This morning I was at the Monmouth coffee
shop, just outside Borough Market, to buy our regular 500g bag of ground
coffee, sourced from some far flung corner of the globe. Coffee is the current opium of the masses and
I always like to indulge in a distinctive flavour with a bit of a kick to it. I
sampled the current Indonesian, Brazilian and Ethiopian offerings. The
Indonesian was incredible but ultimately quite bitter, the Brazilian was
relatively mild and the Ethiopian was strong and fruity. Get me a slot on a
food and drink programme why don’t you!! I settled on the Ethiopian. A place
like Monmouth, sourcing its coffee beans direct from farmers in the country of
origin, has genuine expertise and is doing things the right way, unlike the
mass market Starbucks slop, served up with your name written on the cup.
I started writing this, as I often do, from
the balcony of the Members Room at Tate Modern, looking across the Thames to
St. Paul’s Cathedral. The sky was blue, the sun blazed down and a couple of
middle aged women sat behind me were talking about drinking gin and tonic.
Chimes from a bell tower drifted across the water as they struck 11 o’clock. The
women’s conversation drifted onto how their bamboo had shot up and I was off to
the Sonia Delaunay exhibition. I didn’t know anything about her, so it was good
to be discovering her work.
One of my life’s ambitions, of seeing Aston
Villa win the F.A Cup fell horrifically flat on Saturday, as the team was
played off the park by Arsenal. As good as the Gunners were, we were equally as
bad. To have not recorded a single shot on goal in 90 minutes is embarrassingly
pathetic. The mood of the fans was one of acceptance, that we had come up
against a better team. There were no dodgy decisions to complain about, or a
sense of grievance. It had happened and that was that. One team on a great run
of form, playing with great confidence and newly qualified for the Champions
League, had come up against a team that had been through a traumatic season,
having lost twenty league games – and it showed. There was to be no Cup magic. As
Villa have played in three Cup Finals in the past 58 years, I may be able to
fit in one more before I’m pushing up daisies. They had better bloody win the
next one!!
In music, I saw Unknown Mortal Orchestra at
Islington Assembly Hall a couple of weeks ago. They had stepped things up from
the previous time I saw them, at the Electric Ballroom in Camden (see HSD 8 November 2013.)
They were much more of a band this time round, rather than a front for the main
man Ruban Neilson. The drummer had some serious bouts of expression; the bass
player kept it tight and simple and the addition of a keyboard player has given
the music more room to breathe. Ruban is
a master guitarist and showman who transports you to other sonic dimensions. He
is a small guy, with a low centre of gravity, similar to Lionel Messi at
Barcelona and whilst Messi appears to have a football fused to his foot, Neilson
is fused to his guitar – an extension of his being.
It often amazes me how when played live,
the recorded music you love can be completely transformed and lifted to a
higher plain. A live sound is always going to differ sonically as the music is
being played in a concert hall and not your front room or directly into your e
ears via an mp3 player. There is plenty of scope to push the sound, try new
things and the tunes will have developed since they were first recorded. There
was certainly much more of a guitar influence in UMO’s live performance, which
was fantastic and I look forward to seeing them again at Shepherd’s Bush Empire
in September.
Today has been a beautiful day and whilst I
have been sat on my bed writing this post, the sun has set, the bright blue
becoming a fading grey. The sun is rising early and setting late as we approach
the longest day of the year. Sunshine is essential and a complete mood changer.
. .
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