Okay, I know I can't stop harping on about the genius that is Datarock but please check this out - now with added school marching band.
How great are Datarock? Unquestionably, truly great..

Kevin Tkachuk - not a naturally Glaswegian name. Rugby - not a naturally Glaswegian game. But hey - who's complaining?? Not me.

Volcano The Bear (above)
Dreams Of Tall Buildings
Bummer Road
Burning Star Core
With Throats As Fine As Needles
Les Poissons Autistes
People Under The Stairs
Fat Worm Of Error
Times New Viking
Spires That In The Sunset Rise

Last week saw the debut UK shows by the US band Tapes 'n' Tapes. Their CD, The Loon, pressed themselves and sold via their website, has become the latest US indie sensation - much in the manner of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah before them. It was with slight trepidation that I joined this particular bandwagon, since I found the Clap Your Hands... record a bit underwhelming, and their live show a very soulless and character-free affair.
Over the last few weeks, though, The Loon has been a permanent fixture on the CD and iPod. It's a very varied album, and goes through a variety of styles - but theyr're all styles I approve of, and the songs are really strong. It takes a bit of time, but it's certainly worth it. So I looked forward to seeing if their supposedly fierce live reputation would stand up.
On the evidece of their London show the verdict was 'promising but watch this space'. Playing in the intimate basement club The Metro meant we got to see them at close range, but there were two problems. It was the band's first UK show and they seemed tired and nervous, taking a while to kick in. Also, the problem with an intimate basement venue is you can't escape from the journalist, geust list and all round wanker types who either talk through the entire show or stand their waiting for some miracle of live performance to break their questioning passivity towards the act. As I say, promising.
On Wednesday the Tapes bandwagon was scheduled to hit Glasgow. I happened to be back in Glasgow then, and it happened to be my niece Hannah's 18th birthday. Hannah has become disturbingly similar to her uncle in the last couple of years or so when it comes to all things musical, and this year so far has been my gig-going partner to a series of shows that she has totally loved (particularly Secret Machines and Flaming Lips). As she had no plans for celebrating the big '18th' event, I suggested we go and see Tapes 'n' Tapes. What I hadn't told her was I had mailed the band's website asking if they could in some way acknowledge the event and they'd mailed back to say they would "certainly try and remember to do something".
We got into the venue - Nice & Sleazy - which I've never been to before. It's more basement and more intimate than even The Metro. Essentially it's a converted cellar, with an unfortunate pillar right in front of the stage. It's almost possible to touch the ceiling without stretching. But we got close to the front and found a spot where the band would be largely visible and pretty soon they were on.
After their first two, almost 'warm-up' tracks frontman Josh Grier announced that before they continue they want to acknowledge a birthday in the audience. He then encouraged the entire crowd to chant "Happy Bithday Hannah" before going into the standout track from their album, Insister. After that (and I know I am going to sound biased here) Tapes 'n' Tapes ripped the joint with an intense, tight, thrilling performance. It might only have been another half an hour or so but it was totally magnificent. And the Glasgow audience responded in such a dramatically different way to London, as if they knew they were watching something really special. We even managed to persuade them to come back for an encore - something I know the band almost never do.
Afterwards they sold their CD from the front of the stage, and I managed to thank the guys for being so kind, and Hannah got a CD and a hug from them, and we left feeling very happy and elated. It gives me great pleasure to report that not only are Tapes 'n' Tapes totally worth the hype and the fearsome live reputation, but they are a bunch of sweet guys who keep to their word and made an old uncle and his niece very happy for the night.

