A Hectic Week: Part One

The last 10 days or so have been most frantic, I’ve been here there and everywhere, mostly London.

It began sometime last Thursday when I had my last day in my old job, at least for four months anyway, on top of this I had a job interview and an election to get excited about.  The outcome of the election and the interview were neither what I had hoped for, although more about the election in a bit I think.

Friday I ventured down to London to watch She and Him and the Koko in Camden.  I took photos on my phone and also a couple of videos, the photos look shite and the videos have no sound (at least on this laptop – my new one).  The performance was great and seemed to go on forever, if they had people at gigs who circled around the crowd offering you drinks or snacks like they do at baseball I would have stayed away from the bar.  As it was after what seemed like two glorious hours of folky-indie-poptasticness I left my hard earned spot behind they guy with the microphone head.  Perhaps gig venus could invest in a few of those toy helicopters and literally airlift a pint to you, the only downside is that all the talls nobs who insist on standing at the front and in front of me would probably steal  you drink as well your view.

I would like to talk more about the gig but my memory is not always reliable, all I can say is that they played all of my favourites from Volume One and Volume Two (which has been on constantly in my car for the last two weeks).  Hold the phone!  I just checked Youtube and people have good videos of the show.  Firstly ‘Gonna Get Along Without You Now’ where Zooey Deschanel looks like she is giant playing a human sized geetar.  The second is possibly my favourite song from Volume Two ‘Home’ kudos to the guy who filmed these for the close-ups of Zooey.

Zooey is just great, her voice is wonderful and she balances cute, with fun and sultry sexiness very well.  M Ward is just a cool motherfucker and the backing band was great, I especially liked the hat on the old geezer who strutted around the stage like he owned the joint (you can see him briefly in the Home video.  The Chapin Sisters were also great backing singers, and a not bad support band.  We did feel that the whole thing would be better suited to a boozy summer afternoon at a festival than an old fashioned club on a Friday night, so if you ever get the chance to see  them that way I suggest you do it.

It was certainly a more enjoyable gig than Pavement on Wednesday night which felt like a bit of a let down, there were some great moments but also a sense of being underwhelmed.  I’d like to see them again someday just to hope that this was perhaps a one-off and maybe it was me not you Pavement.

Saturday saw myself and my friend Nic spend most of sat in Camden in a kind of Waiting for Godot scenario, except we were waiting for Moff who eventually (after some 4 or 5 hours) turned up looking like Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man (without the big iron suit).  Twas a fun day of just casual booze and chatter where we got to meet the most incredibly funny Polish guy who claimed to be a former Polish Olympic Ice Hockey player that now owns a cafe in Shoreditch and hates Germans.  I want to believe him and I do.  He now looks like something out of Anvil which made the whole experience more fun, the low point was the fact that he did have an aroma of spicy sausage.

On Sunday, rather than going home like my plan for Saturday, I ended up watching Hot Tub Time Machine and have my second all day breakfast in a pub in two days.  I shall save my thoughts on the film for a film review post but it is always nice to go to the cinema, something I don’t do often enough.

I finally headed home that evening after a long, long weekend only to find the country on the verge of a ConDem coalition, I’ll write more about that in Part Two but don’t be surprised if Part Two doesn’t turn up.