sw’as

I’m not really sure I’ve got room in my life for another music based website, but lately last.fm radio has been leaving me uninspired. Today I discovered the The Hype Machine and after a week or so of mostly listening to the office radio station of choice^[1], an afternoon of The Hype Machine’s latest tracks has been a welcome relief.

On another music front, I’m off to Gotye live at Scala tonight! Get warmed up (or see what you’re missing) by playing Gotye at The Hype Machine. And best of all, once you’ve signed up they’ll even Scrobble your tracks! How awesome is that?

1. Don’t get me wrong, I actually quite like XFM, but like every other UK radio station they seem to have a very small pool of artists/tracks to pull from on any given day. [↩]

So, we attended V Festival on the weekend. It was awesome. Here is a random assortment of highlights, lowlights and other shit.

Highlights

• Muse. Best gig of the weekend.
• The Presets. This was the first act we saw and the only disappointment was its extreme brevity. 25 minutes is not enough Presets. We were left wanting more, much more.
• The Hoosiers. Don’t think I’d heard of them before, but they put on an awesome show.
• The Zutons. After listening to their latest album You Can Do Anything a lot, I was really looking forward to seeing these guys. They sure didn’t disappoint. Their version of Valerie was amazing live and really highlighted how boring the Amy Winehouse gig was, as we’d heard her sing Valerie about 15 minutes earlier.
• The Kooks. I’d never really got into their music, but seeing them live was a treat. There was something about their gig which just screamed quality.
• Kaiser Chiefs. Closing the festival, they put a huge exclamation mark on the weekend. What a show.
• Friends. As always with these kinds of events, the friends we hung out with really topped it off. It wouldn’t have been as great without them.

Lowlights

• The camping facilities. The other three day music festival I’ve camped at a few times is Splendour In The Grass. The toilets and showers^[1] at V are seriously lacking when compared to Splendour. You definitely have to expect a degree of disgusting shit when you camp at a festival, but most times I visited the toilets at V there was very literally^[2] shit up to the rim of the bowl. They were simply unusable.
• Amy Winehouse. Boring! That’s all I can say, not that I expected or hoped for much.
• Line-up changes. Spending ages in the crowd working our way right to the front and waiting for Sam Sparro didn’t pay off when we found he’d been switched with Robyn, who was also cool, but we were there for Sam.
• Waiting. There is too much waiting between shows.
• Missing The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. I’d seen them both before so we chose Muse and Kaiser Chiefs instead, choices I don’t regret, but it would have been awesome to see them both again.
• Unidentified flying liquids. There was far too many unknown liquids being thrown around for comfort. I don’t mind a bit of water being thrown around a hot crowd, in fact I love it, but it’s simply rude to throw anything else. It’s very sad that people do because they can. An extreme lowlight was being hit (along with many people around us) with a distinctly warm liquid; much to warm to be a warm beer.

Other shit

• Extreme inebriation. Seeing a chick who had pissed her self and was left stumbling around looking dazed with soaked jeans was a bit funny - in a sad kind of way.

The whole weekend really was a blast, and it’s re-invigorated my love of (live) music. The other acts we saw were: Royworld, Alphabeat, Taio Cruz, Lost Prophets, Alanis Morissette, Lenny Kravitz, The Pigeon Detectives and Stereophonics.

1. Oh, wait, there were no showers at V. [↩]
2. I mean the literal meaning of the word literally, not the ‘I literally shit my pants’ kind of literally which is used far too often for comfort. [↩]

As far as I’m concerned we’ve got a good two weeks of summer left, but the past week or so^[1] has seen a decided - and somewhat unwelcome - swing to autumn. The English summer, all four weeks of it, was a glorious experience - but the leaves are now falling.

The long summer days of latitudes above 51° 30′ really are something to treasure. It’s a new and delightful pleasure - if only it wasn’t so fleeting - to get off work at five (or so) and have a full 4 hours of daylight left to play with. Picnics in London’s oasis where the bright blue sky and impossibly elastic twilight provide a catalyst for the friends, cheese and wine to coalesce into memories that should last a lifetime.

I must get around to taking some pictures of the estate we live in before the summer leaves disappear entirely.

The English autumn will be a new experience to enjoy, and the winter has its own charms which I can look forward to, but the summer will be missed. How time flies.

1. Excluding the weekend, which was amazing weather timed very well. [↩]

This afternoon^[1] was one of those afternoons when you step out of the office and everything is gorgeous. It’s as though that little box chock full of beautiful stuff which the world usually keeps mostly hidden away has just exploded and there’s beauty just dripping from everything.

