Last night we went to see The Fray in the Optimolwerke in Munich.  The gig was great, albeit we’re just too fucking short for Munich audiences; they tend to be far taller than us and have an annoying tendency to film every gig they go to in significant detail.  I hadn’t heard that much of The Fray’s music before, even though we have their latest album.  Unfortunately I just didn’t have time to actually listen to the CD before the gig which is a pity as I really enjoyed it.  I would have enjoyed it more if I knew the songs better, I guess, but what the hell.  We’re also potentially going to see Athlete in a couple of days, pending ticket acquisition etc.  They have a new album out which isn’t that bad, though I think it needs some more listening in the next few days.

We saw Bell-X1 recently too.  That turned out to be a fantastic gig.  They’re far better in concert than I had expected, and the crowd were great.  As was Duke Special, who supported them.  Even better was seeing The Airborne Toxic Event live, who were just stunning.  Their most famous song “Sometime Around Midnight”, was incredible live. As I’ve mentioned here or on twitter, I have seen more live gigs here in the last six months than the previous ten years in London, and I had seriously missed the buzz from live music.

Oh, and I just bought tickets to see U2 in Munich next September.

So, another day, another German class out of the way.  Unfortunately I have an hour to kill in town before my physiotherapy so I figured I'd hang out in Starbucks for a bit.  I deliberately chose to hang out in town so that I could use the wireless in Starbucks and post a new entry here, but I have to admit that now that I'm sitting here I simply have nothing that I want to write about.  Fucking typical. 
I don't know if I mentioned it before, but we saw a singer called Lenka recently.  She's a Australian who has lived in California for a few years, so her accent is... interesting.  Her singing voice is brilliant though, and you should definitely pick up her self titled debut album.  Before going solo she performed with Decoder Ring.  We went to see her in concert a few weeks ago and she was brilliant.  There were about four fans in the audience, and the rest seems to have been a bunch of jaded music industry insiders.  Reception at the start of the event was kind of bland, with not much enthusiasm from what was obviously a pretty weary crowd.  Lenka brought them to life however, and really livened up what could have been a dead audience.  By the end of the concert, the four fans (of which Anna and I were two) weren't the only ones cheering.

I wrote that first paragraph about three weeks ago, fully intending to finish it off and publish the post.  It seems I’ve been a little lax.  Some of you have made up for it however, and some of you seem to have stopped blogging altogether.  What’s that about, dude?  Anyway, since then, a bunch of interesting things have happened.  We were in Berlin last weekend for the U2 concert, which was every bit as good as I expected it to be.  I think Anna has some photos of me screaming like a little girl when. I have a couple too, and some videos, but they were recorded on my mobile and really don’t do the experience justice. This is a concert and stage that has to be seen to be believed.  It was truly Magnificent. The set list was awesome, and comprised of Breathe, No Line on the Horizon, a much better than expected Get on your Boots, Magnificent, Beautiful Day (awesome… Dave B, was it you who said this song just made you smile every time you heard it?), Mysterious Ways and I Still Haven’t Found what I’m Looking For in which the seventy thousand strong audience possibly out sang the band. Angel of Harlem was next, which was assisted by three musicians dragged from the audience who apparently had a flag saying they were a band from the Czech Republic.  Bono asked our forbearance while they tried something new… and promptly had the three guys play Angel of Harlem, assisted by U2!. Pure magic! Then came Stay, Unknown Caller and the ever wonderful and even better live Unforgettable Fire. Next was City of Blinding Lights and Vertigo (which I had never seen before live), and a different version of I’ll go Crazy than the one on the album.  It was… interesting, and reception was perhaps a bit more muted for it than some of the other tracks.  Then Larry started up the intro drum sequence for Sunday Bloody Sunday and seventy thousand fans just went apeshit.  I have to include myself in that too.  There may have been a couple of tears brushed out of my eyes during that one.  An awesome rendition of Pride was up next, at which point I started to lose my voice. Then MLK and Walk On, and then Desmond Tutu was shown on the screen saying that everyone should be nice to each other, with some background music that faded into the intro for Where The Streets Have No Name.  I almost lost it at this point I have to say, it was a moment of sheer awesomeness that is going to be hard to beat. Once that had ended, and the crowd finally calmed down, we were brought back up again with One which Bono described as having been written in Berlin years ago. You can imagine the reaction to that.  Then came Ultraviolet, which was awesome too, and With or Without You which was so much better than I was expecting.  Bono’s voice cracked (deliberately I think) slightly on the higher registers, giving the song a kind of magic it doesn’t have on the studio version.  Finally Moment of Surrender and that was it for one hell of a memorable night. Luckily enough we were staying in Anna’s uncle’s apartment which is in Charlottenburg and very close to the stadium.  We were home in twenty minutes.

