Tue
30-Jan-2007

koko

Went with Benjie and Jordan to Koko in Camden last night for a gig being performed for some Channel 4 programme called the Album Chart Show. It was fun, though the drinks were a tad expensive. But then the gig itself was free.

There were four bands, each doing two or three songs. The only one I knew well was The Feeling, and they were very good, all polished and fun. They played Rosé, which is really growing on me. I like the idea of an ode to rosé wine. It's surely worthy of one!

Rosé
I love ya
Especially today
Rosé
I love your delicate way...

Thu
04-Jan-2007

kylie!

I'm back! And the first event of the New Year was a massive Kylie concert last night at Wembley Arena. I've never been to an epic pop concert before - it was excellent. Loads of costume changes and elaborate themes and dancing. She was kitted out in an enormous drag style pink peacock outfit, then in a kind of golden flapper dress, then a middle eastern setup, near the end she went all eighties and started looking like Boy George.

She did a marvellous slow jazz version of the Locomotion, did a glorious duet with the audience on Especially For You and sang Somewhere Over The Rainbow in a glittering glamorous red 1930s dress, seated on a giant crescent moon. When she performed Slow, it was set in a gym with the princess of pop surrounded by hordes of almost naked male dancers. It felt like taking ketamine in a gym. Excellent!

Tue
12-Sep-2006

the wiyos

Matt and I went to the Spice of Life on Cambridge Circus to see the Wiyos, who are on their second tour of the UK. We saw them last year when they came to an open mic night at Monkey Chews in Chalk Farm, and have enjoyed listening to their albums since then. The Wiyos play gloriously old fashioned "vaudevillian ragtime blues and hillbilly swing" and are an absolute joy to watch live.

The venue itself is a bit soulless, at least compared to the open mic nights we've been to up round Camden. The Spice of Life suffers from middle of the road light wood chain hotel decor, and things were a bit too quiet and polite. All worth it to see the mighty Wiyos though!

Wed
26-Jul-2006

foxes! again

I headed down to Oxford to join Alex and the whole Bell clan for a really good performance by Foxes!, and I mean really good, like totally rock 'n' roll!

It was upstairs in the Wheatsheaf, on the High Street, and it was incredibly hot. We were pouring with sweat, and it all added to the rock atmosphere. I also took the opportunity to treat myself to a battered Mars Bar from Carfax Chippy since I was in the area. One doesn't often have the chance to partake of a battered Mars Bar in this day and age!

Wed
01-Mar-2006

winter gospel concert

Matt and I headed to the Museum of London today for a free lunchtime concert by the London Community Gospel Choir. It was a lovely little performance, with lots of contemporary and classic stuff. For some reason, we were both feeling very emotional and fond of London today. I kept struggling not to burst into tears during several of the songs. I fall prey to gospel too easily! Matt was looking round at all the London schoolkids wandering round the museum and seeing their different colours and creeds and getting emotional about that. Then afterwards, we had a quick look at the "Queer is here" exhibition they are running at the moment, which surveys LGBT politics and community in London over the last 30 years. I didn't know that a third of all gay people in the UK live in London! Again, I was fighting back tears as I looked through it all.

Finally, we sat on a windy park bench nearby and shared a cheese sandwich before heading off back to our respective offices.

Sun
11-Dec-2005

foxes

Matt and I were in Oxford last night, and we dropped in on Adam and Kayla's fabulous new band Foxes. It was upstairs in the City Tavern, and they played too long, with the organisers telling them to stop midway through their last song (it was a song about rabbits, I think) as they forged ahead and ignored him, forcing them to start cutting off the power to all their instruments until it was just Kayla bashing her drums acoustic style in rock 'n' roll desperation! Check out the downloadable tracks on their MySpace site - it's indie with something of a folk sensibility.

Thu
22-Sep-2005

trachtenburg family slideshow players

Alex gave me two tickets to see the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players for my birthday - they had been up at the Edinburgh Festival and were now playing in London at the Pleasance Theatre, quite near our place in Kentish Town. Matt and I went to see them last night.

We enjoyed it a lot. The band is basically a family unit - Jason, Tina and their 11 year old daughter Rachel - which makes for a really nice family vibe in their performance. Jason specialises in a kind of Woody Allen style babbling, while his daughter and wife gently take the piss out of him. He is the main prophet of the band, describing them as an indie rock conceptual art band based on "the slideshow concept". They take slides they've found at car boot sales and junk shops and write songs based around them and show the slides during the course of the songs. It works very well. We particularly like one song - Look At Me - which follows these two women, Jeanne and Cathy, and their lives in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, including their drinking and camera wielding sessions and their visits to the 'Gas Museum'. If anything, we would have liked to have seen more slides of their lives, and gone into more depth. Really very enjoyable indeed.

