Quiet day today.
Last night I went to see Silversun Pickup’s in Scala and they were excellent. It was my first real gig back in London and it was just nice to get back to seeing some live music like that. There was a quick stop off at the Ship for the usual Thursday evening drinks before a cab ride (fuck it, right?) towards Kings Cross. (Check out the video to their biggest hit to date, Lazy Eye here).
So yeah, excellent gig. I’m still half deaf in one ear so that’s a good sign.
I’m going to have my first ever photographer pass to a gig soon enough and I’m quite looking forward to it. The only down side is that it’s for a band I really like (and would have gone to see anyway). So I’m not sure how that’s going to work out. I know I need to get a 50mm prime for low-light shooting, this may also be the encouragement I need to go out get a proper flash too. More on all this closer to the time.
No plans at all for this evening which is in a small way kinda nice as it’s been all go the past little while and the idea of getting home and having a quiet Friday night appeals.
Of course the flip side to that is spending Friday night at home alone which is, ya know, not the best thing in the world.
And now a meeting.
Sometimes I really love XKCD: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language
(Make with the clicky if you can’t read ‘em).
Sometimes its really really annoying not knowing what the future holds. It can complicate stuff.
It’s Wednesday already and this is quite nice. I realised as I was walking to Swiss Cottage station this morning that I had managed to go to work and get home from work without taking the tube yesterday. It was nice. As much as I like the tube and as handy as it is, sometimes I never want to get on the damn thing again.
I was in work fairly early yesterday and so I headed off early too. It was nice to have time to wander to the book shop (bad Dave!) and then still get home around 6.30. The evening was mainly quiet, I played around a bit but then I sat down to write a little about some music. Two hours later I was still going strong and working through some very specific tracks in my collection. It’s slightly odd to be writing about how much an affect a track or a moment of music has, thinking that I have to listen to the song again and then stopping writing for a moment because the moment has come around in the recording and it’s just glorious (Radiohead, Glastonbury 2003 and a hundred thousand people singing “For a minute there I lost myself”).
Anyway it was a lot of fun, more than I was even expecting and I ended up going to bed a little later than I had planned as a result. It must be nice to be able to write.
This morning, also on the way to work, was an odd mood.
In late 1999 I discovered Metallica. Quite late to the game, I know. I had just started working for a company in their tech support area and well piracy wasn’t rampant *but* there was a fine selection of music on a number of the computers. The old Apple next to me (OS 7.6!) had some tunes on it and I started to listen. There was a ton of Nirvana which was good of course and a good amount of Metallica. It was my first introduction to Napster *sniff*
Fuck, those were the days. And so I listened to some songs and I liked them, a lot. And so, as it works, I went out and bought some Metallica, eventually building up the back catalogue (including St. Anger, so fuck off, I’ve paid my dues!) and I’ve seen them several times. Two of those times are worthy of note actually. The first time was a “secret” gig. They were playing Reading Festival in 2003 and were under contract not to be advertised to play anywhere else. But of course, with Donnington hosting a metal festival and the availability of the internet, it was fairly well believed that they’d do a “secret gig” on the second stage at 3pm on the Saturday. Armed with this knowledge we headed towards the second stage around 2.40…to find the road starting to be lined with security. At which point the atmosphere very noticeably changed, Metallica were about to play in a tent that would hold a couple of thousand people at best. It would be tiny! So we ran and we made it in and we made it a good way up the front and then Metallica came on and played. They opened with Blackened and that’s all you really need to know. It was the first time I’d seen them and I can’t imagine a better way to do so. It’s still a joke going on five years later between the two of us that were there, “do you remember that time we saw Metallica’s secret gig”? and it annoys some of the lads to no end.
I would see them again at Download the next year, this time on a full headlining slot on the main stage but it was to be a little different. The drummer was “ill” (very badly fallen off the wagon as rumour would have it) and instead they took a selection of drummers from other bands. Starting with Slayer’s Dave fuckin’ Lombardo (to give him his full name), widely considered one of the greatest drummers in the world, he came on and did Battery and The Four Horsemen and just nailed it. So after waiting for an extra 90 minutes for the set to start we were quite pleased to see them still playing to to have the extra benefit of Lombardo on drums. Now when you start with someone like that, it’s going to be pretty hard to keep the momentum going. Or so we thought. Earlier on despite all scoffing to the contrary we had seen Slipknot, mainly because we didn’t want to move after Slayer and they blew us away. Excellent live band, I’m not really one to listen to their albums but I’d now see them live anytime.
So when they bring out Slipknot’s Joey Jordison (in full mask of course), we didn’t think he’d be so bad. We could not have been more wrong, bad? Well to put it in context around 70,000 Metallica fans proceeded to spend the rest of the set not chanting for Metallica but chanting for Joey. It wasn’t that he knew all of the songs (grown up learning the drums to Metallica) and that he came on and just played them perfectly, but he added to them. He’s drumming away and adding his own little flourishes to the drum beats. You could almost see the rest of Metallica turning around, realising they could just play away and he was with them. Wonderful stuff. So with 1 exception for Lar’s drum tech to play a below average Fade to Black, they cancelled the other planned drummers and stuck with Joey.
Download says: Slipknot hero saves Metallica’s day! Joey Jordison makes Rock History
When I’m feeling out of sorts in work, I almost always fall back to Metallica. Usually …And Justice For All although I do recognise that Master of Puppets is the better album, there is just something about Justice for me. My favourite though is S & M. In 1999 they played for two nights with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Symphony & Metallica, what were you thinking???), it was filmed for a DVD release and released as a double album and it’s good stuff. I’m a sucker for orchestral stuff mixed in with metal or rock etc and here it just works perfectly well. So that’s my favourite Metallica album, thanks for asking, and it was what got me through the journey into work this morning.
Now I’m listening to that 2004 Download performance and remembering. I do have to run out for some lunch soon. Then this evening we are having a morale boosting team event…
October 22, 2003 7:01 AM
MetaFilter Elliott Smith dead at 34
http://www.metafilter.com/29091/Elliott-Smith-dead-at-34/
It’s quite astounding how much impact that posting would have on me.
.
It’s just before midday on the Tuesday after a bank holiday. I’ve been sat at my desk since around 8.30 this morning and I’m feeling slightly tired. I have been mainly listening/watching Arcade Fire from Reading for the morning however that has just spent a little while on pause as some fairly random surfing lead me from downloading The Foo Fighter’s cover of Keep The Car Running to a leaked track from the upcoming new Springsteen album and it’s great! Nice and guitary. It’s available to take a listen to if you head over to Hype Machine and click onto listen next to Radio Nowhere. It’s good stuff, it’s really good stuff and I’m now quite excited to hear the new album.
Now is it home time yet?