We also visited the Reichstag in Berlin, the Berlin Wall Museum and the obligatory ancient stuff for Archaeology geeks.  The ancient stuff was better than I was expecting actually.  It was in the Pergamon museum where they have the Pergamon Altar, Ishtar Gate and the Gate of Miletus all housed in lifelike surroundings.  We picked up some excellent audio guides for this tour, and again I have pictures but they don’t do it justice.

Okay so I'm back, and I've got coffee. I’ve no real excuse for not posting except for being really busy.  That and the inevitable blog-apathy that comes in early every year.  If you could graph the frequency with which I posted I’m sure you’d come up with the winter being the least populous.  Right, so after typing that last sentence, I did just that.  I was wrong.  My least frequent posting is done during the summer. Here is the average number of posts I’ve made every month for the last nine and a bit years.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Now	Dec
Avg. Posts	5	5	6	8	8	3	4	3	3	7	6	4

Naturally enough, I also drew a pretty graph about it. So what can we tell from all this?  Well, I’m not the most prodigious of posters, that’s for sure.  That’d be about it really.  I do find it strange that the most frequent time of year for posting is actually in the Autumn, but that’s just me.  Anyway, the reason I was able to get all this data into Excel really easily is that I’ve been working a little on a new design for here.  I know I’ve been talking about this for months, I do have a good excuse for not rolling it out sooner.  I’ve just been really busy with other things, and not in a position to do significant typing with my finger. So, even though I’m still in this cast, here’s a rundown on everything that’s going on at the moment. 

I finished watching Buffy last night.  The ending was good but lacked something I think.  Then again, I was used to having each of the series end with a cliff-hanger, and this one nicely tied up all the loose ends.  It left something for the future, but I guess that never panned out.  Overall it was a brilliant series.  There were high points, such as “Once More With Feeling”, “The Body” and of course “Hush”, and… well not much in the way of low points.  “Once More With Feeling”, was an episode that was filmed as a musical and was so good that I can’t get the music out of my head. Its very Sondheimey, and brilliantly written.  I also have the entire six series of Angel to watch, though I’m a bit tired now, so maybe that can wait for a few weeks. Awesome series though, I have no idea why I didn’t watch it years ago.  If you don’t already know, the guy who created the show is called Joss Whedon. He the one who created both Buffy and Angel, and also Firefly with its spin-off movie Serenity. He also created the excellent series Dollhouse, which is airing right now.  I had been a fan of his long before I knew who he was.

German classes are of course ongoing, though a little slowly at the moment.  There were so few applicants for my course (ie: two) that they decided to change the times around to once a week instead of two.  On top of that, our teacher has been out for the last week, so apart from some homework (which I got mostly wrong!) there’s fuck all happening there.  I thought I had a complete handle on the meaning of the words in the homework – obwohl, falls, wenn, dass, weil, um, damit etc.  English translations would be although, if, that…, at…, with etc, and it turns out I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did.  I actually though I had nailed the meanings of these words about a year ago and had no problem with them. Until now.  Oh well, there’s a major re-learning session coming up I think.

I’m going to be potentially doing some interesting work for James soon, if a couple of quotes that we have sent out are accepted.  More on that as it happens, but there’s a chance to get better at some things I’ve been familiar with but never used extensively in the past.  Oh, and in the next post I’ll tell you about my new mobile.  I’ll start that in a while, just have to go do some things first.

U2 have been doing their thing all over the BBC for the last couple of days. Someone commented somewhere that the BBC was acting like their own personal publicity machine, which would be really cool if if only it were true. Anyway, they just signed a big contract with Live Nation to handle their concerts and merchandising for the next twelve years. This morning I went to take a look and see if there had been any more details about the tour released yet, but alas there was nothing. I did find some other groups of interest playing in Munich though, but fuck me were they expensive. Tickets for Madonna range from €70 up to €195! Eagles are coming in June, priced at €110.50 or €127.75.  Springsteen prices range from €79.40 to €96.65. Compare that to Bell X1, whose tickets are €15.16, or Simply Red for €48.05.  Its a fucking crime. If it were just me then I’d be hard pushed to justify spending €80 on a single event, but it isn’t just me.  There are two of us, which drives the prices sky high.  Oh this is interesting… I would never actually have complained about these sorts of prices when we were living in London.  That city was substantially more expensive, and I had a well paying job.  Here though my awareness of the price of expensive things is heightened probably because everything is cheaper and I don’t have a regular job.

