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a great week for gigs

So last night was the third night of going to gigs in a row for me, and another fantastic night out. This one, at , was part of the /-hosted night called , and featured Andy, along with and Deacon Blue frontman, .

Cara was up first – blimey, I wish I had that much talent at 19!! She’s obviously heavily Tori Amos influenced and had a batch of really nice songs, sung well. Bodes v. well for the future.

After that was Andy – as the more attentive of you will know, I’ve played with Andy lots, including being on his last album. We’ve even gigged together at the Troubadour a couple of times. Andy was showcasing a whole load of new songs, as well as a handful of favourites, and sounded great, as always. He also flagged up the campaign, and wrist bands were available, which reminded me that I ought to do that with CDs from the shop… Anyway.

The headliner (and the reason tonight’s gig sold out a week in advance) was Ricky Ross – I was a big Deacon Blue fan back in the 80s/90s, and have seen Ricky solo live before, so knew he’d be good, but was still surprised at how good his new material is. He’s apparently been consuming a steady diet of Randy Newman for the last while, as the influence hang low over most of the new songs, but in a really good way. I mean, if you’re going to be influenced by someone, who better than one of the finest songwriters of the last 50 years?

Ricky’s a great performer and story-teller, and I’m really looking forward to his new album coming out.

And then I’ll be back at the troubadour for My gig with BJ Cole next Friday – so I hope to see you there!

Soundtrack – , ‘Season Of The Hurricane’; , ‘Manic Moonlight’.

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Some things are just so… WRONG!!

OK, so I was checking out the site of a venue that a friend of mine’s band are playing at, and found this list of events for the week – I draw your attention to the listing for the 28th – “ALL YOU CAN EAT FISH AND CHIPS FOLLOWED BY KARAOKE @10PM” – all you can eat fish and chips?????????? WTF???? I don’t even eat fish, in fact, find the whole idea of eating any kind of animal completely twisted, but I’m still really really wierded out by the combination of this most british of institutions coupled with that most heinous of american serving disasters. It’s like asking if you want to supersize a Vegetable Balti. Just Plain Wrongness.

I mean, OK, so it’s an English theme pub, but still, ‘all you can eat fish and chips’????? no no no no no no no. Stop it.

Soundtrack – , ‘Back In The Circus’.

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Two gigs – one played one watched

A two gig day, but I only played at the first one.

It was the lunchtime gig at the RFH Foyer, with the mighty , and it went very well. Well, I wasn’t in the PA for the first couple of tunes, due to me plugging the DIs into the wrong outputs on my mixer (doh!), but with my rig, it didn’t really matter… :o) After that, we sounded marvellous! This duo just keeps getting better and better, and one of the improv/goo things we did today will no doubt end up as a new Travis/Lawson tune. Good stuff.

Here’s a piccie, taken by Jude on her phone cam thingie –

Then tonights gig, which began with a lovely surprise – I was going to see and anyway, but I walked down the stairs at the Borderline to the unmistakeable sound of ‘s pedal steel guitar! He was playing in a duo with a singer/songwriter called Laura Stark, and doing a mighty fine job of it too!

After that was Duke Special – Pete’s a great performer, and a truly delightful person. If you ever the chance to go and see him, please take it.

And Juliet, she just keeps getting better and better. Her voice was on top form tonight, the new songs she was playing sounded fantastic, Brian and the-keyboardist-whose-name-I-didn’t-catch were both playing and singing marvellously, and Brian Kennedy made a guest appearance. A truly wonderful night out. They are coming to the end of the tour, but if you’re in Gloucester tomorrow night, or Swindon on Saturday, please go and see Duke and Julie do their respective thangs – gig dates here.

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More great live music in England

…and I don’t just mean my upcoming gigs! :o)

is probably best known as drummer extraordinaire with Level 42, Alan Holdsworth and a whole bunch of other people. He’s also a stunning piano player, and has assembled a remarkable band under the name , featuring one of the finest bassist on the planet, , along with Jim Beard, Randy Brecker, Elliot Mason, Jerry Goodman and other top level fusion cats.

I saw them play last year at Turner Simms theatre in Southampton, and the gig was outstanding – very challenging complex music, but marvellous and uplifting too.

They are back on tour starting this Saturday in Milton Keynes, and I urge you to go check them out – click here for the tour dates, which include a week at Ronnie Scott’s in London, and gigs in Manchester, Gainsborough and Gateshead.

Chances to hear music this great outside of the major London concert halls doesn’t come along to often, so please support it. There’s been a thread on the forum about great bassists often bypassing the UK on their European tour dates – if tours like this don’t get supported, it just proves why we’re so often overlooked.

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Another magical Jonatha gig

Tonight’s gig was at , a half hour set, opening the evening (don’t know who the other bands were, didn’t stick around). Another stunning gig – the room was packed, but as it holds about 45 that wasn’t hard (they say the capacity is 60, but I can’t imagine getting 60 people in a room that size!)

