Ever get the situation where you book up for a few things, ages in advance, forget completely when they are, and it turns out they're all bunched together?

Yeah. Had to turn down what sounded like a really good gig tonight, cos that would have been three in three days and I am old and knackered. But still, don't want to whinge — I am ridiculously lucky to be able to go to see so much cool stuff.

So, anyway, here's what burge and I have been up to...


Kurt Wagner's usually to be found heading up his alt-country (or country soul, or Americana, or whatever you fancy calling it) collective Lambchop, but this time out he's on his own, showcasing new songs, really old and obscure songs, and songs he just doesn't fancy singing with the band. Union Chapel, now re-open for gigs after a couple of years off the circuit, is a suitably hushed venue for Wagner, who takes self-effacement to heroic levels: never without a baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows and a pair of thick-framed glasses with lenses that stop just short of being bottle-ends, he's as close to faceless as it's possible for a performer to be. He even performs sitting down. How many lead singer/guitarists perform sitting down?
So it was no surprise to see him amble on-stage before his set was due to start to fiddle around with his microphone, place a sheaf of paper onto a stool, and twang a washing-line on pulleys that was strung up over the stool, then jump off the stage, give an apologetic grin, and scuttle off down the aisle to the back of the church.
What was a surprise was that he then turned around, squared his shoulders, and walked back down the aisle, singing in that description-defying voice ("whispering, crooning bark" is about as close as I can come) all the way, hoick himself up on stage like someone getting out of a swimming pool and sit on the edge, dangling his legs, singing completely unamplified into the chapel's carved vaults.
And then he ambled back to his stool, sat down, picked up his guitar, and all the lights went out.
So, for the first six songs, the only illumination in the entire place was six tiny micro-halogen lights on flexible stalks, bulldog-clipped to the mic stand: two shining on the lyric sheets, two on the guitar, and two pointed back at Wagner's face, reflecting off his glasses. After finishing each song, he pegged the lyric sheet to the washing line and scooted it off to the side to make way for the next one. With the low lighting, Wagner's soft voice, and the minimal brushed acoustic chords that accompany most of his songs, it could have sent us to sleep. It had the opposite effect. The whole place was riveted.
'This is how I usually work,' Wagner explained. 'I just disappear into my basement, turn all the lights off, switch these little things on, and doodle away til I get something I like. Or something I don't like. And sometimes I show 'em to the band, and sometimes I don't.'
He's a very prosaic man, is Kurt Wagner.
He also writes a lot of songs about dogs, which he apologised for, while singing a couple of them; another one about Abraham Lincoln, which he's never managed to record to his satisfaction; and has a penchant for unexpected cover versions — we got Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel #2, even more hushed than the version he'd played with Lambchop at the End of the Road festival.
A really lovely gig, it was: perfect blend of music and venue, and as un-rock'n'roll as you can get. But, you know, quiet is the new loud, isn't it?



Patrick Stewart is 67. It's worth pointing this out. He's barely a year younger than Ian McKellen, who's spent most of the last year going senile in King Lear. And yet here he is, playing a general who leads from the front, a dab hand with submachine gun, dagger and bayonet, and looking a damn sight fitter than most of the 30-somethings on stage. Not to mention a damn sight fitter than me.
Not bloody fair.
This production of Macbeth had the same director as the Patrick Stewart-starring Tempest we saw earlier in the year, and he's a good one. Reversing the order of the first two scenes is a great touch — everyone knows the Three Witches' speech by heart, and it's got to be difficult to stop the play being over-familiar before it starts. But with this, we open with a deafening scream and the sounds of exploding bombs, and the lights crash up on a white-tiled hospital ward, with writhing figures on trolleys and medical staff rushing around, before Duncan comes in, wearing a Soviet-style General's uniform, to ask the 'Bloody Man', all ripped clothing and covered with blood, about the battle. The descriptions of Macbeth's heroism are gasped and gurgled to the accompaniment of an ECG while the nurses fix drips and prepare bandages. Once the King and his retinue depart, the nurses administer a quick lethal injection; while the soldier jerks and twiches and the ECG flatlines, they pull down their surgical masks and ask when the three of them shall meet again.
Great, great touch.
Patrick Stewart plays Macbeth as a career soldier with ambition, and he's clearly considering murder as soon as he's told he'll be king. He's stone-faced behind a sergeant-major's moustache, only letting his guard down around his wife (Kate Fleetwood, disturbingly feline, rather sexy, and looking a lot like Sophie Ellis-Bextor) and goes quickly from reluctant killer to swaggering bully. His disintegration towards the end of the play works particularly well — convinced he's unkillable but clearly not wanting to live after the defection of all his officers, his wife's death, and the defeat of his forces, he greets the revelation of Macduff's unnatural birth with relief. Although he goes down fighting, he's definitely a case of suicide-by-Thane.
There was a lot of great stuff in this production. The set, which went from hospital to castle kitchen to mortuary and even doubled as a banqueting hall and a battlefield with the help of some back-projection, gave everything a cold, clinical note; the rattling double-cage lift at the back which brought most of the characters on-stage was fantastically sinister. The Soviet setting made perfect sense, especially as Macbeth's tyranny began to bite and everyone was looking over their shoulders; Lady Macbeth's washing her hands with neat bleach was particularly squirm-making. But what impressed me most was the way that they handled the minor characters. In most productions, they're a bit interchangeable and only there for the main characters to bounce dialogue off. Not here. Without changing the text at all, they were distinct, recognisable characters: Ross, a speccy, cardiganed wimp among the crisp uniforms and ever-present guns, tortured in a cold cellar to reveal Macduff's whereabouts; Angus, sadistic muscle until he's humiliated at the haunted banquet; Macduff, convincingly turning from a slightly fussy courtier-type with a cosy fur collar to a fatigue-clad, guilt-haunted, revenge-obsessed fighting machine. And a distinctly worrying Malcolm who was far too convincing when talking about his lust and greed, and had a very strange look on his face when looking into the dead eyes of Macbeth's severed head.

