Guns 'n' Roses - Live at the SECC Glasgow

I have to admit that I've never been a Guns 'n' Roses fan.  I was about 11 when they first became popular with 'Appetite for Destruction' and I just didn't  like them.  Initially it was because I thought they were too poppy and later because I thought Axl was a twat.  As I grew older I could appreciate some of their songs.  They do have a few good songs but Axl continued to be a twat.

One of my friends wanted to see them.  He had a spare ticket so he asked me to go with him.  I agreed with some trepidation.  At least I would be able to tick another big name off the list of bands to see.  I was also interested in seeing Thin Lizzy (or at least a band that uses the name and songs of Thin Lizzy).

It was a hot day in Glasgow on Friday.  My friend and I went to the SECC at around 6ish to get parked.  A sign on the doors warned that Thin Lizzy would be on at GNR would take the stage at 9:30PM and play for a very long time.  We went for a meal before returning to see Thin Lizzy.  Phil Lynott is irreplaceable and probably embodied Thin Lizzy for most people.  He was missed tonight.  Ricky Warwick made a decent attempt but it really felt like a tribute band. 

Axl and band finally arrived on stage at 1035PM.  By that time the crowd was drunk and tired.  I saw a few very young children who were clearly out well past their bedtimes.  People drifted off at an accelerating rate throughout the 3 hour show. 

Guns 'n' Roses had a strange habit of spoiling their best songs with loud fireworks.  It's a bit stupid to let off a firework that is twice as loud as the band during your most famous song.  It sort of spoils the impact of the music.  It was really annoying. 

Axl had several costume changes and grand pianos were moved around the stage.  A number of models (?strippers) danced at the side of the stage.  Axl disappeared for a bit and the other guys played their own songs.  It was all very boring.

After 33 songs it finished at 1:30AM.  People were running out of the venue by then.  Many fans would have been unable to stay till the end because of a reliance on public transport.  I was just glad to get to my bed.  This could have been a great 80 minute show.  It was an overblown 3 hours.

New Order live at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh

I've been neglecting this blog recently.  I've been busy with work and I've just not felt like writing much.  I've also not been to many gigs recently but New Order are worth writing about.

I was born in 1977 so I remember New Order being on the radio and the TV a lot when I was a kid.  I started to listen to Joy Division when I was 11 or 12 and the crossover between these two great bands made them both seem even more special.  

This was the first time that I've managed to see New Order.  I was meant to be working this weekend so I nearly didn't see them but a fortuitous swap at work went my way so I got a ticket.  The Glasgow show sold out in hours so I had to travel through to Edinburgh.  This did give me a chance to check out the Usher Hall.

The support band played. I stood and waited for New Order.

They started with a bit of Elegia then they went into Crystal. Unfortunately the vocals were mixed down low so we couldn't hear much of what Barney was singing. The band sounded good but they were quiet.  In quick succession we got Regret, Ceremony and Love Vigilantes.  Later on we heard Bizzare Love Triangle, True Faith,The Perfect Kiss and Blue Monday with Temptation finishing the main set. An online look at the Glasgow set lets me know that 1963 was played the night before which is upsetting as it's one of my favourite tracks.

Overall they played well but I wish they'd been a bit louder. The light show was brilliant.  The crowd was middle-aged to a certain extent. Some very big men jumped up and down like teenagers.

They came back and played Transmission and Love will tear us apart for and encore.  Great end to the show.  I went home happy.  I didn't miss Peter Hook.

76 views of my ATP review in 24 hours

Bloody hell - 76 reviews of my ATP review in less than 24 hours.  Cool.

I should post some of my photos.

My weekend at the ATP festival or why Scott Spillane is the nicest guy ever

I’ve been wanting to go to an ATP music festival for a long time.  The festival grew out of the Bowlie Weekender organised by Belle & Sebastian at the Camber Sands holiday camp and was rebooted as the All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) festival curated in its first year by Mogwai.  Cool bands would ask more cool bands to play.  The line-up is often a wet dream for music nerds like myself.

