What was your last concert you went to ?

Lucinda Williams at the Enmore in Sydney.

The lady did not disappoint. Mainly newer songs but a nice collection of older ones as well. Excellent support band - Buick6.

Lonely Drifter Karen at The Joiners, Southampton.

Very different. Pop/ folk, at times almost circus tunes, then cabaret.

Chris

Christoph Eschenbach conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Concertgebouw on March 29. Brahms 1 played in the style of Bernstein (and nothing wrong with that) and Schumann 4 played very tightly. Overall superb, and where can I get a recording of the Schumann played that well?

Angelique Kidjo and Ayo at the Sydney Opera House tonight.

Ayo was opening up for Angelique. She is of Nigerian and Gypsy heritage, but was born and raised in Germany. Her album Gravity At Last topped the French charts in 2008.

Not too much I need to say about Angelique after over 20 years in the business. I knew her as a great singer from Benin but had never seen her live. She is an amazing entertainer and had the whole Opera House standing and dancing throughout the show.

Highly recommended.

Just got back from one of the most boring concerts I have ever been to. Jackson Browne at the Royal Albert Hall. Sound was poor, stage charisma from band about zero and the songs one after the other all sound the same. It was like being in a morgue until Running on Empty and suddenly the audience woke up. Then he finished with another dull tune.

Highlight of the evening was meeting up with BigH47 which tells you are how boring the concert was (just kidding Howard ).

Should have stayed at home on the sofa.

quote:

Originally posted by Lontano:
Just got back from one of the most boring concerts I have ever been to. Jackson Browne at the Royal Albert Hall. Sound was poor, stage charisma from band about zero and the songs one after the other all sound the same. It was like being in a morgue until Running on Empty and suddenly the audience woke up. Then he finished with another dull tune.

Highlight of the evening was meeting up with BigH47 which tells you are how boring the concert was (just kidding Howard ).

Should have stayed at home on the sofa.

Well, this gives me some comfort. I passed on the concert here in Sydney and was questioning my decision.

Better luck next time Adrian.

quote:

Just got back from one of the most boring concerts I have ever been to. Jackson Browne at the Royal Albert Hall. Sound was poor, stage charisma from band about zero and the songs one after the other all sound the same. It was like being in a morgue until Running on Empty and suddenly the audience woke up. Then he finished with another dull tune.

Highlight of the evening was meeting up with BigH47 which tells you are how boring the concert was (just kidding Howard Winker ).

Should have stayed at home on the sofa.

I was really looking forward to this concert and what a disappointment. No "spark" at all. Good musicians but they seem to just phoning their parts in.
At least the rest of the day in London(boat trip from Little Venice to Camden Lock and the market, science museum and a spag bol).

Thanks Adrian, are we quits now?

quote:

Originally posted by BigH47:
Thanks Adrian, are we quits now?

Oh, alright then!!

That is disappointing news. We are seeing at RAH next month. Maybe things will have picked up by then!

Seeing JB, I should have said. (Eric Clapton and George Thorogood too, all within a week!).

Wagner's Walkure, 2nd of the Ring cycle, just ****ing amazing fantasy staged at LA Opera with Achim Freyer director. Colorful and wild. Incredible singing.

Kate Rusby At Cadogan Hall London. Absolutely sublime! A wonderful evening of music and stories in a fantastic venue.
Don

quote:

Originally posted by Chris Kelly:
That is disappointing news. We are seeing at RAH next month. Maybe things will have picked up by then!

It will be interesting to see if a trip around Europe will change anything.

3 out of 5 in the Times today

On the cover of his new album, Time the Conqueror, Jackson Browne is pictured sporting a rather alarming grey beard. No trace of it remained when he took the stage at the Albert Hall, and with his floppy, nut-brown hair and clean jawline restored, the 60-year-old singer instead looked miraculously as one remembers him from all those album covers of the 1970s.

With his mellifluous voice rising eloquently above a precise acoustic and electric guitar playing style, he sounded pretty much the same too, and while his contemporaries once extolled the excitements of life in the fast lane, Browne has clearly not suffered from a life spent gravitating towards the musical middle lane. Accompanied by a superlative four-man band and two female backing singers, he put on a long, and sometimes meandering show, that was notable for its relaxed gait and genial tone. Beginning with the mid-tempo soft-rock of Boulevard, followed by the polite reggae groove of Everywhere I Go, he performed a succession of songs with much the same quietly spoken grace, perfect for nodding along - or nodding off - to, depending on your mood.