Looking out my window and watching the clouds roll in from the south-west it strikes me that I don’t have an umbrella at work and I don’t particularly feel like getting wet. Normally storms make me very excited, but this isn’t really a storm, more just an afternoon shower. As the rain eased, I take my opportunity and dash out the door for my trip across the Goodwill Bridge to the bus station^[2].

The second I open the door I’m hit by the smell. The smell of rain on a warm afternoon has little comparison; I’m almost sure it’s my favourite smell. As I’m moving down the stairs as fast as I can I catch little glimpses of the outside world which is producing this wonderful smell. A couple walking down the stairs on their way home from a stressful day at uni (not likely); a few bike riders cruising along and quickly acquiring a soggy feeling between their arse cheeks and a trail of water up their backs; the paving, now illuminated by the water; the light spots of rain still falling on to the glass roof above; and the guy who hasn’t noticed any of this because he’s too engrossed in the music coming from his headphones and the magazine in his hands. I hit the bottom of the stairs and I’m now definitely free of the office and on my way home. The scene is glorious. The sky is light but filled with deep grey clouds and the trees and grass are a saturated green that only seems to appear after summer rain.

I already know that this is one of those days where it’s simply impossible to miss noticing the joys of life, and just as I’m nearing the start of the bridge my MP3 player on random spits out Hotel Song^[3] by Regina Spektor. I don’t think I could have chosen a song to better suit the scene^[4]. The river looks great this afternoon, much better than it often does. The bright sky is being reflected, and as I move out from under the freeway I look toward Southbank to see the sun, just hiding behind one of the deep clouds that are scattered around the sky. It giving the cloud a spectacular outer glow. Beams of sunlight can be seen descending on parts of south Brisbane and West End behind the lager office blocks and apartment buildings that now define the Southbank skyline and mostly obscure Mt Coot-tha.

Having taken in the view to the south-west I turn to my left to take a peek toward the Captain Cook Bridge^[5]. An intermittent, but vibrant, rainbow stretches across the sky from somewhere near the Story Bridge right over the river to somewhere south of The Gabba.

As I continue my journey across the bridge with the rain lightly falling on my face I start to take in some of the people in the scene. There are still bike riders cruising past with wet backs; people stopped to take photos of the sky; and a group of Asian tourists taking photos of themselves under the rainbow. Coming toward me I notice a girl from a distance who is wearing bunny ears. Thinking it unusual, I take a little more notice of her as she passes than I do with most. She seems kind of distracted and maybe a little sad or angry. She passes by without leaving me any clue as to why she wears the ears. It’s a strange encounter, but somehow it adds to the scene, makes it feel more dynamic, if that’s even possible.

Nearing the end of the bridge there is a wedding party having photos and it makes me think of Laura, who I’m hoping I catch in a half hour or so at the bus stop where she’s leaving me the car and heading into the city on the same bus I’ll be catching out. I get to Southbank and immediately notice the deep purple of the bougainvillea in full flower. Trying to take in as much of the scene as possible I almost run into part of it. She looks at me as though I’m a little crazy, but that’s ok, because I probably do look that way.

As I walk up the hill toward the end of Southbank, I’m getting close to the end of my stroll, where the beauty of the scene gives way to the overcrowded and polluted bus station. What the scene loses in beauty, it usually gains in interest as I get the chance to observe the many and varied people who call this city home. But there are still a couple more good feelings to help wind up this part of my journey home. As I wait to cross the road I look up just in time to see a kid jump right in the middle of a huge puddle, much to the disgust of his mother. The musical accompaniment to my journey is being nicely rounded out by The Panda Band with Fools ‘n’ Sharks. Just after crossing the road I catch a whiff of the jacaranda flowers and they look wonderful too. It makes me think of exams.

This is a quick profile of a tiny part of my city, Brisbane, on one of its better days. But most days are good in Brisbane, it’s just that the beauty doesn’t always hit you in the face, sometimes you have to remember to notice it.

1. Ok, so the clock has ticked over midnight, so it was actually yesterday afternoon. [↩]
2. Walking across the bridge in the morning is usually my favourite part of the day, and this morning was no exception. [↩]
3. I’ve just noticed people are tagging the song as ‘anti-folk’ whatever that is. [↩]
4. Except potentially, Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues [↩]
5. The north-east view isn’t usually quite as interesting, but from certain spots you can see the Kangaroo Point Cliffs. [↩]