overlap

I've sat on this for a couple of weeks, in the hope it might come out in a slightly more fully formed manner. Being sat on a train and realising that I was coming into Waterloo for a gig for the first time in quite a few years was a brief reminder of my early trips to the big city, mostly to the old new Marquee on Charing Cross Road. The landmarks of the lego effect colourful blocks of flats and Battersea power station are still there, but the addition of a fair number of new buildings, and at least three CCTV cameras for every pigeon show how much has changed, and not necessarily for the better. 

As is becoming something of a routine, I headed out onto the South Bank, this time to visit an exhibition that a friend of mine had something in, wandered around taking clichéd tourist pictures (as you may have seen on flickr), knocked off a few light trail shots of the early evening rush hour along the Victoria Embankment, and ended up passing in the street a well known celeb with the initials TPT in Pimlico. Making the most of the opportunity to do stuff in London over and above go to the gig suits me and there's plenty of it to see, though it does sometimes mean getting to the gig already tiring after a couple of hours of brisk walking. It's a long way to go though, and the travel-pub-venue-home routine seems a bit restrictive to me, so if I can fit something else into the time, so much the better.

I only been to Brixton Academy a couple of times, the last being four years ago, so it's not one of those venues I'm especially familiar with. After their brief reformation in memory of Wiz, the full scale two-off Carter USM 90s revival extravaganza was much awaited in many quarters. And while I wouldn't have missed it, I went with slightly mixed feelings. Despite my concerns about getting inside on schedule to miss nothing, we made it with enough time to see Sultans of Ping deliver an all hits support set, and it was superb to be reminded what a great frontman Niall is.

As a flavour of the moment big band, in the early 90s Carter somewhat pre-dated Oasis when they moved into the multi-thousand capacity venues. One of my least favourite gig memories is of a venue that holds about three thousand, overfull of beered up lads in sweaty Fred Perry shirts, exercising their rights to barge into people. One of my more favourite memories is the last time I saw Carter in the olden days, at that point with a fully expanded line-up of six people, playing to little over seventy people in support of their fantastic but not commercially acclaimed album I Blame The Government.

Against this background, it's a little rich to say the least, when some obnoxious fat legend in nobody's lunchtime introduces them by slagging off another band of that generation, indeed the one I first saw Carter with, for still touring and sometimes playing to crowds in only three figures.

There are other places you can find two week old setlists posted on the web, and with a freshly minted greatest hits double CD in the shops, the content of the set was pretty much what you might expect. The Pet Shop Boys cover (Rent) was great, Fruity's drink-free regime had paid dividends, and Team Carter had obviously spent a lot of time, effort and money on the lights and the sound. Getting the visuals of the videos from those tracks which were singles on screens in the background was great fun, if something of a lightning trip through history, and there was nothing in almost two hours that felt obviously missing. To hear the songs Jim's been doing some of in his solo incarnation back in their fully souped up electrified glory was great, and for a brief period it was 1993 all over again.

And that may be precisely why for me there was something just slightly missing. Maybe it's that I've not been to enough gigs with thousands of people in a while, maybe my natural disinclination towards getting barged in the middle of huge crowds of people was set to a higher than normal level, and/or maybe my recollection of the over-exuberance of beered up lads in sweaty Fred Perry shirts was rather accurate and the passage of time hasn't been fully accompanied by people growing up. It doesn't suit me to stand in the middle at the front, where stagediving muppets can be expected, so I don't do it. Perhaps due to the one-off nature of Wiz's gig, and of course the very fact it was Wiz's gig, I think I enjoyed four songs of Carter there more than I did the two hours of Brixton.

An hour or so later, back in suburbia collecting my car from a commuter belt station where even the car park prices are eye-watering, it seemed like I've come a very long way since those days, and while change for the sake of it is really no change at all, I can't imagine wanting to go back.

Funny time of year, but seems like a bunch of stuff comes up at once. At some point in either the last couple of days or the next couple of days is the anniversary of my handing my notice in at my old job, which was the sort of cause for celebration that ranks with an Olympic gold or a World Cup win - I was reminded of this when earlier this week I bumped into someone I worked with there. Equally I've just come out on the right side of a not inconsiderable number of redundancies, but I'm aware that nothing is forever, and I could just as easily have been on the other side. It's only work, and I'm sure something would turn up, but it does no harm for me to be reminded how lucky I am.

