wrm

From just about everyone in the blogosphere this morning.

“I’ll kill a man in a fair fight. Or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight. Or if he bothers me. Or if there’s a woman. Or if I’m gettin’ paid. Mostly when I’m gettin’ paid.” — Jayne Cobb.

Random thoughts.

• Computicket is smoking their socks — They’ve been showing that all seats had been booked out for weeks, and when Tanya got tickets for us, there were only four available — yet at the venue about a third of the seats were empty. Block bookings?
• Got better seats this time. Off to the side, which means we probably escaped the brunt of the loud :-( but the view was good :-)

• Grand West has a serious problem getting lots of people in through security. Once through, the queue disappears.
• None of these guys have the voices they used to have. Ons word almal oud :-)
• Uriah Heep still rocks, even though only Mick Box remains of the band I grew up on.
• Bernie Shaw is Barney when he’s not touring with Uriah Heep.
• It should be illegal to have as much fun behind a set of drums as Russell Gilbrook has.
• Uriah Heep’s sound was awful — some kind of phase distortion in the middle of the keyboards. I suspect one of their floor speakers was beating with the main speakers where we were sitting — because after they re-arranged the stage for Deep Purple things were a lot better.
• We were seated in the middle of the Wildebeest migration. Seriously. Every three minutes someone else decided they needed to be somewhere else. It was like Jane Fonda with heavy metal. Fortunately all these fools settled down eventually.
• Deep Purple rawks.
• Don Airey plays a mean keyboard.
• Steve Morse mag maar ‘n kitaar tokkel.
• They did Lazy! Yeah! But without the bouncy bit from Made in Japan, I guess that bit belongs to Richie Blackmore or Jon Lord.
• Don Airey luves the right hand side of his Hammond organ. He must have a standing order for replacement keys.
• They didn’t do Child in Time. Yea, I know, last time they did was in 2002. One can hope.
• They did come back after leaving the stage and proceeded for another half an hour, with Hush and Black Night.
• Getting home at 2 o’clock on a week night is Not a Good Thing.
• Did I mention that Don Airey is incredible?

I opined that either option was low on common sense, and attempted to point out that all this fuss was over one single swallow. Had his mother been so obliging, perhaps our evening would have not been so marred, but I managed to bite my tongue on that point.

— Stingray, describing a conversation with a clear idiot.

Fsck me, all these old people are my age!

So we went to the Alphaville / Spandau Ballet concert at the Grand West Grand Arena last night.

This is the view from the Q row (hint: there are no R, S or T rows).

Being far away was good, because… it was loud. I want a hi-fi like that. Alphaville was great, lots of good loud noise and stuph. And strobes have certainly improved since the eighties, these must draw the power of a small third world country each.

Spandau Ballet? zzzzzzz. I mean, a very nicely put together show, video footage from waybackwhen, very well done but… it’s still Spandau Ballet :-)  OK, Barricades was great, but the rest was just a variation on the theme. Pick a line, sing it N times, cue a sax solo, sing the line a few more times, end of song.

Maybe I’m just not a Spandau Ballet fan (I’m not. I was there for Alphaville)

Down in the mosh pit golden circle the glow of cellphones has pretty much replaced the traditional cigarette lighter (although a few lighters did come out for Forever Young). In our day you had to smuggle a recording Walkman in to make bootlegs.

Next up: Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Wishbone Ash, on the first. If I can get the damn Computicket site to work right. Right now, it shows either “fully booked” or “no space available” — last night’s show was far from full, so I don’t believe that.