I think there is a two week delay between stuff happening and me blogging it. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Kerry and I were at the (brand new) Connect Festival in Inveraray on the west coast of Scotland. Here are some good points:

• Awesome lineup, including Bjork, Beastie Boys, Regina Spektor, Big Star, Teenage Fanclub, Divine Comedy and on and on…
• Excellent food
• Nice vibe
• Smaller crowd than T in the Park

Here are some not so good things:

• The mud! The horror!
• 8 washbasins for 4000 people? I kid not
• Campsite on a sloping bumpy field seemingly infested with spiders

But they’re all pretty minor, I mean, you don’t have to wash for three days.

There is a metric ass-load of photos on my flickr steam.

I saw Foo Fighters supported by Nine Inch Nails and the Silver Sun Pickups at Meadowbank the other week. It was part of T on the Fringe – the music part of the Fringe events and was an awesome concert. It was a long afternoon event (5-11) but the venue is a good size and there is plenty to keep you occupied. It almost rained a couple of times but for the most part we managed to keep pretty dry. There is a shed-load of pictures on my flickr stream and a video of Dave rocking out – surprisingly good quality from my new camera.

Yay, woo.

So, I broke the other day and started using iTunes about 3 months after getting my Nano. It is actually not such a bad programme and hasn’t quite taken over my music collection in the evil-hell-spawn way I thought it might. What lead me to use iTunes was the fact that I totally broke my Nano messing around with ipodlinux. I had to do an ipod restore and it was just easier to use iTunes…damn Apple and their bundled easy to use feature packed software. Whilst exploring the iTunes interface I came across the vast index of podcasts that Apple let you browse through. I’m now hooked on radio five’s film review podcast, and one from “Security Now” is also quite interesting. It’s like radio for your ipod that you can pause! Great stuff.

I’ve totally forgotten to give some props to my work-mate Blair’s band Charlie’s Boat. You can hear some of their tunes on their myspace page. Looks like they’re playing in Edinburgh on Thursday night, so y’all should go and stuff.

So I’ve been totally slack and not blogged about the De La Soul (up inna’ hizzy) gig. I went to see them last Friday along with James & Catriona and Alex and they rocked. It was the most fun I’ve had at a gig for ages. They got the crowd totally worked up and everyone was bouncing and having a great time. There was lots of “Hands in the air if you love hip-hop!” and “Is the party on the left? or the right?”. Masterful crowd control stuff. It’s not until they started doing their stuff you realise how much material they’ve done and how consistently awesome it all is. It was a great night. Such a shame Kerry couldn’t make it as she was ill. I had to tone down the “awesomeness” when I got home so she wasn’t too jealous :). There are a few (not brilliant) pics up over in the pictures hizzouse.

Wow, this is super-cool. The Beastie Boys have put up mp3s of A Capella versions of some of their tracks for personal remixing and such.

Toot, toot. De La Soul are playing at Scratch in September and we got tickets.

These Are the Breaks

Kerry and I went to the see TES tonight at the Film House. He was showing a re-editing of the ‘The Warriors‘ with a live hip-hop soundtrack. It was prety damn cool. I’d never seen the film before but Kerry loves it, and now I want to see the full version. He was powering everything off a powerbook aswell, which added to the geek factor 🙂

Last Saturday Kerry and I went to see the Beastie Boys live at the SECC in Glasgow. First time I’d seen them and the first time I’d been the SECC. The gig was amazing, we had a good spot quite near the front and managed to avoid the drunken beer-throwing and crushing that went on in the middle. They started with a huge screen showing what was happening back-stage. Some roadies were wheeling a big case up to the stage, smiling and slapping and pointing at it. They brought it up the stage, opened it and Mixmaster Mike jumped out and lept up to the DJ booth. He then did some amazing turntablist trickery for a bit including the “5-4-3-2-1” countdown from Thunderbirds (genius) and then the Beasties came jumping on to the stage in matching adidas tracksuits. It was a great show starting with them doing their “3 MCs and 1 DJ” style stuff. Then they went off the stage leaving Mike in the DJ booth. Then the booth disappeared backwards and a huge stage/float thing was wheeled around from the back with a whole band on it, plus the Beasties all in really bad suits. They then did a few of their more instrumental tracks before the stage did some more trickey and reverted back to DJ booth/dancing space. Amazing night in all, even though it took us 3 hours to get home.

Review here from the Independent.

And another from the Guardian.

And a last one from the Times.

