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ventaI know I keep grumbling about sunshine - it's too hot, it burns me, and it brings the hayfever demons out - but it does change everyone's attitude. For some reason, six of us piling into Big Sharon (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ach's seven-seater) to go to the pub for lunch today had much more of a feeling of playing truant than our usual sedate Friday pub-trips.
Mind you, since Ach has taken two of the seats out, I had to sit in the boot - so rattling around there, with his cheese-o-matic 80s collection playing did remind me of student-days outings.
Nostalgia, sunshine and Fuller's Summer Ale.
Then they made me come back to work :(
The first thing that struck me on entering the Town Hall last night was the sheer variety of people who were there. A girl who looked about my age in a business suit, by herself. In front of me at the bar, a couple of crusties, straight out of 1995, with beaten-up faces, one of them carrying a tent under his arm. Sitting (yeah, a seated gig) on the end of one row, a serious-faced guy in his late thirties, greying hair drawn back in a ponytail, with a copy of The Economist open on his knee. Surprisingly few people, actually, of student-looking age - I guess the Levellers are old news, these days.
My first encounter with the Levellers was in my sixth-form, when Levelling The Land was on everybody's stereo, and anyone who had a gutar could (and did) play Another Man's Cause. That album is inextricably linked in my mind with our room in the sixth-form building - which smelt of incense, always had music on, had posters plastered all over the walls, and which we entered and left via the sash window into the car park. Using the window meant we avoided the serious-minded room next door, usually quiet, and tastefully decorated with oversized black and white photos.
Levelling The Land still stands in my mind as one of those albums, and nothing the Levellers have done before or since has ever lived up to it. I bought Zeitgeist when it came out, and I've occasionally waggled my ears at new singles, but they've always been... OK. Nothing more.
So I pottered along last night, because Samantha wanted to go, but without desperately high hopes. An acoustic tour, you say ? I wasn't entirely convinced I trusted the Levellers to be musically good enough to pull that kind of thing off.
No points to me: it was a really good evening. Actually being able to hear the instruments properly for once (despite the best efforts of the Town Hall's shite acoustics) made me notice - the Levellers aren't virtuosi, but they're surprisingly competent.
And two songs in, they played The Road, and I remembered why that album caught our imaginations so much when we were teenagers. Great, sweeping folk-style melodies that pick up you and carry you along with them. And although it was a seated gig, people were up and dancing around.
I often wonder how becoming known 'works' for a band like that - after all, their image was the scruffy, penniless buskers who'd give it all for their music and the causes they supported. And, to be fair to them, they certainly give the impression that they've remaind the same people - still with the slightly vague, slightly goofy manner on stage as if they're still busking on a street corner rather than playing at a paid gig. I noticed that last year they were out doing a lot of anti-war stuff, and they still pop up at political events. And maybe they all come off stage, comby their hair out and don Chinos, but I hope not.
And what I'd forgotten about from Levellers gigs - the happiness, the sense of one-happy-family. People say the same about NMA gigs, but there there's always that slight edge of anger, of cynicism, bubbling under the songs. For all their political messages, the Levellers remain the cheerful, optimistic face of rebellion.
They didn't play some of the songs I really wanted to hear - The Game, Fifteen Years, 4am or 100 Years of Solitude. But they also didn't play the ones I particularly wanted not to hear - This Garden and Hope Street, so that seems fair. The Mogadishu award for repeatedly shouting for the same song all evening goes to the bloke three rows behind me who wanted Liberty - and didn't get it.
And -triskellian will be pleased to hear - there was an Intermission! A proper, announced one and everything. No ice cream to be had though :( And they also suddenly shot off stage at the end of the second half, without warning, before coming back for a four-song encore (including the song Samantha tells me "they always finish with"). So the jury's still out on that one.
ach's seven-seater) to go to the pub for lunch today had much more of a feeling of playing truant than our usual sedate Friday pub-trips. Mind you, since Ach has taken two of the seats out, I had to sit in the boot - so rattling around there, with his cheese-o-matic 80s collection playing did remind me of student-days outings.
Nostalgia, sunshine and Fuller's Summer Ale.
Then they made me come back to work :(
The first thing that struck me on entering the Town Hall last night was the sheer variety of people who were there. A girl who looked about my age in a business suit, by herself. In front of me at the bar, a couple of crusties, straight out of 1995, with beaten-up faces, one of them carrying a tent under his arm. Sitting (yeah, a seated gig) on the end of one row, a serious-faced guy in his late thirties, greying hair drawn back in a ponytail, with a copy of The Economist open on his knee. Surprisingly few people, actually, of student-looking age - I guess the Levellers are old news, these days.
My first encounter with the Levellers was in my sixth-form, when Levelling The Land was on everybody's stereo, and anyone who had a gutar could (and did) play Another Man's Cause. That album is inextricably linked in my mind with our room in the sixth-form building - which smelt of incense, always had music on, had posters plastered all over the walls, and which we entered and left via the sash window into the car park. Using the window meant we avoided the serious-minded room next door, usually quiet, and tastefully decorated with oversized black and white photos.
Levelling The Land still stands in my mind as one of those albums, and nothing the Levellers have done before or since has ever lived up to it. I bought Zeitgeist when it came out, and I've occasionally waggled my ears at new singles, but they've always been... OK. Nothing more.
So I pottered along last night, because Samantha wanted to go, but without desperately high hopes. An acoustic tour, you say ? I wasn't entirely convinced I trusted the Levellers to be musically good enough to pull that kind of thing off.
No points to me: it was a really good evening. Actually being able to hear the instruments properly for once (despite the best efforts of the Town Hall's shite acoustics) made me notice - the Levellers aren't virtuosi, but they're surprisingly competent.
And two songs in, they played The Road, and I remembered why that album caught our imaginations so much when we were teenagers. Great, sweeping folk-style melodies that pick up you and carry you along with them. And although it was a seated gig, people were up and dancing around.
I often wonder how becoming known 'works' for a band like that - after all, their image was the scruffy, penniless buskers who'd give it all for their music and the causes they supported. And, to be fair to them, they certainly give the impression that they've remaind the same people - still with the slightly vague, slightly goofy manner on stage as if they're still busking on a street corner rather than playing at a paid gig. I noticed that last year they were out doing a lot of anti-war stuff, and they still pop up at political events. And maybe they all come off stage, comby their hair out and don Chinos, but I hope not.
And what I'd forgotten about from Levellers gigs - the happiness, the sense of one-happy-family. People say the same about NMA gigs, but there there's always that slight edge of anger, of cynicism, bubbling under the songs. For all their political messages, the Levellers remain the cheerful, optimistic face of rebellion.
They didn't play some of the songs I really wanted to hear - The Game, Fifteen Years, 4am or 100 Years of Solitude. But they also didn't play the ones I particularly wanted not to hear - This Garden and Hope Street, so that seems fair. The Mogadishu award for repeatedly shouting for the same song all evening goes to the bloke three rows behind me who wanted Liberty - and didn't get it.
And -
triskellian will be pleased to hear - there was an Intermission! A proper, announced one and everything. No ice cream to be had though :( And they also suddenly shot off stage at the end of the second half, without warning, before coming back for a four-song encore (including the song Samantha tells me "they always finish with"). So the jury's still out on that one. 
no subject
Date: 2004-07-23 08:19 am (UTC)For me this was provoked by the fact that I'd only just got into work and hadn't actually done any work yet :-)
(...I expect I'll be working late this evening, though.)