Sadly, circumstances have prevented me attending before now.  This has been due to limited finance and, limited holiday entitlement.  Thankfully, times have changed, I’ve paid off some debts and I get more freedom with my holidays that I did in the past.  When I saw that ATP was to be curated by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel in December I picked up tickets as soon as I could.  

It wasn’t straightforward from there.  The festival had to be rescheduled for undisclosed reasons shortly before the initial date in December.  This change of dates was a two edged sword.  March is a better time for travel than December but two of my friends could not make the new date.  This triggered some frantic searching for other people to use the tickets.  I didn’t really want to sell the tickets to strangers and the market value of the tickets dropped.  Fortunately two friends stepped into the breach bringing their 2 year old son with them.

Despite these logistical difficulties I was still very excited about the event.  I counted about 20 bands on the bill that I wanted to see.  Below is a list of the bands I managed to see.

The Elephant 6 holiday surprise band

Jeff Mangum (twice)

Mike Watt and George Hurley playing the songs of the Minutemen

Thurston Moore

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

The Fall

Robin Hitchcock

A hawk and a hacksaw

The Boredoms (twice)

Low

Yann Tierson

The Magnetic Fields

Earth

The Raincoats

Olivia Tremor Control

The American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME)

The Apples in Stereo

The Magic Band

The Sun-Ra Arkestra

Scratch Acid

Sebadoh

Secret Surprise closing set featuring Sun-Ra arkestra, Olivia Tremor Control, The Elephant 6 holiday Surprise band, the Boredoms and friends.

Overall, this represents a very good weekend.  I saw a lot of bands I never thought I would see, I made some new friends and I had a lot of fun.  I will now labour this point in detail.

The Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Band opened the festival on the Friday afternoon.  The Holiday Surprise band is basically a pick-up/jam band composed of available members of Elephant 6 bands.  They play covers and songs from their individual bands.  At times they had more than 10 people on stage.  They play an impressive array of instruments including the saw and some form of horn that fits around a large man.  They played songs by bands like the Gerbils and Elf Power during a set which culminated in a cover of a Sun-Ra track called ‘enlightenment’.  They got the crowd singing along with this track before walking into the crowd while playing their instruments.  They then left the concert hall and walked about the pavilion at Butlins as the song continued.  This was a great thing to see.

After this set I bought some t-shirts and ate some food.  I then got myself into position to see the first Jeff Mangum set of the weekend.  For many reasons I never thought that I would see Jeff Mangum play live.  He has kept a very low profile for the best part of 15 years and it hasn’t really been possible to imagine that he would return to live work.  I have been aware of Neutral Milk Hotel since my friends were blown away by them at a Glasgow show supporting Sparklehorse in the late ‘90s.  I had a couple of Olivia Tremor Control records but I only picked up ‘in the aeroplane over the sea’ when it was reissued by Domino in 2005.  Since then it has been one of my favourite records.  I love it.

Seeing these songs played live was something special.  For the most part Mangum played acoustic guitar unaccompanied but at key moments he was joined by other Julian Koster on the saw or Scott Spillane blowing a horn.  Like many of the bands on this bill the sound is capable of raising goosebumps.  I was singing along to songs like Holland, 1945, The King of Carrot Flowers and two-headed boy.  My singing made me happy although I’m sure others would disagree.

After the end of the Jeff Mangum set I watched part of the Raincoats set.  I saw the Raincoats at the Phoenix festival in 1994 although I’ve only picked up their records in the past couple of years.  I managed to see 5 songs including their classic version of ‘lola’.  I then ran through to see the Fall who delivered an aggressive set of classic Mark E Smith.  This was the 3^rd time I’ve seen the Fall and they’ve been good every time. 

