Birds are singing in the Greenery
Today I'm giving up nicotine. Aren't I just the best. I've not had any since yesterday evening. At least I'm telling myself this now and feeling quite good about it.
Truth is there's a fucking snow storm outside and I can't quite be bothered to make the trek through it to the news agents. I kinda suspect that after having dragged myself through the snow to the tube station after work I'll feel that I warrant a reward.
Bear Quartet were playing Nalen on Friday. I have a feeling I've blabbered on about Bear Quartet before. I must have. They're a bit of a favourite at the moment. Saturday Night, their last album was amazing, completely off the wall but wonderful. Kinda reminded me of the first time I heard Bowie's Low. A strange and beautiful little world seperate from everything else going on around it. Or rather that's not true, it's full of musical references - but it kinda hops and skips it's way through genres with an ease that kinda makes you think they were always meant to be played that way.
So I was excited about the gig. They have a bit of a reputation for being difficult live. I've heard wild and crazy stories, most of which I'm convinced are myth. They are certainly however a bit audience unfriendly - seemingly so resoloute about not being "easy" that they can at times be actively boring. I've seen them once before and the gig mostly consisted of them playing one instrumental song endlessly. It was a nice song but....
Still Friday's gig was strange even by their standards. It's kinda hard to explain what it was about it that was so perculiar, but everyone felt it.
They had Alexandra Dahlström (semi famous, very pretty, Swedish actress) on stage Djing. Playing apparently random and innapropriate songs at apparently random and innapropriate times. Sometimes they'd feed into the end of the song the band were playing sometimes they'd turn up in the middle of the song they were playing. You never really could tell. All this while Mattias Alkberg seemed to be giving her a hard time and trying to steal her records or he might have been trying to persuade her to play other ones. God knows. He looked absoloutely wasted and had gone up about 5 stone since his solo gig in the summer. His hair had gone from being the usual immaculate quiff to being semi long and greasy. It all seemed to be screaming "mental instability".
Alexandra did get her 15 minutes later in the gig when she got up and started dancing round the stage relating a series of bizare and disturbing stories of modern life in clipped, high speed Swedish whilst the rest of the band did the whole Velvet Underground drone thing.
All through the gig band memebers wandered off, had meetings, behind the drum kit, stopped playing, started playing when and however. Needless to say they ignored there whole back catalogue and played only songs off the new album and even then they were drasticaly rearranged.
All this is admittedly fairly average behaviour for your everyday beligerant rock band but what made it so strange what made it so unforgettable is that it worked. I mean really worked. I can't say why but it was fucking fantastic.
Lola said about half way through (what was in the end a very very long gig) that it was far more like a sound installation than it was a concert, which it pretty much was.
That's not to say it was neccesarily popular, half the audience had vanished before the end and there was a strange and slightly disturbing atmosphere all the way through it. As if the entire band had decided to drive the tour bus off a cliff the next day. This was there final fuck off. The fact that it was being filmed for SVT only increased that suicide note feeling. It struck me that the last song off the latest album was called Death to Bear Quartet, it was also the song they finished off with on Friday - funeral bells, feedback and lyrics about how everything was exhausted, they had done everything, there was nowhere else to go.
Sadly, I guess there's a chance that this was the last concert they'll do.
It all finished about 1am ad Lola and I tried to find somewhere else to go but Daniel was at a club called Bunny - the name being all I needed to persuade myself it was not somewhere I wanted to go. So that left Debaser, but even at that time there was a 50ft queue and it was hailing so we went home and I persuaded her that she really did want to sit up with me and see Patrick Troughton giving some men in costumes a hard time. Tragic I know.
Since then it's been hanging out with Polly, not much to talk about but fun all the same. She likes snow, and we got her a sled which is a lot more practical than a pram at this time of year and makes me feel a bit like a reindeer. She looks well cool in it, crashed out on furs and stuff like some red haired ice queen.
By the by, I'm not sure if this is true but I recently read that in Islam the two most feared physical characterists used to be red hair and blue eyes. In deed the most terrifying aspect of the recording angels on judgement day was that there eyes were blue.
Considering that Polly's hair is a very bright copper red and her eyes a very vivid blue. She must be truly a fucking demon. Which it's pretty cool.