Anyway, we went on a walking trip yesterday.  We started in Starnberg, walked through the Maisinger Gorge to Maising and the lake, then on to Aschering. We were supposed to walk through about 2km of forest west of Aschering and then turn north, but there was a navigational malfunction and we ended up heading south to Machtlfing and then on to Erling and up to Andechs.  All in all we covered about 20km. I have to say, walking through snow is incredibly difficult.  When it comes up to your knees you discover just how hard water is to walk through.  I haven’t had any exercise in the last three weeks, and am dreadfully out of shape (even more so than usual) so I found everything beyond Machtlfing fucking hard.  Every step to Erling was hell, and even the thought of getting some good food and a few beers at Andechs wasn’t much consolation.  Still, we made it, and there’ll be more too.  I badly need to get in shape, as does Anna, so this is a good start.  Click the picture to see the route we took, the red line is where we walked, the yellow where we should have gone.

Dave recently posted that he was shocked at me going to see Coldplay in concert.  I’ve left that hanging for a few days while stewing over the correct response.  The truth is actually very simple, and really shouldn’t need to be said.  I went to see them in concert because I like their music.  There.  Happy now?  It is of course a bit more complicated than that, but the core of it is that I enjoy their music and wanted to see them play live.  I haven’t been to a large concert in a long time, and to be honest I know I’ve missed out on some incredible moments.  I had also never been to the Olympiahalle in Munich and wanted to see it.

I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan as you know, and have been for a very very long time.  It goes back to Niamh I think, an old friend from Dublin who turned me on to them first.  I think at the time I was pretty into Jean-Michael Jarre, which gives you an understanding of the root of my tastes.  I’ve always been more into rock than pop, though that’s a generalisation as opposed to a rule.  I have seen Michael Jackson in concert and it ranks up there as one of the best concerts I have ever seen. Likewise U2, who blew my mind with their Zoo Tour.  Music is a selfish thing: It touches you in ways that it can’t and won’t ever touch other people.  Coldplay’s music pushes the same buttons in me that the Floyd and U2 push, and that shouldn’t be too hard for anyone to see.  They’re simply a great rock band who have released some brilliant music.  How could I not go to see them in concert?

Chris Martin seems to be a polarising character in the world of music.  I have to say that I really don’t have an opinion on him either way.  I don’t tend to pay that much attention to what bands do when they’re not performing (excepting Bono and St. Bob perhaps).  In concert he came across as someone who was humbled by the adoration of the crowd on the floor.  I don’t know how real or fake that was, though if I had to bet, I’d say that it was a slight enhancement of what may actually be a natural shyness.  How could you not find it appealing to have the frontman of a group be incredulous at your response to their performance.  Whatever it was, and whether he pulled it off or not, is something that only someone who has been to many of his concerts can say.  Nicely enough, the entire concert was taped for Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin) and can be view online here. To quote him after the show, “I think the concert was the least shit Coldplay concert at the moment that you could have possibly ever seen.  Do you see what I mean?”.

I’ve missed the concert scene for so long that this getting tickets for them was a “now or never” kind of thing.  I’m glad I did too, as otherwise I would have missed out on a great gig.  When I last saw U2, they screwed up my concert-going experience for the rest of my life.  They played “Running to Stand Still” and ran it into “Where The Streets Have No Name” and it was perhaps the best thing I have ever heard live.  Actually there’s no perhaps… it was the best thing I have ever seen live.  While Coldplay didn’t come close to that, in part because I had a fucker of a cold and in part because their show was a little smaller, they were pretty close.  If I was feeling better I would have left my seat and moved towards the front, but I wasn’t.  I would have preferred to be right in the middle of the crowd, as opposed to sitting beside someone who really didn’t seem to want to be there. I just wasn’t feeling up to it though.

So ultimately it comes down to this: Why Coldplay?  Well, why the fuck not?

The lights go out and I can’t be saved at dave bushe dot net

In nine years of blogging, I seem to have only mentioned The Pink Floyd about four times. I have no idea why this is, as they have been one of my (if not the) favourite bands for far longer than the lifetime of DaveWhite.Net.  I never got to see them play, to my great distress. In fact, I had the opportunity to see them on two occasions, but circumstances played against me. 

The first time was for the Division Bell tour in 1994.  There was a Rocky Horror Picture Show convention on in London that we (as cast members of the Irish Rocky) were supposed to go to.  I had quit my job about two weeks before that so I didn't go because I thought it would be a waste of money.  Little did I know that Pink Floyd played their famous Earl's Court gigs that weekend and that there were tickets for us to go to see them.  Those concerts were later immortalised on the P•U•L•S•E album. I found out about it on the Monday when someone came back and told me that the concerts were the best thing they had ever seen.  Typical.  The second time was for the Live 8 gig.  The problem with that one was that Anna came home from a trip to the US early, sick, and in need of care.  That trumps a concert in my eyes.