He talked of life in his beloved California before the coming-of-age song Barricades of Heaven, and again as he explained the inspiration for Live Nude Cabaret, but confessed to having written many of his songs in a London hotel room. A gentle, unspoilt character, he interrupted one number to rescue a white rose that had landed at his foot as he played a keyboard, and place it out of harm's way on a corner of the drum riser. When he tripped, rather clumsily, on a lead as he left the stage he turned, not to vent his anger as some performers would have done, but to apologise to the guitar technician.

But while his performance, like his manners, was faultless, it lacked a little in edge. His brief “political” speech before Going Down to Cuba was pretty tame, and his outspoken new song The Drums of War, a classic rock-star critique of American foreign policy, did little to stir the emotions. But with a catalogue of favourites, including Doctor My Eyes, The Pretender and Running On Empty, to fall back on, he was never going to disappoint a crowd of such long-serving admirers.

On reflection I think that Time review, was quite a fair summing up. OK, but not outstanding, Sally said she quite enjoyed the second half. I personally couldn't hear enough of the words, and as a "sometime" fan, did not have the knowledge to fill in the blanks.

Just got back from Le Beat Bespoke weekender at Great Portland Street - The Pretty Things played the whole of the SF Sorrow album plus classic extras in a stripped down and revved up performance, different to the last time I saw them on the South bank but equally superb! Sound quality was excellent...I think, (I was pretty drunk by the time they finished!)

Burnin' Down the House - David Byrne - The Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno - Brighton Dome

After Sunday nights dull to the extreme show at the Royal Albert Hall, my faith in live concerts has been swiftly restored. What a contrast and what a great show.

There was more innovation in 60 seconds of this show than in the whole JB concert. The atmosphere was electric and the crowd danced and screamed the night away.

He is a damm fine chap, coming on and chatting for a few minutes, telling us to take as many photos as we want as long as we only post the good ones on the web. Then there was two hours of great music with quite a few Talking Heads tracks.

His stage presence, musicianship and the way the band and his dancers move on the stage that just makes this special. So many fabulous ideas often so simple but so visually effective. Genius.


Here is the 5 star review of yesterday's show at the RFH from tonight's Evening Standard.

Once in a lifetime live music from David Byrne


Burning down the house: a tutu-clad David Byrne is wholly reborn as a live act, blending sound and vision to produce a breathless show

All white on the night: Byrne, his band and three dancers were dressed like a Fifties cricket team

In the 21 years since Naked, the final Talking Heads album, leader David Byrne’s solo career has chugged along pleasantly enough, but no more.

Perhaps it’s his new relationship with the groundbreaking American photographer Cindy Sherman or perhaps it’s the realisation that at 56 he still has much to prove, but suddenly Byrne is bursting through boundaries once again.

Last year’s collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and his lovely soundtrack to the US television programme Big Love suggested a creative stirring, but even those fine albums failed to serve notice that as a live act Byrne is wholly and fabulously reborn.

Last night, the second of Byrne’s two for the Southbank’s Ether festival which runs until 24 April, was a two-hour cornucopia of delight covering Byrne’s two albums with Eno, Talking Heads staples and My Big Hands (Fall Through The Cracks) from his 1981 collaboration with choreographer Twyla Tharp. Yet it was more than catalogue cherry-picking.

From the moment the Scottish-born New Yorker emerged with his four-man band and three backing singers, there was magic afoot.

Like some Fifties cricket team, the entire ensemble were clad from head to toe in white — the colour of Byrne’s hair and his braces — and they were often joined by three white-wearing dancers, choreographed in the faux-natural style (the one that requires intensive rehearsal to look off-the-cuff) of Fatboy Slim’s Praise You video.

When they weren’t jiving with the backing singers or grappling with each other like tactile ninjas, the dervish dancers leapfrogged over Byrne during a jaw-droppingly spectacular version of Talking Heads’s Once In A Lifetime; they caught him as he dropped — still singing — during Houses In Motion and they joined him on swivelling office chairs for Life Is Long.

In lesser hands, with weaker music the dancers would have hijacked the show. Instead, sound and vision enhanced each other and when the dancers took a breather nobody’s attention wandered. In fact, the crowd adored it and Crosseyed And Painless was so irresistibly funky that it invoked a mass, spontaneous charge to the front which startled and delighted Byrne, although surely it happens every night he plays.