Fred Sandback is one of the lesser known and less celebrated of the artists loosely termed 'Minimalists' from their breakthrough in the mid 60s onwards. Where Donald Judd was all about the box, and Dan Flavin all abut the light fitting, Sandback is all about (largely) string, twine, cord, thread or any kind of thin flexible line. His big thing is creating planes, spaces and forms by making taut shapes with his material across the corners and surfaces of a gallery's walls, ceiling and floor. I like it a lot - it's spatial and delicate and interesting to not simply look at but walk around. It's kind of architectural, and kind of drawing in space. I like it formally, pure and simple. I hate the guff that gets written about it to justify it (see a recent entry on Flavin below).
So I was drawn to a show of his work in Edinburgh that was due to close last week. Billing itself as a 'retrospective', it was at the Fruitmarket Gallery where ironically I once worked in the mid 1980s - as a lowly gallery assistant, mind, not a high flying drug-fuelled curator in Armani shades with Bottega Veneta luggage.
What can I say - this show was an utter nonsense and total disgrace. The Fruitmarket is currently one of the worst examples of a loathsome provincial, vaguely state-supported, UK art gallery. Given funds by the Arts Council it renovated for commerce not aesthetics. So the large glass-walled ground floor space houses - you guessed it - a poncey café and a bookshop treading the preposterous line between Lacanian theory and gift wrap. Behind them lie two cramped 'gallery' spaces entirely devoid of artificial light with tatty detailing. In one of them, a Sandback piece formed of rising vertical lines of pure white string was installed in a corner, dreadfully lit, rising from floor to ceiling but eventually having to go through an air duct or ventilation system that runs across the roof of the space. I'd seen this work at Dia:Beacon a few years ago so I know it's beautiful. Here it was ineffectual, pointless, rendered ugly. After that I ventured upstairs, where there is some semblance of natural light. Flat rhomboids and floor works that could easily have been situated downstairs were crammed in among pillars, staircases, and all the architectural obstacles that make this more of a corridor than a viable contemporary art space. I hate to say it but nothing looked even vaguely powerful here (apart, perhaps, from a cluster of vertical yellow string lines that mirrored the pillar they lay behind).
I know that good art should be able to survive a bad space, but this was just shocking. With probably only around 15 real sculptural planar shapes padded out by a load of prints and drawings, this was certainly far from a retrospective. It was a desecration. I know I've fallen out of love with the nonsense of the Art World over the last few years, but few shows have actually left me this angry. Fred Sandback deserves better - as do Edinburgh's cultured classes, even if they're only popping in for a lemon tart, a latte and a Moleskine notebook.

Another month – and another delay in posting. I wish I had the time, the resources, the wherewithal, and the dead space to be able to just keep filling this with random observations. But I don’t. In the last month many things have happened – many more mountain things for a start. Awesome things. Wandering alone on the snow in CairnGorm in the dark at 10pm on a relatively balmy evening – another sublime and unforgettable moment, having lain down in a snow hole for comfort about half an hour before. A long trek up the North Face of Ben Nevis. And so on and so on. And all without my camera - I forgot to pack it when I left, dammit, so have nothing of these experiences to show here.


Is the digital camera the curse of the modern age? I used to get pissed off at those people who go on holiday and wander round simply videoing everything, never seeming to take in their surroundings. Now I feel the same way at gigs – often half the crowd is blocking the view by holding up phone cameras, or trying to take a great still, or even more annoyingly taking a video clip of an entire song.
Last week I succumbed to this evil disease. On Thursday night Hitch and I went to the Luminaire in London to see the Norwegian act Datarock. I wrote about Datarock this time last year – you can easily find the entry by typing their name into the search box. But it’s enough for now to say that I absolutely adore them. I feel a bit guilty for saying this because, to be honest, they’re kind of rubbish – or rather, they’re not a great deal more than pure, silly, unpretentious fun. Few people in their right mind would fly 500 miles from Glasgow to London to see what amounts to a bargain basement version of Devo but this was one show I was determined not to miss.
The Luminaire is the nicest new venue in London and the people who run it and work there are music lovers first and foremost, as evidenced by their total enthusiasm over this show. They’d been plugging it on their website for months, and as such the venue was surprisingly busy. I say surprisingly because I didn’t think that many people had caught the Datarock bug yet. But this crowd truly had – the atmosphere was electric throughout their performance and at least the half of the audience nearest the stage were devoted fans, singing along to the band’s classic songs Computer Camp Love (which steals brilliantly from the Grease soundtrack) and the truly wonderful I Used To Dance With My Daddy.
For the second half of the set support band Udomskulen (think of XTC crossed with King Crimson) joined Datarock as extra members, in trademark red jumpsuits, and I got carried away by it all and (whisper it) simply had to take these pictures.



