Loving Angels instead...

I promised I would report back, and here I am!

A fantastic gig – really glad we made the effort to go (it’s the best part of an hour on the motorway, plus a trip through the back streets of Sheffield, which have changed greatly since I were a lad).

It was apparently a quiet night by Acoustic Angels standards – Bank Holiday weekend, so a lot of the regulars were away, and we didn’t need to turn up quite as early as we did. Consequently we were close to the head of the queue and grabbed a prime table near to the front. Still, by the time the band came on, the place was pretty full, helped by the fact that it’s quite a small venue (The Boardwalk, in Sheffield, in case you aren’t keeping up).

John and the boys proceeded to belt out a range of cover versions for the next few hours, taking in everything from disco classics to Country & Western to U2. Personal highlights were Bowie’s ‘Starman’ and a cracking version of ‘Substitute’ by The Who. John’s versatile vocal performance managed to carry off this wide range of styles, and he was ably helped by the band – stars for me were Steve Beighton on sax and the very charismatic and talented Julian Jones, who also did a couple of his own songs.

All in all, an excellent night, helped by the friends we went with and the mad Acoustic Angels/Boy on a Dolphin fan base, who know how to party.

My only complaints – a week of sleep deprivation meant that I was flagging by about 10.30 (didn’t get home ‘til 1.00am), and the volume. Perhaps I really am getting old, but it shouldn’t hurt, should it? Unless you’re at a Motorhead gig? I think small venue meets sound engineer with aspirations to stadiumhood.

So, check out any of John Reilly’s projects – Acoustic Angels, Boy on a Dolphin or his solo work. And look out for his collaborators, particularly the ridiculously talented (and thoroughly nice) Steve Beighton and his magic fingers.

Fellow Blog-meister

Just discovered that my collaborator, the brilliant singer/songwriter John Reilly, has a blog on Blogger too. Check it out here.

He’s a smashing bloke and depressingly talented – mercifully he is lending some of that talent to the Personal Demons project and – bless him – he mentions the project several times in his blog.

Hoping to see him perform with The Acoustic Angels at the Boardwalk in Sheffield tomorrow evening – I’ll let you know how it goes.

Brought to you today by...

I don’t often gush about software (except games – ‘Prey’, anyone?) but I had to give a plug for this one - Liquid Story Binder from Black Obelisk Software. It’s a word processor for writers, and it’s great! Despite the terrible name (sorry, guys, but it is), it does – easily and quickly – loads of things that I’ve always wanted to be able to do, like produce word counts for individual chapters, or open a document at the place where I last left off, or produce a timeline, or auto-complete frequently used words, or….

Anyway, you get the idea. I guess a lot of these features are available in M$ Word, but not as simply and intuitively as in LSB. So, after my rant about electricians, here’s a big thumbs up to the developers at Black Obelisk. There are still craftspeople in the world…

Get a trade, young man!

Knew I should have trained as a plumber. Or an electrician.

It seems that skilled tradesmen of that kind have so much work available these days that they barely even need to own a telephone, never mind advertise their services.

One of the great plans when we moved into ‘the village’ was that the brick shed would be converted into an office. This would then become the throbbing heart of my writing empire, a fortress of solitude from whence I could churn out works of wonder and delight in peace and uninterrupted concentration.

What actually happened was we just chucked a load of junk in there, and now you can’t even step inside. However, we did manage to get it dry-lined and painted, so all that’s needed now is electricity. A simple matter, you would think. After all, the shed is about 4 feet diagonally from the back of the house.

But oh, no. This is an insurmountable problem for the simple fact that we can’t get an electrician to so much as look at it. Well, that’s not strictly true. One turned up, said he give us a quote, then vanished never to be seen again. One came round recently, but seems to have misunderstood our requirements, since the figure he’s quoting would be sufficient to build a new house, from the ground up, and wire it with gold cable. Three other electricians who were approached didn’t answer their phones or reply to messages left for them.

By the time I get my office, it will be winter and I will be tapping away at my keyboard in fingerless gloves, wearing my entire wardrobe of jumpers.

Job's a good 'un!

Well, I‘ve finished the first draft text of volume 1 in the ‘Gorgeously Gross Guides’ series, and it has passed the first editing hurdle with flying colours. We’re now choosing microscope photos of various unpleasant bits of the human body for a ‘guess the close-up’ feature on each page.

I’m quietly confident that it’s going to be a blinder when it’s finished!

[feeling: smug]