Not a borderline famous rock star, for once, but the grim reaper's been busy again within my world, if not especially close to me. Last week someone I first encountered over twenty-three years ago died, aged 77 which is hardly all that young. Last time I saw her, she said goodbye to me and it was entirely clear that it *was* goodbye rather than a variant of see you next time - she was definitely ready to go by then. Given two weeks to live on diagnosis, she died eight months later, which was long enough for everyone to get used to the idea and think about practical preparations, and make the most of the remaining time. She was not in much pain except for the last day, and her husband says that he was extremely lucky to have that long goodbye time and for it to come as neither a long drawn out painful death, nor a sudden shock for which nobody is prepared or expecting. In the circumstances you probably don't get much of a better go at the inevitable than that, and at that age after a full and happy family life, there's plenty to celebrate there. On that note, I also see Chad Varah's died, and that's another very frutiful life to be celebrated, not mourned.

The internet's a funny place. One of the things I like it for is the opportunity it provides to deal with content over style, in the sense that if you're interested in whatever I'm waffling on about and you search for that, you might find me here, but if you're, say, a colleague just interested in sticking your nose into what I'm up to, then you won't find it by looking for me. And even if you did find me from the content search, you wouldn't necessarily find me identifiable.

And that matters because it's only that anonymity that means I feel comfortable with being open about things that are important to me, although the truth is I've already become far less open online over the last couple of years, and losing a friend or two along the way already leaves me increasingly reverting to type and keeping my counsel far more frequently than I might prefer.

Against this background, you might imagine my lack of amusement at being found on F*ceb**k, despite my efforts at obfuscation, by someone I know from the real world. Begging for "friendship" from everybody they've ever met is perhaps not the end of the world, and to be honest I'm surprised to have even been searched for by someone who I don't particularly consider a friend, but with whom I'm on what I guess I'd call reasonably friendly but nothing special terms, and whom I run into a couple or three times a year.

After years of gradual adjustment to even limited public exposure, I'm not prepared to surrender my hard-won ability to discuss my TVism or anything else for the benefit of what little F*ceb**k actually offers me, and much as I don't always feel entirely convinced of it, I do know I shouldn't be prepared to live in fear. And if isolating content from identity is the only way I can make that balance out for me, then that's the end of my F*ceb**k adventure, and it's for the best with this very limited amount of impact rather than whatever else might follow further down the line.

Two quotes - firstly me, here, a week ago. "I dare say I'll live, but that won't stop me also hoping for another band (that I now won't be seeing) to get the reformation fever thing, that turns one gig into the odd few!" And secondly, Dave Ling, from his site at the link on the right. "Confirming pre-show whispers that FM were already considering some sort of post-Firefest rebirth, a clearly shellshocked Pete Jupp left the stage by informing the crowd: "We'll see you again in 2008". YES! How 'bout that for good news.

Labels: FM, gigs, rock

In a repeat of a gig from a few weeeks ago, it turns out I missed out adding here what I wrote elsewhere. Which I've now added below. This one was a better show, on account of great onstage vibes and an interested audience, as well as a setlist that included Maybe, which is a song that doesn't get aired enough, so I'm very happy with that. What makes this more notable is that I spent half an hour before the show chatting with a guy who'd come over from the US for a week of gigs in european capital cities (and Blackpool!), which is a tremendous effort. Quite why anyone would travel that far and then want to waste their time watching The chuffing V*rve is another story, but there's no accounting for taste. If you do ever find this Scott, I hope the rest of your week was as good as tonight's show! Lots of people have their own ideas what Miles Hunt has to offer, based on a rubbish cover version with Vic Reeves, and one monster pop hit. Fair enough, but they're missing an awful lot. The latest material, and what you'll see on tour at the moment is acoustic guitar with fiddle accompaniment, and even in the short support slots on some gigs on this current tour showcase that material a treat. A little over half an hour is just long enough for a handful of tracks of the new(ish) album and a few established classics from the back catalogue - great stuff. Vinny Peculiar, better known to some people as Vinny Reilly of Durutti Column fame, cuts a strange figure. Visually it's Jarvis Cocker chic, with a hint of Russell Mael animation in places. The songs are a little Jarvis-esque, and though I forget the titles, the one about losing a girlfriend to Jesus and the one about Two Fat Lovers do strike the same sort of kitchen sink drama domestic story note that Jarvis hits so easily, albeit from a Mancunian angle rather than the other side of the Pennines. The keyboards make all the difference to the sound, but with a rhythm section of BoneheadOasis and MikeJoyceSmiths it is inevitable there is a Manc flavour to the show. I didn't stay for all of Vinny this time, but Everlasting Teenage Bedroom is a fantastic song.

Labels: gigs, Miles Hunt, Vinny Peculiar