Another week that I am glad to get to the end of. There seem to be a lot of these lately, at least where work is concerned. No matter, it’s Friday evening, and there was some half-decent music down in town courtesy of this gentleman and his relatively portable retro equipment.
Judging by the number of ads that covered his pedestal (you see only a small portion of them here), this is what this guy does, full-time. But we all have our social media presence, don’t we.
How Goat are good? Sorry…. How God are Goat? Surely the best band ever to hail from Sweden. OK… maybe the second, but only in more general popular opinion.
My 54th birthday. The title of this blog is now 12 years out of date, but never mind. A chance to celebrate this anniversary at the Piece Hall, Halifax, where The Charlatans were doing their own latest ‘Not Quite Dead Yet Tour’ (Tim Burgess is 56: we’ve both still got a couple of decades on Roger Daltrey, admittedly).
But they’ve been on here before, so let’s feature instead the Unexpectedly Decent Support Act, Johnny Marr — who dutifully did deign to perform the one and only Smiths song I really do give a toss about. Altogether now: “There’s a club if you’d like to go…. you might meet somebody who really loves you. So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry and you want to die.” Ah: How Soon Is Now? It does take me back.
When the lady dropped off her coins, the busker immediately said he would play her a request: which she seemed quite happy about. I suppose this could be a shopping centre anywhere in Britain, but it happens to be Bury, to the north of Manchester.
The Who should have already appeared on this blog one way or another. I had tickets to see them in Manchester a few years ago and then couldn’t go for reasons I don’t even remember properly. In March 2020 we were one week, literally, away from seeing them in Leeds (Live in Leeds!) when Bojo The Clown decided that the rest of the country (but not him) had to cease all this entertainment rubbish — postponed a year, that gig was eventually cancelled too. BUT — here we are, finally, in Edinburgh Castle, watching Daltrey and Townshend do their thing. At 79 years old, Roger Daltrey understandably doesn’t leap about the stage as much as he used to but he can definitely still sing, and right at this point he is reproducing one of the best screams in rock history — the one near the end of Won’t Get Fooled Again, which is up there in my ‘top 5’ all-time great tracks.
So yes…. all in all it could be said that I had a good evening.
Lately every Monday in the Railway there has been a singer on in the afternoon, starting around 4pm. This seems an endearingly pointless activity, done just for the sake of having music on at a quiet time of the week — I sure don’t see how anyone in the pub makes a great deal of extra money from this. But who cares, the guy today picked up a small and select audience who seem interested enough. I like this shot because it’s one of those that turned out exactly as intended when I pressed the shutter, and we can’t ask for much more than that.
Our 23rd wedding anniversary. I took Clare to a non-league football match and she took me to see Paloma Faith. I have no idea who got the better of the transaction. Photography opportunities were better at the gig, even if musically this is not my thing. A couple of thousand other people seemed happy enough with it all, though.
Some parts of the old Berlin Wall remain in the city. Probably they could have been demolished back in 1990 but the authorities realised — correctly — that they were valuable as memorials and/or tourist attractions. Or, as in the case of the East Side Gallery, which runs beside the Spree for about a kilometer near the Ostbahnhof, an art installation; this long line of concrete has been decorated by a range of murals, including this one of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who seems to disdain the busker beside him, playing as he is on a load of old water pipes, or something.
It’s Clare’s birthday on Wednesday, one of those significant ones — or rather, one that we culturally choose to assign significance to because it has a zero at the end. Anyway, the celebrations are taking place in various locations over the next few days and start this weekend with her & I going down to Brighton, where this shot is taken. It’s a mess I know, but so are most things by 10.35pm on a Friday night out; the time makes this the latest shot on the blog since June 2015.
Being 42 