I’ve been to two gigs in the past two days. So here is me writing about them and that:
RX Bandits
On Thursday night, I went to Birmingham Barfly with Bouff to see RX Bandits – a band who I’d previously only heard one song by, but the one song is one of my favourite songs. Birmingham verified its place as worst city in the world, with the relatively new and shiny Bull Ring shopping centre merely confirming that you can’t polish a turd. It isn’t that I have an irrational dislike of Birmingham or anyone living in it, it is just the most unpleasant place you could ever have the misfortune to end up in. But these were desperate times – the band weren’t going to come and play somewhere more pleasant (Belsen?), so we had to brave it.
The support were pretty forgettable… by which I mean, I saw them on Thursday, yet can’t for the life of me remember who they were.
RX Bandits were really good – I’d perhaps liken them to Reel Big Fish if they were just really happy rather than funny too. The singer had a big beard and long hair. They did the predictable thing and played some songs whilst a large gathering of people looked on. I particularly enjoyed a slightly slowed down version of Overcome (The Recapitulation). In summary: “Pretty good!”
Hadouken!
I wasn’t expecting to go to this gig until yesterday afternoon when Sarah asked me if I wanted to go. Being hopelessly out of touch, I had no idea who Hadouken were, but I went anyway, because she’s endured a few punk gigs in the past for my benefit. They’re quite unusual – I think they play, er, sort of dance music off of a tape, but with live guitars and keyboards and so on. Its hard to describe.
The audience were subtly different to most of the gigs I go to. Or at least, they would have been subtle if they weren’t all loudly dressed and covered in glowsticks.
One of the support bands had a bloke wearing a silver vest and a red tinted visor over his eyes. His instrument? What looked like an array of buttons that triggered samples, which he tapped periodically between doing the robot.
They were alright though… I… I… don’t know what else to say apart from that as I’m not familiar with their music.
Last night, my friend Bouff and I went to see Send More Paramedics on their last ever tour – as they’re splitting up next month. They’re a fun band, because their gimmick is that they claim to be zombies. They dressed up as zombies, bantered about feasting on the audience, and introduced every single song by saying something like “this one’s about brains”, “this is a song about cannibalism”, “this song’s about zombies”, and so on. They had a varied repertoire.
Their music is much heavier than a lot of stuff I listen to – they’re hardcore and cross-over thrash, whatever that means. They call it “Zombiecore”. Regardless of genre placement, they were excellent. Or you could say they were dead good. Here’s a picture of a grown man dressed as a zombie:
At one point, the singer urged everyone to move forwards into the pit, specifically asking (well, telling), “you in the NOFX shirt and you in the Bane t-shirt” to move forwards. That was us. So I confidently strode forwards before having to make a humiliating retreat back away from the pit as I realised that I was going to be mauled by the nutter standing next to me who was jumping and waving his arms about as if he were being electrocuted.
They only played for about 45 minutes, which felt a bit short – especially as there was no encore. Although they did finish on Zombie Crew, which is to Zombiecore what Hey Jude is to big charity gigs: the big finishing song. Its actually better than Hey Jude because its about zombies, and Paul McCartney isn’t in the band.
After the gig, Bouff has the bright idea of going to Mosh, which for the uninitiated is an awful nightclub in Leicester. Its just about tolerable when its playing agreeable music, but last night when we went there thinking it was metal night, it turned out it was terrible indie night. Unfortunately, we didn’t discover this until we were inside.
I made the following observations:
There were a lot of glowsticks. According to Bouff who is less cripplingly out of touch than me, this is apparently because “new rave” is in. If I’d have known this, I’d have bought mine and (figuratively) made a killing.
Out of everyone there, I’d probably spent the least amount of time preparing my hair (approx 0 minutes)
Going out in fancy dress still makes you look like a twat. This is practically a scientific law as it has been proved countless times throughout history.
But Send More Paramedics were ace, which is the main thing. More exciting gig reports soon!
People came almost literally from all over the country – we had people who’d come from Scotland, Wales, East Anglia, Kent, the south coast – almost everywhere really. My friend Jeroen, who’s from the Netherlands, had even given up a day of his holiday in London to meet us all.
Nearly everyone who was there.
Being the webmaster and technically the owner of a major website has its perks. In the afternoon, when we were all in Hyde Park, my fellow administrators and I managed to persuade a couple of the lesser proletariat to go and buy us drinks. The other interesting thing was that because I’m the webmaster, the bloke at the top, I sort of assumed the leadership position. I was making executive decisions about where we should go and where we should go and so on.
Jeroen, Mike, Me, Steffan and Terry – the PKMN.NET Administration team.
