Indigo Girls

At QPAC, supported by Women in Docs who were pretty cool in their own right.

The Indigo girls were pretty impressive, just guitars and their voices.

The noise level did get a bit much for me in the last half hour though.

Tori Amos concert

The concert was held at the great hall of the Brisbane Exhibition centre. I was there earlier in the day for a motorcycle expo, early enough to see Tori go in for sound checks. She was lovely and talkative to fans, and not at all cooky.

I had high hopes for concert, the sound check sounded awesome. Unfortunately the sound levels of the rest of the band basically drowned out Tori’s voice and piano for the most part. Even during solo performances her voice and playing were being clipped by the amp.

Overall I was happy I went (first time I’ve seen her live) but it could have been a lot better.

Mia Dyson

At The Troubadour, a folksy venue. Half of it is meant to be non-smoking, but that didn’t stop me stinking when I came home. Supported by Jamie x, who had a fairly earthy beat thing going on.

The crowd were great, really calm and friendly. I’ve only owned her cd for a little while, so going to this gig was a fairly spur of the moment thing, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Mia‘s stuff is blues/rock; blues vocals, rock backing. She finished the set with Down which is all rock, I certainly hope she continues down that path some more.

Veruca Salt

At the Zoo. Supported by Dakota Star and Lovejoy.

Lovejoy were great, I got into them pretty quickly. Especially their bass guitarist, there’s something very sexy about a woman with six foot of wood and steel hanging around her shoulders. And then there were the fishnets.

Next up, Dakota Star. It took me a little while to get into these guys, their pretentious (wearing headphones!) drummer was drowning out the lovely front woman.

And then, there were Veruca Salt themselves. Lovely Louise, and absolutely stunning Eva, doing the bass bit for the Australia tour.

Just don’t make me pick between the two bass players.

A new toy, an Iriver.

A solid state MP3 Player.

Features I care about:

• It is tiny.
• One (marketing) GB of memory.
• plays Oggs.
• FM receiver, quite good.
• In built microphone, I was very surprised at the quality of the recording.
• Uses normal AA batteries.

Complaints:

• The menu controls are a little dorky, requiring hold-and-press to get to a menu means you need more buttons.
• Slight delay between playback of oggs, a tiny bit annoying when listening to audio stories.

Unfortunately there’s no UMS (USB Mass Storage, apparently) firmware for my particular version so it doesn’t appear as a USB memory stick. Instead I have to use a little program called ifp, which basically treats the iriver as an ftp server. It works, but it’s not as convenient as a UMS device. It would have been nice if the debian package was recent enough to work my device too :)

Overall, I’m very impressed and happy.

Red, White, and the Blues

This movie tells the story of the exporting of the Blues from America to the UK, the mixing of it there with Folk music, the re-importation of this white Blues back into the America and the sudden awaking that country had of it’s very own style of music.

Tom Jones singing Blues music, wow.

Feel Like Going Home

Traces the history of Blues music from the slave trade through to the cotton fields. Includes some intruiging footage of american pipe music, with very obvious beginnings in African tribal music.

Godfathers and Sons

Where as Feel like going Home traced the Blues back to Africa roots, this movie explores the urban influences of integration and commercialism that went to create the electric guitar sound of modern Blues and rock, and, apparently, Hip Hop and Rap :)

Given the context of the Jewish record label owner and Christian Blues musicians around a table, the quote of the movie is `critics are just the reincarnated members of the mob that hanged Jesus.’

The Blues

I’m going to be attending The Blues film series showing at the Schonell. Should be very cool.