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.