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Am just returned from my stint as a member of Bill Drummond's The17. Given the whole point of the exercise is to stand apart from recorded music, it would seem unfair to record it here, but to all of you - and especially those who already expressed an interest but whom I couldn't handle herding - I strongly recommed you get in touch and get involved.
Luxembourg did their usual thing of playing their best when the odds were against them, but their set aside, Friday night was not great. So I very much needed the steampunk extravaganza* of Saturday's White Mischief. Such costumes! Moustaches Dali would envy, the goggles of gentlemen engineers, brass-bound jetpacks, silverware become radar dishes, armoured waistcoats. The fairer sex seemed mainly to go for variations on the theme of corsetry, which was as historically justified as it was welcome. Oh, and there was one cove dressed as a giant panda, who provided a handy locational reference if one was trying to find anyone in the British Sea Power crowd. And this was quite the best I've seen BSP, surfing the edge of chaos, dropkicking owls and scaling the balcony, and somehow projecting such concentrated sonic power that the next day, I felt like I must have spent at least some of the evening getting kicked in the midsection. Kunta Kinte also clicked for me, far more so than at the previous White Mischief (and on the whole, the Scala was definitely a much happier venue for the night than Conway Hall**). But to speak only of the headliners would be to misrepresent the wonder of the night - because it was a night, an event, not just a concert with trappings and frills. One could wander happily past dancers and skin-harpists and time-travelling pirates, or stop and stare. It felt, as too few nights feel, like the sort of club one sees in films, the party at the mad nobleman's palace.
There were a lot of poppies about last week; more than the last couple of years, I'm sure. Perhaps it was that ad campaign that did it (although personally I found the poppy ghosts bloody terrifying), but society at large seems to have remembereed that acknowledging a debt of honour to the dead and wounded is not the same thing as expressing an opinion on any particular war. I've even seen them worn unselfconsciously at gigs and clubs, which for the few years previous had seemed very much a Statement. And today, promptly, they're all gone - not dragging on shabbily and gauchely as they sometimes do. Perhaps it helped that the 11th fell on the Sunday this year?
(Odd though it may seem, I think the best piece I've seen on Remembrance Sunday this year was a retrospective on Amiga classic Cannon Fodder. Oh, and while we're on remembrance - I've never read more than the odd article or quote of Norman Mailer, and was always rather put off by his Dave Sim-approved comments on women writers. But this wonderfully honest and non-hagiographic appreciation by Christopher Hitchens makes me reconsider my failure to investigate further, cliche though it is to get into the work of the newly dead)
My contribution to Blog A Penguin Classic, a review of their edition of Henry V, is now online at their site; my initial grand plans were undermined when I spotted the character limit, but that may have been for the best.
Who drinks so much they don't realise they need to pee? And if they do, how come they don't just wet themselves? That always seems to work for the street drinker community. Granted, I am aware of one previous case of someone bursting their bladder rather than letting it out, but that was one of my less illustrious ancestors, who couldn't bear the idea of going for a wee on a train. So yes, OK, the unyielding will of the overly decorous leading to a burst bladder, fair enough. But the debaucheries of Binge Drink Britain (TM)? I find that improbable.
*What music does a steampunk night play? Well, I dressed myself up to the second Dresden Dolls album, and two of the DJs aired tracks from it, so that would be the short answer.
**Which has given me the seeds of a theory on the incompatibility of humanism and burlesque.
Luxembourg did their usual thing of playing their best when the odds were against them, but their set aside, Friday night was not great. So I very much needed the steampunk extravaganza* of Saturday's White Mischief. Such costumes! Moustaches Dali would envy, the goggles of gentlemen engineers, brass-bound jetpacks, silverware become radar dishes, armoured waistcoats. The fairer sex seemed mainly to go for variations on the theme of corsetry, which was as historically justified as it was welcome. Oh, and there was one cove dressed as a giant panda, who provided a handy locational reference if one was trying to find anyone in the British Sea Power crowd. And this was quite the best I've seen BSP, surfing the edge of chaos, dropkicking owls and scaling the balcony, and somehow projecting such concentrated sonic power that the next day, I felt like I must have spent at least some of the evening getting kicked in the midsection. Kunta Kinte also clicked for me, far more so than at the previous White Mischief (and on the whole, the Scala was definitely a much happier venue for the night than Conway Hall**). But to speak only of the headliners would be to misrepresent the wonder of the night - because it was a night, an event, not just a concert with trappings and frills. One could wander happily past dancers and skin-harpists and time-travelling pirates, or stop and stare. It felt, as too few nights feel, like the sort of club one sees in films, the party at the mad nobleman's palace.
There were a lot of poppies about last week; more than the last couple of years, I'm sure. Perhaps it was that ad campaign that did it (although personally I found the poppy ghosts bloody terrifying), but society at large seems to have remembereed that acknowledging a debt of honour to the dead and wounded is not the same thing as expressing an opinion on any particular war. I've even seen them worn unselfconsciously at gigs and clubs, which for the few years previous had seemed very much a Statement. And today, promptly, they're all gone - not dragging on shabbily and gauchely as they sometimes do. Perhaps it helped that the 11th fell on the Sunday this year?
(Odd though it may seem, I think the best piece I've seen on Remembrance Sunday this year was a retrospective on Amiga classic Cannon Fodder. Oh, and while we're on remembrance - I've never read more than the odd article or quote of Norman Mailer, and was always rather put off by his Dave Sim-approved comments on women writers. But this wonderfully honest and non-hagiographic appreciation by Christopher Hitchens makes me reconsider my failure to investigate further, cliche though it is to get into the work of the newly dead)
My contribution to Blog A Penguin Classic, a review of their edition of Henry V, is now online at their site; my initial grand plans were undermined when I spotted the character limit, but that may have been for the best.
Who drinks so much they don't realise they need to pee? And if they do, how come they don't just wet themselves? That always seems to work for the street drinker community. Granted, I am aware of one previous case of someone bursting their bladder rather than letting it out, but that was one of my less illustrious ancestors, who couldn't bear the idea of going for a wee on a train. So yes, OK, the unyielding will of the overly decorous leading to a burst bladder, fair enough. But the debaucheries of Binge Drink Britain (TM)? I find that improbable.
*What music does a steampunk night play? Well, I dressed myself up to the second Dresden Dolls album, and two of the DJs aired tracks from it, so that would be the short answer.
**Which has given me the seeds of a theory on the incompatibility of humanism and burlesque.
