ComEnts

I've been even worse than normal at blogging. Sorry! I've been on holiday relaxing in the countryside and have just bought a house...

Jail Guitar Doors, which I think I mentioned in my last blog, was really good. Loads of great bands and £2000 raised for charridee which is brilliant. None of my pictures turned out very well which is a shame. I'm off to watch Pete and the Pirates at a festival in Rotterdam over the weekend, hopefully there'll be lots to tell about that in the near future.

I've also just changed the settings on here so I get an e-mail when someone posts a comment asking me why I've not updated this thing. I know some of you will appreciate that!

Recently on Berkshire Live I suggested that if people were fed up with not being given gigs, they should just put their own on, and that's exactly what we did last night. It was a very incestuous affair really. Joey Ultra invited Monkey Bob (our guitarist Paul's other band) and The Limes (my brother Pete's Uni band) to play with us at the BBBs (where my other brother kinda sorts out bookings for wednesday nights).

The BBBs has some great points and bad points. Good points are; it's easy to sort out a gig but bear in mind they might be booked up a few months in advance, it's free, there's a PA you can use and you can just basically get on with it and sort your own thing out. The down sides are that you have to sort it all out yourself, including everything from getting someone to work the PA and someone/something to play music between the bands. We were lucky yesterday to have a couple of great people step in to help us with that stuff. Many thanks Luella and Joe! It's also quite a difficult room to do sound in, there's a low ceiling and loads of pillars so the sound bounces around all over.

Monkey Bob opened the evening and I wasn't sure what to expect. PaulC had told us stories of past Monkey Bob gigs that sounded like complete carnage but in the end it was much more about the music and less about the mentalness which was nice. It's still punk but Lawrence can actually sing and they did well, especially for their first gig for ages!

The Limes turned up with 2 bass players, 3 guitarists, a percussionist, keyboardist and a drummer. Approximately double the number of members they had last time I saw them. They were a lot less laid back and rambling with the full band, and I don't mean that being laid back and rambling was a bad thing, but it was all a lot tighter and more professional sounding. I really enjoyed it.

We were on last. I got all confused about sound levels and a bit paranoid, kept turning myself up and down. Enjoyed playing a lot more than the last couple of gigs, but I was still frustrated that we don't seem to be able to play as well as we do in rehearsals in a gig situation. When I say we, I mean me obviously I think everyone else did pretty well. My little brother said he was quite impressed which means a lot. Next gig I'm attending is the Jail Guitar Doors thing at the Fez this saturday which has been plugged to death but it's a great line-up and cause. Kicks off early, first band is 4pm.

About 3 hours until I'm due to be at the BBBs in Reading to set up for our "Introducing: Joey Ultra" gig. I am really looking foward to it. Somehow it's worked out that PaulC (Joey Ultra and Monkey Bob guitarist) is driving pretty much all the gear for all the bands to the gig, bit of a logistical nightmare but I'm sure it'll all come together on the night!

Hope to see some of you there. I guess there'll be a report tomorrow.

Friday night was the launch night for Pete and the Pirates new single, Come on Feet. The launch party was at The Water Rats in Kings Cross, which is a cozy little venue. It was a really good evening.

Let's Wrestle opened the night. They are a punky 3 piece, loads of energy, funny songs and a really good start to the night.

They were followed by Screaming Tea Party, who I'd been told were really, really good. They certainly didn't disappoint. Apparently the band members are 2 Japanese guys and an Italian girl, the big city is so cosmopolitan! They played really interesting stuff. I don't know what it is but the combination of pop and metal and spiky punk seems to be something that's relatively common with japanese bands but you almost never get it here. Screaming Tea Party were all of those, and quite proggy too. The music was great, and their stage show was even better. It was really nice to see them picking everything up again once they'd trashed the stage after their set.

Matthew Sawyer and The Ghosts was next, apparently most of the Ghosts weren't there. I didn't see most of his set because I was outside trying to cool down. It was an incredibly hot evening!

The Pirates set was absolutely brilliant. These days, now they actually rehearse a lot, they are really professional sounding. They've managed to get really tight without losing any of the energy or sounding sterile and the new songs sound fantastic. They've got a busy summer coming up playing major festivals all over the shop and an Irish and Scottish tour to follow. Exciting times!

Last night I went to see Does It Offend You, Yeah? at the Fez club. They were supporting Hadouken on tour and Rob the DIOYY drummer, and former drummer with my old band Sonic Undermind, invited me along. I had a really good time. It was a 16+ gig so I felt suitably old. It was a "no ID, no drinks" gig, and you had to get a wristband to buy drinks. The bouncer dispensing the alcohol wristbands kind of laughed in a pitying way at me as I half heartedly waved id towards him. You mean I don't look under 18? Balls.

The Kids, as I'll patronisingly refer to them mainly due to my jealousy that I no longer am one, were having a great time. A batch of about 200 at the front danced through all the acts, going especially mental for DOIYY. The touring group for DOIYY has only been together for a few weeks but they've already started to build a decent stage show. Loads of crowd interaction, and even band members crowd surfing (didn't they read the posters saying it was banned?).

Hadouken had some really good songs, but mixed in between was quite a lot of boring samey filler stuff, the energy dropped and the crowd didn't seem to be getting into it as much. They still got huge cheers between songs and their good songs were really good. Much more metal influenced than I was expecting, and there were a couple of places I thought Dizzee Rascal should sue them for stealing, but at their best they were great.

No, not the TV show! Since I started my new blog I installed google analytics on this blog, so I could see who was visiting and reading. Kevin the owner of Josaka and this blog has always said that it got a surprising amount of traffic. Well he said it got a lot of traffic and I said it was surprising considering what a load of old tosh I talk. I got my first proper full days worth of data this morning and it seems we had 52 unique visitors yesterday. 52! Most of these are direct links but some people have found the blog by searching. Kevin has all his sites very well set up for search engine indexing which is excellent, but it's interesting to see what people are searching for. It seems my post on mxmf conversion is getting a few hits, but brilliantly someone found this blog by searching for "what is easier to play the mandolin or guitar". Genius.

So, Mark Thomas was very good on Saturday night. I found out later that the gig was #1 in the Guardian Guide's recommended list for the week. Which was good. He was very funny. First half of the show was about his protesting of the SOCPA bill that means you need to get permission to demonstrate in a large area of central London. It was very funny and the final part was that he's set up a company called McDemo who are a professional demonstrations company who'll register a demo on your behalf and perform it for you whilst you sit in the comfort of your own home. It only costs a fiver so I'm going to get one done. Suggestions for what I should protest about in comments section please. Here is a map of the zone, you can protest about anything in the zone, but I'd like to make it funny and appropriate.

As someone said they like them. Yesterday I went to the BBBs for a drink. It's the first day of their new no-smoking policy, which I've been really looking forward to... but it was a nice day so we just sat outside where you're allowed to smoke! Then I watched the football and seemed to get rather drunk. It wasn't a great game, but England did ok I think.

Tonight I'm going to see Mark Thomas at South Street. Once again, despite saying I'd try and go to more comedy, it's only because someone else had spare tickets, not because I've actually sorted it out myself. D'oh!

I am now also contributing to an additional blog at Lazy View.

If you have a google home page you can add the feed from that to your homepage with this button:

I might have to see about redeploying this site back onto the blogger servers, it seems there's quite a lot of additional functionality available if you do that. eg. Site feeds etc.

Don't worry, I'll keep updating this place with the same old infrequent boring dross I normally do!