More pop reviews: Grizzly Bear and Everything Everything

We really are "down with the kids" round at Marshside Acres you know. We recently spent a couple of days up in London to do a bit of gig-going. Just to prove what all-round culture-vultures we are, we took in the Pre Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate too. I knew you'd be impressed.

 

Grizzly Bear were on at the Brixton Academy. This is an old cinema and is a great venue. Although it's one of the biggest around, excluding the enormodome places like the horrid O2 (Marshside blogs passim), it somehow has an intimate vibe about it. You can choose to stand or opt for unreserved seating - we went for the latter this time round: our legs and backs were still recovering from the Radiohead gig.

 

Grizzly Bear at Brixton: Chinese lanterns ahoy

 

Grizzly Bear are like a louder Fleet Foxes, i.e. it's still gentle stuff. This is a bit surprising given that they come from the urban jungle of Brooklyn. I guess New York has a different feel about it these days, compared to that which influenced bands like the Velvet Underground and the Ramones. The Bears had a great light show which utilised remote controlled Chinese lanterns which could be moved around into interesting patterns: a bit like a lower cost version of Radiohead's moving video screens. Speaking of which, another lower cost thing here compared to Radiohead was the ticket price which was less than half what we paid to see Thom and the boys. Weird, eh? They are much better than half as good. And the Brixton Academy is much better than twice as good as the O2.

 

Anyway, do check out the Bears from Brooklyn - they are excellent.

 

The following night, we ventured into what New Yorkers might call the "funky" neighbourhood of Shoreditch to see one of our great fave raves, Everything Everything. Now, Shoreditch is a fascinating place. Very much a part of the true East End of London, being adjacent to the City, it's not an area that you, gentle reader, would have wanted to dally in after dark a few years ago. I used to regularly drive through it sharpish en route between London and Kent. But now the blessing (or curse, depending on your point of view) of gentrification has spread here and it's getting very trendy. Somewhat bizarrely, a few yards up the old Roman road of which Shoreditch High Street forms a part, a kind of Little Saigon has been born, with Vietnamese restaurants everywhere. We had our dinner at one such. Our verdict: good but a bit too much like your common or garden Chinese.

The Village Undergound in funky downtown Shoreditch

 

 

So trendy has Shoreditch become that someone has created a new music venue under the railway arches. It's called the Village Underground and I recommend it, apart from the beer prices: £4 for a can of lager is too much and brings back unpleasant O2 memories. Mind you, at around £13, the ticket prices for this gig were such a bargain that we were able to drink the beer without choking.

 

We half expected to see Shaun Keavney, the host of the very wonderful BBC Radio 6 breakfast prog there as he's a well-known EE fan. Sure enough, I turned round and there he was right next to me. I am of course far too shy and retiring to dare speak to him but Mrs Marshside, fuelled by too many rash purchases of that overpriced beer, had no such inhibitions. Not sure if he ever gave us the "shout out" (as I believe you young people call it) on the radio the next morning: couldn't get BBC 6 Music in our hotel room (why not? It's on Freeview. Wake up Travelodge!)

The Everything Everything boys do their stuff: Chinese lanterns as yet unaffordable

 

The band were great. They've got a new album out in the new year and will be touring more extensively to promote it. Do go and see them.

 

One final observation from our visit to the Smoke. The transport system in London now is truly remarkable. Get this: we got a river boat from the Tate (that's near the Houses of Parliament) all the way to Greenwich. After a stroll round Greenwich, we walked through the pedestrian tunnel (a new one on me) under the river to the Isle of Dogs. We then got a Docklands Light Railway train from Island Gardens to Shadwell, where we changed to a London Overground train to Hoxton, right next to our Vietnamese restaurant and a short walk from the gig venue. After the gig, a brief train journey from Shoreditch High Street would have brought us to Whitechapel where a change to the metropolitan tube line would have whisked us back to our hotel near King's Cross. (But we pampered ourselves with a taxi for the home leg.) All of these journeys can be paid for with one of these Oyster card things. I don't know quite why I should be so impressed with this as London has always had a pretty good transport network but it's the way it's now integrated that makes it so easy to use. That and the Oyster card.

