On Saturday night Liz & I went to Hammersmith Apollo to see an appearance by the currently touring film director, actor, comic book enthusiast and self-professed enthusiast of the sound of his own voice – Kevin Smith.  What was particularly appealing about this rare appearance was the accompaniment of long-time collaborator, friend and co-star, Jason Mewes.  The night was called “Jay and Silent Bob Get Old”, and the promo email highlighted phrases like “They now perform the cult storytelling podcast Jay and Silent Bob Get Old, which chronicles their early …

We’re back up in Edinburgh this year for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – this time Marty’s over from Australia, and he’s joined Liz, Billy, Myk, Kat & I in a nice centrally-placed apartment for a week of theatrical excess and mayhem.  So far we’ve seen (I suspect I’ll edit this list a few times in the next couple of days to add detail as I get time & inclination):

Powaqqatsi
Andrew Maxwell’s Fullmooners
Three Man Roast
John Hegley / Family Wordship
David Leddy’s Untitled Love Story
Andy Zaltzman’s Political Animal
Simon Callow’s Tuesday at Tesco’s
Andy Zaltzman / …

Just quickly, New York proved its awesomeness the other night by turning up an opportunity to go see improvisational maestro Bobby McFerrin play a gig at the Highline Ballroom as part of the Blue Note Jazz Festival with a band he described as one of his personal favourites, The Yellowjackets.

Bit of an unusual gig – The Yellowjackets didn’t really do it for me so much, seeming a little bit too uptight and not “just going with the music”.  I can’t quantify that particularly well, but it’s a statement of taste, so …

60 comedians in 60 minutes sounds like a potentially ridiculous format for a gig, and if you thought that you’d be absolutely right.  However somebody cooked the concept up, and there’s clearly plenty of talent keen to get involved because when I went to Comedy Rush at the Shaftesbury Theatre it was the second night in the series.  Apparently revisiting an Edinburgh Fringe concept from 2001, the gargantuan lineup for each night was only hinted at with a few key names – it makes sense really, given the vagaries of …

Weird Al Yankovic is a comedy legend.  He released his first parody song in 1976, and has been steadily at it ever since.  Far from being mainstream, people claim not to know who he is and yet all seem to know a handful of his breakthrough songs.  And whilst touring nearly consistently as well, he seldom leaves the USA.  I was lucky enough to see him during his first trip to Australia in 2003, and on Monday night I had the privilege of watching his first ever concert in London, …

One of the most vibrant and fun fixtures on the UK calendar is the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe experience, and this year I was once again lucky enough to have the opportunity to go up there land in my lap.  Certainly a massive aspect of its appeal is the similarity the atmosphere bears to the Adelaide Fringe, only it’s on what feels like a much larger scale.  A bunch of us went up in 2007 and had a thoroughly and comprehensively excellent time, and we hoped this to be in …

Getting out to London’s former Millennium Dome – now ambiguously named “The O2″, like a selection of other venues around the continent – is always an exercise carried out with a sense of wistful resignation.  You know there’s nothing empirically good to do out there, and there’s the vague likelihood that it’ll be unecessarily difficult to get back again if everything doesn’t go EXACTLY to plan.  However it is one of London’s only 20,000+ seater venues, and they keep putting the big gigs on there.  So when one manages to …

I’ve previously waxed cynical about all-star comedy gigs for charities: a couple of the smaller ones have been fun, such as the MIND Comedy night at Leicester Square Theatre (although an element of the buzz there was because Daniel Kitson was on the bill), or the No Sweat! gig at the Cross Kings in Kings Cross (aside from the inept compering and the conspiracy theorist speaker, Andrew O’Neill, Stewart Lee and Josie Long really brought it home), and the mid-size ones were amusing enough (OrangAID was a fairly unspectacular bill …

It should be clear by now that I’m not a poodle.  At least they seem to learn by repetition.  I seem to keep buying tickets to large-scale comedy gigs and optimistically expecting to enjoy it.
The culprit in this case was the seemingly irresistible opportunity to be an audient at Channel 4′s Comedy Gala – a humungous comedy effort put together in conjunction with Off The Kerb (a fairly prominent comedy management company) to raise funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital.  By all accounts the idea was to put on the largest …

Buying a ticket to see German industrial hard rockers Rammstein seemed like a good idea at the time, and then afterwards I started to have a few hesitations, as the fans give over a certain image being a fairly hard & intense crowd, and though I’ve survived Iron Maiden and Prodigy gigs before, I really started to wonder whether this might be a bit “next level”.
Turns out it was, but for entirely different reasons.
As it happened, I didn’t find a taker for my second ticket, so I did some neat …