Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

  Thank you for your click.  If you want to know anything more/specific, please do ask me.    Where you are is actually a follow up to:   Keeping your Voice Healthy Which I learned through having a scare with my vocal cords. May this never happen to you.  Perhaps clicking through to that blog entry, you'll find some safeguards against this.   The bottom line for my Voice Tips?   Technique is all I've got. Contents: Breathing   Support Speech exercises Singing exercises How to learn a song       How to Breathe Correctly/How to Support your Voice    1.  Do a minute or so of cardio.     2.  Lie on the floor with a book under your head.  Massage your head, neck and shoulders. Put the backs of your hands against your ribs.  Shoulder blades down, neck free.  Breathe in and push your hands away from your body.  Next, with your hands by your sides, i...

                                                    Liam Norval hosting at Cafe de Paris  '   'You were bought for thirty seven thousand?  At what age?'   'Twelve.  So it had to be a tribunal case.'   'I should think it would, frankly.'     Colourful cocktail in hand, he walks through the VIP bar at the Cafe de Paris.  Loafers, jeans, tweed jacket.  Barber wet shave.  From the patrician features and dark blue eyes he might be the lovechild of Sir Richard Burton. He is actually Welsh; though these days he's more San Fernando than Rhondda Valley. From the walk you know he played football, from the talk - Twitter - you know that these days he spends more of his time fine-dining than running the park.     He is now directly beneath a light and I can see how immaculate his hair is. Brushed...

  1.  If you don't understand your vocal technique, you won't be able to use it. Speaking and singing really are as simple as breathe, support, imbibe sound; while looking unconcernedly at an imaginary horizon.  Having a perfect technique means that you can produce any note in your range, at any dynamic, at any speed, on any vowel shape, preceded and followed by any consonant or cluster of consonants. Vocal exercises should do no more and no less than facilitate your doing this.    For breathing, take a basic posture that's a happy medium between guardsman being square-bashed and camel about to spit, then coax your ribs away from your body and imagine that your lungs are in your shins.     For support, I incline to Dame Joan Sutherland's view that it's a lot like being sick.          (Just now, recreate the physical process of being sick.  Then think how in reality you wouldn't want to get in the way...)   Fo...

                                                                                                         Be part of StageFaves   This week I was expecting certain things to crop up on social media:   1) People vilifying Germaine Greer.   2)  Personal trainers advertising programmes designed to pre-buffer you against the effects of the Festive season.   3)  Photos of people overdoing the halloween costumes.        And just to put in my tuppence-worth concerning the above:   1)  There are myriad hues of gender to be brought into the discussion.   2)  Overeat midway through December - it's our biological imperative, saluting the sun's return or ...

                                                              Photo: James Millar   My mother, living at the War Museum (wrong) end of the Lambeth Walk, thinks it's common to have curtains pulled right back, always licks her fingers after flicking someone the v-sign; and in the early seventies raided the mahoganyique three-cornered cupboard in the lounge for the hoard of Green Shield Stamps, screamingly roped us all in schlepping them to the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre and cashed in the whole lot for a single bottle of Chanel nail varnish.     'Will look stand-out posh, that thick and that colour, now, Iestyn,' she said, gazing down at the bottle in her open palm.  'What's it for?  It's for marking your name clearly and indelibly on your mug, plate, bowl, knife, fork and spoon to take away campin...

                                             The Asbos' official site    At the Wam Bam Club, Cafe de Paris, January 28th, 2012, Lady Alex was about to introduce me. 'Galina, there are red regimental dress jackets to be seen at the far booth stage right.  Have fun!'   One of the regimental dress jackets was being worn by Royal Marines Band trombonist Theodore Preston.  He was wearing jeans and the wrong shirt with it - frilly fronted.  The hens parties shriekingly liked seeing his underwear, and were clearly thinking he was part of my act. I had to ask him to ignore their encouragement to take the little black pants off, as Cafe de Paris wasn't licensed for nudity. He obligingly put his jeans back on.   I saw Preston on Camden High Street a couple of times after that night and we'd stop and chat.  He always stood with hi...

  'Tarting up again, showing all the cheap finery.  Think we're going to fall for it.  Every year it happens.  I don't know.'   This was my aunt Kay, with the glass eye, toby jugs and pug, Mitzi. I thought at first she might have been talking about Brenda Slutty  Morgan, who lived in the next street down towards Bargoed station; Brenda deflowered at least three of my male cousins.     'Brenda would have her roots touched up by Sheri at number twelve, put on this mauve sequinned boob-tube she had, then make sure she was at her open door as the village boys were coming back from playing their Saturday football.  But all this only if she'd heard they'd won, so would be fired up and one or other of them might want to stop off.'   Kay didn't seem to be talking about Slutty Brenda this time, however; she was prodding a copy of the Woman's Concerns .  'See?  Shameless.  Think we'll experience lift off of joy, just from a bi...

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I...