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 …

Every now and again a weekend comes up which culminates in an almost shellshocked feeling of “Wow, how lucky am I?!”.  And the 15th was the beginning of just such a weekend, because it started with a chance to see marathon-talking & epically curious global documenter Henry Rollins at Royal Festival Hall.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch Rollins’ spoken word shows a couple of times in the past, and this time was every bit as engaging & inspiring.  He’s famous for being a hard punk powerhouse, but as he’s aged, …

Yet another one of those rare opportunities that crop up as a result of living here: on Tuesday night Paul, HC & I were fortunate enough to attend “The Last Night Of The Poms” at the Royal Albert Hall – a concert featuring the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, and starring Housewife Gigastar Dame Edna Everage, and Australia’s former cultural attaché to the Court of St James’s, and now Chairperson of the Australian Chapter of the International Cheese Board: Sir Les Patterson.
Roundly panned by newspaper critics, I have to say I …

Went & saw U2 on Friday night (the other week… 14th, I think it was) out at the London Cathedral to Football: Wembley Stadium.  I’d never been to a U2 gig before.

I think it’s fair to say that it was massively frigging impressive.
They’re not a band that I’ve ever been fanatical about, however they are of course — like Madonna, Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, etc. — one of the “big acts” of my lifetime, and them playing 2 nights at Wembley Stadium gave me a 1 in …

Quickish gig review — on Wednesday night Libby, Owen, Belinda, Tom, Brett, Rachel, The Puzzler, Pamela and I all braved the rigours of travelling south of the river to visit the O2 dome-thing for the farewell concert of industrial rocker legends Nine Inch Nails.  Admittedly we didn’t brave it all together, and even if we had done it would have been a bit futile because we were spread all over the shop.  Probably just as well, cos you couldn’t really talk to each other during the gig (and why would …

What a weekend!  This year saw the 75th anniversary of The Morris Ring, celebrated at the Thaxted Ring Meeting (I know, the what?!), and once again the Westminster Morris Men were honoured to participate.  What this translates into for our young hero is a weekend absolutely jam-packed with dancing, beer sampling, travelling around Essex, watching other people dance, singing in pubs, listening to top-class folk music being played in the same pubs in an effort to drown out some of the less-good singing, and generally having a mad and slightly …

Review of The Prodigy at Wembley Arena:  Quite good.
Slightly more informative review: Given that going to see an electronic rock/breakbeats act warrants more than a series of complaints about the length of the queue to get in, it seemed relevant to at least remark on the fact it ever took place.
Housemate James & I made our way out to the former swimming pool, and after an hour and 15 minutes of queueing found ourselves inside the venue on the arena floor, just in time to miss nearly the entire set …