Sunday, December 13, 2009

SIMPLE MINDS at the SECC



Veteran Rockers were performing with support from OMD.

My favourite album is Real Life , here are two hits from it:

See the lights:



and Real Life:



Like most bands with vast archives they cannot perform everything , this included the brilliant Mandela Days.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

STEVE EARLE at The Glasgow Royal Concert Hall




The last time i saw steve earle was at the celtic connections festival in 2007.He looked lot different from his mid-eighties persona , clean shaven and determined looking.

This time round he is sporting a huge beard ; excess mass , but , and this is very important , he looks more content and at tranquility with his state than he has been at any point in his life.

The songs were mostly from his latest tribute album to his youthful hero and inspiration Townes van Zant.

This wonderful song captures just about everything Townes meant to Steve:




He did perform a very inspirational version of Someday.It is very hard to capture quality acoustic resonance in the audio available of mobile cameras these days and videos posted on youtubeistan either has good visuals and poor sound or nice sound with jumpy visuals , below is about the best i could find on the net.



He had a lot to say about the wave of disappointment about Obama and his foreign policies , the first artist to be forthright about the dissipation of early promises.

On Afghanistan , he said he hoped Obama was only bullshitting when he made campaign allusions to increase troop involvement in the region and would think better of it once in office.

Steve rightly postulated this will have a bad ending for the US , as previous experience shows the British Empire in its zenith failed in afghanistan , the soviet empire collapsed in the region and even Alexander " the fuckin" Great ( his words , not mine) suffered defeats there and had to turn back without establishing permanent long term influential roots.