Gigs, Albums and Why's?

Sorry, again, for the delay in posting. I'll get the boring stuff out of the way first. Things are still going well with job, girlfriend and life in general. BT finally admitted that we do exist and so have kindly started giving us access to their wonderful broadband so that's allnow sorted. Now for some (hopefully) more interesting stuff.

On Thursday night I went with James Underwood to the first Raconteurs gig in London. It was obviously some sort of big deal as we saw a bunch of music/radio people in the VIP section also waiting to hear exactly what Jack White's new band would sound like. I went to the gig having not heard anything that they'd done at all and came out knowing that I'd be buying the album as soon as it came out. It was proper rock and roll with a bit of pink floyd and an occasional country style flourish thrown in. Jack White is just an incredible, genius guitar player and hearing him play in the context of a band as oppose to him on his own with a drummer was something that everyone should try and see. He dominated the stage, not just because he looked about a foot taller than the other four in the band, but with his sheer stage presence and vituosity. The gig for me was like listening to an album by a new band that you'd not heard before and falling in love with it, except this time it was at a gig, live and loud, and that made it all the more exciting and all the easier to fall completely in love with the exciting, outstanding music of the Raconteurs. You should check out their website www.theraconteurs.com not only because it's just a very cool website, but so that you can listen to a couple of their songs too.

The other night I finally got wound to downloading Graham Coxon's new album 'love travels at illegal speeds' which is a great album title for a great album. Since leaving Blur Graham's made two fantastic guitar driven pop albums that, if they'd been made by a new band and not 'that guy from Blur' would have probably become much more popular. His singing's certainly not the best in the world but his voice is right for the songs which are consistently strong, exciting and excellent. As you'd expect from graham, the guitar playing is fantastic, but he's also got a great band together, which is something that he didn't have for his last album which makes this album sound better than 'Hapiness in Magazines' although I'll need a couple of listens more before I'm confident enough to say that this album is better.

After all that geeking out over music, I want to ask a question. Why are we so crap? Why, for example, do we always leave the washing up until the tea has grown so solid and attatched to the bottom of the mug that it takes 5 minutes soaking and 1 minutes rubbing with the cloth to go away? If we'd just rinsed it under the tap when we'd finished it, wiped it quickly with the cloth it would have been done in seconds. Why, when there's a job to be done, for instance cleaning the bathroom, writing an essay or finally sorting out that bill that should and could have been paid a couple of weeks ago do we, rather than actually just do it, find ourselves suddenly obsessed with beating blackburn on pro evo, fascinated by exactly what Philip Schofield thinks about todays heart warming/tear jerking story on This Morning or unable to do anything without the aid of at least three cups of tea/coffee/cigarettes/west wing episodes or whatever other substance gets you through the day. Why, when we see that the bin in the kitchen is full, do we start a game of jenga with the rubbish, delicately balancing an empty yoghurt pot on top of the pile of old tea bags which in turn are wavering dangerously on the bottom of an upturned empty jar of Lloyd Grossman's Tikka Masala sauce? Why do we do these things? Or is it just me?