overlap

Now, I’ve had my ticket for this gig for months, and long-awaited gigs have a habit of not quite turning out so good for the months of impatient waiting, but this was not to be the case. In the late 1990s I first came across Mick Thomas doing solo shows with Attila the Stockbroker, and was impressed enough to look for some of his back catalogue fronting Weddings Parties Anything to the point that I ended up working pretty hard on ebay to end up with six or seven albums. WPA reformed to do a show down under in 2006, and on subsequent european trips, Mick was asked if there was any chance of them doing a show over here enough times that I eventually got an email from the mailing list months ago inviting people to express a firm commitment to try to get there if such a gig were to happen. It turns out their last show in the UK was fourteen years ago, and with less than a dozen shows in Australia this time around, the only show in the northern hemisphere, probably ever, is always going to be a little bit special. Cover songs are often a bit of a lottery, but The Go Set were onto a winner by ending their set with a rocked up version of Billy Bragg’s Waiting For the Great Leap Forward. WPA top this with a highly appropriate slowed down trot through Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town, with Mark Wallace’s accordion and Jen Anderson’s fiddle doing the twin harmony guitar lines – genius! Two songs in, Mick’s shirt is soaked with sweat, the crowd are in full voice and it’s an absolute privilege just to witness this show. As a one-off event, I’m noting down the set so I end up knowing what they played, and as one song finishes and another starts within about ten seconds, there’s a notable intent to pack the songs in. I do like the stories Mick tells at his solo shows, but the effort to get on with it is very much appreciated, even if some people on stage look like they are only just catching their breath between songs! Mick, getting warmed up Unknown set pieces in songs can sometimes leave the unfamiliar gig-goer feeling excluded from a private event, but in this case having a good handle on virtually everything they play means I can demonstrate how far short of word perfect I am singing along. It also means that I understand what’s happening in Ticket In Tatts, when the line “I’m ten cents short of a dollar” is sung with Mick covering his eyes and Jen hiding behind Mark as a helpful crowd chucks copper coins at Mick to help him make up the shortfall. It would be easy for some performers to not enjoy that sort of thing, but Mick’s a bit tougher than that, and he can hardly argue that he didn’t ask for it. Indeed, the big don’t argue, to quote a WPA album title. Industrial Town sees the guest appearance of Swill from The Men They Couldn’t Hang singing (and identifying which vocal mike wasn’t working), and as Tilting At Windmills is belted out, we are ten songs in and my voice is starting to go. All too quickly we run through most of what is on the live album ‘They Were Better Live’ and a few select other tracks before Scorn Of The Women closes the set as a thoughtful reminder of what ANZAC day is all about. It’s one of the appealing factors of WPA for me, where the vast amounts of particularly British but also American stuff I listen to is outshone by exotic names of places I expect never to visit, no matter how exotic Warrnambool and Woolloomooloo may or may not turn out to be in reality. It’s also something that WPA and the Go Set share, a healthy sense of where they are from rather than a desperate urge to suppress what comes naturally in order to fit in with Hollywood or wherever the big money is these days. And it’s the natural sweat of authenticity that sees them back on stage for a three song encore before an epic and appropriately tapering For A Short Time fades away to finish off a very special night. I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for such grandiose claims, and even I rate this in my top ten gigs which is something that doesn’t happen often these days. Thanks Mick and co, that was truly splendid and I’m really glad you made it back to this side of the planet one last time – chonk on! Setlist: The Boys Are Back In Town Roaring Days Away Away Ticket In Tatts Laughing Boy Industrial Town Grey Skies Over Collingwood Luckiest Man Hungry Years Tilting At Windmills Rosy And Grey Father’s Day Rain In My Heart Sergeant Small Woman Of Ireland Streets Of Forbes Scorn Of The Women -------- Step In Step Out Wide Open Road Knockbacks In Halifax -------- For A Short Time

Labels: gigs, Jen Anderson, Mark Wallace, Michael Barclay, Mick Thomas, Paul Thomas, Stephen O'Prey, Weddings Parties Anything