Playing songs from the new CD, from Steady Pull and from Plumb, it was lovely to hear Jonatha do a slightly longer set than at the Bedford. She even managed to play a piano with no sustain piano and make it work, which is pretty skillful, if y’all ask me.

and Not-At-All-Evil-Dan came along, at my suggestion, and were both mightily impressed. Also bumped into Andy Piercy, who produced one of the Johnny Markin records I played on in the mid 90s, which was a night surprise. He loved the gig too. Everyone loved it, she’s a genius.

So don’t miss the rest of the London gigs!

Soundtrack – Dream Ticket on BBC 6 Music (who just read out my mini-review of the Jonatha gig).

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fairwell, tooth.

A trip to the dentist this morning resulted in me coming home with one less tooth in my head than I had when I arrived – how come they take my teeth and then charge me £45 for the priviledge? surely they should pay me for my lovely knackered tooth!

Anyway, there’s now a gaping hole in the back of my mouth where said tooth used to be… it’s been broken for a long time, but now there’s just a space. Fortunately it’s far enough back for me not to end up looking like some kind of solo bass Shane MacGowan (thanks for that mental image, Evil Harv).

So I’ve been eating lots of ice-cream today, as instructed by my dentist. That’s the kind of prescription I like! ‘Take two scoops, 9 times a day’.

Teaching this afternoon was fun, trying to explain bass-ness while not dribbling blood and bits of gum and jaw-bone down myself. ewwwwww

so now I’m sat here, with an empty tub of Haaggen-Dazs in front of me and a dull ache in my jaw (from both the monster injection I was given and the tooth being dug out – that’s got to do some muscle damage…)

Still, I’ve got Jonatha Brooke’s gig at the Betsy Trotwood tomorrow night to look forward to! yay!

Soundtrack – , ‘Hearts And Bones’; , ‘Big Dreams And The Bottom Line’; Peter Gabriel, ‘So’; , ‘Plumb’.

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Aha, I think it's fixed…

Well, after much marvellous help from , It looks like the new paypal thingie in the shop is now working! The PHP troubles are dealt with, my paypal account is upgraded to a ‘business account’ and I can now take any old Credit/Debit card orders via paypal without the need for people to sign up to paypal in order to use it! This is marvellous news, believe me! If anyone feels like trying it out please, be my guest. It’s even set up to copy your address details across into the paypal pages, so that you’ve got less typing to do, at least, that’s the idea… Hopefully all of this will mean lots more lovely CD sales for me!

Soundtrack – Finley Quaye, ‘Maverick A Strike’; , ‘Shapeshifter’; , ‘Big Dreams And The Bottom Line’.

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maybe it's time to learn php…

So, I’ve spent most of the afternoon and evening battling with the software on my webshop, trying to impliment a new payment processing thingie via . Paypal have finally made it possible to pay for things through their site without having to sign up for a paypal account, which means that my shop can now handle payments from loads more people – all those people who previously didn’t want to get a paypal account in order to pay!

So, , the lovely open source programming community that came up with the shop interface I use, have implemented a new payment module that allows this new ebay functionality to dovetail nicely with the shop, and with a secure transfer of info, using security certificates, and all that jazz… the problem is, the information on how to actually get all that jazz to work is written in geek-speak, and while I’m reasonably computer-savvy, I’m largely self-taught, so don’t know all the terminology.

Which means I’ll just have to wait to The Captain or Sarda have a spare 20 minutes to help me sort it out. ‘Til then I’ll just keep wasting the hours trying to find new tweaks that will fool php into working.

So maybe it’s time I got a book on php (the language that all these pages and scripts are written in) and found out how to do all this stuff…

Soundtrack – , ‘Speed Your Love’; Free, ‘The Free Story’; Bill Frisell, ‘Live at Pizza Express’.

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Big achievement

OK, so I’m blogging this a week late, but last weekend, I managed to get my email inbox down from over 1200 to 7! The main upshot of this was that I was able to ditch Outlook Express and switch over to , which also allows me to have all my news/blog feeds in the same programme as my email. which is nice. One more step away from Microsoft stuff.

On the subject of groovy free software, I mentioned a few days ago about , the free photo management thingie from Google. Well, I’ve been toying with it, and it’s even better than I first realised. It’ll generate webpages with your photos in, movie files of your photos as a slideshow, and all the edits are non-destructive, so you can do as much editing as you like, and then save a copy later… It’s great. Seriously, I’d have happily paid £100 for a piece of software this logical and useful. I’ve hardly opened photoshop since I started using this.

Soundtrack – and Elvis Costello, ‘Deep Dead Blue’; , ’10 Cent Wings’ and ‘Back In The Circus’; , ‘Entremundo’; , ‘Legs To Make Us Longer’.


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