Mat Ricardo's Cabaret - Mixing It Up

This is a review of Mat Ricardo's London Varieties, which happen monthly. All the details you need are here. 

Podcast of Mat's superb ToMax Talk up soon.

Mat Ricardo is an artist. The Bethnal Green Working Men's Club is hard to find. You need to go.

I have just returned from Mat Ricardo's monthly London Varieties completely exhilirated - so much so, that on the way out I bought a ticket for the next show on Thursday 10^th May. The room is higgledy-piggledy and worn: behind the stage is a big, pink, heart-shaped frame adorned with arcade bulbs, every other one blown. It is what you expect from a working men's club, complete with lurid red carpet, smelling, as Steve Furst's character Lenny Beige observed, 'very much like the working man'. A perfect backdrop for the unexpected.

Of course, variety's in the name. But I didn't expect such interesting variety of tone. Mat Ricardo the gentleman juggler presided, guiding the show from swagger to irony, to earnesty. 'When you go to a cabaret and it's all too polished,' observed Dusty Limits at ToMax talks the previous evening, 'you walk away feeling cheated.' No danger of that here, despite the exceptional quality of the acts (the brilliant mime artist The Boy With Tape On His Face and Lenny Beige 'the King of Light Entertainment' to name but two).

Mat Ricardo with Dusty Limits

One sequence captured this spirit of surprise. Mat had prepared a potted lecture about one of his Hollywood heroes, Gene Kelly. We learnt how Kelly had been sent to dance school as a young boy, found it too girly and quit. Aged 16, Kelly realised that dancing might be a good way to pick up girls. “So he went back on his own terms. Always the best way to do things.” We were treated to a couple of memoirs and a comparison with Fred Astaire. “Fred floated; Gene worked close to the ground.” The mini-lecture concluded with a video of Kelly's Summer Stock tap dance (the one with the creaking floorboard and rustling newspaper).

It was a serious moment: the audience was asked to recollect and admire a great and influential dancer - as it became clear when Ricardo produced his own bit of tap. He was soon joined by two rather prettier, professional tap-dancers.

Our compere again: “Those of you that know me will be aware I'm often in shows with burlesque performers. And when you've been on the circuit for a while, you realise that pretty much everyone you meet can do a bit of tap.” And - hey presto! - ten burlesque dancers from the circuit for a giggly, minute-long tap routine. Incongruous, brilliant - an education.

The evening has another original feature: Ricardo interviews one of the main acts. This time, it was the fictional entertainer and producer Lenny Beige, who had the room in the palm of his hand with his stand-up: 'my father was so dull he couldn't entertain a doubt' he rambled, 'we were so poor we couldn't even pay attention'.

Every month, Ricardo sets himself a challenge to attempt at the following show. For the show in hand, he had promised to learn a plate-juggling routine – a skill entirely new to him. A film of the last month's training showed Ricardo backstage at various theatres tirelessly flipping plastic plates (to fellow performers' amusement and irritation alike). So when the drums rolled and Mat actually performed the plate routine, we knew better how impressive it was, how much skill and practice it required. For the next show he has promised to learn a juggling routine involving magic.

Gentleman Juggler in ActionIn general, the show cast an eye on craft and paid tribute to what came before. It was a demonstration of Dusty Limits' point that the intimacy and responsiveness of Cabaret allow the performers to revel in their identity as performers. Here it was less ironic and meta – more earnest and educational.

At ToMax talks, Mat explained how important it is to him to be part of a tradition:

“When you're middle aged, you start to think about...death! You start to think about what you leave behind you. If you're a song-writer you leave songs. If you're a director you leave films which your fans can watch, and quote, and love...If you're a variety performer, if you're a speciality act, if you're a vaudeville shmuck like me, what do you leave? You leave that....[gets right thumb stuck in jacket button hole...and then left thumb trying to remove it]...Shtick. That's what you leave, you leave shtick - bits of business, routines, tricks, gags that have been passed down from performer to performer, generation to generation, like the fragile heirlooms they are, passed down by shmucks doing them for a cheap laugh, like I just did.

“Some of the things I do in my act have been through the hands of at least a dozen other jugglers, stretching back generations and generations. It's my job to find them, give them a polish, take care of them, maybe put a twist on 'em, and pass them down to the next person. It's a beautiful thing to be part of.”

Ricardo began, as do most such performers, on the street: “Street performing is the single

most honest, pure and beautiful form of theatre you will ever see.” Astonishingly, for ten years, people paid him enough to live. But how could he take his art to the next level? Perform for local councils? At Butlins, Pontins? Comedy clubs? (“where the stand-ups see you as a second class citizen, because you commit the cardinal sin of being as funny as they are and doing something else at the same time.”) Cruise ships...? (“which are great, if your idea of fun is being trapped in the middle of the ocean, in a prison made of glass and marble, with three and a half thousand cunts.”) Ricardo tried them all, and a decade later was beginning to lose hope. “I'd tried to force myself into a dozen different shaped boxes, but didn't fit into any of them.”

