Are you out there? Can you hear this?

Published on Mon 6 Dec 2010

I've decided to move this here from myspace, as the only advantage of myspace (the fact that it used to tell people when I'd written something) has finally been removed. Them redeveloping their site and forgetting to put in the RSS feed was the final straw. Also, they've made it very hard to see old ones. I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep writing this anyway, I don't seem to have much time these days. I'll start to fill in the back episodes slowly over in front of the TV as the weeks go by. I (eventually) got the whole lot out of myspace. 260,000 words. I've wasted my life.

The last couple of weeks have been comparatively quiet.  The Travis Waltons did a show at The Portland, which wasn't as good as others have been due to a soundman mix up straight out of one of the lower grade American comedies involving the landlord having the same name as one of the people who could maybe have been doing the sound. And ended up doing it, but not really having enough time to get it quite right. I don't know much about how it sounded because I had a loud guitar amp by my head (I was slightly deaf the next day, despite my earplugs), but the feedback I got was "LOUD" and I'm fairly sure I didn't cover myself in glory, though I couldn't really hear what I was doing. The other bands, The Judge Reinholds and (what I saw of) Magoo were great. Onwards and upwards. 

Jason came to visit last weekend. We watched Splash! then went to the pub and sat in front of the fire watching You Only Live Twice (or whichever Bond film it is where they shave his chest and he passes for Japanese. There was another amazing bit where he was trapped a room with a heavily armoured door and paper walls) and Federer v Nadal. Predictably, this also happened at one point:

I went to see Dar Williams at Union Chapel last night, and it was lovely. Andy and I went for a Nando's beforehand (2 in a month! - life is good) and used about a year's worth of luck up on a quiz machine in the Hope and Anchor.

I didn't much like the support act Catherine AD (A.D.? A-D?) - she was fine at playing and the strings sounded nice, but the songs were precocious rather than good, and I've never been a fan of Kate Bush. Also I couldn't get past the feeling that she's being bankrolled by indulgent parents. Not that there's even anything wrong with that.

Watching anything there is pretty bloody nice though...

I was a bit nervous before Dar's set about the presence of a couple of keyboards, because there seems to be something about the kind of people that end up playing keyboards for folk music that makes them choose cheesy piano sounds and play as many notes as possible, but it became obvious very quickly that the guy she had ( Bryn Roberts his name is I think) was more concerned about making everything sound good than showing off and added quite a lot. I've gone on about Dar Williams often enough in the past, so I'll just say that it was lovely. She played a fair amount of newer stuff which tends to be a bit issue based for me, but she told a lot of funny stories (my favourites being a slight whinge about the songwriters who end up as the soundtrack to medical dramas because they can write polished love songs, as an introduction to a song about the  Milgram experiment and not being able to be on the cover of High Times on account of not using marijuana) and we got If I Wrote You (which was particularly beautiful), February, As Cool As I Am, Spring Street and The Blessings (which I'm pretty sure I've not heard before, and, it turns out have had the words wrong to all this time). She broke a string just before the second to last song and, oddly for a professional I thought, didn't have a spare guitar or change it, but played bravely on. I guess if you rarely break strings it's a balance between the risk of actually breaking one and the hassle of carrying more stuff.  

I've been listening to Withered Hand a lot for the last week or so. I first heard of him a couple of years ago when I did a gig in Edinburgh with Small Town Boredom and he was playing elsewhere in the city and (apparently) pinched a fair amount of the people who might have otherwise gone. I've forgiven him, and them, though because his album is really great. Genius lyrics. Check it out.