Year: 2004

Apologies for the non-post, but this made me laugh.

The other week, the rudest pub in islington was no more, but somehow it’s back now. Even better, I spotted this today. I can’t guarantee that it’s going to hang around, so I took a screengrab for posterity.

A mere dress rehearsal for the bigger and better festival happenings to come the weekend after next it may have been, but this weekend’s Isle of Wight festival was still great. I wasn’t overly impressed with the two old blokes pretending to be The Who, and found everything post-Word Gets Around that the Stereophonics played to be, well, a touch on the dull side, but aside from that it was a really good weekend. The Manics were on top form, and I even enjoyed the two new songs they played (Empty Souls and Solitude Sometimes Is), sounding as they did like an improvement on the lyrical failings of recent new material like Forever Delayed. I was also suitably embarrassed to discover during No Surface, All Feeling that the two blokes next to me had suddenly started straining to hear me singing along (I have a tendency to sing along mindlessly at gigs without thinking that the people in my immediate vicinty might be able to hear). They didn’t seem to mind, though, describing it as being “like subtitles, only better”.

Earlier, we’d enjoyed seeing Jet play a truncated version of the set we saw at Brixton the other week. It’s definitely a shame that they’re not going to be at Glasto, but one other band that I’ll definitely be trying to see again is Snow Patrol, who played a cracking set on the Sunday (they seemed genuinely, but endearingly, overwhelmed by the [positive crowd response as well).

The only downside to something like IoW is that you have to suffer the usual it’s-not-glasto festival issues, like not being able to take your own beer in and having to queue twice to buy hideously overpriced alcohol inside the venue (whose daft money extorting idea was beer tokens anyway?), but one unusual aspect was that the crowd seemed to be one of the friendliest I’ve encountered at a festival (set against Reading 2001’s bottle throwing Sunday afternoon teenagers as probably the worst). Even when they were being wankers, and there was plently of that going on, especially around the showing of the England match on the Sunday, they were still being quite nice about it. The locals (past whose houses hordes of festival goers trudged twice daily on their way from the campsite to the arena) even seemed to be surprisingly friendly and understanding. Maybe it’s something in the island air. Then again, when David Bowie introduced All The Young Dudes during his excellent–but not quite as good as at Glastonbury 2000–headlining set, he suggested we shouldn’t sing along during the chorus “because of all the local farmers who go to bed early”. I couldn’t help thinking he’d got a bit confused about the whole thing. Perhaps he thought he was somewhere else.

I hate to admit it, but I have something of a soft spot for the free Aussie/Kiwi/SA travellers’ magazine, TNT, and I always pick it up when I notice a spare copy in one of those red bins around town. It’s not, you understand, because I need to keep up with the latest developments in Aussie Rules, or see which more important international leader John Howard has been bending over for this week, but because some of the features are surprisingly good, and because of the entertainment value of a number of the regular sections. It’s always worth looking, for example, at the Spotted feature, where they send some hapless photographer to some traveller-filled bar in South West London (perhaps a Puzzle, or a Walkabout), and take photos of drunken antipodean youngsters. In a stroke of (no doubt unintentional) genius, the photos are always terrible, making it seem like you’re flicking through someone else’s photographs from a drunken night out, rather than something you might find in a professional magazine.

My favourite feature, however, without a shadow of a doubt, is Desperately Seeking, the personal ad/message board page at the back. Personal ads are grimly entertaining at the best of times, and I’ve always enjoyed things like the “behind the classifieds” feature in the Observer magazine, but for sheer entertainment value, it’s hard to beat Desperately Seeking. Perhaps it’s just the stories that these ads unwittingly tell about the people involved. In this week’s issue, for example, I couldn’t help but notice this item:

Shy S seeking Mark at the Bok Bar (TNT May 31): This “sexy barman” shouldn’t be saying he’d do anything for you and taking your number because he’s not single. He is, in fact, my boyfriend.

Further down the page, I noticed two adjacent ads linked to the same email address. Not only has KatwomanC @ AOL been losing her mobile phone at the Redback, but she’s also been meeting a “cute kiwi” at the Shepherd’s Bush Walkabout a few days earlier. One can only imagine the meeting of minds evident from her description of the encounter: “we talked about growing up on a farm and made a joke about sheep.” Hopefully the “cute kiwi”, if he is reading, isn’t reading the rest of the ads, however, or else he might find the one that the same katwoman has placed in the column to the side asking after a “nice SA guy” she’d “met at the Walkabout” (not the same night she talked about to a cute kiwi about sheep, surely?). She got his number, the brazen hussey, but of course she can’t call him because of the lost phone. Ah! The tragedy.

Another wonderful feature of the ads, is the way the people posting them (apart from the ubiqutous KatwomanC) create their own email addresses at hotmail or yahoo for the occasion, which is understandable if you don’t want to give out your real email address. But you do have to pity the chap has to plump for AussieRedback3@hotmail.com. Presumably AussieRedback1 and AussieRedback2 were already taken.

As mentioned a couple of week’s ago, I’ve been able to acquire a gmail account for myself, and have been using the service for a couple of weeks. It’s pretty good, mainly because you get a GB of email storage and all, and also because (unlike hotmail) the best account names aren’t all taken… yet (because it’s not available to the general public).

Anyway, I’ve just been given two gmail invites. I could sell/swap em here, but I won’t. I’m offering them to you lucky people instead.

