I’ve been a fan of Yello since the mid eighties, when someone introduced me to the Stella album. From there I got the previous albums, and I’ve bought every one since. There’s a couple missing now (The Race, and Essential), but all the same, they’re a collection of CDs that I love.

The last Yello album I bought was The Eye, back in 2003, and I hadn’t heard anything more from them since then.

For whatever reason, I’ve been listening to the Pocket Universe album in the car over the last couple of weeks, and (as always) really enjoyed listening to it – and it occurred to me that I hadn’t checked in a while to see whether there was anything new.

And lo, it turned out that there was – Touch, released in October last year. Happy, happy day.

I received it yesterday, and it’s been on in the car today.

And it’s really good – as usual. Much more accessible than most of their stuff, and much less mad – rather than heavy electronica it’s got a really bluesy feel to a lot of it, which I really like.

I hope it’ll be a lot less than seven years before the next album comes out.

As has been mentioned before on here, I’m a bit of a fan of Peter Gabriel – not hardcore “all the way back to the 70s”, but I like far more of his stuff than I dislike, and I’ll usually go and see him live. Mind you, I’m gobsmacked that it’s now six years since I’d seen him live – although I did end up missing (OK, not going to) the concert a couple of years back at Blickling Hall in Norfolk.

Anyway, when I saw about tickets coming available for a concert at the O2, I was there. It was in promotion of the “Scratch My Back” album which hadn’t even been released at the time, but *shrug* I don’t worry about things like that.

The gig itself was always going to be slightly strange. Gabriel’s done away with the general band stuff, and instead gone with a total orchestra, stripping down the songs and then orchestrating them. It had been billed as being no support, an hour of the new album, an interval, then another session with older stuff. It didn’t work out quite like that – everything started late, there was then a short (three song) intro by Anna Lünd – who’s also doing a lot of the backing vocals in the rest of the show. At that point the lights went back up, an interval of about ten-fifteen minutes, and then into the Scratch My Back section of the show. A fifteen minute interval that stretched to nearly thirty, then back to the final “older stuff” section.

All that aside though, it was a really good gig. The visuals were really impressive, doing stuff I hadn’t seen before with multi-layered screens, and almost holographic at some points. The sound was fantastic, and the orchestra were stunning. Some of the songs were just fantastic – particularly his versions of Arcade Fire’s “My Body Is A Cage” and Magnetic Fields “Book of Love”. The entire album was done live, which is quite an achievement in itself.

The second section was more of the same, but orchestrated versions of older tracks, including the crowd favourites. There were a couple I wish he’d done as well, but I think that’s always the way when it’s a gig covering nearly forty years of music. But he played (among others) “Digging in the Dirt”, “Signal to Noise”, “Mercy Street”, “Darkness”. “In Your Eyes” and (of course) “Solsbury Hill”, which still managed to be as whimsical as ever.

I’d have loved to see Sledgehammer done in this gig, or Growing Up, but I guess they’d be hard to do in an orchestrated version.

All told, it was a pretty great gig – allbeit a very different one to most of the ones I see, and very different to the previous Peter Gabriel concerts. But still, fantastic to see.

Yesterday we went off down to London to see Depeche Mode at the O2.

It was a gig that’d been postponed from 30th May last year, due to the lead singer developing gastroenteritis, if memory serves.

I’ll write more about it when I get time, wake up, or generally get round to it.

Way back in the day, I was a big fan of Janes Addiction, but never got to see them live. Then they reformed and created a new album (Strays), and I still didn’t get to see them live.

And I’ve been a fan of Nine Inch Nails all the way back to the first album, some twenty years ago now.

So it was a complete no-brainer that when the NIN/JA (Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction) tour was announced with UK dates, I was going to be going.

And lo, last night was the night – and amazingly, I got there in plenty of time. (Considering that last time I was going to see them, Ticketmaster never sent the tickets) Hell, I even got to see the support act – a band called Mew, who I wasn’t overly impressed with. Sorry, Lori, they just didn’t do it for me – but bear in mind I said the same thing way back when Muse supported Skunk Anansie, so don’t count on my opinions for much…

Jane’s Addiction, on the other hand, absolutely rocked the place. It was very much a case of “playing the known stuff” – although that’s not a massive challenge when you’ve only released three albums anyway. My only disappointment was that they didn’t play “Hypersonic” from the “Strays” album – but them’s the breaks. They played pretty much everything else they’ve done that was popular and/or well known.

As for NIN themselves, they did even more. Even though Jane’s had been fantastic (and loud!), with a storming lighting set-up, NIN just did the same only more so.  Brighter, louder, harder. It was awe-inspiring. Even better, it seemed like almost a retrospective – again, lots of stuff from the first couple of albums, the real crowd-pleasers, with not much from the latest album at all.

