In a massive stroke of luck (it had sold out by the time I found out about it and you couldn't get tickets online for less that £60) I ended up going to see Explosions in the Sky at The Astoria last night. I remember the first time I heard them quite clearly - I was having dinner in a cafe in Brighton before a gig a few years ago, and I liked the music they were playing so much that I asked what it was. That's pretty rare for me, what with my morbid fear of speaking to anyone. The show was fantastic - it had a similar effect on me to Mark Kozelek - I could have stood there, trance like, buried in it, for the entire night. If it was still going now, I'd still be there I think. I'm not really into instrumental stuff mostly, but what they do is really hypnotic. It's kind of calming and exciting at the same time. Oddly, they had a keyboard set up, which they never used, other than to get my hopes up for an encore that never came. They also looked really cool, apart from the guy on the right who kept doing hippy dancing and taking massive steps everywhere. Afterwards we went to a really nice underground cocktail bar that I would never have spotted in a million years and made me want to move to London. I wish there were places like that here. Maybe there are and I've just never spotted them. I had a Brandy Alexander for Feist reasons, which was girly looking but surprisingly nice, then got the last train back, which, as ever, featured some completely made up stops (seriously, Gordon Hill?). I'm not sure I approve of The Railway's programme of repeatedly building new little stations just to make the last train take longer.
The gig with Dan at the Barfly on Tuesday was really disappointing, which serves me right for looking forward to it. I guess you always get short shrift when you're first support to touring bands, but they took absolutely ages over their soundchecks (I suspect maliciously, but maybe not - at least they didn't do what The Undertones did when Logan supported them and leave their engineer plugging in and unplugging a cable from the desk for 45 minutes for no reason other than delaying us), meaning that we hardly got one at all (and we had to fight for that) and were generally made to feel pretty unwelcome. Also, there wasn't a mic for my guitar amp, which is stupid and pissed me off, because I had no way of telling how loud it was sounding out the front compared to everything else and anyway, loud as it is, my amp is never going to fill a room that size from on the floor behind a barrier. I think everyone felt uncomfortable/uncertain on stage and couldn't really hear what was going on, and we didn't play well. We were all a bit too angry/fed up to watch the main acts, so I dunno what they were like. Vincent Vincent and the Villains had a lot of drums. Onwards and upwards.