Hello, anyone there?
So it's been almost a month since my last post, but I can explain everthing. We had a little holiday in Sicily, which was great but quite light on music - I suppose we needed a holiday from the Barfly and the Brixton Academy as much as a holiday from work. We did hear The Arctic Monkeys on Italian radio whilst sitting down to dinner one evening, which made us very proud. We also discovered a band called Subsonica who seemed to be on heavy rotation on Italian music television.

When we got back disaster struck and my old laptop died so I was without a usable computer (I could sit at my server and type but I really need to be sat on the sofa to write these missives). Anyway, I'd been weighing up a new Dell laptop for a while and so I jumped in and got myself one. I've heard some horror stories about Dell customer support but I have to say both pre-sales and post sales they were excellent and my new baby was delivered 4 working days after I ordered it.

On the music front we dived back in after our holiday and went to see Maximo Park, The Kaisers, Patrick Wolf and Bloc Party on 2 subsequent nights. For me Bloc Party edged it as best band of the 2 nights but it was a close thing and Annie thinks The Kaisers were better. I think I've managed to persuade Annie that Maximo Park really are a great band. The mosh pit on both nights was pretty fierce - I must be getting old.

We also got to see The Cribs last week at ULU who were excellent - thanks Simon for recomending them to me all those months ago (March). Front man Ryan (or is it Gary -I don't know which is which) needs to realise that if he jumps into the moshpit at the end of the gig his clothes might get ripped and if he jumps in twice then he's going to be lucky to get out alive. I only say this because he looked really pissed off when secuirty managed to drag him back in with his jeans in shreads. We ended the evening with the sight of a skinny indie kid in his kecks. nice.

Support was from Pylon and Envelopes. Pylon are friends of the Cribs who survive on Stereophonics style bluster and sound like Britpop chancers Northern Uproar (surely I'm not the only person to remember them - they were really bad).

Envelopes are actually really good and from Sweden. I guess you could compare them to The Cardigans, they've got some really good quirky pop songs.
- posted by Nigella @ 7:59 PM