Then, one day, he got booked for something different. “It's in a dark, crowded room in Soho. And it's full of singers and burlesque performers and clowns and acrobats - and me. And the audience are wonderful. And they listen. And they laugh and they clap, and they even gasp. And it is the perfect place to work. Instead of forcing myself into someone else's box I'd found the tin where all the broken biscuits live.”

Perhaps that explains the ebullience of Mat Ricardo's London Varieties: there's a sense that, at last, Mat's doing it the best way: on his own terms.  

Supercharged Growth - Social Media the Zaggora Way

Malcolm Bell, Co-Founder of ZaggoraMalcolm Bell and his wife Dessi have had a phenomenal few months. When Malcolm arrived at ToMax, he leafed through our program, which detailed a future talk called 'Bread and Butter'. The headline speaker, Tim Roupell, spent 23 years building his business up from nothing into a catering outfit with a turn-over of £14m. “It's funny to think of this guy” said Malcolm in his unplaceable, amicable accent “23 years of sweat and tears! The web has made so much possible, especially, I think, for brands with a real product.” In a promotional video he observes that “Social Media has supercharged our growth,” while during our talks he stressed the opportunity for brands to sell online, instead of just using social media to improve their PR or characterise themselves, as Tesco have. 

Zaggora launched in July last year. Dessi Bell, Malcolm's wife, invented the 'HotPants' (for which they secured the trademark) when she wanted to shed some pounds ahead of her wedding. The clue is in the name: the shorts help women lose weight by raising their core temperature during exercise - sweating buckets is a side effect, clarified Malcolm, and not the cause of the weightloss. And the HotPants are selling like hot-cakes. So far, 350,000 pairs sold; 178,000 Facebook Fans; 22,000 Twitter followers. The HotPants retail at £45, and you don't have to be a genius to work out the revenue. Everyone wanted to hear the secrets.

“It's simple” said Malcolm, who engrossed the audience with his personal narrative. He is one of those approachable guys with the gift of rapid yet accurate speech who indeed makes eveything sound simple. Although Malcolm has spent much of his career managing property for wealthy families such as the Greek Panayiotous, he clearly has entrepreneurship in his blood:

'I began my entrepreneurial life when I was about 8 years old. My friends at school wanted to watch a lot of movies. But at this time there was no internet and no such thing as Blockbuster. So I rented out my parents DVDs for a pound a day. As an 8 or 9 year old making ten twenty quid a week...I was pretty happy with that!'

Undergoing 'a kind of early midlife crisis' as he approached thirty, Malcolm abandoned managing portfolios for the likes of the Kuwaiti Royal Family, and turned his proactivity and hunger to investing his own money through his Dessinka fund. First stop, Zaggora.

So what are the secrets to the popularity? As Malcolm put it 'Anti-cellulite weight-loss shorts are not new, they've been around for 20-30 years. Boxers have been using this technique for a long time - wearing ski-suits to sweat a lot...' There's no doubt that the HotPants work, but so do other brands. Hermione Way also rose from the floor to challenge the uniqueness of the product. "Tomorrow, I'm going to start a company called Sexy HotPants! What are you going to do about it?"

But that would not worry Malcolm any more than other anti-cellulite shorts: 'Our product definitely doesn't look sexy!' 

So how are the shorts positioned?

'We've managed to make the message “Have fun! Take the two week challenge, can you lose two jean sizes?!”...if we're going to do a weight loss product, aimed at helping women lose weight, that's kind of nasty...that's a bit ugly. A lot of brands out there are not particularly inspiring. Of course, you have the Nikes, and the Reeboks, and the Addidases, and they all focus on how strong women are and how athletic they are - how they can run up mountains. It's not really true...for most women of course. So we thought “how about making a business and a brand which is far more positive in message, with the product name 'HotPants'?” It's a little bit cheeky, but it does what it says on the tin because that is really how the product works.'

So, point one: accessbile positioning of the product. But how did Malcolm and Dessi disseminate this message through social media?

At first, it was slow going. Then, they introduced a competition: 500 women were sent HotPants and asked to publish their results on the facebook page (see here). 200 pairs were never seen again. 100 appeared on e-bay. But, little by little, the stories trickled in – and then a deluge.

'Consumers are interested in stories. So create a forum for discussion. It seems like a difficult thing to do, but actually it's quite easy. It's about starting a conversation. If you can get it going, then people will take it forward.'

Iron Logic! Toms Shoes told a great story. Reggae Reggae Sauce had behind it the tale of an audacious Dragons' Den winner. And often I buy an acquaintance's book because of the part I know it plays in that person's life.

So, two tips for social media: be fun and involve your audience in stories.

This is the first time that Malcolm has had the trouble of communicating with customers, and it hasn't always been mutual adoration. To demonstrate this point he read out an e-mail from Jenny, in Colorado:

“I still don't have my fucking pants, you mugs!”

 Gotta take the rough with the smooth.