Dirty jokes and English beer — the baroque stars of the all-night Prom

Times

17-07-2025

Raucous, uproarious and salted with dirty jokes, Bjarte Eike's Alehouse Sessions have become his unlikely golden ticket — and he knows it. The Norwegian violinist, founder of Barokksolistene, is a fan of beer and Henry Purcell, and a passionate anglophile. It turns out that by uniting these three loves into a flexible concert experience inspired by the music of late-17th-century London he can play to huge and ecstatic crowds in all sorts of places.
Earlier this summer I heard his group play an Alehouse show in Koko, Camden Town — to a standing crowd of twenty and thirtysomethings who bellowed their approval (and drank many overpriced pints of IPA while doing so). 'That was part of a five-concert [UK] tour and all five concerts were completely sold out, and they were all standing-only,' Eike says. The Alehouse Sessions have also gone to Europe's fanciest concert halls — 'We sold out at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, with a capacity of 2,000 or something. We've played in the Konzerthaus in Vienna numerous times and we're going back there next year.'
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Eike likes to think of the show, which started in 2007, 'as a tree, with all those different branches in it'. He means that it can be adapted to fit the atmosphere. 'So if we're in a beer festival, I would play more on the … beer topics. At a children's concert we wouldn't talk about alcohol.' He recalls a memorable show at a gay club in the Hague. 'We seem to be, er, darlings with the festivals that need to do outreach. Of course that concert was not just for gay people. But there was glitter and bling and … videos with soft porn playing in the corner. It was quite something.'
There's no avoiding Eike in Britain this summer. He and Barokksolistene will be at the Edinburgh International Festival for a ceilidh-infused twist on the Alehouse programme. After a show at Snape in Suffolk, they then come to the Royal Albert Hall to provide witching hour entertainment for the Dark till Dawn Prom hosted by the organist Anna Lapwood — an all-night concert. 'I think we have one hour, then a small break, then half an hour at some time between midnight and 2am.' What do people want to hear at two in the morning? 'Well, we'll bring an extra percussion player, an extra fiddle and an all-female dance group from Norway called Mamelukk. They do a particularly virtuosic type of dance, which is traditionally reserved for males, but these girls have taken the whole tradition on. It's a more Nordic style of Alehouse, if you like.'
The Alehouse Sessions invite a relaxed, jovial response. But Eike says the secret is to take it very seriously. 'My guys and girls have never [allowed any] compromise when it comes to the quality of the music. And then the story … well, it happens to be a good one.'
He's talking about the historical basis for the Alehouse — harking back to the era in which Oliver Cromwell closed the London theatres, so musicians set up informally in taverns instead. Even after the Restoration, this style of music-making continued to flourish. 'Music was back in fashion under Charles II but they couldn't build theatres fast enough. So the back rooms of alehouses were turned into music rooms.' Punters paid a form of membership to support the musicians and reserve a good seat. 'So it could be argued that the whole idea of a subscription to a symphony orchestra began in England in the 1670s.'
Not all Alehouse music may have been sophisticated — the written scores that survive are often limited to a single line of melody, the tune with older roots in English folk (hats off to Barokksolistene for their springily complex arrangements). As for the lyrics, Eike does not think I should share with Times readers one salacious number that begins 'John had a thing that was long', and when he concludes the verse I agree with him that it ought to remain unprinted. 'And that one's by Henry Purcell, who also writes, you know, the Funeral Music for Queen Mary …'
It's the connections between Purcell and the alehouse tradition that have fed into Eike and the Barokksolistene's other big project of the summer, before the Proms and the Edinburgh festival: a revamp or 'expansion' of Purcell's one-act opera Dido and Aeneas, which the group will present at Longborough Festival in Gloucestershire as a full evening of entertainment. 'It's not about turning Dido into a sort of pub session or making it cheap. But it will be more true to what I think Purcell is about.'
Look at what we call the score of Dido, Eike argues, and it's actually full of gaps — instructions for dance but no music to set the dance to, as well as a lost overture, chorus and entire prologue. So in his new version Aeneas and Dido will get new arias, drawn from other, earthier works by Purcell. Dido's new number is an attempt to fill a glaring gap at the centre of the opera, a declaration of love for her Trojan toyboy in the scene set in the grove. 'It's such a pity that Dido doesn't have anything to sing! There are all these things going on. They're sitting there. They're being entertained … and her response is: 'Oops. It's gonna rain. Let's go home.' What an anticlimax.' Eike has added more characters to the drama, and his musicians will be acting as well as playing. The night will finish with a wake for the dead queen, with sea shanties imported from the Alehouse Sessions.
Eike has devoted much of his career to a particularly English tranche of music and culture. So I wonder how he feels about the increasingly volatile debate about 'English values' being lost, either through immigration, deference to other nations in the UK or through fear of being perceived to be boorish or nationalistic. 'I think you're on to something. If you take the field of folk music, it's always the Scottish or the Irish, never the English, right? But you have a strong English tradition.' In Norway, he says, there is concern that young people are becoming ' historielose ' (literally, 'history-less'). 'But you have a lot to be proud of in England. It doesn't always have to be about having a bad conscience about various things you've done in the past.'
Grab a beer — and toast John and his thing that was long.
eif.co.uk bbc.co.uk/proms)