As the expanded band left the stage, singer Fredrik Saroea announced “We call this our Dirty Dancing tour because we’re having the time of our lives, and we hope you did too,” and on came “Time of My Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes. The couple of hundred or so people in the Luminaire burst into an en mass singalong to this classic bit of ‘80s movie soundtrack nonsense, and so ended a totally perfect evening.

At the totally opposite end of the musical spectrum (you could say) lie Radiohead. Intense, serious, über-musical, stadium-sized. No fun, many people might say. No tunes either, argue the detractors of their “difficult”, “experimental” records Kid A and Amnesiac. Of course I happen to think those are Radiohead’s best records, and that The National Anthem from Kid A is quite possibly my favourite of all their songs, certainly their most (er…) anthemic.
Hitch and I made our way up to Blackpool on Friday to see Radiohead play an unusually intimate show at the Empress Ballroom in the town’s Winter Gardens complex. The Empress Ballroom is precisely that, an ornate dancehall – a relic from the Victorian era where Blackpool was a glorious resort by the sea rather than the tacky hell-hole it’s become today. At a pinch I imagine it holds about 2500 people, and that’s nothing by Radiohead’s standards. It took seven intermittent hours of trying to access the fan club pre-sale website (constantly crashing due to the volume of traffic) for me to get the tickets in the first place so I was hyper-excited in anticipation of this show. We got there fairly early, and once inside were something like ten rows away from the stage. Support act Willy Mason strummed away but you could tell the palpable excitement was the imminent arrival of Radiohead themselves.
Lights go down, scrambled radio signals come through the speakers at huge volume, five guys walk on stage and immediately launch into – The National Anthem! I honestly thought I would explode. Aside from the Kraftwerk shows of the last couple of years (see entries passim) this has to have been the greatest opening to a gig ever. Straight away they went into 2+2=5, the song I’ve had in my head all day in the hope they’ll play that as well. I would say that they could have gone off after that and I’d have left happy, but nobody spends seven hours trying to get tickets for a ten minute concert and luckily what we got instead was two hours of absolute bliss. There were about seven or eight new songs, one of which was vaguely reggae and one vaguely funky, an exquisite rendition of Exit Music (For A Film) during which I have to confess I shed a few tears, and much more besides. And to the doubters out there who see Radiohead as merely a bunch of pretentious stuck-up stiff shirts, from where I was standing the band were palpably loose and thoroughly enjoying themselves. A couple of encores later, we wandered out of the Empress dehydrated, sweaty, and (for me at least) utterly exhilarated. It will be a challenge for any act this year to better that as a live performance – watch this space.
In keeping with the Radiohead-Can-Be-Fun mood of the evening, Hitch and I ‘rehydrated’ in a theme pub with a tacky DJ playing Bananarama-style records and giving away free tequila shots, only to discover that the DJ was in fact telling the truth when he announced that the band’s after-show party was at the pub’s upstairs ‘Sports Bar’, except the manageress then put a damper on things when she revealed the band themselves were only going to attend the following night’s party. So we went back to the faded grandeur (extremely faded) of the Grand Motropole hotel, hit the cocktail lounge, had a Jack Daniel’s and watched a cheesy lounge organist play a gloss white Hammond organ. Once the JD had kicked in I even managed to persuade him to give us some Gershwin, specifically Someone To Watch Over Me. So I got my favourite Radiohead song and my favourite Gershwin tune all in one evening.
Saturday was spent exploring the delights of Blackpool itself. Ah – the piers, the tower, the trams, the gift shops, the stag parties, the dnonkey rides, the romance.





And of course my favourite – the kiddies Bash-The-Squeaky-Animals fairground game.


Our Blackpool experience - taken as a whole - amply demonstrates how much it’s a fine line between the ridiculous and the sublime. You could easily say the same about the Lightning Bolt gig in Glasgow the following night. But that will have to wait for another day or so.
But phew - what a weekend.