At Home with John and Debbie

Yesterday afternoon, after a delightful two and a half hours of jovial conference call banter with my fellow G-Force / QXL / G-Unit / G-Police transferees, Debbie picked me up from work, and we drove to Birmingham to see Joanna Newsom play her harp and sing oddly at the Glee Club.

Coming in along the littlish roads from Warwick meant we drove through all sorts of old Birmingham haunts. Debbie was particularly pleased to see that Yardleys School appears to be in the process of demolition. We cast a nostalgic eye over many of Stratford Road’s balti houses.

We had a quick dinner in Las Iguanas: packed with theatregoers when we arrived, but so empty that we were moved from our weeny table to a nice comfy booth before our meals arrived.

Outside the Glee Club, we joined a queue. Since it was a prebooked and sold out affair, I checked with a man at the end of the queue.

Me:

Is this queue for the Glee Club?

Brummie:

Yes, but I’ve never seen is as busy as this

Me:

And do we still have to queue if we’ve booked?

Brummie:

Ooh, I don’t think there’s an event on. It’s just CeRoc tonight

As it transpired, the CeRoc dancers could skip the queue and go straight into the main Glee Club room, tables and chairs cleared to the side. Us sophisticated music afficionados were in the Studio.

Absentee provided support. I’m going to call them lo-fi alt-rock alt-country, because I like to use buzzwords. They sit down and play quiet songs. Their drummer seldom beats a drum particularly hard, preferring to tap gently. As well as your basic guitar, drums and bass, they have a particularly hairy pedal-steel guitarist, and a girl with big glasses who plays xylophone, tambourine, and some keyboard instrument that sounds like a reed organ and is also controlled by mouthpiece…

I enjoyed Absentee. I didn’t feel their particular ouvre was likely to provoke the crowd into violence, so I thought the plastic glasses used by the bar were probably unnecessary.

Joanna Newsom was terrific. Our angle meant we saw her face only through the strings of her harp. I’d be interested to know what an experienced harpist would make of the arrangements, but they seem pretty damn ornate to me. It’s such a direct instrument: you pluck a string, a noise comes out (we’ll gloss over the pedals for now).

The only fly in the ointment was audience members taking flash photographs. What with quiet being the new loud and everything, the whirrs of their zoom lenses and the clicks of their shutters were clearly audible, and of course the flashes were distracting. If you’re reading, you are SELFISH, SELFISH BASTARDS, and the least you could do to recompense me is to send me some of the photographs, so I have the consolation of a souvenir.

One photographer (he may have been a pro: this does not excuse him) wandered around the room (the audience was seated) in an exaggerated “I’m being unobtrusive” tiptoe. Note to him: THERE’S NO POINT CREEPING AROUND WHEN YOUR SHUTTER IS LOUDER THAN THE HARP.

Bah. Despite this, a good night out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004 at 09:39 and is filed under Imported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.