Pot74pouri

Has anyone else received an email from Google purporting to explain how effectively or otherwise one's blog is dealt with by their search engine? I didn't really understand it and, let's be honest, I don't care anyway, but one thing did rather leap out from their analysis. Virtually everyone who gets Discourses on Wargaming's url displayed in their search results is actually looking for gay porn. Your bloggist has lost 8 kg in weight over the last year and is looking pretty buff, even if he says so himself; so on balance, well done Google. However, further investigation also points to a single post from almost five years ago about an opera I went to see, Handel's misleadingly titled 'Joshua' (It's really about Othniel - yes, that Othniel), as the source of the traffic. So, today's post should start it all off again; perhaps I should get get some advertising on the site to monetise the upcoming surge in visitors.

Anyway, while I'm here let me bring you up to date on events in January that I have neglected to mention so far:

Opera: I saw Opera North's revival of 'Madama Butterfly' which was as good as I remembered. Anne Sophie Duprels was wonderful in the title role and appropriately enough kept her clothes on this time. I also saw the Royal Opera House live transmission of 'Rigoletto' which proved once again that closeups can sometimes not work to the advantage of sopranos playing much younger parts. Just to avoid charges of sexism, Michael Fabiano may also have been favoured by watching from further away. He was physically a very unconvincing starving poet in last year's 'La Boheme' and here he appeared to be wearing a costume two sizes too small. I have a good mind to email him with my own proven tips for losing weight (1).

Theatre: Speaking of broadcasts I also caught up with an encore of 'Young Marx' from the new Bridge Theatre in London. I nearly didn't bother because it had mixed reviews, but I enjoyed it and can report that it made me laugh. As did Alan Ayckbourn's 'Role Play' which easily delivered its quota of laugh out loud moments and featured some fairly authentic sounding East London accents. Less convincing was 'You're Only Young Twice' which, whilst well performed and mildly amusing in places, seemed to have very little connection to real life or real people.

Gigs: I've written about a couple of these already. The other one that I will mention is Henry Parker, a very good localish (Bingley I think) guitarist in the Davey Graham fingerstyle mode. I'd seen him before and on this occasion was able to buy a live album of a performance at which I was present in the audience; the third such that I own.

I didn't get to ride on the cherry picker and the roof still leaks, albeit not as badly as before.


(1) Diet and exercise; controversial I know, but there it is.

Uhh, one, two, three, four...

'Jeremy Hunt, Jeremy Hunt

Can't think of a rhyme for Jeremy Hunt'

Still no wargaming, painting or anything remotely relevant to the purpose of the blog, but there has been yet more music. Live albums used to be all the rage. Think "Get Yer Ya Ya's Out", "Live at Leeds", "Live at Folsom Prison" or "Stupidity". Double live albums were particularly popular and I owned a few on vinyl. I think I'd have to go for Dylan's "Before the Flood" as my favourite, but being the age that I am Lynyrd Skynyrd's "One More from the Road" would also feature highly (I can't think about it without shouting out "Give me a T for Alabama"; possibly that's just me.). I even owned a Judas Priest double live album, although in my defence I won it in a raffle at a Bradford working man's club on my 8,000th birthday, never actually listened to it and long ago gave it to my ex-wife's sister's first husband. However, despite all that intimate association with the format, I've never been present at the recording of one - until now (1).

I have been to see the Jon Palmer Acoustic Band record a live album and very good it was too, a band that usually plays to a couple of dozen people in pubs relishing a sold out venue full of, let's face it, friends and family. But it was a great atmosphere, they played their brand of uptempo folk with passion and ability, and they were very rude about Jeremy Hunt and the rest of the 'posh boys talking bollocks'. What's not to like? Mostly JP's own compositions, but with an idiosyncratic cover of 'Dirty Old Town' and a moving one of 'Meet on the Ledge'. I look forward to the CD, a free copy of which was included in the ticket price.

(1) Like so much on this blog, that statement isn't actually true. I was in the audience when the Ramones recorded "It's Alive" - New Year's Eve 1977 at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park, and what a night that was. See if you can spot me. Gabba Gabba Hey.

For the young ones won't be young ones very long

I have been to the City Varieties to see Ade Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds, in whom I was rather disappointed. My understanding had been that they played folk versions of punk songs, but actually they played punk songs on folk instruments, which is a rather different thing. The band consisted of violin, mandolin (I think), bouzouki with occasional pipes.  

The two songs that responded best to this treatment were, as it happens, both by the Sex Pistols. The drone of the pipes framed the nihilism (alright the pseudy, play-acting nihilism) of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ very well and ‘God Save the Queen’ was declaimed by Edmondson in a sort of half-spoken, poetry reading style that both reflected its structure and in fact matched Lydon’s delivery in the original. Not of course that I am suggesting it is poetry per se. “We’re the flowers in the dustbin, we’re the poison in your human machine”. I don’t think so.

However, when they covered, for example, the Ramones all it did was remind me how brilliant the originals were when I saw them at the Rainbow on, I think, New Year's Eve 1977. Gabba Gabba Hey!. High point musically of the Bad Shepherds set was a version of ‘Shipbuilding’, not, as you will have spotted, a punk song, but rather one written with the intent that it be interpreted by different artists, in different styles and whose lyrics – described by Elvis Costello as the best that he ever wrote – are certainly poetry.

I was there

So, all in all a bit of a let down, notwithstanding some fine, crude banter between songs by the self-styled “bloke off the telly”. And there were a large number of empty seats for a sold-out gig.