Category - Music

OK, I think I got this gallery thing figured out – here are some photos I took at the Queen + Paul Rodgers gig a few weeks ago.     

Click the thumbnails to see a medium-sized image, then click that image to see the full size photo (the full-sized images are reduced to 800×600 from the original 2592×1944).

Well, I went to see MGMT last night. Musically, very good, but couldn’t hear a damned word he was singing. Couldn’t even hear a word he was saying on the (very) rare occasions he spoke to the audience. The sound was a bit muddy and the vocals had way too much echo on them.

I was surprised by the performance. The band has almost no stage presence at all. It’s just five people, each doing their own thing in their own little space. The singer looks like a sulky teenager and behaves like that all the way through. The keyboards player at least made an effort: he was wearing large and ridiculously dark sunglasses. The lead guitar looks the part and is quite accomplished, and since much of MGMT’s repertoire involves fairly long guitar riffs this was welcome. I don’t think the bass player looked at the audience all night. You definitely got the impression that they didn’t really want to be there.

The thing we noticed on the way in was the age of the crowd. It was full of students doing what students do best: being annoying. I’ve never seen so many people in one place all trying to take their own photographs.

In the venue there is a flight of stairs which leads up to a first floor. I’m pretty sure there is a bar up there, and I’d be surprised if there are no toilets (but there might not be). Well, we stood quite near these stairs, and also near the two or three steps which lead down to the floor in front of the stage. As the time neared for the main band to appear there was a constant two-way flow of people up and down the stairs and up and down from the main floor. I have never seen it that way before. Even when the band came on, it triggered a further flow of people – away from the stage, it seems.

I suppose that since students are only technically not children, and certainly at this precise moment they were children up until about a month ago, the presence of a flight of stairs to keep walking up an down simply because it is there has to be accepted by those who were genuinely there as adults. (Incidentally, at a Rush gig last year someone had brought their son – he only looked about 9 or 10. He must have walked from his seat at one end of the row, past me to go somewhere, then come back 5 minutes later at least a dozen times. It’s just what kids do, even if it IS extremely irritating.)

Oh, and the other people-watching thing involved the two girls in front of me. After they’d taken a few pictures of themselves on the camera phone, heads together, laughing hysterically, arm outstretched, they then spent the whole gig yak-yak-yakking to each other. I don’t think they looked towards the stage once.

Finally, we went for a curry in a local restaurant which has featured on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. It was absolutely crap – like the chef had forgotten to put any curry powder at all in the dishes when he was making them. There was literally no curry taste of any kind.

Every night, when I go to bed, I spend some time listening to the various digital music channels on Sky. I channel-hop until I find something decent – something which can make your finger tired after a while, as the amount of decent music seems to constitute less than 1% of the total music played on these channels.

I detest all forms of (c)rap music – the ‘c’ is silent when you pronounce that.

I like rock, so Kerrang! (Sky channel 368) is annoying when it plays (c)rap music. It’s also annoying when it keeps playing Slipknot and other bands who all sound exactly the same, and who feature lead singers for whom laryngitis is a suitable cover to hide their inability to sing. Apart from Kings Of Leon, Foo Fighters, and so on, one gem I heard recently was Operation Ground & Pound by Dragonforce. It was good enough to make me get tickets to go and see them on their forthcoming tour.

MTV2 (355) blows hot and cold. It goes through long phases of playing absolute rubbish (more (c)rap, Oasis, pop music, people from London pretending they talk like black gang members, people pretending they’re from London pretending they talk like black gang members, etc.). At rare intervals, they play a track a few times by someone who actually sounds good –  so I got tickets while back to see MGMT in a few weeks. Meanwhile, MTV2 is back to playing Oasis every five minutes.

Sometimes, you’ll channel-hop several times through all the channels and the only music you can find is (c)rap. Boring bass lines, blokes trying to pretend they’re gangsters (sorry, ‘gangstas’ – illiteracy is mandatory for this genre), women trying to pretend they’re somehow hot, all feeling really happy with themselves because the video editor made it look as if they could dance like Michael Jackson used to be able to. Yaaaaawn. The only song in the last 10 years broadly from this genre that was anywhere near good was Outkast’s Hey Ya. And everything they did after that (and before) was crap (the ‘c’ isn’t silent this time).

Now, I enjoy some classical music, too. It’s great to hear Vivaldi or Mozart played by a decent orchestra or musician on ClassicFM (now oMusic, channel 369), though hearing Nigel Kennedy say ‘cool’ at the end of a performance is somehow pushing attempts to make classical more accessible a little too far. Videos for classical music often try too hard! There’s something slightly disturbing about a strapping red-haired woman being shown dressed demurely in one scene, then with her legs wide open and a cello stuffed in between them in another. It just doesn’t quite work. Some of the newer classical or pseudo-classical composers are simply pretentious (anything by the Michael Nyman band – discordant, reptitive garbage), but every now and then you find out about something really good. Sigur Ros and Efterklang are two such, and Little Death Orchestra’s Tiny Crescent Sun was excellent (shame they were a one-off).

But one that really caught my attention the other night was Nell Bryden’s Second Time Around (link removed as it is now broken).