Well last night was a bit of a failure, really. I dropped off at Dubulah's to pick something up, and managed to miss the bus to Charing Cross Road, but I was only 20 minutes late at Ray's Jazz Shop in Foyle's, and still just made it for the last three chords of the French guitarist's set! Pring, pring, pring.... Steve Beresford's brother was playing at the Electric Proms so he had to go off- so I went to Denmark Street and played a nice Hofner acoustic for about half an hour before going down to Brixton to Offline. Of course I got there far too early but managed to catch Lisa Dee's hip hop soundcheck- she's a white Irish rapper with a trumpet player- she sounded very good but I thought too much of her backing-track was pre-recorded. The trumpet playing was great- a really unusual touch. She had an acoustic guitarist as well. I like it when rap is almost classifiable as performance poetry.Speaking of which, Vic Lambrusco was on, very loud and witty. He was leaning on the bar writing one of his poems about 5 minutes before he went on, which I thought was great! There was another bloke caled Courtly Lover who did a lot of poem cover versions- Ian Dury, John Cooper Clarke, Tom Waits, John Donne- but his own stuff was perfectly adequate. The more I think of it, the more I think cover versons are a bad idea. I know I used to do them, but you've got to be a complete hypocrite sometimes, haven't you? Anyway, although I had a nice chat with Mike, I missed the rest of it.
So tonight, I'm playing it safe and going to see The Queen. I don't like the royal family but I liked Princess Diana because she silenced the tabloids by heading down to St Mary's and holding hands with AIDS patients, then campaigned against the most disgusting method of blowing limbs off children in developing countries that us Brits have ever sold to mad dictators. So I liked her. How the awful Charles must be chortling as all those lovely flowers that covered the Mall after she died, rot in his royal compost-heaps!!
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