Category: Personal

Like much of the world, I was glued to the Live 8 proceedings over the weekend, mostly the London concert. FWIW, I think the Murrayfield gig on Wednesday will probably be much better, partly because it’s in a stadium (sprawling park gigs never really sustain much of an atmosphere), and partly because the line-up looks a bit more to my taste– there are certainly a lot fewer people on the bill that I’d just like to slap.

Politics really isn’t my thing, so I’ll stick to my impressions of the music that was on offer at Hyde Park.

Acts who were better than I expected: Stereophonics (surprisingly good vocals), Madonna (nice choir– shame about the face), Mariah Carey (actually sounded like she could sing, even if she’s as mad as a box of frogs), Keane (generally a pale imitation of Travis, but performed better than Fran and Co on the day), and The Who (could all still have been 21 if you’d shut your eyes).

Acts who disappointed: Paul McCartney & U2 (for the opening song– Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Dirge hardly got the crowd going á la Rocking All Over the World), Elton John (didn’t play any of his good ones from his pre-American-accent days), and Pink Floyd (more of a kiss-and-make-up stunt than the anticipated psych rock treat).

Acts who were even worse than I feared: R.E.M. (plumbed yet more depths of stripey blue pretentiousness), UB40 (the reggae equivalent of the Black and White Minstrel Show), Snoop Dogg (reading out some sweary words to a backing track still ain’t music, whatever anyone says) and U2 again (as skin-crawlingly self-important as ever, sound about as authentically northside Dublin as I do, and even David Copperfield would have turned down that dove stunt for being too cheesy).

Everyone else performed much as expected, really. It certainly didn’t have the momentous feel of Live Aid about it (which I have to confess never really caught my attention as a 14-year old at the time anyway– I seem to be one of the few who can’t remember what he was doing that day, other than watching the last hour or two). But it goes without saying that I’d love it to have the desired effect.

As I mentioned last week, we were off to The Point again this weekend, this time to see noted guitar picker and former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler.

It’s been ten years since I last saw him live, and in some respects the set wasn’t a lot different, bar a wider repertoire of solo material– fortunately he does at least now seem to be over his pedal steel guitar phase, which started with the last couple of Straits albums, and bled into his first solo outings. Otherwise the staging and arrangements haven’t changed much in a decade, which isn’t a bad thing, just a little surprising. I was a tad disappointed that Private Investigations didn’t feature this time around, but we did get a satisfyingly-rousing version of the epic Telegraph Road instead (although the pianist did sound a bit like he was playing it out the Alchemy song book– the tinkly bits on the Money for Nothing version remain the definitive ones for me…)

Modern-day critics often look back sneeringly on Dire Straits, but as somebody who was learning to play guitar finger-style at the time while most kids were happy to go the plectrum-and-power-chords route, their omnipresence (and of course, Mark Knopfler’s in particular) proved to be a big influence for me. He might never really look like he’s trying, and he still sings about as well as Bob Dylan on a bad day, but I could have listened to him all night.

In the penultimate stage of our current retro-bands “tour”, Julie and I went to see Queen with Paul Rodgers in Dublin on Saturday. Of course, Queen are really just Brian May and Roger Taylor these days, with Danny Miranda (of Blue Oyster Cult and Pyramid fame) taking the disassociated John Deacon’s place on bass, and Spike Edney (SAS Band, and a million-and-one big-name session, production and musical director credits) on keyboards. The unenviable task of trying not to impersonate Freddie Mercury fell to Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company) on this tour, one which he pulled off with varying degrees of success… he was certainly more comfortable performing the songs that originated in his own back catalogue, though.

While I’ve never been a great Brian May fan– he’s certainly not in the league of guitar gods who should be trying to pull off ten-minute guitar solos in the middle of a show, but try he did– his guitar-playing is certainly the most defining feature of the Queen sound in the absence of Freddie’s voice, and if you shut your eyes, you did occasionally get a flash of what it must have been like to see them live in their heyday. Queen it probably wasn’t, but a good old-fashioned rock gig it certainly was.

Next week: Mark Knopfler…

I wasn’t long out of university when Ocean Colour Scene made it big in the mid-90s, with grungey guitar hits like The Day We Caught the Train and The Riverboat Song. Can’t say I was really into them then, but we went to see them in Dublin at the weekend and they totally rocked… it’s rare enough for one Britpop singer to hit every note all night, let alone the whole band! (Well, okay, apart from Oscar on drums and piano, who belted one out during the encore and was pretty dire…)