Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Shepherds Bush Empire

02 Monday Oct 2006

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originally uploaded by Phil & Catherine Wilkins.

We finally caught up with Ryan Adams last night at the Shepherds Bush Empire in London. This was our third attempt to catch him live (the first tour got cancelled because Ryan managed to break his arm walking off stage in Loverpool, the second due to ill health).

 

The performance was pretty good, it certainly demonstrated his musicianship & and workaholic rate, as Ryan backed Neal Casal’s support slot on drums, and then his own set wasn’t stopped to mess around with encores, they plaid straight through until the curfew.

 

The band played through a lot of material from the albums last year, with the audience responding particularly well to the material from Cold Roses.

 

The ownly irritation of the evening, was that both Neal and Ryan demonstrated Dylanesque attitudes. Neal, stopped a couple of times to rant at tha audience for talking. Although sympathetic to his case, but people talking whilst you’re performing is par for the course when you’re the support. Then Ryan reacted badly to hecklers later in the show when was talking between songs about the problems of picking up coughs and colds whilst on the road. Think Ryan needs to learn a couple of good put-downs.

 

I managed to capture some pictures on the 3megapixel phone camea (sony ericsson K800i) – a set of which is available on our flickr photoss.

 

Overall, I’d say a band worth seeing.

BBC Still Banning Songs

26 Tuesday Sep 2006

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I thought the days of the BBC banning particular songs was long gone, and that the worst they did was consign the song to a minor playlist or worse.  But this wouldn’t seem to be the case, as according the AlbumVote.co.uk the BBC have banned the latest single by The Sparks – Dick Around (a reference to time wasting) (article here).  Understandably with BBC 6 Music and some of Radio 1’s alternative programming being one of the few potential outlets to get the single heard the Mael brothers are pretty pissed off.

 

The irony is, that they performed the song live on BBC 1 TV only last Friday as the closing performance on the Jonathon Ross show!  Plus having just searched the BeeB’s website already been plaid a number of times on BBC 6 Music. A little late now to band the song?  Doesn’t this smack of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax?

Flickr Pools

26 Tuesday Sep 2006

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I’ve been using Flickr for nearly a year now, and still continue to be impressed by it.  We’ve principally been using it to share our photos with friends and family who spread around around the world.

 

Pollock No. 1 from MOMAHowever one interesting trend I’ve encountered, are Flickr pools/groups, to date I’ve used them with friends to share photos from get togethers.  But it appears people have been using them for far wider associations.  For example, when I posted photos from our New York trip earlier in the year I was approached, and asked if I’d contribute to a pool that is collecting photos of all the work in MOMA – an interesting idea, with all-sorts of potentially interesting implications if it becomes a wide spread occurrence.

 

Scissor Sisters - Red SquareThen as a result of posting photos from the Scissor sisters gig in Trafalgar Square, we’ve been asked if we’d contribute to the Scissor Sister’s pool of that event which can be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/motoredsquare/pool/.

 

I mentioned, that such pools if they become a wider spread idea, could have some interesting implications.  Consider, if you could go online and see images from every exhibit in MOMA , would you still go?  Personally yes I would, but is my view representative?  But I would take advantage of such pools to help identify which exhibitions within MOMA I would like to see.  The MOMA pool can be found here.

 

As cameras become increasingly smaller, cleverer and greater resolutions, what will happen to photo journalism, as pools like the Scissor Sisters ones may end providing publishers with suitable sources of images from events around the world?

Mark Thomas – Live

21 Thursday Sep 2006

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I was lucky enough to see Mark Thomas perform live last night. For those who haven’t heard of Mark, he is part investigative journalist, part comedian and part campaigner.

 

Mark’s research and knowledge on things he investigates upon is tremendous.  For example, the SOCPA legislation which includes provisions to prevents demonstration near Parliament without a license – a crazy law that was passed ostensibly to help protect parliament from terrorism, like a terrorist would worry about small legal issues as that. The definition of demonstration means that for one or more people to demonstrate about anything requires a license to be issued by the Police. So Mark, related how he addressed this organising individual demonstrations on subjects like ‘the decline of surrealism’ and going as far as arranging for several hundred people to demonstrate together, all demonstrating for their own thing on the same day – creating hilarious results.  For more about this see Mark’s website here.

 

Then there is the question is celebrating Guy Fawkes night, actually an act of glorifying terrorism now?  If so, how many years will you get sent down for if you wave a sparkler about?

 

Although these things may not sound very funny, Mark’s humour comes from relating back the characters that he comes across, on his travels and the juxtapositions of some of the situations he finds himself in when investigating or trying to highlight issues.

 

The tour in part is to help promote his new book about the arms trade and the extent that they will go to circumvent national and international legislation.  I got an autographed copy of the book last night and started reading, initial impression is that it is as both entertaining and informative as his live show – so would recommend it, even if you don’t agree with his views.

 

The Times have a review of an earlier performance in the tour here.

iTunes Users

19 Tuesday Sep 2006

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The BBC and Digital Music News (and I’m sure others as well) have articles about the results of some research by Jupiter Research.  The research shows how little iTunes use gets, compared to the number of iPods incirculation and the alternative sources of music to load onto them. The report indicates that people draw the bulk of their music on their iPods from CDs that they own and to an extent P2P file sharing.

The most interesting point that the BeeB highlights is the fact that people who tend to have these devices also tend to purchase more CDs.  So, despite the integration of iTunes and iPods – people at the end of the date like to have something real that they can touch and feel.

Scissor Sisters Live – Red Square

17 Sunday Sep 2006

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originally uploaded by Phil & Catherine Wilkins.

We have been fortunate enough to have won a pair of tickets to see the Scissor Sisters as part of their Red Square concert in Trafalgar Square, London. I got to try my Sony Ericsson K800i phone camera in anger for the first time, and this is one of the results (a complete set is on our Flickr site http://photos.mp3monster.org)

Guerrilla Art

15 Friday Sep 2006

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The Guerrilla Artists Banksy is getting a lot of press at the moment, with another article on the BeeB news site.  I found it rather amusing that in the BBC article some of the people interviewed couldn’t get their head around some of his simple messages.

If you’d like to see more interesting work, then check out his website here.

Free Really Legal Downloads – SpiralFrog

07 Thursday Sep 2006

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Following on from an earlier blog entry (here) about SpiralFrog providing legal, freedownloads – EMI have now made an agreement to license their music to the service, that puts the catalogues of two of the largest players into the service. In addition to this, EMI have approved the use of lyrics as well on the site. If my recollection is correct about nine months ago EMI was one of the players that spent time trying to shutdown lyric search engines.

The Motoring Darwin Awards?

07 Thursday Sep 2006

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There seems to be a rising number of cases of people trying to do something (illegal) about speed cameras. The cases that I’ve seen have actually resulted in the individual(s) end up being hurt or prosecuted for more serious crimes and receiving greater punchishment as a result. So I’d like to suggest a new form of Darwin award for motorists where nominees end up beig prosecuted for more serious crimes as a result of trying to avoid speeding charges.

Here are my first nominees:

Feel free to post links to more nominees in the blog comments 🙂

Mercury Music Prize 2006 Announced

06 Wednesday Sep 2006

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This year’s Mercury Music Prize has been awarded to the Arctic Monkeys – not my choice, but there you go.  Anyway more information can be found at the Award’s website here.