Sacred Hell: The Best of the Alternative Proms 2019

Ever since Sir Henry Wood made his fortune inventing the material that took his name, he has spent much of the rest of his varied career creating and selling different types of music, played, largely, by the same six people on rotation. Now more than 170 years old, Sir Henry has allowed his 'Properly Really Organised Music', or 'Prom', to slug free from the airy bewilderments of the Royal Albert Hall, and to romp, naked, flapping, carefree through cornfields, carparks, pool halls, schools, malls and ball pools, and to be taken on by different, more unortho-producers, creatives, spaces and, in one well-documented case in 2004, a mass murderer. Sir Henry still emerges, now and again, pushed around and held up in a self-designed wooden roller-frame, veins running thickly with a mixture of Savlon and Ketamine, forehead polished to a shiny bonce, to cut some ribbon or other and, in that same incident in 2004, fully denounce his association with the man that later emerged to be the Penge Ripper. Whilst the Royal Albert Hall Proms (or 'RAHP!' as the turgid new world of television commissioners have had it rechristened for "the shiny new millennial generations to mainline between hash-twitters and snapselfies") continue to trundle around in, quite literally, a circle, like a lawnmower come to life in the middle of the night to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting moonbather, the New Proms have now spread elsewhere: Sir Henry's riddled influence tremors through the supple young muscles of yesterday's hellraisers and tomorrow's childraisers, and 'Alternative Proms' now take place basically everywhere, or something.

Here are some of my top picks:

The Motorway Prom

The underside of the Hammersmith Flyover is more commonly associated with proteinated louts hucking warm punches at each others' children whilst some old men in prams look on. The weary roar of M4 enthusiasts blunder overneath, their choking gas-swillers blurting nature-killer into the grey atmosphere like a newborn spraying recent milk back into the face of its tired mother. Now, however, dithering lovers underperforming on benches are to be replaced with zithering brothers overperforming on, well, benches, as the Defunct Orchestra of West London, or DOWL, forward rolls into the deadzone, armed with hydrolauphones, zadar sea organs, ringing trees and an actual fridge 'up-purposed' from irradiated Chernobyl. DOWL will be "responding truthfully to the sounds from around", including, presumably, the sounds of truculent motorists telling each other to 'just completely fuck off'. Tickets have been on sale since October, but not the one you're thinking of, and sales are now approaching 'one'.

Probably best known for: that time they kicked a live hand grenade into a basket of snakes to hear 'the collective rattle', a sound that I have heard and will now never stop hearing. Best avoided unless you can't.

The Highpitched Prom

"The problem with the so-called democratic, popular and downright accessible proms is that they've lost touch with the original purpose of music," says Larceny Longsands, the bellicose, belligerent and round-bellied Field Marshall of Music for the DogWhistle Orchestra. "The original purpose was to disturb, to physically harm. And what hurts more than a really high note played repeatedly really close to your ears for just a bit too long?" Being stabbed, I suppose, but I wouldn't know. The DogWhistle Orchestra, founded with the deformalisation of the manufacture of dog whistles in the High Notes Act 2011, are dedicated to playing music that exists on the edge of what humans can actually hear, treading that line with the delicacy of a large piano being dropped from the top of the Shard. Their debut performance at the Greenhouses in Kew Gardens in 2012 left "several children screaming for the end, whilst twenty known species of extremely rare orchid were wiped out by the shattering glasses in an extremely ill-judged concert venue" (The Kew Gardens Newsparp, 8 June 2012). They have lain dormant (or, in Longsands's words, "unhearable") since then, with rehearsals in concrete venues underneath the Tower of London banned in 2013 after "many, many members just kept dying". But now they're back, with an all-new line-up and an all-old attitude to whether music should be hearable, enjoyable or even just plain-old affordable. Their £1700-a-head 'concert and crisps' Prom will be taking place at high speed across Victoria Park, Hackney, so that "they're all wrapped up before all of the Earth's dogs find us again".

Probably best known for: you know silence? Yeah. That's them.

The Horse Prom

Just some bloody old horses cantering around tunelessly in a dilapidated sports hall in South Norwood to the rhythm of an unpaid man clapping. Sort of the musical equivalent of liver disease.

Probably best known for: solving the mystery of that mass horse theft from Kentish Town City Farm in June this year.

The Olfactory Prom

Here's one to turn your nose up at. Appealing to every sense, other than hearing, sight, sound and taste, the Olfactory Prom is brought to us by the Orchestra of Smells, who claim to put the 'Chest Roar' back into orchestra, whatever the flipping fuck that means. The Scentsemble will be "playing smells" right up and around our nostrils, rare smells curated from "distant, distinct and disturbing" aromas that are difficult to source unless you live distantly, distinctly or disturbingly. Playing on the fact that the sense of smell is adept at conjuring up long-repressed memories, the OoS will apparently refuse to stop stenching until "at least everyone has tried to call their dads". Some of the highlights include the work of acclaimed de-composer Bartin 'Borthoven' Bort, the 'Smell of Hurt' and the world's first ever specially commissioned 'smell poem'. The Olfactory Prom will be taking place, appropriately, in an ol' factory, specifically the famous Blood Baths of Bethnal Green. Entry is free, but please just don't.

Probably best known for: the ultimate viral stunt of the London Fatberg last year, or, as their lightly-blistering Musical Director Malcolm Earth called it, "our first studio album".

So perhaps 2019 will be the year at which you'll finally set down your truffle-scented Royal Albert Hall programme, freely dismember your dinner jacket thread from thread, chuck your bloody brogues into a neighbours barbecue, uncork your second bottle of red and lunge, a little too boisterously and raising a hurried shush from at least one aunt, right into the future of this country's soggy past. Sir Henry Wood salutes you, if only he could. If Wood Could, He Would.