And for the third encore, a special treat when Eno himself — dressed in white of course — added backing vocals to the heartbreaking lullaby Everything That Happens. Live music really doesn’t get any better than this. Breathlessly brilliant.

Wish I'd gone for the David Byrne concert now.

quote:

Originally posted by BigH47:
Wish I'd gone for the David Byrne concert now.

Yes well worth it.



Another Jackson Browne review - The Independent - 2 Stars

The grey beard of experience Jackson Browne wore on the sleeve of his last album, Time the Conqueror, is gone. He looks the same lean, long lank-haired troubadour he has done since his 1970s pomp. The songs laid out over three hours tonight are also stolidly consistent. Regret at time passing and the loss of 1960s ideals troubled him 35 years ago, as they do now. He still speaks to the baby-boom generation, in an ongoing, exclusive conversation. And this definitive southern Californian singer-songwriter, for all his genuine struggles to escape lotusland and wrestle profound truths, remains unworldly. Though his wife Phyllis committed suicide in 1976, and political activism consumed his 1980s career, tonight it feels as if experience hasn't really scarred him, and nowhere but his comfortable, sun-baked home is true.

Time the Conqueror's pleasingly mellow, harmonic hook negates its theoretical struggle between past and future, both anyway seen through a 1960s prism. "Giving That Heaven Away" shows likeable befuddlement with its "home-shopping... hip-hopping" definition of modern mores, over a warm, rocking sound you can float away on. George Harrison haunts the bright melody of "Off of Wonderland". Its lyric recalls hippie days "ankle-deep in contraband". But as he explains seeing the sign that inspired "Live Nude Cabaret" while waiting at a stop-light, his virtuous disinterest in experiencing the song's subject is telling. Its languid, jazzy drift is a dream of lonely degradation far from the thumping reality. Browne, a long-time Laurel Canyon compadre of the Eagles, cannot be so innocent. But no song tonight casts off its soft literacy to find a subject's raw meat. Gauche, halting patter between songs adds to his weirdly untouched aura.

"These Days" finds him "losing heart for the life I live in song". Recently covered by Glen Campbell, that non-songwriter found a deeper channel to the implacable guilt that this fine song contains. Browne's plain voice handicaps him as much as his prissy sensitivity. Giving over much of "Lives in the Balance" to young gospel-soul backing singers Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills lets them soar free as he can't. Browne is stiff for such a veteran performer, a trait infecting even admirable political stances such as "Going Down to Cuba". By "The Pretender" (his best look at a compromised life), at least the crowd are standing, encouraging a tie-loosening din. But to an outsider, tonight feels like a worthy but tepid rite.

Just did Neil Young Saturday night, great show, still has a little left in him. Nice mix of old and new....electric and accoustic....too bad the sound man had no clue what he was doing....

Tepid, that was a good word the reviewer used about JB.

I saw the Killers last week and they left me cold. Everyone else I spoke to enjoyed it though and the crowd were certainly up for it.

Off to see Lucinda Williams tomorrow night. Should be much more my style

Angels and Broken Hearts

Sydney, City Recital Hall | Angel Place |

"Radiance, flexibility, passion and sheer virtuosity: these were the job requirements for an 18th-century soprano – the voice of an angel in other words. For this concert we’ve cast a modern angel, the radiant Sara Macliver, in a program that covers the gamut of emotions, from heartbreak and vengeance to the luminous joy of faith. Hear Handel and Mozart in their element – that is, on the stage!"


HANDEL
Rinaldo: Overture and arias
Samson: Overture and ‘Let the
bright seraphim’

MOZART
Mitridate: Overture
‘Non so d’onde viene’, K294
Four Minuets from K585
The Magic Flute: ‘Ach ich fühl’s’
‘Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio!’, K418

Michael Dauth ~ violin-director
Sara Macliver ~ soprano

Los Lobos Wednesday night. A great show mixing some of the early with the old, the Spanish with the English, and a little Jimi thrown into the mix for fun.

Last night's Royal Northern College of Music John Lennon Memorial Charity Concert. Started at 7.15 pm.
session 1
I Am Blackbird
Big Fin
Someone who I can't remember!

session 2
Stephen Fretwell
I Am Kloot
Badly Drawn Boy

session 3
Jarvis Cocker

Concert ended at 5 past midnight.
Some lucky bugger won the original artwork for the cover of Seldom seen Kid signed by Guy Garvey.

Great evening