And this is what Crowded House look like when at Hammersmith last night.

Yes I was back to see them once again and for the last time on this tour (probably). Once again they were great, playing some unusual tracks (“Recurring Dream” anyone?), as well as plenty of crowd pleasers. However, unlike Oxford, there was no Skype video call but there was an awful lot of singing from the crowd. I don’t think I have heard quite so many raucous voices at a concert before. Say what you like about Crowded House fans they’re nothing if not passionate. The friend I went with commented afterwards how it was great to see so many happy faces singing along when he looked back into the audience.

But you saw them right? I told you to book tickets!

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Crowded House are always good for a laugh when live and last night at the Oxford Apollo was no different. They (eventually) played a good mix of new, unreleased until Monday, songs and older stuff. I was a little concerned as the first 2/3rds were from the last few albums but as time went on they started to play more from the first two “classic” albums.

One of the reasons I continue to go to see Crowded House live, other than the music, is that they are just so good live. No two nights are the same. They don’t play the same set list every night (*ahem* Genesis) and their interaction with the crowd is superb and last night was no exception.

At one point Neil brought a laptop onto the stage on which he was running Skype and was in the middle of a video call with his Dad. The audience then had a “conversation” with Finn’s father. This was a trick that he had tried to pull off when I went to see him last but no-one was online. The laptop was then set on top of a piece of equipment facing the audience so that Dad could see his son (and grandson) at work.

That is what makes Crowded House unique in my opinion and why you should be booking to see them.

Below are a few more photos from those that I surreptitiously took as the ushers were pretty hot on preventing anyone capturing the moment for prosperity.

 

 

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A few weeks ago our eldest son wrote to Kerrang magazine stating that he had been to see Zebrahead in concert a couple of times and on both occasions the friends that he had gone with had come away with some piece of memorabilia. Basically he felt that this wasn’t right as it was him that was the real fan and the others were there for the ride.

Proving that sometimes you do get what you ask for his letter was published (see below) and not only that they had arranged for him to go back stage before a gig and meet the band. True to their word last Wednesday Alex travelled to London and before the concert went back stage where the gave him tour merchandise, picks and some beer(!) . He was able to “hang out” with the band and have his picture taken.

I am currently penning a letter to Kerrang to ask if they can fix it for me to go back stage and meet Genesis c. 1973.

 

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Having been at Bush Hall only a few weeks previously to see Liam Finn Mat and I were back again last night to see Liam’s Dad and he was just superb. The venue is tiny and there were only 350 tickets available to the public and all of them were snapped up by members of the fan club.

The great thing about Finn is that he is such a natural showman, so easy and relaxed on stage and no two shows are ever the same. Last night with only a piano and acoustic guitar he worked his way through his extensive catalogue. The playlist list quickly went out the window as more and more requests were shouted from the crowd and Finn agreed to songs that he hadn’t played in a while and the audience helped out with the lyrics.

Another great thing that makes Finn so engaging is how he is happy to share the stage with audience members and last night three got the opportunity to go up including one on the piano who brilliant played my favourite Crowded House song, Love you ’til the day i die.

The only disappointment was Finn wasn’t able to raise anyone on Skype which would have been fun to see.

I’m really looking forward to the Crowded House gigs coming up in the summer.

 

 

 

 

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Spent last night at my first concert of the year at a chilly Shepherd’s Bush Empire seeing OK GO. I had been in two minds as to whether to go as the weather was grotty still but Mat was keen to go and so we went and I am glad that I did. For a start there was virtually no snow in London and secondly OK GO were just great.

I have been to see some bands who have been great on record (remember those?) and not up to much on tour (see Genesis and John Mayer). Others meanwhile put a bit of effort into it. I have been to many Crowded House concerts and each one has been entertaining and different. OK GO certainly fall into the latter category. As you can see from the photos below it was a well staged and visually stunning show which included ticker tape, mic mounted cameras, video walls and hand bells. You might feel that all of this distracts from the music but it complemented it well and was a great evening.

If you get a chance to see them you should GO, OK?

