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2016-07-25 - 11:36 p.m.

This blog is really about one thing, but like any good Ronnie Corbett story, I'll take the scenic route to getting there.

It's been a strange year so far. From New Year's Day, on a weekly and sometimes daily basis for the first 4 or 5 months, a really famous figure has died. David Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali are just the tip of the iceberg. Prince was the big one for me though, and if I'm not careful I can easily drift into wallowing about his absence.

I wish I'd discovered Periscope about a month earlier than I eventually did. This might be read in 5,10 or 20 years time, when Periscope might be a faded memory, so I'll just explain quickly what it is. It's a smartphone app that allows you to broadcast video live to the Internet. There are some odd restrictions that are genius though. You can browse a map of the World, and select live streams ('scopes), look at suggested/trending scopes or scopes by people that you have found and now follow.

As you can imagine, not everyone in the World SHOULD be allowed to broadcast. Not everybody wants to watch them same stuff, so for me, 95% of it is rubbish - teenagers talking to their mates (and probably paedophiles, unbeknownst to them). But for all the rubbish transmissions, there have been things like live vigils from Paisley Park, within minutes of news of Prince's death, 'citizen journalism' of events, terrorist attacks, even live video of US police officers using excessive force or shooting unarmed citizens. One shooting was filmed by the driver of a car as the police poked a gun through the window and shot the passenger next to her, seemingly for no reason.

People have found interesting things to do with broadcasts - pottery demonstrations, hosting live quizzes for example, playing music or singing on request. And then there's Gilly Bean.

Gilly Bean is a self-taught pianist, who performs in a restaurant in London's fashionable West-end. She can't read music and so plays by ear, and claims to know 10,000 songs. Pretty much anything popular, she'll know, but you can catch her out with cover versions (she might not know the cover, but knows the original or vice-versa) and she seems to have a blind-spot with Scottish bands like Deacon Blue. Anyway, she's very friendly, and engages with her viewers, taking requests and seamlessly responding to comments as she plays, sings songs and blocks any abusive commenters.

Looking back through her Twitter history, I noticed that on the night that Prince died, she wasn't working, but did a midnight session of Prince requests. I wish I'd known of her and Periscope at the time, and had the chance to 'be' around like-minded Prince fans and share memories of his music. I'm sure Gilly did a great job - in fact, I'm going to ask her about it one day.

Anyway, although she knows so many songs, it's probably like Word and Excel - 90% of people only use 10% of the available features. So in Gilly's case, she probably gets asked to play the same couple of dozen different songs over and over even though she has so many in her head. I know she hates playing Tiny Dancer and My Heart Will Go On, for example, so I try to be slightly more creative with the songs I request. Some of them she doesn't know - some I'm sure she'd like if she did - a lot of them she smiles when I suggest them, probably because it makes such a nice change for her. But now and then, her whole face will light-up at a suggestion - as it's a song she loves.

Tonight, she played a sequence that went: Loving You by Minnie Riperton, Betcha By Golly Wow (which I suggested) and You Make Me Feel Brand New by the Stylistics, Move Closer by Phyllis Nelson and Still by Lionel Richie which I suggested. Gilly and the group watching the scope all seemed to enjoy the songs, but the way she played Move Closer and Still was just on a different planet - it was magical. I'm going to try to capture the video and get it on Youtube. Still obviously had deep meaning to her, as tears rolled down her face a couple of times and she played the song so passionately that she BLEW Lionel Richie's playing out of the water. It's something I never want to forget.

I know that nobody knows about this blog, and to be honest, I like it that way, but if anybody is reading this, please add @GillyBeanMusic on Periscope.

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