Images of the show? Macduff, still and silent for a good three minutes after hearing about the massacre of his family... Macbeth, suborning Banquo's murder, calmly makes a ham sandwich and offers quarters of it to the murderers... Banquo, murdered by lethal injection and a shot to the head on a crowded train, whose passengers then stand and sing a Russian folk song while revealing themselves as Macbeth and his court... At the banquet, Macbeth is happily sitting down, when two of the serving girls (those witches, again) suddenly show daggers behind their backs. Then the lift descends, the grilles clatter open, and blood blooms across the back wall as Banquo steps up onto the banquet table...

Oh, and by the way, Patrick Stewart is 67.



Arcade Fire are clearly demob-happy. On the very last day of what's apparently been a gruelling and not particularly enjoyable year for them, they don't look like a band that are jaded from playing the same songs over and over again; instead they're fired-up, fizzing with energy and throwing themselves around the huge Alexandra Palace stage.

Fortunately, Ally Pally seems to have sorted out the sound problems that spoiled the last gig I went to there: the barrel-vaulted glass roof is veiled with fabric panels, and several heavy black curtains stop the sound escaping into the void. The sound's not as thunderous and all-encompassing as Brixton Academy — what is? — and the completely flat floor is a pain, but the stage is raised high up so there's a clear view even for shortarses like us, and you can hear every instrument and every voice.

And bloody hell, they are good. If anything, they've got better since last time. Win Butler's bulked out a bit and puts even more force behind the vocals, and his hair is plastered to his face after the first time he raises his voice in Black Mirror. A train of blokes surges past us as the first chords of Keep the Car Running ring out, carrying taikonaut and friend into the moshpit, which regularly blooms and spills crowdsurfers. Richard Reed Parry and William Butler's frenzied percussion (including crash helmets and mic stands) during Laika spills into a scuffle which takes them sprinting and tumbling across the stage; Will tries a rugby-style palm-off on big brother Win which earns him a cuff across the head for his trouble, and Richard and William end up kicking each other across the floor (and chants of "Richard, Richard" after the song prove that the band isn't the Win'n'Regine-plus-mates show).

Regine Chassagne darts from one side of the stage to the other, playing everything she can get her hands on and doing her almost-Batusi dance with Sarah Neufeld and Marika Anthony-Shaw, the two violinists at stage right. Marika looks like she isn't regretting her decision to run away from being a primary-school teacher to join the band; Sarah is flinging herself into it, singing every word and leading the wordless choruses of many of the songs.

The frenzied mood drops a little for a sombre Neon Bible, a stripped-down cover of New Order's Age of Consent, and the B-side of No Cars Go, Surf City Eastern Bloc, then picks up again for Tunnels which starts off stately and quickly becomes frenzied. Win spits out a bitter version of Antichrist Television Blues and the band up the ante by segueing straight from Power Out into Rebellion. As they troop off, the moshpit take up the closing chant of the song and repeat it, over and over, until the whole hall joins in a hoarse chorus — and the band troupe back on for the encore, all holding sparklers, and taking up their positions, join back into the chant. It's a strange, moving moment.

The encore is inevitable — Intervention, followed by Wake Up, with the brass section swelling into a fanfare after each line. Win puts down his guitar and heads into the audience to sing the last line — he's head and shoulders above everyone around him, and dripping with sweat — then clambers back up to the band, knocking over a fluorescent tube at the edge of the stage on the way. 'We're goin' home now,' he says. 'And by the time we come back, we'll have beards down to our fuckin' knees.'