  

  

  

More pictures and a video of OK GO on hand bells here!

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iTunes have been having a series of gigs at the Roundhouse, London over the last few weeks tickets for which were free but you had to win them by applying through Facebook. And win tickets I did – to see Simple Minds and Alex and I went on Thursday night to take up our places.

I have always liked Simple Minds but hadn’t seen them previously. They are very much of their decade with some tracks sounding very “eighties” but without sounding dated.

The great thing about the Roundhouse is that it is a very small venue and so you are able to get pretty close to the action. While the acoustics are good the sound mixing itself was pretty poor with Jim Kerrs vocals almost impossible to hear. It will be interesting to hear what the mix is like on the release when it is available on iTunes.

What really impressed me though was Kerr’s interaction with the audience. He clearly recognised many there and was happy to strike a pose for those taking pictures. He also dedicated a song to the fans that had been supporting Simple Minds for thirty years. There are one or two other bands that could do with remembering just why they are where they are – I’m looking at you Oasis…

 

 Click here for more pictures from Simple Minds, iTunes Live

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With iTunes 8 comes Genius – a system to help you find similar music in your collection or a cynical attempt to sell more downloads by Apple, depending on your view. It also works on both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. You simply select a track and press the genius icon and a new playlist is generated featuring similar tracks and it makes a pretty good go of it. This could be, of course, because I have lots of similar music on my iPod in the first place and anything out of the ordinary is simply ignored – it couldn’t make a playlist from a Tangerine Dream track for example. However, on the whole you do get a fairly good selection of music and if you don’t want to be sold to – hide the Genius bar in iTunes!

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So we are here to say goodbye to Humphrey Lyttelton long-time chairman to the antidote to panel games I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, who passed away yesterday. It has only a few months ago that all the family went to see him on stage with the rest of the panel and, as I noted then, was blown away by his trumpet playing.

Many a long car journey has been lit up by listening to the show and even the boys have learned to love it and enjoy its little quirks too. My favourites were always the new meanings for old words, the late arrivals at the ball and the lovely Samantha.

There was such an easy charm about the whole team that made the thing seem effortless and that they all seemed to get on so well made it even more enjoyable.

Humph you brought a laugh to our car that on occasions would lead to tears and the danger of crashing through so much laughter. I can honestly say there is nothing else that has had such an effect on me – you will be missed.

Obituary: Humphrey Lyttelton (BBC).

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There is an article on the BBC website today about why the musical instruments that a child will choose to play are heavily influenced by their gender. So the top instruments for boys are: electric/bass guitar (81%), tuba (775) and drums (75%). For girls the list is harp (90%), flute (89%) and voice (80%). To be clear that doesn’t mean that 90% of girls take up the harp but that 90% of harpists are girls.

I have two boys both of whom take music lessons and guess which instruments they play, yep the guitar and the drums – ours is not a quiet household! If you want to know why the different genders are drawn to the various instruments then you need to read the article. I have been thinking back to what influenced our boys to choose the instruments they did – I know that there was no pressure from myself or their mum to go with what they chose – certainly where the drums were concerned! I wonder if our choice of music had an impact at all. We listen almost exclusively to modern rock/pop and the boys will have had little or no exposure of classical music and therefore the instruments. Or perhaps it could just have been me wanting the boys to achieve what I never did and become the next Eric or Phil.

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My iPod is messing with my head. It has taken a real liking to Peter Gabriel, Genesis and Pink Floyd. On the whole not bad choices but I do strive for a bit of variety in my music. Now, I would be the first to admit that I have more than my fair share of Genesis tracks on the player. It would, therefore, be reasonable to expect that in any shuffled playlist of all tracks that Genesis would appear with some regularity but Pink Floyd? I have Echoes and nothing else. To put it in some perspective I have 75 tracks by Crowded House and 26 by Floyd. Crowded House never seems to come up – why is that? And before anyone answers that with the comment that the iPod is simply acting as some arbiter of good taste remember that I moderate all comments…

Of course the real reason is that computers are absolutely hopeless at generating truly random numbers. What we get is a pseudorandom number which is more often than not based upon the internal clock and nothing like as random as I would hope. All of this leads to what appears to be a human behaviour, a passion for Steve Hackett guitar solos and a fumbling in the pocket to skip to another track. Bugger, it’s Genesis again!

