Don McCullin in Concert

Weds 24th April 2019

Don McCullin - In Concert

Aki asks me who we are seeing tonight. We are sitting at a table for two in The German Gymnasium in the heart of regenerated Kings Cross; she's just ordered the pork knuckle with sauerkraut...I've plumped for the chicken schnitzel with sweet potato fries. There are two half pint 'flagons' of pilsner fizzing away on the table in front of us.

"Is it a folk band?"

"A folk band?" I cry with comic scorn..."Nope".

"Classic?"

"Classic...!?! I hope not!".

I'm determined she doesn't find out who we are about to see at Kings Place this evening. I booked the tickets last month as a late birthday surprise, shortly after we'd visited Tate Britain to attend an exhibition of Don McCullin's more famous, or infamous, black & white prints, documenting some 60 years of his bearing witness to man's inhumanity to man. A BBC documentary added further interest in him, as we learnt he'd been born and raised in Finsbury Park, at No.40 Fonthill Road, just around the corner, a stone's throw from one of our favoured local Italian restaurants.

Aki's pork knuckle looks huge, served with potato dumpling and a beer jus. I bet her she won't be able to finish it. I get stuck into my chicken schnitzel, which is painfully hot and scalds my tongue, so I'm surprised to find the fries are lukewarm. 

As we enter the foyer of Kings Place, I instruct Aki not to look at any posters for fear of her discovering what we are about to see. We get through the foyer without incident, but as we reach basement level she notices the pile of books being prepared for signing at a table outside Hall One, and she gleans the author's name on the spine! Darn it....but she looks pleased.

It's pretty much a full house. Some of Don's more famous images are being projected onto a large white screen above the stage, and there are two empty chairs and a small table with glasses of water set centre stage. Fergal Keane, the BBC reporter, who was reporting from Khartoum only the night before at the public protest against the newly incumbent military regime in the Sudan, enters stage left, and introduces his interviewee in glowing terms, citing his journalistic integrity as an inspiration to his own career. Don McCullin, now in his mid-eighties, enters to a rapturous round of applause and takes his seat opposite Fergal. Mr.Keane has a wonderfully gentle interviewing technique, his sonorous Irish burr reverberating around the intimate Hall One; both have been adorned with head mics. 

Fergal gently guides Don through his early life, career beginnings, and wartime experiences, ending up some 45 minutes later with questions about Don's current obsession with photographing the landscape of the Somerset Levels, where he now resides. Over the course of the evening, Don has hinted that his often harrowing work still haunts him, and admits to having had several bouts of work-related depression which saw him take solace in the bottle. He confesses that he felt his work has not changed humanity one iota...wars are inevitable where humankind rub up against one another. There's a depressing thread running through the evening as we all mentally clock in with the more recent atrocities reported in the news; the shooting of Lyra McKee in Derry, the Sri Lankan Easter massacres, ISIS and their grisly modus operandi. There are fifteen minutes of Q&A at the end, with one woman telling him tearfully that he should look on his body of work as shining a light into the dark places of the human experience, and that he should consider himself doing mankind a great service. It's an emotional moment; and when he leaves the auditorium to a standing ovation, the lights come up to catch us all blowing our noses and wiping a tear from our eyes. An extraordinary evening in Kings Cross.