 

So there you have it. Plugs for Grizzly Bear, Everything Everything, the Brixton Academy, the Village Underground, BBC Radio 6 Music and Transport for London. If these search engines are any good, the visitor numbers to this blog will go through the roof!

 

Updates: gadgets, fashion and (shock) private sector pay

Morning all. A few stories by way of confirmation that your favourite blogger is ahead of the times...and, a first for this blog, a bit of balance. This latter may be a disappointment and you may infer that I'm losing my touch but it relates also to my piece on fashion. Quite clearly, I have no time for balance for its own sake - perish the thought!

 

As we've started on this balance business let's continue. I write in response to the revelation that FTSE 100 head honcho salaries are up by 27%. Now in one or two cases, this might be justified but only one or two, as most shareholders will know only too painfully. These people are now paid spectacular amounts of money and like wages generally, as we have previously observed, their salaries are "sticky downwards"...i.e. they go up when times are good but rarely seem to fall when times are bad. And times have been very bad recently.

 

So how come? Well it's our old friend fashion. It's also the "what happens in the USA will one day happen in the UK" syndrome. It used to be the case that the grands frommages amongst our US cousins got paid way more than their UK equivalents whose salaries, whilst being much higher than those of their minions, were at least within the realms of the same universe. No longer. Sure enough, the massive US salary package phenomenon crossed the Atlantic (just like hallowe'en celebrations amongst other wacky ideas), some time in the late 1980s I would estimate and now our own fat cats are having to spend as much time worrying about their own finances (the tax must be terrible) as they do running their companies. And now it's the fashion to pay people so much, who wants to be out of fashion by trying to cut things down to size?

 

Before you think I've changed sides, this is nothing like so serious as the over inflated pay in the public sector for two obvious reasons. First, there's very few of these uber-salaried types in the private sector and second, you and I don't have to write the cheques. Let their shareholders worry about it.

 

In other news...I see that some council somewhere has spent zillions on laptops for the kiddies to play with but because of some administrative cock-up, they've never been used. Actually this is probably a good thing as getting the kids to use them just compounds the problem and it won't bring the money back.

 

There are still loads of people of my sort of age who don't know one end of a computer from another. The members of this group who hold the purse strings are so terrified by their own skills shortage that they have been determined to throw money at gadgets to atone for this. Chief among these was Tony Blair who was PM when this fashion (there's that word again) started. By all accounts, old Tone never went near a computer: he even had a minion print out emails for him to read. Thus started the trend for those who know least about IT to be the ones who spend the most on the stuff. Sadly there seems to be no sign of this fashion going away. The blind leading the partially-sighted.

 

Speaking of printing out emails and the consequent planet-damage that might ensue, I read that the organisation which kind of runs the climate change agenda (the ICCC or something, you know the ones) has said that they won't know for sure that man-made carbon emissions are harming the planet for about another 30 years. Great! So for a lot of us, we will be long gone before we can have any warm glow (metaphorically of course - don't turn up the heating) from our years of sorting rubbish into different coloured bins and for you younger readers, there's something for you to look forward to: by the time you are far too old to care, someone may announce that, surprise surprise, the sun is a lot more powerful than any of us and buying that shiny electric car, installing your own windmill, or voting for the Green Party (you wouldn't, would you?) made no difference to anything.

 

Alternatively, they may decide that, yes - it was our disgusting profligacy with the earth's resources that has caused the ice caps to thin out a bit but never mind, because the carbon savings made by us enlightened westerners have been cancelled out many hundreds of times over by the increase in emissions from places like China and India. (If you do still believe that your tiny actions can have a bearing on anything, just take a peek at the historical and predicted increases in emissions from these developing countries and your mind will be changed in a trice.)

 

Of course well before the 30 years are up, some nutter in Iran or Israel (there's more balance for you) will have pushed the button and blown us all into our very own little piles of carbon.

 

Please think of the planet before you print out this blog.