I have seen David Gilmour play in concert at the Royal Albert Hall for his On An Island tour, and that was awesome.  The particular night we were there was the one where David Bowie sang Arnold Layne and Comfortably Numb, and ranks up there with the best concerts I have ever seen.  I do have the DVDs, but I haven't ever looked at them to see if we can be seen, being usually too concerned with what was happening on the stage.  I think we (Trev, Dennis, Seamus, Duncan, me) should be pretty visible, as we were in a box centred on the left wall.  I must check that out sometime.

I have all of Pink Floyd's albums, and have downloaded some bootlegs and variations I haven't found in physical format.  Most of the albums are in CD format, but I think there's actually a couple of vinyl albums back in Ireland, that I'll have to dig out at some point.  They are all of course digitised and on my MP3 player, and taking up a lot of room as I have them ripped at a high bit rate.  Again, at some point in the future I'm going to make lossless rips of them (and possibly my U2 collection, actually probably most of our CDs, but that's a project for a later time) and to hell with the size implications.  Disks are cheap now days, right? One that I don't have (yet) is the new boxed set Oh By The Way that they just released.  Each of the CDs on it are miniature versions of the original albums and presented inside sleeves that look like the album slip covers.  I also have a couple of their VHS videos - Live at Pompeii and a recorded-from-TV Earls Court concert.

I have also seen the Australian Pink Floyd many many times.  They are perhaps one of the best tribute bands in the world, and have been around for a long time now.  Stumbling across their updated web site yesterday prompted me to write this post, though I can't remember the impetus for looking at their site in the first place.  It might have been something somebody on Twitter mentioned, but it eludes me now. Anyway, your chances of seeing them in concert are far better than seeing the originals, and while nothing will ever match the real thing, they're pretty damn good.  We've also seen them in the Albert Hall, where they performed the 30th anniversary tour of Dark Side of the Moon, which was pretty special.  Oh, I remember now what made me think of them.  There was a track that I was looking for online which is their version of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which had a sequence of sound before it (effects like the Skippy theme, Neighbours theme etc building into a slight crescendo and then fading rapidly to leave you with the familiar G minor opening sequence. It was in fact a rare moment that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up when I first heard it.  I couldn't find it online, although some of the effects are audible on some sequences of the embedded songs on their site.

I guess its pretty safe to assume that they are my favourite band.  As a general rule I listen to anything from metal to classical, but I have some staples in my taste.  Rock and Roll, a la Pink Floyd, U2 and Bruce Springsteen being my most listened to genre. Those are the bands that I used to go asleep to when I was younger, and the ones that I now have on my MP3 player and routinely play.

They're making a sequel to the Lost Boys.  Corey Haim and Corey Feldman are in it and the trailer actually looks fucking awesome!  IMDB Page, and Trailer on MTV.Com.  If nothing else, put some headphones on and watch the trailer with the volume up.  The music is gonna blow you away..

In start contrast to yesterday, the first song on my MP3 player was some shit by Sophie Ellis-Baxtor.

The song playing on my music player right now is Billy Jean, that wonderful melody by Michael Jackson. Remember the video to that? The one before that was Queen's We Will Rock You. While I booted up my laptop U2's One started. What a brilliant mix to bring me down from the constant concentration of German class.  
This was the first one in a week, and I'm trashed after it. I think I'm ahead of the curve though, in that I knew everything we did today with the exception for some vocabulary. There are three of us this time, and a teacher whose accent is a little hard to understand. Just like the last course however, she doesn't stick completely to the rules and some of the more difficult words are explained in English. I don't know if I mentioned already, but the course is being run by Berlitz in their school just off Marienplz (Marien Platz).  
The Berlitz method of teaching is to completely immerse you in the language and use repetition as a learning device. Typically the teacher says something and we repeat it, and then she asks the corresponding question and we answer. Then we ask the questions to each other and get the same answers, or slight variations of. So far though, I haven't seen that method adhered to completely, and that's just fine by me. I think I have improved quite a lot in the last four weeks, and the next four will be even better. I believe that this course actually covers all of the different aspects of German grammar and leaves you with a full (albeit narrow from a vocabulary perspective) understanding of the language. Jesus, the music just changed to Wham's Careless Whispers. Good thing sound doesn't leak from these headphones, otherwise I imagine I'd be getting strange looks. Anyway, we're getting close to Ismaning now so I'm going to suspend my laptop and post this at home.

Last night we went to see Rodrigo y Gabriela again.  This was my third time seeing them, and they were awesome.  It was a small venue too, which was nice.  We were standing so close to them, that we could have reached over and touched their guitars.  Like I said... Awesome!