After the Fall I watched the solo set by Thurston Moore despite drunken interjections from my friends who don’t like Sonic Youth as much as I do.  The set drew mainly from the 1995 Psychic Hearts album.  At present, this is the closest I’ll get to seeing Sonic Youth for a year or two.

The next set that I saw was probably the musical highlight of my weekend.  I saw Mike Watt and George Hurley play a set of Minutemen songs.  For the uninitiated, the Minutemen were an early ‘80s SST punk band whose career was cut short by the death of singer/guitarist D. Boon in a car crash.  The Minutemen were more expansive than most punk bands.  Musically they were self taught and they played with an almost psychic degree of precision.  They sounded like nothing that came before them.  Their songs had intelligent political lyrics and off-beat humour.  D. Boon and Mike Watt seemed to have their own private language.  Watt and Hurley will play Minutemen songs as a duo but they would never use another guitarist on these songs.

I started to listen the Minutemen on boxing day 1991 when I bought their post-mersh volume 3 singles compliation CD from Tower Records in Glasgow.  As soon as I heard ‘if regan played disco’ that they were nearly perfect.  I susbsequently bought up their entire back catalogue and spent several years trying to play guitar like D Boon.  I failed. 

Walking into a room and hearing the music of the minutemen is an amazing experience.   Seeing Mike Watt play bass is an amazing experience.  These songs are fast, complicated and tight.  Watt would play all the bass parts and sing the songs.  At points where we expected a D Boon guitar break he would pause and look at the other side of the stage.  It was really poignant.  At a guess I would say that more than 30 songs were played with few pauses of breath.  Many of my favourites were there but I could have watched them for 2 hours.  At the end of the set Watt thanked the crowd and suggested that we should start out own bands.  I’m too old for that sort of thing but the experience was spiritual.  I hope I get to see this again.

After that I watched the end of the Blues Explosion set before heading home to catch some sleep before day 2.

We started the second day watching A Hawk and A Hacksaw.  They were playing a soundtrack to some old Eastern European film.  The music was very relaxing, perfect for a hangover.  After that I went over to the main hall to catch the first Boredoms set of the weekend.  I was blown away by the Boredoms when I saw them in Glasgow a few years back and the experience was similar here.  The main dude, Eye, stood in a circle of 5 drummers, conducting them while 15 guitarists added further colour to the sound.  The Boredoms had also bought their strange percurive guitar machine which is always fun.  I urge anyone who likes interesting music to see the Boredoms if they can.

Later on that evening I watched Low who delivered the goods as they usually do.  They were followed by Yann Tierson who was a new name to me.  His electronic music made me think of Blade Runner and Air.  I popped out to see a couple of songs by Earth but I was unimpressed so I returned to see the end of the Yann Tierson set.

Scratch Acid were another band I thought I would never see.  I have a certain fondness for the Jesus Lizard, the band that Scratch Acid evolved into.  Scratch Acid are a good, aggressive, noise rock band and David Yow is a great frontman but they lack the razor-like guitar of the Jesus Lizard.  It was great seeing them but the Jesus Lizard are probably better.

On the Sunday morning I started the day by watching ACME – the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.  They are an instrumental group who played a few chilled out pieces.  They were helped on one song by Julian Koster of Elephant 6 fame.

After that we went for a bit of a wander and we met Scott Spillane, a member of both Neutral Milk Hotel and the Gerbils.  He is a really nice bloke.  I always feel like I’m bothering someone famous if I go up and start talking to them but Spillane was very genial.  We talked a bit about the dire state of American politics, health care in the US and the UK, what he thought various Neutral Milk Hotel Songs were about (he doesn’t know) and the possibility of new Jeff Mangum material.  He told me that Jeff has written some new songs that he might record and that there are still plenty of old songs yet to be recorded.  He thinks that Jeff sometimes doesn’t want to record because that means a song is ‘finished’ but he thinks we’ll hear something at some point.  Really nice bloke.

