Spare time seems to be at a premium this week! Charlie and Dan are gonna be so cranked off that I've updated my site today though – they've been hassling me for the last few days about not having written anything new, and then at 4am this morning they shot off to Greece for a week's (entirely well deserved) holiday.
Once again, I've had a stonkingly busy week, in both activity and intensity. I won't bore you with a lot of the detail, however one obvious standout point of excellence was Wednesday night, when Paul the dodgy Aussie, Chris (aka Lord Science) and I went down to Brixton Academy to see The John Butler Trio.
Man, what a wild gig ! The place was absolutely rammed with Aussies – Chris made the comment that he felt like he was in the airport bar in Sydney… you could hear almost every regional variation on the Aussie twang. Paul & I told him to shut up and get a beer in his hand.
One of the things was that because of the ambient noise (i.e. the constant babble of all the idiots getting more and more pissed) and the vagaries of the PA system, it was often difficult to make out lyrics. In the case of John Butler though, his lyrics are quite often pointedly political, which when you're conscious of can throw you a bit from being able to sink back in and just enjoy the music. Tonight though was simply a case of getting into the awesome groove that that band creates.
They opened up with “Treat your mama”, which got the crowd nice and fired – in listening to it again later on CD I was surprised that there were as many references to John Howard in there as there were… a case in point of my earlier statement I guess !
There were a couple of other of his songs off “Sunrise Over Sea” that I liked better live, although without the track list in front of me I couldn't say which. I still thought it a shame that he didn't play “Home is where the heart is”, but then I've probably completely missed the point of that one too, and it's probably about some issue which makes it either impractical, insensitive or irrelevant to sing it in England. And of course he finished up with “Zebra”, which is just an all-round wicked song.
Paul and Chris seemed fairly impressed with the gig – we were all kind of grooving along to the music for most of it. Not *dancing* as such, but more that kind of slightyly uncoordinated rocking back and forth in time with the music and slapping your fists on your hips occasionally for emphasis – more akin to what you'd expect from a Rockin' Flower. At one point there was a short-ish girl in front of us who elected to climb up on her boyfriend's back, piggy-back style, which in turn exposed us to a view of about 5cm of plumber's crack. It was a real test of will to not pour beer or drop coins down there.
What else…? Last week was Charlie's farewell drinks from work, which was a lot of fun and had a pretty good turnout. I think this picture of Hannah and I provides a pretty good synopsis of the evening's performance. Thankfully no photos were captured of certain other aspects of the evening… but it's good to see that the Full Moon is still alive and well as a form of communication.
Time to dash off. Maybe I'll pop back on here tomorrow and espouse my views of what I thought about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.