It was when I was speaking to the group as a whole and leading people to a spot in the park that I realised that I had created an army. I’d re-iterate that it was amazing, but I fear that it could be (correctly) interpreted that I was enjoying the power trip and megalomania more than I was the meeting people.
Most of the gang lasted until Leicester Square.
After the “official” meet in Hyde Park, about fourteen of us took a trip to Leicester Square to acquisition some food, before (at my command) heading to Westminster via Trafalgar Square. It’s not a trip to London if you don’t see Big Ben. It wasn’t until we were sitting in an underground bar in the former Greater London Council meeting (just across the Thames from Parliament) that we realised we were missing someone. Whoops.
We found him eventually though. As the evening went on it ended up with seven of us, the most hardcore of the gang going to another pub near Euston station – which coincidentally, was a Scream pub. In other words, the same brand of pubs I go to all of the time – and it was just like the ones in Leicester, with its stacker, video jukebox and pool table. The only difference was that it was charging London Prices.
When I was down in London the other day, I was with Katy, and we went for lunch at Pizza Hut – it was the one near the site of the failed Tiger Tiger nightclub bombing in Piccadilly Circus, so we were really living life on the edge.
As we were sitting waiting for our food, for some reason Katy made a vague punching fist gesture towards me (you’d be surprised how often my friends seem to do this to me) for conversational reasons that escape me (for the sake of context, assume it was after a hilarious sexist quip).
Suddenly, one of the waiters chipped in: “No fighting in here, please… you’ll have to take it outside”. He was perhaps 40 years old and sounded like a proper cockney – I imagine he is the sort of person who would use rhyming slang as a matter of course rather than when trying to sound like a Londoner.
“What have you done?” he asked in his best cockney accent, to which I could only manage to respond with genuine but perhaps slightly over-forced laughter. “Do you want any help?” he said to Katy, as he himself clenched his fists and mimed a punching motion.
Its not that I don’t mind receiving threats of violence from strangers… it’s just a little odd. And it made me worry as he looked like the sort of bloke who might “know some people”.
Maybe he used to be a contract killer, but work dried up when the made murder illegal a few years ago, so he’s turned his hand to waiter-ing (waiting?), and has a lot of pent up aggression?
After we’d finished eating he came back. Rather than ask if we wanted the bill or whether everything was alright, he again made his hands into fists and said directly to me with some faux-indignation “Are you still alive?“. It was almost as if he’d expected me to be a bloody corpse by the time he returned.
I don’t know what it is about Piccadilly Circus – first terrorists try (and fail) to bomb somewhere close to where I was two days after I was there, and now a passive aggressive threat. Weird.
I can’t believe how much we did yesterday. We must have seen almost everything in Paris, apart from perhaps the inevitable suburban riots and unionised Frenchmen doing some actual work.
Our first visit of the day was to the Arc Du Triumph, which is surprisingly massive. Its in the middle of a gigantic roundabout that has approximately fifty lanes of traffic and no road markings. I think Parisian roundabouts work on a system where by you filter on to the roundabout whenever, and it’s a free-for-all as you fight for survival. Luckily, we didn’t have to cross the road to get there – there was an poorly lit underpass full of tourists.
Next up, we walked down the Champs Elysee, which was full of some very expensive looking shops – not the useful kinds of shops though, as they all looked like women’s clothes shops. We stopped for some food near to a man who was standing about whistling tunes in the style of pigeons. He was trying to hawk some sort of bird whistle, so played a number of recognisable tunes in (pun-alert!) pigeon English. JD, ever the obvious tourist with his ‘Paris’ t-shirt, shorts and sandals, was taken in by this and bought one. I haven’t seen him use it yet, although they’ll be a YouTube video when he does.
We continued down the CdE, meandering through one of the various jardins that are invariably actually the roof of an underground car park, passing the seating that had been set up for the Tour de France. I think we went past the Elysee Palace, but I’ve really no idea – there were some fancy gates, so they must have been in front of something important.
At the bottom of the Champs Elysee is the Place de la Concorde, which is where two hundred years ago they guillotined the Royal Family, and set in motion the chain of events that would lead to not only the American revolution and republican democracy around the world, but a boom in sales for guillotine salesmen.
From the PdlC, you get the most incredible view. The French National Assembly on one side, the Louvre on another, the Arc De Triumph and the Grand Arch de Defence and the Eiffel Tower. This was also surrounded by what was probably the most dangerous roundabout in the world. In the middle, rather than have a guillotine set up, just in case the French Royal Family try and organise another rebellion, there’s a big Egyptian Obelisk, which is incredible to look at. It’s surprisingly big and covered in hieroglyphics. I would give it 9/10.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon on a monday, the queue was incredibly short. We couldn’t have queued for any longer than two minutes. First of all we did the most obvious thing and went to try and see the Mona Lisa, just like every other tourist ever. It had its own sign posts.
