How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall?

My latest trip into London took me to the wonderful Royal Albert Hall to see one of my favourite singers, Chris Cornell. Taking a little break from Soundgarden, Chris released his 4th (well, if we forget the weird Timbaland-produced album, 3rd) solo album "Higher Truth" last Autumn and has been playing acoustic shows in symphony halls around the world since March.

Possibly one of the best concert venues in the world - at least acoustically - the RAH was packed out and saw Chris come on to play a couple from the new LP and then dive straight into a fantastic cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U". Swathed in purple light, it seemed a really poignant tribute to Prince and like his music or not, the world is a poorer place without his genius.

Jesus Christ Pose indeed.

It was a hurricane of a performance through his career - Soundgarden songs such as "Fell On Black Days", "Rusty Cage" (re-jigged to play it how Johnny Cash did), Audioslave songs "I Am The Highway", "Doesn't Remind Me" and some real trips through early 90's memory lane from his Temple Of The Dog project with pre-Pearl Jam members, "Hunger Strike", "Call Me A Dog" and "Wooden Jesus" were all amazing.

Another cover, Led Zeppelin's "Thank You" was aired and if that wasn't good enough, he dedicated it to Sir Jimmy Page who was sat in one of the boxes who then received a - no doubt - awkwardly embarrassing ovation from the crowd. He'd probably only just stepped out to go to a quiet gig and now had to face thousands of cheers (again).

After all these years, Chris still has am amazing vocal range - he's got a 4-octave range and years of smoking don't seem to have broken it. He still hits some amazingly high notes, carries them and then descends into deep, bass-y growls.

The London homage came home again with probably my highlight of the show. He'd been covering "Imagine" at some of the earlier stops in the tour but - and I guess he'd been leading up to this - pulled out a beautiful cover of The Beatles' "A Day In The Life" complete with it's lyrics which, it seems, got the song banned from the RAH in the 1960s...

A hole-y unacceptable lyric.

Now I'm just itching for another Soundgarden record.

Brilliant.

An incredible party!

So, after the trip to see Wolf Alice resulted in not actually seeing Wolf Alice (think, the designated driver being too sick to drive and all trains being cancelled due to something daft like the wrong leaves on the line, or snow.. maybe just rain or a butterfly taking off in Madagascar) I was lucky enough to get tickets to see the wonderful Bellowhead on one of their last shows before their singer, Jon Boden, bows out of the spotlight. Without him, the others decided to call it a day which is as sad as much as it is a compliment to their great, charismatic singer.

Apologies for the ropey picture but phone cameras are lousy and there were so many of them onstage, it had to be a widescreen shot.

Widescreen... the only way to get the entire band in shot!

Bittersweet waffle aside, these guys have been ripping up stages for over 10 years with really fun, energetic folk songs. Tales of drinking, unrequited love, trysts, more drinking, dark humour, some more drinking and beer.

Sadly and unless you have tickets to see them in the next few weeks, you'll probably never get to see these guys which is a real shame but I'd totally recommend getting any of their albums - Hedonism or their most recent, Revival being great to make yourself a fan. CAMRA membership and weird beard optional, despite the prevalence in the audience.

If you have Ghost

Given my propensity to find myself listening to awesome things and attending too many gigs, I figured I should probably start documenting it somewhere so where better than my otherwise-gathering-dust blog?

Last night, I went to the London Palladium - possibly the poshest gig venue I've been too in a while outside the Royal Albert Hall - to see the quite wonderful (and now Grammy award winning) Ghost.

Hailing from Sweden, they bridge pop with hard rock with a fantastic and theatrical stage presence - imagine Slipknot crossed with Abba. Then throw in a bit of Renaissance Italy in the form of Papa, the devilish Pope figure on vocals.

'Nameless Ghoul' giving us some rock 'n' roll attitude

I can't recommend them enough if you can get a change to see them on their next tour. Great melodies, anthemic choruses. Weird baroque stuff metal. If you're interested, check out their 2013 covers EP produced by none other than Dave Grohl featuring an awesome Roky Erickson cover, "If You Have Ghost".

Thanks for reading!

Intro & Manifesto

An Introduction

Despite the ocean of other music blogs, I'm an opinionated and passionate music lover and finally decided I should direct some of this passion into something others might want to read.

My real musical sweet-spot lies in the early to mid-'90s, both the US New Wave / Grunge scene and the UK "Britpop" scene, although that term really makes me cringe. I've followed the output of a few of the bands that made it big in that era and they opened my eyes and ears to a lot of great acts along the way.


The Manifesto

I'm sure a lot of the artists that will appear on these pages won't need extra coverage and have great and established fanbases but my aim for this blog is simply to talk about interesting music - new, classic, live or whatever fits - and hopefully have people read it.

If one person's interest is piqued enough to go out and buy something or see a band following a visit to this blog, I'll have done my job.

Frankly, the other main objective is to allow me to vent some of my opinions about music and ideally entertain people in the process.