dead can dance

sorry, posting this a bit late, its from the first week in june!

this week the weather has dominated the topics of conversation. it is a hot one. today is a bit cooler, the wind cycling to work was quite icy but the beginning of the week was marked by the heat and lack of air and all those things about summer i hate. i'm not really a summer person. i like temperate climates, not those that make you want to pass out after lunch. a welcome break from the weather was watching werner herzog's new film ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. herzog is an odd man seeking out other oddities and praise be! for that. he was in antartica for 7 weeks to interview people who lived and worked there, to find out what they did and why they chose to live in such an inhospitable climate. i found it facinating and beautiful. there were amusing moments when an engineer stopped talking logically about the ins and outs of living in the continent and started talking about how everyone there was an amateur philsopher and how he was probably related to mayan royalty. to decide purposefully to pack up your old life and move to a place where human beings shouldn't be takes a bit of a leap into the unknown and i felt privaleged that herzog decided to do a study of this. moments from the film stay with me, the scenery and heartbreaking times like the penguin who decides to follow a path to certain death towards the mountains rather than going back to the nest or the feeding ground, we humans watch him, unable to stop him on his suicidal quest.

on tuesday we dashed to buffalo to see the LOOSE gig with the patti ladies, jon and raybould. we had a lovely chat with liz and john rostron first about swn. i am getting excited in that way that makes me make involuntary squeaking noises. this year will be ace! we went to get a drink and discovered that two small bottles of water costs £5.20 in buffalo. never have i been more grateful for tap water. what a cheek! first on was a bunch of posh lads singing pleasant enough songs and looking like they'd stepped off a set of brideshead revisited. next up was MEINZ HEINZ. the first time i saw them was supporting john mouse in dempseys a good couple of years ago. they have the air of a gang that you're not cool enough to join but i know that huw evans is a lovely lad and the playfulness between him and his girlfriend cate le bon and steve baboo is great to watch. the songs were messier and squelchier than i've heard before and they didn't seem quite as pissed as when i've seen them previously. bloody good fun. the band on as support was JESUS H. FOXX, a rather silly name for a band much sweeter and less fashionable than that. they were very arcade fire, all banging percussion and swinging sweet harmonies. i really enjoyed their set and made use of the money i'd taken out of the cashpoint to buy an ep, they needed it, apparently they've lost £300 on this tour already. but for the headliner. i must admit i was getting gig fatigue by this point and had to bow out and sit at the back for the last half of the gig. CRYPTACIZE were a band with proper songs. apparently she used to be in DEERHOOF but i'm afraid i've not digested deerhoof yet, missed the boat there clearly cos she was great. her voice reminded me at times of nina persson from THE CARDIGANS who i love, all pure and sweet. it was a great gig but a strange atmosphere. meinz heinz attract a weird crowd that you see about in cardiff often at these sorts of fashionable places where people will come and watch their mates' band and fuck off. in a way i wish they'd just not turned up in the first place cos they tend to talk loudly in the back if they are there and just disappoint the headline band when they come out to play to half a room. why would you go to a gig and not want to see everything? i find the whole thing really idiotic. i'm really glad i'm not cool if cool means you have to irritate the promoter by blagging a guestlist place and then talk through sets and leave. morons.

anyway, enough of the anger. wednesday is one of my favourite days of the week, my old people movie day. this week i thought they'd love it, IS ANYBODY THERE? the new film with michael caine set in an old people's home. but they didn't. a bit too close to home maybe? it dealt with senility and undignified old age and some of them were quite angry as they left. i loved it though, i'm not afraid or ashamed of old age! it had a fantastic cast with peter vaughan, elizabeth spriggs, thelma barlow, leslie phillips, rosemary harris, sylvia sims playing the old people (how amazing is that line up?!), david morrisey and anne marie duff playing the people running the home and the brilliant bill millner (from SON OF RAMBOW) playing edward, their son obsessed with death and ghosts. edward befriends micheal caine's character clarence, a grumpy retired magician and he helps him on his search for an answer to "what 'appens" after death. everyone was wonderful and it was made me cry and laugh a few times. at the end i discovered that elizabeth spriggs from SIMON AND THE WITCH and ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT and countless other things from when i was young, had died during post-production and this made me cry all the more.