The Mona Lisa has glass in front of it, and it is mounted on what I assume is some sort of security device. There were hundreds of tourists all standing around trying to push their way to the front to see it – although its not like they hadn’t seen it before. It was quite surreal, as no one could give a damn about the other paintings, yet get the one from the Da Vinci code on the wall and everyone is dying to see it.
It was pretty good though – someone said to me that seeing it is exciting because you’re seeing something so famous, not because of the actual artistic ability, which were distinctly average. I’m sure Da Vinci’s use of light in paintings was revolutionary at the time, but these days we have photos that do much the same thing.
The other wing of Louvre, over the other side of the courtyard was practically empty (slight exaggeration). The best thing it had to boast was a load of old Persian carpets and Islamic pots. One thing it did have were some old timey Mesopotamian statues – they were incredible.
The Louvre was pretty good – much better than the Tate Modern, in that the paintings actually looked like the things that they’re supposed to be.
We left the Lourve via the secret underground shopping centre – which had a Virgin Megastores underneath the lovely jardin above. Which was a bit bizarre if you were expecting the grave of Mary Magdalene instead.
At the bottom of the hill there appears to be some con-artists in permanent residence. Apparently the scam is that they go up to tourists and tie a piece of string around their fingers… and sell them the string. And probably try to pick-pocket them at the same time.
The inside of the church was pretty predictable: it was basically a bunch of Catholics being wrong, but they were happy so we left them to it. The view from the top of the hill gives you an ace view of the Paris skyline.
Next, as it was getting dark, we went to the Eiffel Tower and incredibly, seemed to get lucky with the lines again. We only had to queue for about half an hour, which is pretty good when you consider that everyone you talk to about the Eiffel Tower who has usually been there tends to recoil in horror when you tell them you just want to look at it, because there’s so many tourists that the tower isn’t even reflecting or emitting enough photons to be seen properly without flickering.
We went to the second floor on the basis that it wouldn’t be as expensive or busy as the top. Perhaps the most startling revelation is that it turns out that I appear to suffer from vertigo when being really, really high up. I’m assuming its because you’re not behind a sheet of glass and theoretically you could fall. I mean, if there were an earthquake that throws you over the high barriers.
The view was incredible you could see everything. The most surprising thing though was the cost of a Coke there. I was expecting a “grande” Coke to be 330ml and cost about half a million pounds, yet it turns out that the Eiffel Tower’s definition of large is approximately the same size as a cinema Coke. Not bad value, really.
After getting down from the Eiffel Tower it was just after midnight, and we had to act fast to catch the Metro – which finished running at half 12. After faffing about for about 15 minutes trying to find the metro station, we got on a train to find people playing music on the train. It seemed very French. It wasn’t until they went around afterwards begging for money that it because obvious what their hidden motive was. Here’s a video:
We arrived at the Latin Quarter to find the most incredible thing: a dance battle. Just in the street like – there were a group of people with a stereo and two men trying to out-do each other at dancing whilst a sizeable crowd watched. It was a bit embarrassing as one bloke was shit hot doing flips and spinning and wearing a jaunty hat, whilst the other was just a bit rubbish.
We made our way to a Jazz Club that JD and Fundar wanted to go to. There was some sort of “swing” band on and they played the sort of twenty minute long songs you’d expect at a jazz club. The barman also had the ability to throw glass bottles around a catch them.
We stayed there until around half-two, when we caught the night-bus home. At 3am. In the centre of Paris. It was a bit scary.
One of the games we’ve been playing today is “spot the Frenchman”. By “we” I basically mean “me in my head”, but its quite an exciting and probably borderline racist game. The best person I saw was a short Parisian woman wearing a red beret, smoking a cigarette with it hanging out of her mouth to the extent that she was gripping the very end of it with her teeth. She was squawking something incomprehensible in a language that is permanently an octave higher than English.
We went into central Paris this evening and had a wander around and saw a lot of people eating in restaurants and drinking in bars, which I guess is what you’d expect. There was a man playing an accordion on the Paris Metro. It felt very French. We ended up bumping into Notre Dame cathedral, which is pretty good.
Its visually very impressive – the effort gone into building it is ridiculous, with it all being intricate carvings and old-timey people, that sort of thing. One thing that bothered me once it was pointed out was the asymmetry: all of the flying buttresses in the world can’t make up for inconsistent arches. As you can tell, I’m quite the architectural expert.
