![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's the ones who've cracked that the light shines through
Well, I've been a bit slack here. So, last week in bullet point form:
- The Trout in Oxford, is really not the place to be on a Sunday lunchtime. I've only ever been in the evenings before. Busy, slow, poor food. And Pintwatch had to give its pint of Bass back it was so nasty.
- Bloc Party, the band I've been intermittently wittering about, got played on Radio 1's Evening Session, and had very nice things said about them.
- Taro, the Japanese restaurant somewhere near Gt Marlborough Street, remains nice. They do, however, serve their edamame cold which strikes me as just wrong.
- The Fun Lovin' Criminals were... OK. But not much else. I enjoyed listening to them, but the whole thing was a bit lacking in energy. Huge contrast in the crowd to last week's Rancid gig - I got the impression that most of the audience only really cared about Scooby Snacks, and the rest was just filler.
- Being in your office by yourself is strangely soothing, particularly late at night.
- Poached smoked haddock is really nice. Especially with asparagus.
- DHW for last week would have been, of course, the next door neighbour who leant me the ladders to get into our house when the lock was playing up again.
Now, wasn't that nicer than having to wade through a whole week's worth of posts to extract the same information ?
This weekend, I wanted to go to Fiona's birthday party,
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
waistcoatmark's party, a Rome Burns gig in London, and to see a concertina dealer in Whitney. Sadly, The Diary said I was doing none of those, and I went to the delightfully-named Much Wenlock with my rapper team instead for the Morris Federation AGM.Fortunately, as it happened, I managed to avoid the actual meeting altogether, and just did the fun parts. When the AGM happened, we were hiding in a coffee shop eating toasted teacakes.
Friday night dissolved in a haze of driving up there, and catching up with everyone. I turned up just as the rest of my team realised they'd run out of red wine. Fortunately, I know them and could produce another bottle out of my bag before panic set it. Which was fine, except owing to Jean's rather enthusiastic gesticulations I ended up wearing quite a lot of it.
Saturday was dancing, most of the day, at Blist's Hill Industrial Museum (well worth a visit if you think you might be interested in a recreation of a Victorian community) and Ironbridge. And I got to ride on old-fashioned fairground rides, including a shuggy boat (or, I think, a swing boat if you're foreign). And I shot corks out of an air rifle and won some Smarties. And I watched a blacksmith making twisty iron pokers. I like watching skilled craftspeople doing their Thing. And a ceilidh in the evening.
Top tip for the day: do not play a recorder in a bus which is going over speed bumps.
Sunday involved a certain amount of pottering and peering (see below), hiding in a coffee shop, and hiding in a pub, before heading down to London...
A little while ago, I was introduced to the concept of Anti-Folk. And the more I investigate it, the more impressed I am. It's a fairly small, New York-based music scene, but which keeps leaking out in the UK.
Sunday night was Jeffrey Lewis at the Arts Cafe in Aldgate, supported by Diane Cluck. I'd never heard of Diane Cluck, but was really very impressed with her set. She'd just about fit in as a standard folksinger, though admittedly one who sings rather off-beat songs. She's got a remarkable voice, and is much prone to changing note mid-word, in a way that sounds very like the singer from the Cranberries. (I wanted to put the word melismatic in that sentence, but experience tells me it makes people go "eh?") Either way, I was impressed, to the extent of CD purchase. Anti-folk acts appear to have raised the concept of the low-budget CD to an art form; this is no exception.
And then Jeff Lewis, singer/songwriter and comic artist extraordinaire. I've only heard odd bits of his songs here and there before, but he's absolutely fantastic. Long, rambling songs about everything and nothing, rhymes which sometimes verge on Lehrer-levels of painful, and an infectious good humour. And he does "low-budget videos" for some songs - him, standing on a chair to be seen, flicking through an A3 book of comic scenes to illustrate the song.
The number of people on stage is wildly variable, as his bassist and drummer, the support act, and some random bloke who's acting as their driver (and also plays harmonium and theramin[*]) drop in an out. The songs vary with them, from gentle, melodic (even folky :) solos, to the full-out shouty noise of If You Shoot The Head You Kill The Ghoul.
What's not to like? Well, having to stand up in a roasting-hot, packed-out small, room, but let's forget about that. As it says on the wall of ladies' toilets in The Cellar on Cornmarket: "Jeffrey 'Lightning' Lewis rocks!" (to which someone has appended "Yes he does, and hardly anyone knows").
[*]I don't know how to spell this. And I think it sounds like a class A drug, anyway.
The past two weekends have both involved doing something that I now realise I've been missing - wandering about the place, Looking At Stuff. Last weekend, I was in Alrewas (which is pronounced in a mysterious way which makes it sound like "a walrus"), a little village between Burton-on-Trent and Lichfield. The people I was stopping with took us on a short walk out into the countryside... as I got to Peer at things. I'm easily interested, so can happily spend an afternoon trotting around, Peering. Last week I got to Peer at barges, narrowboats, locks, ducks, cows paddling, horses, an architectural collage church and lots of nice scenery. And pick brambles to eat. And, like all good walks, it finished in a nice pub (Pintwatch liked the Charlie Well's Bombadier, but resented slightly paying £2.20 when so far north).
This week I was Pottering round Much Wenlock, which is a small town made of mostly old buildings. Half-timbered and stone buildings are all mixed up together, with shops and interesting pubs between, and even a working farm stuck in the middle of the town, bits of which are medieval. And it's well littered with plaques, inscriptions, and modern info boards which can be Peered at. Rather less livestock than last week, and an inconveniently spikey railing which I mistakenly sat on while waiting for someone, but otherwise a fine place for a Potter.
This Week's Designated Hero is Sue, for driving me to Much Wenlock.
no subject
Infoboards are one of the best things about the growth in modern tourism. However sometimes I worry that some people only see places through a camera lens/screen I can get carried away and only see the boards.
no subject
no subject
no subject
The The Music? Is this a hideous crossbreed?
no subject
The The Music? Is this a hideous crossbreed?
Fortunately not. It's more of a running joke about bands whose names begin with "The".
And any venue where you can get yourself a pizza while watching a band gets my vote.
no subject
no subject
You should have learned from the WIG school not to ask to have musical genres defined :) However, if you hear very low-fi recordings, with long rambly lyrics, and an occasional intentional lack of musicality, you're probably safe guessing it might be anti-folk.
Alternatively, the more common description "acoustic punk" might be more use. I'll bring some to Whitby and subject you to it :)
no subject
Yes, play me some, sounds like the kind of thing that I'd like.
no subject
no subject