that evening, after playing with the cat in the garden and crying MORE over my book group book EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE (i swear i'm not premenstrual, there were just a lot of sad things i chose to take into my heart that day) i tried to wrest myself of all the sadness by going to see HOLLY GOLIGHTLY in buffalo. there was a lot of confusion over this gig and strange circumstances bringing her here. it was originally scheduled to be in treorchy, there is a man there called john who is trying to bring music to the valleys other than boozy guitar bands, a valiant effort but he booked holly only to find that no fucker bought a ticket so had to see if anyone else wanted to put her on so she wouldn't lose out. last minute this was transferred to buffalo but circumstances being what they are there was a miscommunication about the price (advertised in listings as £10, actually a more digestible £5) and no flyers about till the night before. so this was pretty much a facebook 1 day only advertising campaign. in all about 20-odd people came, i was worried that she would be playing to me and my friends and hate it but the atmosphere was actually genuinely lovely in sort of british "getting on with the show" way. first up were OK, who were ok. don't have a name that leaves you open to predictable reviews, boys. they shyly announced that they had recently lost half the band so would be playing an acoustic set but i think this is probably the direction to go in, they harmonised and sung nice songs, it reminded me of SCOUTING FOR GIRLS or something that if i heard on the radio a few hundred times a day i would probably hate and want burnt but they did a lily allen cover and a version of "you've got a friend in me" and plodded along nicely enough. holly golightly's official support on this tour is swedish alt country lad ANDI ALMQVIST. his was a set of two halves. the first half kind of irritated me, he seemed insincere. this swedish guy singing songs in an american accent about devil women was odd, it left me with the image of a chinese elvis impersonator, i was longing him to play what he knew. the second half he played songs that sounded a bit more real with longing and heartbreak and i warmed to him more. he was playing a room of about 10 people maximum and seemed a bit more humble and grateful by the end. when HOLLY GOLIGHTLY came on stage you knew that this was the real deal. she had an excellent slide guitarist with her lawyer dave (the broke offs) and their acidic stage banter was a joy. rather than throw a starry diva fit at the lack of an audience she made us her friends, telling us stories about their cat that her mum ran over with the car and trips on the brecon steam railway with two people in the audience. the sound transported us somewhere else, a shack somewhere in the appalacians maybe. some of the songs were so old no-one knew who they were by "so let's just say i wrote it" joked sidekick dave, some were modern ditties on domestic violence "you better run you better hide... that .45". the feeling was authentic bluegrass and a lady you don't wanna mess with. a great gig.

thursday night was the pop quiz in Y FWCH GOCH. this is the first time i realised that the place is owned by clwb ifor bach. its a good idea of them to have somewhere that is more of a pub rather than just a darkened venue, it had the same easy going vibe as clwb but brighter and expensive looking tables. apparently the food is quite good but all i had that night was cider and crisps (very good crisps) so i couldn't really comment. i didn't know what to expect from the pop quiz, i tend to start pub quizzes very laid back but by the end turn into a horrid competitive shrew and especially something so close to my heart as a music quiz i was worried i would start banging my head in frustration. the questions were pleasingly difficult and made my brain hurt and kept that "its at the tip of my tongue" quality of a good quiz. lots of people were there, intimidatingly enough most of them were involved with music promotion and djs. i am sure these people have watched at least the same amount of top of the pops as me. but we did ok. in fact, out of a team called "you shouldn't bake cakes for dogs" made of me, steen, smallsteen and anwen we came 3rd, beating noel and rostron and all kinds of people, which was a total shock (i actually thought we'd been disqualified for some reason after our names weren't called for a long while). a good result. made me salivate for the next quiz.

but on! to a family holiday with steen. hmmm, this should be interesting...