Five-O Said, Freeze! And I Got Numb
I type from Belfast International Airport at the end of a dizzy month. Gig wise it’s been: Oppenheimer’s album launch shows in the UK; Clone Quartet’s London debut at White Heat; Deftones at Brixton Academy (where Ben got knocked out by a flying elbow to the back of the head); Deerhoof at Koko (more ideas per song than a year’s worth of Kerrang!) and An Emergency at Islington Academy supporting These Arms Are Snakes.
L. and I travelled to Paris to see Jamie and Ruth, who are on the first part of their foreign travels - what a lovely time we had: Monmartre; La Marais; Parisian parks; cheese, olives, la canard, du pain, du vin... Anyway it was fantastic, they were wonderful hosts - there’s a little message from Mr. B himself at the bottom of this blog post.
In the midst of all this, the bank I work at has decided that it would be a good idea to buy another bank (surely one is enough?) - which meant twelve days straight at the regular office this month (it’s my excuse for only one blog in four weeks). I have reached the end-point with work now; I am locked into repetition of the same thing, month after month - it has gone beyond ‘I hate this place’ to acceptance of the fact that it’s pointless exchanging my time my time for their money. I’ve got six months left in me I think - it’s time to move on...
I’ve been in Belfast with Pocock attending the Cathedral Arts Festival - we went to a gig in the square on Friday night (Oppenheimer, (Thanks to Shaun O for putting us up!)
LaFaro and Clone Quartet) and then set up an STA stall at the Oh Yeah Centre Open Day on Saturday. I was asked to perform as part of Oh Yeah’s inaugural show: other acts included Elbow and Snow Patrol - so the only thing to do was to get the drum machine out and ask Cahir to do some guitar solos over some Derry rap.
It was a short set: Revolution Rock; Song For Sonia Sanchez; Backlash Cop and Bring The Noise but it seemed to go over quite well, got a couple of fists in the air by the end - it was nice to do a couple of new songs and the bloke from Elbow said that we were ‘great’ - that should shift a few thousand copies of BC alone. I’m pretty sure a suitably distorted clip will find it’s way onto youtube over the next few weeks and I’ll be sure to put up a wee link! Thank you to Alan Maguire for these pictures. Contact Alan on this email address.
Last thing to mention is Graham Smith’s new book that has just been published; Graham is a photographer who lives in Belfast and the book ‘Going Deaf For A Living’ compiles his work over the last four years it coincides with an exhibition in the Waterfront. We’ve always enjoyed being photographed by Graham and it’s so nice to see his work continually move forward. Check out his website and if you’re interested in booking him for a shoot drop him an email.
No bank holiday day off for me tomorrow - I have 300 Backlash Cops to burn and mail out this week. I shall speak to you all again soon.
Kisses. Lyrics: BringTheNoisePublicEnemy.txt
Sunday, 6 May 2007