We’ll probably go and have another look at it at some point, so I’ll hopefully be able to blog more in depth then.
We’ve just got to Paris after a long train journey. Its quite exciting being in France, as its just like being in Britain, but slightly different. For example, the font and kerning on road signs are slightly different, and everyone speaks a weird nonsense language in place of English.
The journey was mostly flawless, apart from a couple of moments.
Us at the Eurostar terminal
On the Eurostar, I went to use the toilet. After using the toilet I attempted to wash my hands – I pressed the button on the sink expecting water to come out – instead, it covered my hands in soap. I then pressed the other button on the sink, and it produced hot air… Where was the water? I went back to my seat half-assuming that it must have been some sort of gel that combines both the soap and the water parts, only to discover after another passenger pointed it out that for some inexplicable reason, the sink was operated by a foot pedal. It was a bit embarrassing.
When we got to Paris and had to negotiate the Paris metro. We spent around fifteen minutes faffing about with a ticket machine like only awful foreigners can, only to buy the wrong tickets. It’s slightly embarrassing walking up to a ticket barrier, confidently putting your ticket into the machine, carrying a couple of large heavy bags, only to walk into an immobile turnstyle. The woman at the ticket desk was quite dismissive when we asked her “what le fuck?” – she pointed out that our tickets were only valid from tomorrow. This wasn’t a problem with our translation, as it was written in numerals… we just didn’t know what day of the week it was.
But we’re in the hotel now and we’re trying to figure out what to do this evening. The other looming problem is that despite booking a triple room there is only two beds. I’m going to have the bunk bed I think, and JD and Fundar will have to share. This isn’t only to make it less weird, but it means that if the bunk bed collapses under our adult weights, my face won’t be crushed.
Tomorrow morning, I’m going on holiday! I’m going to Paris for five days with my friends JD and Fundar – who you might remember from the video of when I went to London.
Obscure blog in-joke: The French is going to meet The French.
The reason my friends have such ridiculous nicknames is because they are all called James. I’m half expecting passport control to think we’re taking the piss.
I’m not entirely sure what to expect though. Hopefully there won’t be too many awful foreigners. I realise that the culture in Paris is slightly different to the UK, so I’m going to try and integrate myself by shaving my head and draping myself in a union jack cape for the duration of the trip – they’ll love that.
I’m not entirely sure what we’re going to do in Paris yet – if you’ve got any suggestions for anything cool we could do post a comment below. I don’t think the other two are too enthusiastic about my idea to try and incite a new revolution by demanding a maximum price on bread – and they think my calls for the fourth estate to get seats in the Senate is ridiculous. This is probably still more plausible than my original plan for a European adventure though: I wanted to take the ferry to Normandy on June 6th and prove how easy it is to invade Europe using only a Ford KA.
I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to blog whilst on holiday. I’m hoping it’ll be rather a lot – the hotel has wifi, and I’ll probably be taking my laptop. Who knows… you might even get video blogs?
Yeah, I quite likegoing to zoos. Katy and I decided to “up the ante” today (whatever that means) and take a trip to a Safari Park, where we’d actually get dangerously close the animals.
One thing I worried about before going, aside from potentially being eaten by lions, was the car insurance implications. I mean, do the park pay for any damage the monkeys make? Or do I have to swap insurance details with the monkey, then ring my insurer and try and explain to them how a primate smashed in the bonnet?
Unlike most worries, this was not baseless: a monkey did actually jump on to the car, and wouldn’t go away. So I ended up driving along with a monkey on the roof to try and knock it off.
After the drive though bit, where we came up-close with a rhino, a bear, a lion – all of the scary animals basically, you can park your car and look around a more traditional Zoo-like area. Unlike zoos though, the animals don’t tend to be behind fences, and you can get right up close to them. Here are some photos to prove this point, in case you, er, don’t believe me:
Lots of Wallabies at feeding time.
A lemur? Something like that.
Me, scared of a peacock.
Hello, new Facebook profile picture.
The best bit though was undoubtedly an aviary, where you can just walk in and be surrounded by birds. Whilst this doesn’t sound too spectacular, you could buy nectar in little cups, so that when you walk into the main area, half a million birds swarm around you and land on you, fighting over the food. Here’s a short video (and I do mean short- it’s only 26 seconds, unlike the eight minute epics I’ve been producing lately):
In retrospect, instead of saying “Hello” to the bird at the end, I should have said “So, do you come here often?” to maximise the gag. I guess this is why proper film makers write scripts.
Yesterday, Katy and I went down to London to watch the big Prime Ministerial changeover. Here’s what happened in video form. Words and pictures to follow shortly:
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