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shermaramaAnd I've not been keeping up with keeping records of live gigs I've been to, not least because I haven't been to many and I can let them slide a bit. Since the Great Escape I've been to a Brainlove Records night at a pub down in Limehouse, which featured two rather rubbish bands that I can't be bothered to ferret out the names of and which was a bit disappointing, and to Glastonwick, which is a sort of festival organised by Attilla the Stockbroker, and that's it. Crikey. I've been looking at adverts for drummers this week and have replied to a couple of them and heard nothing at all back, which is a bit disappointing too. Both ads specifically wanted female drummers, which I'd have thought I've had stood a bit of a chance at. I've had a look at bass ads as well but to be honest it's the drums I'm missing first, and the bass can wait a bit longer.
Glastonwick was a laugh, though. It's a long weekend at a farm somewhere in the Sussex countryside, with lots of punk bands, poetry and real ale. We misunderstood the terms of working there and thought we'd get paid in beer tokens which we could spend while there; it turned out that we could drink as much as we liked from the bar over the weekend (and there were lots of things I liked, including a pleasing mild called Nutty Slack from my home village of Standish) and *then* we got beer tokens equivalent to five pounds an hour for all the hours we'd worked, to be spent at the Evening Star in Brighton. Seriously, last week we went to the Evening Star and got two four-pinters to take out to a party, and that cost us just under a quarter of our token stash. But hang on a minute, this was supposed to be about music, not beer... the bands were all reasonable, being determined and booked entirely by Attilla the Stockbroker's taste. There were a couple of jangly singer-songwriters albeit of the allowed-to-live sort, there was a bit of dodgy poetry, there was Blyth Power being past it, and there was the seen-too-many-times-to-be-forgivable-now Fish Brothers, but there was also John Otway being good enough at being silly to get away with it, especially with help from Attilla, there was Babar Luck being sharp in a way you still warmed to, there was PPZ-30, a funk-punk-jazz combo that made that combination actually work instead of being a living nightmare, and perhaps best of all there was a venerable Belgian punk band called Contingent that Attilla had been in twenty eight years before, and they would still have given a lot of modern punk bands a run for their money. The singing was mostly in French, which worked better with punk than I'd have expected - the same sort of effect as French rap, I suppose, where the long strings of equal-length syllables make for something hypnotic and possibly describable as relentless. Given that all we paid for all weekend was getting there and food, I think that one was a winner.
Glastonwick was a laugh, though. It's a long weekend at a farm somewhere in the Sussex countryside, with lots of punk bands, poetry and real ale. We misunderstood the terms of working there and thought we'd get paid in beer tokens which we could spend while there; it turned out that we could drink as much as we liked from the bar over the weekend (and there were lots of things I liked, including a pleasing mild called Nutty Slack from my home village of Standish) and *then* we got beer tokens equivalent to five pounds an hour for all the hours we'd worked, to be spent at the Evening Star in Brighton. Seriously, last week we went to the Evening Star and got two four-pinters to take out to a party, and that cost us just under a quarter of our token stash. But hang on a minute, this was supposed to be about music, not beer... the bands were all reasonable, being determined and booked entirely by Attilla the Stockbroker's taste. There were a couple of jangly singer-songwriters albeit of the allowed-to-live sort, there was a bit of dodgy poetry, there was Blyth Power being past it, and there was the seen-too-many-times-to-be-forgivable-now Fish Brothers, but there was also John Otway being good enough at being silly to get away with it, especially with help from Attilla, there was Babar Luck being sharp in a way you still warmed to, there was PPZ-30, a funk-punk-jazz combo that made that combination actually work instead of being a living nightmare, and perhaps best of all there was a venerable Belgian punk band called Contingent that Attilla had been in twenty eight years before, and they would still have given a lot of modern punk bands a run for their money. The singing was mostly in French, which worked better with punk than I'd have expected - the same sort of effect as French rap, I suppose, where the long strings of equal-length syllables make for something hypnotic and possibly describable as relentless. Given that all we paid for all weekend was getting there and food, I think that one was a winner.
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Date: 2008-07-26 03:37 pm (UTC)Best of luck with getting a drumming gig. Much envy - I've always wanted to be able to play the drums!
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Date: 2008-07-28 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 07:10 pm (UTC)