It has become something of a habit to combine gigs in London with a bit of wandering around and seeing where else I find myself; this time I ended up meandering around the City before eventually hitting the Clerkenwell Road and heading back in to the Charing Cross Road area. It's the first time I've covered enough ground to see the amount of transport-related work that's going on in preparation for the Olympics, and while I understand the long-term regenerational benefits to the city, it looks like it's going to be a bit of a mess for a while. It's also the reason why the Astoria venue that was my destination for the evening is lined up for destruction, and having seen some memorable gigs there over the years it'll be a bit of a sad thing when it all goes. Surprise bands who are unfamiliar to me are always a welcome change, and in the case of The Go Set I'd spent five minutes on myspace to conclude that they sounded all right and I wanted to make sure I saw their support slot and left it at that, so it was with no firm expectations that I made it into the Astoria 2 five minutes before they were due on stage. No big announcement or introduction preceded them, just a couple of minutes of furious bagpiping before the piper was joined by the rest of the band. Despite being a long way from home, there was plenty of antipodean attendance at this ANZAC day show, and what we got was a glorious race through fifty minutes of good sweaty fun. They play what might be described as straight rock with a folk twist, with the pipes and a tin whistle heading towards what you'd get if you crossed China Drum with the Pogues. It's slightly distracting with the piper being barely audible over two guitars and a drummer that beats the kit into submission with nonchalant ease, so when the other instruments are not quiet there's an understandable urge in him to either play air guitar on his bagpipes or charge about the stage jumping up and down, and the whole thing adds up to a glorious racket. Lyrics aside, there's perhaps not a lot of subtlety about The Go Set just a healthy blast through some great rock songs, with the sort of honest simplicity that the Kaiser Ferdinand Party posse could learn a thing or two from – excellent stuff, and a new band whose material I now need to track down. I'd not have made the trip for them alone on the strength of what I knew, but if that had been a headline show rather than a support slot I'd not have been disappointed. Which is only part of the reason it gets a post of its own. More pictures to follow on flickr, but you can see for yourself whether you think they are serious about their music.

Labels: gigs, The Go Set

Just before I went away I finally got around to having my first haircut in, er, nine months. It doesn't really get any longer than this (plus the three inches of split ends that were trimmed) and despite having lived in a hairstyle timewarp for a very long time now, I still find myself slightly surprised by a) the difficulty of taking a back view self-portrait and b) quite how long my hair really is, perhaps because it's tied up or plaited so frequently. But nothing is forever!

Mostly I like driving. Or at least I like it when I have time to spare. I plan my driving accordingly, because I don't like the effects of feeling like it's questionable whether I'll get where I'm going on time, but then I'm frequently doing journeys I've done before and where I know roughly how long it takes. Taking yesterday off work to spend six hours of it driving isn't a lot of people's idea of fun, I imagine, and while the route is familiar, doing it on a weekday and risking involvement in rush hour is a new one on me. And doing that for a meeting with a defined start time meant I was clearing the ice off my car rather earlier than I would have preferred. Twenty-odd minutes to spare when I walked in the door was rather more than the two minutes before start time that the arrangements before the meeting are supposed to have been finalised, so it wasn't me that was cutting it fine. With something like fifteen years of variable standards of business management by another of different parties, this was a one-off opportunity to see the people involved in the latest saga of desperation in person, and find out a small amount about what may be coming next for myself rather than through the media. While I was there I made the most of briefly decent weather to take a quick walk around some of my favourite scenery, something I haven't done at all this football season, so that was an added bonus. And as for the football club, threatened with either liquidation or a bright new dawn? Well, today it was announced that one party had been successful in their aim of buying the club, and then that announcement was retracted and a different party was disclosed as the successful bidder. With this sort of example of knowing exactly what we are doing, is it any wonder the business has reached its current desperate straits? I only hope the new owner turns out to be either generous, or capable, preferably both.

Labels: AFCB, football

It's been a funny last year or so workwise, with various instances of stupidity. I've saved quite a bit of money by often not leaving the office in my lunch hour due to the apparently ever changeable "security" routine that doesn't need any sort of pass or identification one day and then has a red-faced buffoon shouting his way up the stairs insisting that nobody could possibly have got in the building without showing a pass for months. My tolerance for that sort of nonsense is limited, especially when it requires a mind reader to work out what is supposed to be going on, so the plus side is that my cash spending has been limited, even if my internet spending has gone some way to making up for that. My tolerance for my time being wasted by the world's most inept "training specialist" is not much greater, especially when this requires two full hours that could have been spent doing something more productive being lost to listening to something that even David Brent would have considered unnecessarily peppered with utterly meaningless business-ese. Naturally I did the only sensible thing possible, and after holding my tongue in the interests of not causing trouble, increased my collection of handbags by exactly one. Oddly I usually enjoy my work, with the proviso that it is only work, but indulging this sort of pointless craziness really doesn't bring out the best in me, and especially so when I'm still a little tired from the changing of the clocks and the disruption that brings. In addition to the fuzzy, barely recognisable postage stamp sized photo on the pass that the operators of the building insisted they needed even if they couldn't decide if they ever wanted to look at it or not, it has now been decreed that the company must issue photo-passes to everyone. Fortunately I'm in a position, both technologically and otherwise, to produce a picture that I'm happy with rather than the production line one-off mugshot. So when this came up, the least I could do was a quick dive for the Ronnie James Dior, and when the photo-pass eventually turns up, all of this is what I'm wearing in it.

Labels: jobsworth, make up, photos