After that we went to the cinema to see 20 minutes of footage from a Slint documentary by director Lance Bangs.  The finished film should be out by the end of the year.  I’m really looking forward to it.  In the footage we learn that the Jesus Lizard song ‘Mouthbreather’ is based on a comment Steve Albini made about Britt from Slint after he trashed Albini’s house – ‘don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy, I like him just fine but he’s a mouthbreather.’ 

After this I saw the Boredoms again, followed by the Magic Band and Olivia Tremor Control.  Olivia Tremor Control were interesting to see but their set was hampered by slightly ropey sound.  I then watched the Sun Ra Arkestra before we all had to queue up to see the second Jeff Mangum set of the weekend.   The songs were slightly different from Friday with a cover of ‘true love will find you in the end’ by Daniel Johnston and the little known Neutral Milk Hotel song ‘little birds’ from the recent box set.  Very, very good.

Sebadoh closed the main festival with an energetic set.  I like Sebadoh so it was good to see them.  However the highlight of the evening was probably a secret show that wasn’t advertised after Sebadoh finished.   A friendly member of the OTC roadcrew told us that Sun Ra, the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Band, the Boredoms and the Olivia Tremor Control would be having a jam in the Reds venue at the end of the night.  We ran down after Sebadoh finished and we were not disappointed.  At least 30 musicians filled the stage to play the Sun Ra song ‘enlightenment’ bringing a musical symmetry to the event.  Beautiful.

ATP is probably the best festival ever.

2012 and all that

It's a new year and I don't have a hangover which is good.  I've been busy with work and I've had a bad viral infection since just before Christmas so I've not had much time or energy to update this blog.  I have done one or two interesting things that I may write about in due course but I didn't really manage to do the regular update thing over the last month or so.  I decided just to spend new year with  my family because I couldn't be bothered with Glasgow at the height of winter alcohol fuelled madness.

The past year has been busy.  I've been working in a clinical job for most of the year after spending two and a half years doing medical research.  I've been running a ward, seeing referrals and working in clinics.  I've learnt a lot and hopefully I've helped a couple of patients.  Hopefully all of this will make me a better doctor.  I've spent 11 months living in the hospital because I work 80 miles away from where I live.  The room in the hospital is a dump but it's what I need to do just now.  I should rotate back to a hospital closer to home later this year.

In a way it's good to be away from home because I have a massive leak in the roof of my flat.  One of the problems with being a flat owner in Scotland is that you need to deal with a factor who is responsible for building maintenance.  Unfortunately the factor for my  building is useless.  These arseholes are not legally regulated so they can get away with doing absolutely fuck all while charging victims lots of money.  Bastards.

So it's a new year and new stuff will happen.  Everyone will get older and the world will keep turning.  Enjoy it folks!

Addendum to Grant Hart, Live at Mono, Glasgow

I seem to be getting a lot of hits on the gig review I wrote about Grant Hart at Mono last week.  As I said, the poor bloke looks like he's a bit unwell and a bit skint.  After the show I bought a couple of his recent albums.  Hot wax was his most recent studio album, recorded with members of Gedspeed You! Black Emperor.  It's a good record that's well worth some of your hard earned cash.  I also picked up the Oeuvrevue compilation album that I'm listening to as I type.  It's fairly solid and it has a nice version of 'no promise have i made' by Husker Du on it.

I also bought a few mp3s from Amazon.  You can't get intolerance  on CD at the moment but you can get individual tracks.  2541  is a great track and you should own it.

It's not easy for American musicians to get health care so think about it and pay for some music to perhaps help someone  who's down on their luck.

Green Lantern - DVD review

I used to read Green Lantern comics when I was younger.  I liked them.  I was less impressed by this film.  It's a bit of a turkey really, nearly as bad as the Fantastic Four films.  Not too good.

Avoid.

Grant Hart - live at Mono, Glasgow

I went to see Grant Hart at Mono last night.  I've been listening to Husker Du since I was about 12 and 'never talking to you again' is one of my favourite songs ever.  I loved seeing him play but it was heartbreaking to watch.  He does not look very well.