Mon
24-Jan-2005

eva yerbabuena

Matt and I just got back from a marvellous concert - Eva Yerbabuena performing at Sadler's Wells as part of the London Flamenco Festival. Apparently, she's a leading light of the new flamenco scene. It was quite mesmerising and beautiful. The narrative was almost non existent, but it seemed to be a a pared down story of a woman's life, from youth to motherhood to old age. She led a troupe of eight dancers in wonderfully choreographed rippling scenes, lit by sombre blue and red light. Dimly lit in the background were three singers/clappers, two guitarists, a percussionist and flautist. It was all very passionate and compelling and quite new for both of us. Very enjoyable indeed.

Thu
30-Sep-2004

recorder woman!

Matt took me on a surprise afternoon anniversary-related excursion this afternoon. We had a pint in a lovely pub on Craven Passage by Heaven nightclub, The Ship and Shovell, and then walked over the bridge to the Royal Festival Hall.

I had no idea what we were going to see, even as we sat down in nice front row seats. Then, everyone was clapping, and out of the door on the stage came a woman comically clutching a handful of recorders in each hand. For a moment I forgot her name so I just cried, "oh, the recorder woman!" It was Michala Petri and her husband Lars Hannibal, whom we saw at the Leicester Early Music Festival with Russ and Lesley! They were magnificent as ever, and trilled and strummed away while we all bathed in Baroque elegance.

Sat
25-Sep-2004

charpentier

Matt and I went down to St John's Church in Brighton for a concert being held as part of the Brighton Early Music Festival 2004. It's a lovely little church, over in Hove. The musicians played recorder, oboe, cello, violin, viola and harpsichord. There was also a very high pitch French counter-tenor. They performed pieces by Charpentier, a French baroque composer who died exactly 300 years ago, interspersed with stories about his life read out in heavily French accented English. We had a spliff in the break and were then collared by a nice old woman who is one of the organisers of the festival and was very excited by the presence of 'young people' and wondered how we'd heard of the performance. We explained we'd picked up a leaflet at a Michala Petri performance in the Leicester Early Music Festival. She was very impressed that we'd come down from London. It is true that there was only one other person under the age of forty at the concert.

The music was very enjoyable. Simple and quiet, but with enjoyably complex ornamentation and frills in the baroque fashion.

Wed
30-Jun-2004

reverend billy and the church of stop shopping

Alex, Matt and I went to Conway Hall at Red Lion Square to behold the wonders of a post-religious, anti-capitalist gospel choir hailing from New York, who had been flown over by the Ecologist magazine for a performance. Reverend Billy is a kind of anti-capitalist, global justice performance artist, backed up by a whole choir of excellent happy gospel singers. They are all completely dedicated to their mission of converting people to the cause of 'stop shopping' and do that thing which the jokers and clowns of anti-corporate capitalism do best, being very funny and entertaining while being deadly serious at the same time. They were absolutely amazing. From the beginning where the choir went around the room covering any logos on people's clothing with strips of brightly coloured tape, to the opening and closing glorious harmonies of 'stop shopping', to the dances and songs of the individual choir members, to Billy himself, totally playing the part of a deep South evangelical man of god ('we put the odd in god!') but harnessing that style to a genuine celebratory progressive love of humanity, it was by turns uplifting, saddening and inspiring. Reverend Billy and his choir really put themselves on the line, constantly going into chain stores to preach to the unconverted and generally living the rock'n'roll global justice dream. They make very simple links between everyday consumer behaviour and environmental destruction, bombing and war, and the replacement of community-based social places, shops and cafes with the endless repeating boring brands of the global neoliberal monoculture.

Check out their website: http://revbilly.com. It has lots of sermons and calls to action, written in a style that's something like a cross between Julian Cope and Michael Moore.

Sample headlines:
'Against the Evil of Chain Stores: Lick Ye! and Kiss Ye with Long Tongue!'
'Gay Marriage is the Power and the Glory' ('and is the key to reversing global climate change brought on by trapped greenhouse gasses. Lesbian Marriage is the life everlasting and will save the Spotted Owl. Change-a-luliah!')

Thu
27-May-2004

the living embodiment of rock'n'roll!

Tom P, Neil, Nick, my brother and myself all sloped off to the Garage at Highbury and Islington last night to witness the glory of Guitar Wolf, the Tokyo rock band with absolutely no irony and an intense dedication to leather jackets, combs and the smouldering essence of rock'n'roll. They came on at ten, we pushed through to the front, and then the next hour was a crazy sweat drenched flying hair moshing screaming pit of madness. Very good band. The lead singer particularly takes the whole thing very seriously, inspiring all around him to also do so. The venue was also perfect, a fairly small dark dingy upstairs room, consecrated by the skulking gods of long hair and black t-shirts, built on powerful foundations of plastic cup beer and jubilant rock magic. It was one of those rare moments of alchemy, when things are just as they should be.

Balls of fire are burning in my body!
The temperature is rising in my leather jacket
The speed meter is fierce & impatient!
Speeding square on the Rock'n Roll!