A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight

As a brief interlude between finishing off the pictures and description of our holiday, I'm going to fill you in on my busy weekend. On Saturday we went to a party in Dagenham for some family member that hasn't been seen for about 20 years, I didn't recognise him, but then I wouldn't have been that old whan I last saw him. Anyway, I skipped out of the party early (well, 10:30) to drive back to Watford in preparation for the Hatton-Mayweather fight. That preparation consisted mostly of foreign beers and poker.

Obviously the fight finished about 6, so I went to sleep at Spike's house and woke up around half 12, getting up and coming home for an hour before heading off to Spurs to see them beat Manchester City.

Not content with that, I headed off to Brixton to meet Susie to go to XFM's Winter Wonderland. Unfortunately we missed the first act who were the XFM Rock School winners, so we had to make do with the rest....in order we had

...One Night Only, of who I do like one of their singles. Nothing else of the guitar based rock they played particularly stood out, but I guess it is hard to make an impression when people are still streaming in. Here's a video.



Next up was Kate Nash, who I thought was worse than when I saw her before at the O2 Wireless festival. She is a bit samey, although the piano playing sort of helps jangle things along, but when she went into a couple of dull songs on the guitar, then it did not go down well, with plenty of chatter in the crowd. Seems the XFM reviewer didn't think to much of her as their review mostly just mentions her sparkly clothes. We weren't the only ones to think she was bad as overhearing conversations both in the venue and on the trains home there was a general consensus. No video for her, I'm sure you have heard Foundations hundreds of times already.

To stop the crowd getting bored, Dan Le Sac v Scroobius Pip came on for a three song set. They basically consist of Mr Pip talking, almost poetically, over Dan's beats provided by an apple mac it looked like. I did recognise the first song, here it is.



Supergrass followed with a good mix of new songs and old. The average age of the crowd wasn't that old, so I did wonder how many of them would have recognised songs being played that were upwards of 10 years old, but they did go down very well (they were my favourites of the night). Apparently they are touring as the Diamond Hoo-Ha Men, or something, very weird name.

Next gap was filled by an "acoustic" set by Jack Penate. I'm not sure an electric guitar plugged into an amp is stricly acoustic, but hey. He seemed to be enjoying himslef very much and was very lively, better than I expected too. Here's Torn on the Platform for your entertainment.



Finally we had Bloc Party, who Susie really likes but I'm not overly into their stuff. They played all the sings I knew, which is always good, especially as includes a couple I do like (like Flux, below). There werre also loads of large balloons for the crowd to play with, and the band were certainly enjoying playing what, in essence, is a home-town concert. The whole thing finished at 11:15, which meant by the time we got back to Euston we just missed a train, and being a Sunday there wasn't another one for 50 minutes, and it was cold. We eventually got back home about 1:15am.....I was so tired, in fact I still am a bit.