So, anyone want a gmail account? Leave a comment explaining why you deserve it and I’ll invite you into the special geek club.

EDIT: apparently it’s not that special anymore–gmail just quadrupled in size, everyone got invites and word has already got to ebay where the invites for sale are rapidly dropping in value. Still, the offer stands if anyone apart from Pete (see comments) wants the other invite. I actually got three, but I’m keeping one for the missus…

EDIT(2): I got given even more invites, and after giving a few away I still have one left, if anyone wants it.

Apologies for the public service announcement-esque nature of this post, but I’d just like to urge you all (if you’re in the UK or Europe) to go out and put a couple of small crosses on a piece of paper between 7am and 10pm tomorrow. It’s not much to ask, is it?

If ever there was a case for arguing against the tired assertions that voting doesn’t make a difference, or that politicans are all the same, it would be this week’s elections. In London, we’re voting for a new Mayor, local councils, and the European elections, and judging by the voting information booklet that dropped through my door the other day, there’s some scary f*ckers out there, and I don’t just mean Steven Norris–look at how many candidates the BNP are fielding and then tell me that all politicians are the same. Even worse, because the European elections, and the elections for the London Assembly, use proportional represention (to a greater or lesser extent), there is a very real chance that some of these people might win seats.

So do me a favour and go out and vote. Cheers.

Oh, and if anyone can explain to me how you “turn out” for a postal vote, I’d be very grateful…

(normal service will be resumed shortly)

As if, at this stage, you could have expected anything any different, following the complete mess that Glastonbury Festivals Limited, Aloud, and the Wayahead box office (See tickets) managed to make of selling tickets to this year’s Glastonbury festival, dealing with the aftermath of their inadequate ticketing system, and making coherent, sensible announcements to the ticket buying public, it now looks rather like they have managed to completely stuff up the whole ticket ID system as well.

I received my tickets this morning, and found them accompanied by the following letter:

Ticket holders will require one of the following forms of official identification, which should match your name on the ticket. This will be checked at the wrist band exchange.

– Original Bank Statement
– Bank Debit Card
– Original Photo Driving Licence

Ignoring for a second the unfortunately ambiguous use of “should”, when I presume they actually mean “must” (it should match the name on the ticket, but if it doesn’t oh well, never mind, you can come in anyway…), there has been something of a breakdown in communication between GFL and Seetickets, at least according to this post (and the many, many other posts from both confused punters and supposedly informed message board moderators). What they meant to say was that the bank statement/debit card should be the one used to purchase the tickets, not the one of the person named on the ticket. (“It is the bank statement of the ticket purchaser even if that is different from the person carrying the ticket.”)

GFL seem rather surprised that some people might have interpreted “match your name on the ticket” as meaning that the named ticket holder should bring his or her bank statement.

And quite apart from anything, this system is ludicrously easy to circumvent. So what was the point, exactly?

Apart from the 4 remaining chances to buy tickets, via the Orange WAP site:
http://mobile.digitalrum.com/index.php?app=1 (onsale from 12pm today, and then again each day until Saturday). Seriously, does anyone not have a ticket yet?

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, I quite like this: the Glastonbury clash finder.

Unfortunately I can’t really say anything more about that for now, so I’ll have to make do with telling you about my bank holiday weekend. And it was just as well that it was a long weekend, because we weren’t in much of a state to function yesterday after Steve and Casey’s afternoon BBQ (something of a typically English affair, involving people running into the house every time the rain started, with the notable exception of the apparently normal, but slightly scary, pyromanic bloke who worked on Big Brother, who was content to stoke the fire with some of the chemically treated wood he’d brought with him to burn) turned into an all day drinking session that ended (for some inexplicable reason) with us in an impossibly hot Walkabout, with me bemoaning the awful music policy–seriously, would it really be that hard to play something from the last 10 years that isn’t rubbish? And does anyone really need to hear the Proclaimers? Honestly.

When we eventually surfaced yesterday, and discovered it to be a much nicer day, we headed off for a gentle wander down through Islington in the sunshine, with the vaugest intentions of heading maybe for Clerkenwell. Somehow, though, when we hit the canal (not literally, obviously), we just kept walking, and ended up strolling through the heart of East London, somehow winding up in London Fields, somewhere previously known only to me as the Martin Amis novel of the same name. After a late lunch in a very nice pub, we both went to sleep in a park surrounded by people playing music, smoking flavoured tabacco and tending to small disposable BBQs. It would have felt very much like being at a festival, were it not for the sound of the Stansted Express trundling along the raised tracks a short distance away. Still, with less than two weeks to go before my personal festival season kicks off, and today’s Glasto lineup announcement, I’m already anticipating a fine, fun summer.

(“…Tom Gray, who got a grade A in 1995, is now lead songwriter for top band Gomez…”)

We rounded off our week of live events with a another cracking gig, Gomez at the Apollo (observant readers may notice that last night was therefore the second time we’ve visited the Apollo in the space of 4 days, and, in fact, the third time we’ve been to Hammersmith since Sunday. Remind me again why we moved to North London…?)

Anyway, the band were great, and I enjoyed pretty much everything from their opening Bring It On through to We Haven’t Turned Around and Whippin’ Picadilly at the end (how could they finish with anything else…) No 78 Stone Wobble though (and they never play Machismo, which is one of my favourites), but still great (and the new album’s sounding excellent). I think even Sal enjoyed it, despite having only the most cursory of previous exposure to the band.

Tonight I will be mostly sleeping.