festival. BAL gave it's final performace in 1996.
J'accuse was one of BAL's set staples and was performed at most shows. 8 minutes was not an unusual length for a BAL number, yet it became one of our most popular pieces with live audiences
Desert Birds
Torment of Flies
J'accuse
Cloud Drumming
Cloud Drumming was part of a new collection of songs that formed a new set in 1994 and was first performed at London's Barbican in January of the year.
Recorded as a demo at RMS studioes in
1990, this is the only album Length set of
BAL recordings. We sold cassettes at gigs
and I hawked it around various Record
companies. Typically, I was greeted with
incredulity, indifference, or occasionally,
ridicule. We appeared a very strange endeavour to the gate keepers of the music business at the time. Regarded with equal suspicion in the classical world (we were labeled a cabaret act). Thankfully, a very different scene exists today.
I am hugely grateful for the generous support of a number of charities and foundations that supported BAL over the course of it's performing life, among them: Music Works, The Holst Foundation, Foundation For Sport And The Arts, Greater London Arts
In 1991 I was commissioned to write a String Trio (Violin/Viola/Cello).
This, for me, new combination, opened up an entire new world of musical possibilities. With much excitement, I expanded BAL's strings to a Quartet. Tambaran was the first piece I wrote for the new line up.
Tambaran
