Tuesday 15/06/10

Although it allows the net police to see exactly who I am, what I'm up to and with whom I do such things, I am a member of a couple of social networking sites. Firstly there's Facebook, who I'm becoming less and less impressed with every time they modify anything. Everything they seem to do pushes me one step closer to closing my account, whether it's the bodged way the news feed works or whether it's the fact that I'm alerted to the information that ten thousand (probably many many more) people think that the governments wants to ban flags in pubs. The only thing that has kept my page open is the fact that a box saying I have an IQ of over 140 is on it, and I'd like to keep the evidence of it there. Which probably proves my IQ isn't over 140 (and that it barely reaches 40).

I'm also a member of Last.fm. I don't use the social side of it too much, only for it to log all the tracks I listen to. Free websites such as this use advertising to make money, often using information the users have provided, in this case the music I listen to, to make it more personal. In my case though it'll take a smart advertiser to work out what to sell to someone who's top 25 listened to artists include McFly, NOFX and Genesis.

As of last night I have seen every single active band in my top 25 list. There are a couple of exceptions. McFly are one as I imagine them to have a terrible live show despite many good poppy songs, which is largely based on the assumption that thousands of screaming girls would not make it an enjoyable gig. The other is the Brian Setzer Orchestra, who would never tour in Britain. Setzer can barely afford to tour here in his 3-piece solo group let alone carry a 17-person strong brass section on the plane as well. I've pretty much accepted I wont see McFly or BSO, so don't cry for me.

Yesterday I saw Butch Walker, who has over 3000 played songs on my chart in the last 4 years or so, which makes him my second favourite act. He is chuffing brilliant. By day he's a producer who writes crummy tunes for fairly crummy pop artists but in the evening he rocks out properly with his band the Black Widows (formerly the Lets-Go-Out-Tonites). I missed his last UK appearance because I'd not heard of him (it was in 2006) but I was determined not to miss out this year.

They played at the Highbury Garage in front of one of the smallest crowds I've ever been part of. There's something about the intimacy of a small show that you don't get at larger venues, theatres or stadiums. The band feel more connected with the audience, and they showed that last night by rocking out for well over 2 hours, though starting with some ponderous solo ballads and ending the set with a glam rock thowback tune called 'Hot Girls in Good Moods' and culminated in Butch Walker standing in the middle of the crowd, having got them all to sit on the floor and calling an Polish man a dick for not joining in. It's not a very good description of what happened but never mind, the memories are there.

On Saturday, I'm going to see Green Day at Wembley Stadium play in front of 80 thousand people. If Butch Walker were to play in front of the same sized crowd as last night, every day, it would take over a year for him to play for as many people as Green Day will on Saturday. And I would rather see Butch Walker perform every day for a year.