This phenomenon was also observed by my mate Dirk who put it far more eloquently than me. His iPod also seems to be more sophisticated than mine in that his matches the same track by different artists – neat!

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Yesterday saw the launch of a new online magazine iGizmo. This is a magazine in the traditional sense of the word in that it is presented as an electronic view with pages to turn just like the real thing. Of course being online allows it to do other neat things like embed videos and link to websites – both of which iGizmo makes good use of.

This seems to be the latest thing as I have been invited to "subscribe" to several online mags in the last few weeks. These include the aforementioned iGizmo (gadgets) GP Mag (motor sport) and idiomag (music). The latter is interesting in that it (allegedly) tailors its content to your musical tastes. You give it the name of three artists you like (or point it at your musical profile on, say, Last.fm) and it then tailors the output.

In general I like this advance in publishing options and it brings with it a couple of clear advantages over print magazines: 1) they are more regularly updated, or contain more up-to-date information and 2) they are (generally) free. Of course the downside is that you cannot (easily) read them on the train as they need a laptop and an internet connection. The question is whether they provide any information that cannot be obtained from a traditional website with a good RSS feed.

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Since my post yesterday about the iPod Touch update that add new applications and features to the device I have discovered that it also takes some things away. A couple of the existing applications were Calendar and Contacts which you could sync with Microsoft Outlook – not any more. It seems that this ability has been”lost” and Outlook no longer appears as an option – in fact there are no options listed at all! A quick search of the Apple support forum reveals that I am not alone in having this problem. I suspect that this is a bug rather than a deliberate choice on the part of Apple but given that it seems to be affecting quite a few people including iPhone users it is a little embarrassing for them. One can only hope that they fix the problem quickly.

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So the picture on the left is what my iPod Touch looked like after I had applied the software update announced at Macworld earlier in the week. The big question is, however, is it worth the £12 price tag that Apple have cheekily applied to it? I think the short answer is no, it’s not and only serves to highlight the differences between the Touch and the iPhone. It also raises questions as to whether the Touch is trying to be a music player or a fully featured PDA.

The update itself adds five new applications: Google Mail, Google Maps, Weather, Stocks and Notepad. While all can be used offline to make the most of them you really need to be connected and that means wifi. The problem is that there are now so many ways to access maps and mail that having another is just overkill. For example, I have both Google maps and mail on my phone and my BlackBerry which have GPRS/3g allowing me to get information anywhere, anytime. Also, Apple take note, they were free to install.

Despite that It has to be said that all the applications and Google Maps in particular are beautifully implemented and a joy to use. I can imagine me using some of these while listening to my music and connected to public wifi but the Touch to me is not a PDA – yet…

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Interesting article in Wired magazine this month where Talking Heads’ David Byrne examines the state of the music industry and the alternative delivery methods for today’s artists. I won’t go through the whole article other than to say that it is well worth a read and I particularly enjoyed the comment Byrne made on artists taking control of their own destiny: “Not everyone is as smart as those nerdy Radiohead boys. Pete Doherty probably should not be handed the steering wheel.”

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I have recently been trying out version 2 of Orb. I really like the idea of being able to get access to music/pictures/videos etc. held on my home PC anywhere in the world and on pretty much any device. While I ran my trial I was able to get access on other PCs, my iPod Touch, my BlackBerry and a Pocket PC. It all worked like a dream when I was away from home. However, all was not good when I was actually sat at my desk trying to use my PC. Everything seemed pretty sluggish and the root cause was that the Orb executable was consuming 50% of the processor power even when it wasn’t doing anything! Now my PC is not the latest spec but it’s not that old and being a 3.4 ghz P4 with 1gb of RAM is well within the minimum specs given on the Orb website.

All of which was a great disappointment and led to me uninstalling and looking for an alternative solution. One such possibility is Avvenu but since its takeover by Nokia it has temporarily been restricted to US users only. So, for now, I will have to live without remote access to my file.

