Slow Thrills

Well, well....
It's been a long time since I posted here (or anywhere for that matter!) such are the lovely distractions of fatherhood. The official announcement was lost in the great ezboard disaster of May/ June so in case you don't know already, I should say that I am now the proud father of Elliott, who was born on the 12th May. All is good!
I had wanted to start up a completely new site, but as it has taken me four months to even post a message here I reckoned against it for now.

So what else has been happening since I lasted posted here?
I've been to a few gigs - Hot Snakes were great in the Limelight, flat-out punk rock all the way. Wolf Eyes were occasionally stunning in the Pavilion, although they expected us to mosh to their abstract noise rather than stroke our collective chins and they cut it a bit short. Who else? Devendra Banhart brought a band and went down well in the Empire but it wasn't what I was expecting. More trad rock than trippy folk this time. Sleater Kinney continued their worrying obsession with bloated 70's rock last night in the Spring and Airbrake. 'The Woods' does sound better live but was eclipsed by the highlights from their back catalogue - 'Oh' and 'Dig Me Out' were particularly great. They left feeling nostalgic for the times I had seen them previously.
Locally, I've seen two great gigs. We Are Knives the other week in Auntie Annies, and Oppenheimer, who were the very best thing that I saw during the viTal gigs last week in Botanic. I've got lots more to say about those two in the future.

Our ezboard has bitten the dust (yeah I know the link is still there but I haven't got time to fix it, and the buggers lost a whole year's worth of posts so I'm not going near it), so I have been fooling around with Audioscrobbler/ Last.fm. There's a lot of potential to tie the blog and archives in with it, but in the meantime you can see what I'm listening to by clicking here.

It's not all good news though. I was sad to hear about the passing of John Loder, Robert Moog and just today, R.L. Burnside. I used to live right behind John Loder's Southern Studios in Wood Green, North London, where many a fine record was made. Look on the back of Big Black's 'Songs About Fucking' - it says "recorded in Chicago and Wood Green, no shit!" It made Wood Green seem that little bit cooler. A friend of mine once rang him about a job vacancy at Southern, they had a phone interview then John invited him to a gig in the Garage that night. I went along as well (I think it was Les Savy Fav but I'm not sure), John had just told us to ask for him when we got there. "Everyone knows me", he had said. It turned out he was right. Bless him.