Current Reading: In a free state - V.S. Naipaul
Truth is there's a fucking snow storm outside and I can't quite be bothered to make the trek through it to the news agents. I kinda suspect that after having dragged myself through the snow to the tube station after work I'll feel that I warrant a reward.
Bear Quartet were playing Nalen on Friday. I have a feeling I've blabbered on about Bear Quartet before. I must have. They're a bit of a favourite at the moment. Saturday Night, their last album was amazing, completely off the wall but wonderful. Kinda reminded me of the first time I heard Bowie's Low. A strange and beautiful little world seperate from everything else going on around it. Or rather that's not true, it's full of musical references - but it kinda hops and skips it's way through genres with an ease that kinda makes you think they were always meant to be played that way.
So I was excited about the gig. They have a bit of a reputation for being difficult live. I've heard wild and crazy stories, most of which I'm convinced are myth. They are certainly however a bit audience unfriendly - seemingly so resoloute about not being "easy" that they can at times be actively boring. I've seen them once before and the gig mostly consisted of them playing one instrumental song endlessly. It was a nice song but....
Still Friday's gig was strange even by their standards. It's kinda hard to explain what it was about it that was so perculiar, but everyone felt it.
They had Alexandra Dahlström (semi famous, very pretty, Swedish actress) on stage Djing. Playing apparently random and innapropriate songs at apparently random and innapropriate times. Sometimes they'd feed into the end of the song the band were playing sometimes they'd turn up in the middle of the song they were playing. You never really could tell. All this while Mattias Alkberg seemed to be giving her a hard time and trying to steal her records or he might have been trying to persuade her to play other ones. God knows. He looked absoloutely wasted and had gone up about 5 stone since his solo gig in the summer. His hair had gone from being the usual immaculate quiff to being semi long and greasy. It all seemed to be screaming "mental instability".
Alexandra did get her 15 minutes later in the gig when she got up and started dancing round the stage relating a series of bizare and disturbing stories of modern life in clipped, high speed Swedish whilst the rest of the band did the whole Velvet Underground drone thing.
All through the gig band memebers wandered off, had meetings, behind the drum kit, stopped playing, started playing when and however. Needless to say they ignored there whole back catalogue and played only songs off the new album and even then they were drasticaly rearranged.
All this is admittedly fairly average behaviour for your everyday beligerant rock band but what made it so strange what made it so unforgettable is that it worked. I mean really worked. I can't say why but it was fucking fantastic.
Lola said about half way through (what was in the end a very very long gig) that it was far more like a sound installation than it was a concert, which it pretty much was.
That's not to say it was neccesarily popular, half the audience had vanished before the end and there was a strange and slightly disturbing atmosphere all the way through it. As if the entire band had decided to drive the tour bus off a cliff the next day. This was there final fuck off. The fact that it was being filmed for SVT only increased that suicide note feeling. It struck me that the last song off the latest album was called Death to Bear Quartet, it was also the song they finished off with on Friday - funeral bells, feedback and lyrics about how everything was exhausted, they had done everything, there was nowhere else to go.
Sadly, I guess there's a chance that this was the last concert they'll do.
It all finished about 1am ad Lola and I tried to find somewhere else to go but Daniel was at a club called Bunny - the name being all I needed to persuade myself it was not somewhere I wanted to go. So that left Debaser, but even at that time there was a 50ft queue and it was hailing so we went home and I persuaded her that she really did want to sit up with me and see Patrick Troughton giving some men in costumes a hard time. Tragic I know.
Since then it's been hanging out with Polly, not much to talk about but fun all the same. She likes snow, and we got her a sled which is a lot more practical than a pram at this time of year and makes me feel a bit like a reindeer. She looks well cool in it, crashed out on furs and stuff like some red haired ice queen.
By the by, I'm not sure if this is true but I recently read that in Islam the two most feared physical characterists used to be red hair and blue eyes. In deed the most terrifying aspect of the recording angels on judgement day was that there eyes were blue.
Considering that Polly's hair is a very bright copper red and her eyes a very vivid blue. She must be truly a fucking demon. Which it's pretty cool.
Current Reading: In a free state - V.S. Naipaul