Bad weather!

Photo by Chris Sellick from BBC Cumbria site.

On Saturday I braved the weather to visit my friend Amanda in Seaton. She picked me up from Workington train station and we went to Tesco to get some supplies. "Get whatever we need now because I don't want to leave the house again!" I said.

We were really bored so we did some art work. Then we watched Merlin and some DVDs, stuffed our faces full of pizza, Doritos, popcorn and Galaxy chocolate. We were occasionally disturbed by her cat Ash jumping on us straight after he'd been outside and was soaking wet and covered in mud!

On Sunday morning we decided to go down to the river Derwent to see how high it had risen. We were very pleased to see that it had swollen and burst its banks (see photo above). Sadly neither of us had cameras with us but Amanda did take some footage on her mobile phone. We got a bit muddy and fairly cold as there was a strong wind but at least we didn't get wet. We even saw a young cormorant sat on the bank.

Down turn

Having a bad spell at the moment and struggling with chain of thought. No blogs for a while, and probably won't be reading anyone else's due to lack of motivation.

News that made me smile today

Long time followers of my blog will know that I have had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the NHS with regards how they have treated me during my employment with them through an agency.

Last year I applied for my job permanently and was told that I couldn't have an interview because I didn't have the correct typing qualifications. The person that did get the job started in December and left in March - she thought she was moving to Cyprus but she didn't in the end. If they'd employed me they wouldn't have had this trouble and I still would have been here.

So after the secretary that took over from me and left in March, I returned as a temp in April. It has taken them until the end of September to advertise the position. I joined the NHS admin bank so that I could apply for the job internally. The closing date was last Friday. I was told by the senior secretary today that my application was accepted by the HR department and that I was in fact the only applicant.

This means that I have the job but I think they will still have to go through all the bollocks of interviewing me for equal opps. Then to get me "free" from the agency they have to give them four weeks notice. So it will probably be November before I get onto the NHS payroll but in these troubled financial times I am happy just to know I will be in permanent employment.

Apology

Last weekend I slagged off Katy Perry and called her a vapid pop act. Well she was on Jools Holland on Friday. OK I'm not going to go out and buy her album on the strength of her performance but she did impress me. She rocked!

Public service announcement

In case you're wondering where my mum, known to a lot of you as Gill, has gone and why she is not blogging it's because she is currently admitted to West Cumberland Hospital with gallstones and infected gallbladder. That is all the news I have but I will keep you updated.

Damien Rice

I then went on to watch the beautiful Damien Rice make equally beautiful music. I really must insist that you watch this too. OK so I have already potentially taken an hour of your life if you watched all of the Jools Holland show I linked in my previous post, so why should you spend another hour watching this video? Well I'll tell you...

I have been lucky enough to see Damien live twice. Both were gigs were in the same venue in Liverpool. The venue was small and intimate, perfectly suited to Damien's style of performance. Both gigs were brilliant but were completely different.

Gig 1

This venue was seated and my then boyfriend Tim and I managed to get seats on the second row. The support act was brilliant, a young lady called Elisa who sang alone, accompanying herself only on acoustic guitar. Her voice was absolutely amazing and brought me to tears a couple of times. Don't bother with her albums though, I bought one and was very disappointed to find it was nothing like her live performance and had gone all europop and totally over-produced.

O had come out in 2002 and still not many people had heard of Damien Rice. There can't have been more than about 200 people in the auditorium. On this night Damien played alone without the band members that helped flesh out his songs on the album. Far from it sounding dull and weak, it was vibrant and exciting. Damien uses lots of pedals and effects on his guitar and voice, even layering them all up to create a wall of sound that even Phil Spector would be envious of.

He was chatty, playful and knocked the audience's socks off! He managed to weave Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" into one of his songs and did the same with Radiohead's "Creep". I think he even threw in a little Jeff Buckley.

Gig 2

A hell of a lot has changed since the last gig. I have split up with Tim and was hoping to go to the concert with a rather handsome pHD student that I'd become friends with. Alas over the summer he decided not to go back to uni and coming all the way from south Wales was too much of a trek. Luckily one of my flatmates buys the ticket from me and borrows my copy of O so she can get to know his music.

Things are different at the concert too - it's the same venue but this time we're standing. People are still milling around while the support act is on so we manage to get near the front. This time Damien is accompanied by his band but minus his co singer Lisa as she is full of cold. She manages to put in an appearance later on though much to the delight of the crowd. People know who Damien Rice is now, he gets played on the radio and there are adverts for his album on the TV. People know the words to his songs and sing along.

In the video linked above you can see that they have lots of candles and joss sticks on stage, and it was the same at our gig. Damien asks for the lights to be turned down just before they play "Cold Water". As the performance is being recorded they can't turn down the lights completely. But imagine what it would be like to be at a concert with a few hundred people and it is completely black apart from the glow of a few candles and joss sticks, which is what it was like at the concert I was at. It was so atmospheric and made the hairs stand up on the end of my neck. Then at the climax of the song, when the drums kick in, they whacked all the lights up again. It was such an overwhelming moment.

Watching this gig online didn't compare to actually being there as I didn't get to fight with my friend as to which one of us Damien was looking at! But it did capture some of the energy and vibrancy of his performance, which sometimes doesn't come across in a recording.

So if you think that his music is wishy washy coffee shop music please watch this video and see how wrong you are. The man is inventive and creative, makes an acoustic guitar makes sounds that a lot of electric guitar players would give they plectrums to be able to make, and has the voice of an angel. Playing for an audience is where his music really comes alive. I was sat there with tears rolling down my cheeks with the beauty of it. Unfortunately I have yet to read this book which I bought last weekend so I can't tell you why I did that.

Jools Holland

Firstly this afternoon I watched the extended version of Jools Holland on BBC iplayer. This show had one of the best line-ups I had seen for a long time since I enjoyed Radiohead, Cat Power and Mary J Blige on the same programme. I really must insist that you watch it, so follow this link. It features such bands and artists as Kings of Leon (pictured above), Metallica, Nicole Atkins, V.V. Brown, Carla Bruni and Sway.


I normally watch Later... after it has been aired on television so I can fast forward through the performances I don't like. This week the only casualty was the one song performed by Sway, a rapper. I'm not a massive fan of Metallica but I was impressed by their performance of "Cyanide", enough to make me want to hear the rest of their new album. Be warned though, "Enter Sandman" which is no doubt one of their best known songs gets cut off part way through. I was outraged! Until I checked out the Later website and found the full performance there for all to see.

Kings of Leon are one of my favourite bands at the moment and I loved seeing them play "On Call" as it's one of the best tracks on "Because of the Times", and a couple of tracks from their new album which is out on Monday. Something tells me I will be taking a slightly extended lunch break to buy it. It's so refreshing that they're number one instead of some vapid pop act. It's been a long time since I felt the need to buy an album on the day it comes out, a privilege normally reserved for Radiohead and possibly Elbow. It makes me even more excited that I'm going to see them in December!!!

I'd never heard of V.V. Brown or Nicole Atkins before but their performances on Jools certainly warrented further investigation. Carla Bruni was pleasant enough, but she sang with an expression her face which annoyed me and didn't make me want to buy any of her music particularly.