Kaiser Chiefs – Brixton Academy, London

When we first arrived in the UK it was a bit of a baptism of fire music-wise. Sure there was quite a bit of stuff I know and love – but there was also a whole suite of bands with crazy sounding names that I’d never heard of suddenly clogging up the record store racks, popping up on the radio, and turning up on the music video shows.

Pretty quickly you start to hear a few things you like, and before you know it there’s a stack of CDs on the bookshelf by bands I’d never even heard of this time last year! Kaiser Chiefs album “Employment” was one of the first of the big UK bands to really grab me. I’ll admit I got sucked in by the singles (how good is ‘I Predict A Riot’?) and a three song appearance on Later with Jools Holland really sealed it for me. So after giving their debut album a thrashing – I was pretty happy to be able to get tickets to see them at Brixton Academy.

The show was part of some beer-sponsored festival “Carling Live 24” - that has a bunch of bands playing all around London for 24 hours. That said – Kaiser Chiefs came on a little after 9pm which is I believe is the standard start time for headliners – so I think it was part of a festival in name alone.

Kicking off with ‘Everyday I Love You Less and Less’ the show has a pretty high intensity and the band played with surprising fire (given this was one of the last shows for an over year-long tour to promote their sole album – you’d forgive them for getting a little bored playing the same set). They did thrown in a few odd ones – the feisty b-side ‘Take My Temperature’, and a few new songs ‘Heat Dies Down’, ‘Learnt My Lesson Well’ and ‘Highroyds’ that bode well for that difficult second album.

Highlights for me where ‘I Predict A Riot’ (with the crowd jumping so much I did, for a sadly not too brief moment, wonder if the upstairs balcony could take it), the slower ‘You Can Have It All’ where Ricky plucking a fan out from the front of the crowd to waltz with, and the show-closing ‘Oh My God’.

All in all – a pretty great show, as I remarked to Kimbo – it’s rare to see a band like at the first peak of their powers.

Iron & Wine/Calexico - The Forum, London

Confessions upfront – I didn’t catch most of this musical extravaganza – that had Iron & Wine opening, followed by Iron & Wine with Calexico, then an internal, Savador Duran, and Calexico to close it out.

What I did see was the Iron & Wine end of the bill – and it was fantastic. Despite the running order being clearly labelled as a 45 minute set by Iron & Wine, followed by 30 minutes of Iron & Wine with Calexico – there was a lot of inter-band mingling going on – with Calexico’s Paul Niehaus playing some brilliant pedal steel on opener ‘Sodom, South Georgia’. After a couple of sparser songs – including ‘Woman King’ with light backing vocals – the full band gave a much tougher feel to ‘Free Until They Cut Me Down’ and ‘Teeth In The Grass’.

I’m probably a bigger fan of the Iron & Wine and Calexico collaboration “In The Reins” than I am of most of the Iron & Wine catalogue – so it was an incredible treat to hear the band recreate their combination live. Highlight for me was a sprawling ‘Red Dust’. Unfortunately I missed hearing the title track ‘He Lays In Reins’ - performed together with a cover of The Velvet Undergrounds ‘All Tomorrows Parties’ at a show-closing all-in finale several hours later, because I nipped home early so I’d be able to face Monday morning work first thing in the morning.

Flaming Lips - Royal Albert Hall

What a fantastic way to spend a Saturday night in London. Despite the show being advertised as sold out – a fairly impromptu enquiry to the Royal Albert Hall box office the day before the show, turned up two great seats in the upper-circle boxes to see The Flaming Lips at The Royal Albert Hall.

Kim hadn’t seen the Lips before and I had distant memories of a blinder of a show at The Palace in Melbourne to live down – but they didn’t fail to disappoint.

Wayne Coyne comes onstage and inflates his giant clear bubble – then rolls out onto the crowd while giant helium balloons are released, the band start playing an intro, and a group of 20-odd martians take stage right, while 20-odd santas take stage left.

It’s great to hear a few of the classic Lips still sound fantastic – opener ‘Race For The Prize’ is a giddy rush with everything else happening at once, it’s good to see ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’ still makes great use of a fish-eye camera and nun puppet. ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ gets a good crowd singalone, while a set closing ‘Do You Realise’ is heart-breaking beautifully – prompting me to ponder my own mortality, and those of loved ones – in the midst of a crazy swirl of streamers, martians, and santas.

This being one of the early shows for their new album “At War With The Mystics” – it was good to hear the new songs live – and the up-tempo songs like “Free Radicals” (complete with Wayne tackling a twin-necked guitar - see pic below) and first (UK) single “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” come across best to me. I think the band still have some work to better integrate the new material into their well worn setlist (they toured “Yoshimi” for what – 3 years?) but ‘Vein of Stars’ – complete with mirror-ball accompaniment – is great.

The encore featured a blistering cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ that had a few of the newspaper reviewers raving – but didn’t really work for me. My only (very) minor gripe – was the amount of non-musical activity going on, and the large number of non-musical performers on stage, was at times in danger of over-powering the music. However the Lips clearly love to make every show an event, and break down the traditional concert performance boundaries, and the succeed on that level hands down!

Nick Hornby with Marah - Dingwalls / Lock 17 Camden

This was an interesting one – billed as “A Night of Words and Music with Nick Hornby and Marah”.

The show featured British author Nick Hornby (best known to me for ‘High Fidelity’ a book about an obsessive music fan and record store owner who puts his music ahead of most everything else in his life – interestingly the year this book was released, 3 different people gave it to me independently as a birthday gift!).

Marah on the other hand are a US rock band from Philadelphia – rock in the true Springsteen meets the Replacements sense of the word. While their “Kids In Philly” album may have been nestled out of my top ten albums of all time – “Roundeye Blues” would easily make a CDr of my favourite songs of all time.

So as you can imagine – I was pretty excited about this show. Things started very well with Phil Jupitus welcoming everyone and introducing things – we then settled into the format for the night: Nick would read a music related essay, and Marah would follow it with a well chosen cover (or in the case of Hornby’s final essay – A Love Letter to Marah, a monstrous version of one of their own songs ‘It's Only Money, Tyrone)

Kicking things off with a tribute to his first concert – Rory Gallagher – and the joys of ear-splittingly loud rock and roll – highlights for me included the tribute to Rod Stewart and The Small Faces, coupled with a great cover of Ronnie Lane’s ‘Debris’.

[In fact – the whole night was recording by Penguin Books for their Penguin podcast series – so you can actually download this portion of the show as a free MP3 here: http://thepenguinpodcast.blogs.com/podcast/files/penguinpodcast11b.mp3]

The crowd was an odd mix of Marah fans, music fans, literature fans – and celebrity spotters who seemed to have come along because the night had the whiff of an “event” about it. To this last lot I offer this piece of advise: if you’re going to see live music, you should generally try and keep chat to a minimum so people can enjoy the show, if you’re going to see a spoken word show SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Ok - glad I got that outta my system, Other subjects included going to a Bob Marley concert, and how The Clash saved Rock and Roll (followed by a brilliant ‘Lost In The Supernarket’).

After Nick finished with his “love letter to Marah” – which I did find strangely unsettling given they were on stage with him at the time – the band played an hour or so set. Highlights for me where ‘Point Breeze’, ‘Dishwasher’ and ‘Float Away’.