Of course, we knew it was going to be something special for the NIN section when they started bringing out extra lights and speaker stacks as well as what had already been on the stage.  What we didn’t expect, though, was a guest appearance by Gary Numan for two tracks – he’s been an inspiration to Trent Reznor (the lead of NIN) for years, but it was still pretty stunning to see him live as well.

All told, my enjoyment of the gig was only slightly damaged at the end, when some fuckwit girl called Lisa decided to keel over next to me – she’d been leaning on me for the previous track, and when it came to an end she just fell forwards, not even an attempt to stop herself.  Luckily, I was standing right next to the sound-desk enclosure, so was able to yell and get a security guy’s attention, and while he sorted out getting her medical help (and, as it turned out, a wheelchair) I ended up being the main prop for her, with her holding on to the railings of the enclosure. I’ve no idea what she’d taken (it certainly wasn’t a fit, she wasn’t pissed, but her eyeballs were floating off in different directions) but she was like a sack of shit – and roughly as good as one at standing up.  All due respect to the O2′s medical and security crews though, they were absolutely fantastic.

It meant I didn’t get to pay the full attention to the final track (an awesome version of “Hurt”) but well, priorities and all that.

Still, it was an absolutely stunning gig – as well as eye-fuckingly bright and brain-throbbingly loud too- and if it is to be (as rumoured) their last tour for a significant time, well it was certainly one hell of a way to go out on a high note…

(Oh, and just to rub it in, it took me less than two hours from leaving the O2 to get back home – I got in at 1am. So suck that Wembley, and your bullshit carparking farce)

Ten days ago (roughly) I was at Wembley Stadium, and at the end of the evening had a total farce of a time getting out of the car parks.  The following morning, I sent off a complaint email to both CS Parking and Wembley Stadium’s “customer services” people.

In fairness to CS Parking, I got a response back pretty quickly from the MD of the company – impressive in itself – after which there was a fairly long email ‘conversation’ about what had happened. That all got closed off by last Friday (i.e. a week after the even) and was all fine. I still think the parking situation is

1. Shit
2. Unmanaged for people leaving Wembley Stadium
3. Farcical

but I can at least now understand why it’s shit, unmanaged, and a total Grade One ClusterFuck.

Wembley Stadium’s customer services, on the other hand, have only just come back to me today, and their email is rather more of a “Not our problem, mate. Go complain to someone else” effort…

All event day parking is managed by a contracted 3rd party; City & Suburban Parking in partnership with the local authority Brent Council and the Metropolitan Police.

The official car parks were full, accommodating in excess of 3,000 cars and in addition there were approx 3,000 cars parked in unauthorised car parks and a further 1,000 vehicles collecting from the area after the concert. As a result of the high volume of traffic, there were delays clearing the car parks the main car parks were not clear until 1½ hours after the end of the concert. We do not believe that these delays are acceptable however the local roads are under the control of Brent Council, not Wembley Stadium. We will be reviewing the exit plans with Brent Council and the Metropolitan Police for future concert events.

Thank you once again for contacting us. We hope you will be able to visit Wembley Stadium again in the future.

Considering that I’ve since had comments here on D4D from people who had the same problem with Wembley Stadium’s Parking after the Take That concerts, I think it’s fair to say that you’re actually far better off if you can avoid using the car parking at Wembley Stadium.  Well, either that or make use of the “pirate” car parks around the stadium, rather than the Stadium’s piece-of-shit “official” car parking.

Other than the aforementioned parking nightmare at Wembley Stadium, the rest of the AC/DC gig on Friday was utterly fantastic.  Bearing in mind we were about as far as it’s possible to get from the stage…

The view from our seats

So AC/DC themselves were about 1cm high. There were videoscreens either side, which made the viewing experience something akin to watching on a small TV from across the room, but that’s still OK. After all, it’s the sound you’re going for, not the vision – and the sound was storming.  Mind you, some people were obviously expected to be just there for the beer…

Carlsberg trailer behind beer tent at floor level

The two-and-a-quarter hours of AC/DC just rocked the place. Interestingly, they only played about five tracks from the latest album, Black Ice, and the rest came from all over the last thirty-odd years. And all of it was ace. Several firm favourites got played, including Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Back in Black, Hells Bells and (of course) For Those About To Rock as a finale, along with cannon blasts.

It wasn’t a show in the same way as the one Pink did recently, but it was still a show – the lighting was spectacular (and improved through the night, as the sun went down) and everyone seemed to have a fantastic time. Personally I felt the ten-plus minutes of Angus’ guitar soloing was a move too far, and could’ve had a couple more tracks instead. But that’s just me.

The AC/DC lightshow

All told, a seriously good gig – I’d go and see them again no worries.