And I thought it would be difficult to top that, and Duke Special the following night would be a gentle wind-down. Ahahaha. No.

Admittedly, the evening didn't get a particularly auspicious start. Arriving at Bush Hall with burge and m'colleague Shawna, who's decided that she "wants to be more cool" and has asked me if she can come to some gigs with us (stop that sniggering at the back), we found most of the middle of the hall taken up by a small stage with a grand piano on it. Bush Hall is beautiful, with wedding-cake plasterwork and an actual carpet, but it's also tiny, and the grand takes up maybe a quarter of the floor-space. And on the small, rickety stage at the other end is a band called Songdog, who are... well, they're full of character. The lead singer/guitarist, who it turns out is called Lyndon, has a pork-pie hat and a pork-pie face. Imagine taking Tom Waits, applying a heavy weight to the top of his head so he shrinks down to about 5'6", then inflating him with a pressure hose. The other guitarist has a black fedora which is unequal to the task of containing his Worzel Gummidge haircut. And God, they are miserable. "Can't they cheer up and do a Leonard Cohen cover?" asked burge, after one song which included the line "I've got rat-shit on the floorboards of my heart."

Fortunately, Songdog's set is quite short, and after a cheerful ditty which involved someone freezing to death on a bench in Porthcawl, they departed, to the relief of many.

Now, Duke Special. You might not be familiar with him. Real name Peter Wilson. Looks a bit like Robert Smith viewed the wrong way through a telescope. He's tiny. Dresses boho, in a dusty velvet jacket and loose tie. Dreadlocks falling over one side of his face, thick eyeliner. Very strong Belfast accent. How strong? He rhymes 'clown' with 'Frankenstein'.

So far, so theatrical, and the music fits. Piano-based, mostly, with strong influences from music hall and flashes of Eastern European clarinet. This show was part of a four-night mini-tour of London, with a different theme each night: vaudeville on Sunday, 'on me tod' on Monday, Big Band on Wednesday, and on our night, music hall. So, accompanied by two sidekicks – singer/pianist/trumpeter Rea Curran, hefty, be-afroed and looking a lot like Seth Rogan, and 'The Matador' Ben Castle (I have no idea) on a variety of wind instruments — Mr Special went from his beaten-up-looking upright piano, crusted with tea lights and sounding a lot less rickety than it looked, to the grand in the middle, and distributed songsheets.

And the gig went from stripped-down version of Duke's own songs, with their jaunty tunes and often wracked lyrics, to unexpected covers and singalongs. I've never been to a gig which went from Wuthering Heights to Kurt Weill (two songs from an unfinished opera based on Huckleberry Finn, which apparently they're recording next year), via I Predict a Riot. Rea Curran, in particular, was astonishing; falsetto backing vocals on one song, almost Tuvalu throat-singing on a thunderous version of Salvation Tambourine and unleashing a stunning blues/gospel bark for a solo cover of Tom Waits' Come On Up To The House which was very, very nearly as good as the real thing (which I have heard: it was one of the songs Waits sung at Hammersmith, almost exactly two years ago).

But that's not to do down Mr Wilson himself. He's an amazing performer, happily chatting with the crowd and then putting heart and soul into torch songs and fairground stomps. Finally alone at the front of the hall, he sung a hushed version of This Could Be My Last Day, reflecting on an eleven-years-dead friend, and getting to the last chorus, snuffing out the tea-lights on top of the piano, until only one remained to illuminate the song's coda, not on the recorded version, a repeated refrain of "We sometimes need/to be a bit broken/to let the light shine through." And then he blew out the last candle, leaving the room in darkness. And most of the audience were in tears.

Encores can be a bit anticlimactic after that sort of finale, but Wilson edged back through the crowd to the grand with pork-pie Lyndon from the support band to do harmonies on an acoustic version of The Clash's Janie Jones that restarted the waterworks in those of us who'd managed to stop crying. After a very different version of his own Freewheel, slowed down and stripped back, we got the two covers which had been promised on the songsheet but not played earlier. 'OK,' says the Duke, 'we are now going to sing together song number three, Jump.'
"This is either going to be genius or awful," says davebushe.
Matador Ben produces a piccolo from his military jacket.
"Genius?" I said.
Yes, you can play a Van Halen guitar solo on a piccolo.
"Genius," said Dave.

Finally, because some of us hadn't shed a tear for a good ten minutes, the Duke ended up with a delicate, yearning version of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Maps.

An absolutely extraordinary show. I've never experienced anything like it.


And last night, I was mostly watching Heroes and laughing at Heston Blumenthal on video. Come on, Heston. Who's going to set a squirrel cage on fire to make a fish pie?