Many, many thanks to James and his excellent Ripped Tickets service for letting me know that Beastie Boys tickets for Glasgow were going to be released. I didn’t even know there was a Glasgow gig! I quickly checked the Beasties site and saw there was a ‘fans only’ link through to ticketweb where you could buy them online. Two days before they went on general sale! I snatched two tickets up sharp-ish as the London tickets sold out in less than 24 hours. Kerry and I have been wanting to see them live for a while, it’s gonna roXor 🙂

The Beasties have a new single out: ‘Triple Trouble’. It uses the hook from Rappers Delight and is just superb. As usual they also have a hilarious video that just has to be seen.

J 5 inna hizzy!
Went to see Jurassic 5 at the Corn Exchange last Wednesday, I’ve basically been too slack to blog it so far. They were pretty awesome. I’ve never really seen any big hip-hop/raps acts live before so it was a lot of fun. The crowd were totally up for it, lots of hands in the air, bigging it up. They did all the faves and actually interacted with the crowd loads. It seemed liked they actually gave a crap about us, the audience. Which was nice.
Of course, I had to buy one of their sweet t-shirts while I was there. Cheaper than buying them from their online shop aswell 🙂

Green Day also seem to have a new album out. There’s new stuff coming out all over the place at the moment. I noticed that they also picked up a life-time achievement type thing at the Kerang awards the other week.

I’ve been hearing some good things about the new prodigy album. I’ve caught bits of the single on radio1 and it sounds pretty darn good. Think I may have to pick it up once pay day comes around.
Fatboyslim also seems to have a new single out which is the usual much repeated sample thing. It’s kinda annoying at first but I’m sure it will grow on me as most of his stuff does.

Jurassic 5 are on at T On The Fringe on the 1st September. I discovered these guys last year and it was one of those moments when you wonder how you couldn’t have know about them already. If you know what I mean…

Oh man, that rocked my socks off. Highlight of the weekend has to Orbital live on the Sunday night. They played all the favourites including Halcyon And On And On, with new Darkness remix action! Their kick-ass Dr Who theme remix was in there aswell. I had to go see it on my own which was cool as everyone else was seeing The Pixies on the main stage. It all seemed pretty well organised, no troubles getting in or anything. Had to queue a while at the bus station in Edinburgh but even there they had loads of staff on-hand. Other people who rocked were: Black Eyes Peas, Faithless (uber rocked), Electric Six. Lots of folk on the Sunday clashed and on the Saturday the main stuff I wanted to see was in the Slam tent which was ridiculously under-sized and therefore always full. It completely filled up for Basment Jaxx, Felix Da Housecat, Chemical Brothers and Groove Armada, which sucked. Now, on with the ass-tastic camera-phone photos:

Told you they were good…

Hey everybody! Just eaten a very nice pie with mash and peas, mmmmmmmm. Just a quick blog from the virgin tent-thing here at t in the park. Laters!

Toot! toot! T in the park today tody and tomorrow! Need to get ready soon or we’ll be a bit late…

Kerry and I are going to T in the park in July \o/

Went to see 2 many djs (aka soulwax) on Friday night with alex. Then venue was City Nightclub, some new fancy-pants place under North Bridge. It was a very nice venue if a little over-sold. The dance floor was getting rather cramped and rock-concert like at times. The support guy (Erol Alkan) was actually just as good as soulwax, they did a good set but it was more like an ordinary dance music set than a kerazy-mad-soulwax set. That was a little dissapointing but they had some brilliant moments such as managing to fit in Stone Roses and Nirvana, which the crowd loved. The only downside was at then end when the cloakroom staff managed to misplace alex’s jumper which meant we had to wait for 30 odd minutes, even though we can see it! This drove us nuts, as we were totally knackered. Good night in all though, and I saw loads of people from computer science, bizzarely.

This is really rather good, much better than I was expecting. If you’re not a fan of home star runner you probably won’t “get it”.

Yes, I suck. Managed to miss Cut Chemist by completely forgetting about it until we were already out, slightly inebriated and it was too late. gah!

Cut Chemist is playing at Honeycomb in Edinburgh!!
Cut Chemist does most of Jurassic 5’s turntable wizardry and producers lots of their stuff. He also teamed up with DJ Shadow to do the infamous Product Placement mix cd and the genius that is BrainFreeze. In other words, rather good on the ones and twos.

These guys are just da bomb. Such good lyrics and beats, I must listen to Quality Control almost every day when I get in from work. Great pickmeup.

(If I could figure out how allmusic does its searches I would link more stuff up….)

My main man John has being showing off his skillz on the decks with the release of an album length progressive house mix. You’ll have to jump onto soulseek to get it, contact him (or me) for more info.

People in the UK may have seen the kerazy Junior Senior song that entered the charts at number 4 this week. Rather fine it is to, although the severe Radio 1 pimpage it got did no harm I’m sure. Anyhoooo, I linked to the vdeo last September. Ahead of the curve/pack/thing I am!
Stay tuned batfans!