I'm not sure who the support act was.  He sounded like a one-man-band playing the Ramones.  It was OK but I don't think I'd rush to hear him again.

Grant came on and he looked terrible.  Even from 20 metres away I could see that he is jaundiced.  He looked worse later on when I bought a single from him after the show.  His teeth are a mess.  As a doctor this was sad to see.  I've worked in a few Glasgow hospitals and I've seen a lot of people in liver failure and you don't want to see a musical hero like this.  I don't know if it's viral hepatitis from when he was injecting drugs or if it's booze or if it's cancer but Grant Hart looks like a very sick man.  As a musician in America I don't think he has a health care plan and I strongly suspect he isn't getting much in the way of Husker Du royalties.  Poor bloke.

The sound in Mono was not great but Hart shone despite the sonic problems.  His voice continues to be great and he ran through his back catalogue playing requests as people shouted them out.  He played his songs from Husker Du including She floated away, Books about UFOs, Pink Turns to Blue and Sorry somehow.  He played my personal favourite never talking to you again as well as stand-out solo tracks like 2541 and Admiral of the sea  by Nova Mob.  He kept going for nearly 2 hours.  It was great to see.

I am worried about him.  He looks very sick and I hope he is getting decent medical attention.  I hope his health improves and he keeps going. 

Exit wounds by Rutu Modan - at the Plan B Graphic Novel book group

I made it along to this months book group and we were talking about Exit Wounds, a book that I wrote about when I read it in 2007 (see here).  I had to re-read the book because I didn't really remember it and thankfully it's a pretty smooth read and I got through it in about an hour.

Exit wounds is a beautiful book to look at.  The art is clean and it flows well.  I've been re-reading Tintin recently and the Herge influence is clear.  Some people felt that the simplicity of the faces in the book made it difficult to gage the emotions that characters were expressing but generally most people liked the art.

The story proved slightly more problematic for some people.  A few expressed the opinion that it didn't really go anywhere while some were struck by the 'kitchen-sink' reality of the story.  There is a big hole in the book as we never meet the absent father who is the McGuffin of the book.  His absence is a real feature of the book.  I have a theory that the titular 'Exit wounds' are the psychic wounds that the father creates as he leaves the lives of the various  women he has relationships with.

Again, this is a book that I would recommend to people.  It is an easy read if not a great read.  It's enjoyable but it's not a masterpiece.

NEDS - DVD review

I approached Neds with trepidation.  I was born in Glasgow, I grew up in Lanarkshire, I went to school with a lot of neds and I own a flat in Glasgow.  I didn't see this film in the cinema because I thought it would attract a dodgy crowd.  I've finally caught up with it on DVD.

I think it's a good film, possibly even a great film, but it could be difficult to follow if you don't speak the language.  It follows a young boy as he finishes primary school where he has academically excelled and starts  secondary school where he falls in with a bad crowd.  Outside school he starts to hang out with a bad crowd and get into trouble.

I recognised the characters and situations in this film.  I've seen people end up like the characters in this film.  It was very real to me and at times very upsetting.  On a personal level, I've been threatened with a knife, kicked in the head and I've had my carry out stolen from me.  I know how all that feels although I'm lucky that I've gotten away from it.  I felt that Peter Mullan and his actors have created a great film that is fairly true.

As I watched the film I was struck by a real feeling that if I have children I would want to avoid them putting up with all that sort of shit.  I guess that means moving to the country or something.  The events dramatised in this film still go on in Glasgow and other Scottish towns on a weekly basis.  Our society is fucked up.  If you disagree, read the newspapers or the BBC website.

The film ends ambiguously but it's a good ending.  You can pick your own ending.  I hope that the main character did well after all of this.  Having read other reviews on the internet I know a lot of people didn't like him but I hope he gets a second chance.

This is a story about how your environment fucks you up.  Well worth seeing.  Use subtitles if you need to.