This Bicycle Life

With the demise of my poor shitbox of a car, I have started riding my bicycle to work.



The ride is a pretty good one - along the river, over the footbridge near the Brewery..... Despite the fact that I am usually wheezing by this point due to a lifetime of no exercise and too many cigarettes.....







Please note the plethora of wooly garments - my riding outfit is hilarious - I must share it with you one day..... I look like some combination of homeless person and crazy cat lady with maybe a dash of Mary Poppins? (I bet that's just the basket on the front - I'm probably dreaming.....)

In other news, these boys played at the pub over the weekend:



The Wilson Pickers

I don't know if I ever mentioned on here that I book the bands for the pub where I work, and it's a hard job, managing expectations and nurturing young musos, and trying hard to stick with the vision you have of the kind of music you want to see and hear - and some days it's a real pain in the arse.

There are managers and booking agents and publicists and unorganised ego-trippers and people you don't want to let down because the music isn't quite what you want, but you know they're a good band anyway.

There are terrible bands with awful demos and wonderful people you'd love to book, but you'll never get them cause the venue is too small or you can't charge the right price.

There are broken amps and missing mike leads and door bitches to organise and promo and print and radio and posters and set times and noise restrictions and double booking fuckups.......

But then you'll have a magic gig - the kind where you get a minute to stop between picking up the glasses and wiping the tables, and watch a mob of boys up on stage working magic with bits of wood and pieces of string - singing their hearts out in a way that is so timeless and so classic that you can't help but know all the words after five minutes because you know they exist inside you somewhere already.....

A magic gig, where it all comes together in that perfect way, and you forget about the calendar and the emails and the MySpace page and whoeverthehellisonnextweekend and you get that moment to just stop and listen...

Brilliant. Bloody mother fucking brilliant. I love it.



xxx