In summary, Orb:

Good

• access your files anywhere
• great ipod touch & BlackBerry specific interfaces

Bad

• Processor hogger

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So x-factor concluded on Saturday with the winner being the decidedly dull and out of tune Leon which confirmed a long held belief of mine that voting is done by young girls based on who they find cute rather than any ability. I also believe that the constant criticism by the judges of Leon and Same Difference contributed to their making it through the final as people voted to prove the judges wrong. If anyone remembers Leon in a years time I will be amazed.

I have filed this under “Music” but I accept that this is a tenuous link.

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Seeing Crowded House again last night reminded me why I keep going back for more. They are simply fantastic live. In fact even better than on record (you remember those black round things?). They were on for about two hours and covered plenty of material old and new. The longer the concert went on the more that they got into their stride and the better it was. This was the first time I had taken my younger son to a concert and it was such a good introduction for him.

These days I don’t normally bother with the support act as they can be a bit lame but wanting to give the boys the full concert experience we went in and saw Duke Special. I was pleasantly surprised. Similar to Divine Comedy with the use of humour in the lyrics – very quirky. Anyway, those of you that follow my Last.FM stats (Dirk…) will notice Duke Special rising up the list over the next few days as I repeatedly play their tracks over and over and in particular the sublime No Cover Up and Freewheel.

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I reported some time back that Genesis were to reform and tour. Well last Sunday I saw them at Twickenham, albeit from a distance.

No doubt the following comments will be seen as heresy by those that were at the concert or those who could not get tickets, so if you are of a nervous disposition watch the video below. The rest can scroll to the following section.

I didn’t really enjoy the concert that much. If I had to choose a word to describe the concert it would be “clinical” – it just left me cold somehow. What made it worse was that it was all so perfectly executed – just like the list time I saw them some 15 years ago. Even the jokes were the same, the Domino principal wasn’t funny then and it hadn’t bettered with age. So I came away disappointed and feeling that I won’t be going back unless the reunion tour with Gabriel really does materialise.Stage set was fantastic though, completely mind boggling in size. There are some pictures that I took on Flickr.

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Finally achieved one of my ambitions yesterday when I got to see Peter Gabriel in concert. Regrettably, I am too young to have seen Gabriel with Genesis and have not caught up with him on any of his solo tours until now. He played an eclectic mix of tracks off his back catalogue. With them having been chosen by visitors to his website there weren’t many of the big hits but it was good to hear a few that I’d not listened to for a while.

Gabriel was headlining Hyde Park Calling along with another favourite of mine Crowded House. Where this was the first time I had seen Gabriel it was the ninth time I have seen Crowded House.

I never thought that I would get to see Crowded House again but, like Genesis, they have reformed and it looks like I will soon be into double figures with the upcoming UK tour. It’s been over ten years since I last saw them but it was just like before with some great interaction with the crowd, great tunes and some cock-ups! Unfortunately the set had to end 15 minutes early as the heavens opened and it was simply too wet for them to continue.Preceding Crowded House were The Feeling and it is the second time I have seen them this year. The Feeling are very different from Gabriel but I love the harmonies on the songs and they sound great on stage.

Despite the rain it was a great day out and if the line up is as strong next year I will definitely be back.

You can see all the pictures I took on my phone over at Flickr.

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Went to see The Feeling in concert Saturday night at the Hammersmith Apollo. I took my eldest son and I wasn’t alone in doing so as a good proportion of the audience was mid to late teens. I had been a bit tardy in booking tickets and so by the time I did we were standing at the back of the circle and boy is it a long way down from there. Any higher and crampons may well have been required. Actually I was surprised health and safety allowed us to stand where we did.

Anyway, a good time was had by all and it gave me the opportunity to try out the camera on my new Nokia N73. Given the low light levels and the distance it isn’t too bad at all.

Funny thing is that just a few years ago not only would this have not been possible but would also have been frowned upon. Nowadays everyone was at it and I not only took the pictures but also emailed them back to Helen who was at home.

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