When The Levees Break

In many ways I am a straightforward man and my thoughts are not ponderous. Questions do not haunt me. If they did I would be lying on the floor right now, my head full of crippling electricity as I failed to answer why a litre of water frequently pours out of the light fitting in the toilet. Or why I cannot make this didgeridoo make a noise beyond the sound of someone blowing a raspberry into a Pringles can.

But eighty percent of New Orleans is currently underwater. This has shaken me despite being sitting here in comfort, staring west through a seventeen inch LCD window. But I am guilty here of weird thoughts. The tragedy of the situation hits me through a sense of academic reasoning...it is tragic because a lot of people have died and many more have lost their homes. But emotionally I feel detached.

A sliding scale of importance exists in these situations. A flooded city 5000 miles is less important to the observer as a flooded town 1000 miles away, which is less important than a flooded village 100 miles away, which is less important than a flooded toilet 10 yards away. We would not function if this were not so. A terrible statement that is nevertheless true. This is the abstraction of tragedy; holding the pain in our hands is difficult until we have found the personal connection...a friend of a friend who lives in Boscastle, or even the fact that we travelled through a tube station an hour before a bomb went off.

Ye gods, that was an unpleasant paragraph and I do not know whether I believe it or not now that it is staring reproachfully back at me from the screen. The human brain needs a jolt, though. It is assaulted with sensory overload from all directions, being filled with extremes from violent, noisy films and whatever, and this acts as a barrier when something horribly real happens. It takes the human angle, the tearful woman on the news screaming about her lost husband to the news reporter or a phone call from a friend who was near the site of the accident and wanted to let you know he was all right, before the mental levee is breached. Again, this is the insulation we use to survive, to get through our day without falling into a paralysis of empathy. Hmm...in fact, after seeing the former on the news last night I did indeed feel the jump-leads kickstarting an emotional reaction in my otherwise detached head.

Hang on..."detached head?" That cannot be right... But it amuses me and I will leave it there unedited.

Much is made of displays of national grief, such as after Princess Diana's death, and Rosie Boycott spoke of this in a programme last night in a piece that did little but rehash old arguments (and also in an article the week before in the Observer that existed precisely and in its entirely to promote her programme). What she forgets is that she is part of media that artificially built the woman up into a goddess. And it is the same media that now sneers at the nation for reacting to the death of this goddess. Media on media wankery. Ah, but this cannot excuse easily led people from lapping this hero worship shit up with tongues the size of surfboards. To hell with them and their tiresome neediness.

Now, those weird thoughts I mentioned earlier were more than just to do with the tragedy of the situation and this is what I was going to write about until that jumbled mess above got in the way. The most weird of these thoughts is perhaps inexcusable, and that is the giddy little thrill from witnessing a completely changed landscape. The ordinary becoming alien, a fresh and emotionally charged layer of atmosphere building up. The same is true with a landscape under snow. The atmosphere is completely changed not just visually, but in our hearts and souls, our emotional centres. We are also changed.

Mother of shitty death! I can hear air being sucked through teeth from here... So before this turns into a spiritual nosebleed of gibberish, I must qualify it. An atmosphere that pushes the right buttons is one that makes us react, charges us with thoughts and feelings that a landscape with no atmosphere cannot provide. But the landscape alone does not provide the atmosphere, otherwise all we have is an exercise in filling the gaps. Knowledge is crucial to the atmosphere, the keystone that keeps it in place. A misty graveyard is strangely moving, but unless you know a few stories about the place, a handful of legends or a superstition or two, then all you have is an abstract sense of how photogenic the place looks. Place is nothing without a mental connection, particularly a personal connection...which is something the best filmmakers know by heart. But that is another subject entirely.

Okay. I am trying to avoid trivialising the floods in New Orleans, but I am doing so simply by writing this thing. I have no connection to the situation, I am just using it as a springboard for another thousand words of relentless jabbering. So the best thing I can do now is lie down and shut up forever. Or, at least, for another few days.

Bare Bones Capital

Other acronyms are available.

Yes, a vaguely cryptic opening there to an experimental attempt at something that has been done before in a variety of different disguises. What we have here is a way of examining the London I have poked around recently without re-reviewing the wheel. So we will limit ourselves to descriptions of six words or less. This is a hopeless steal of the three word film reviews that exists somewhere out there on the Internet, but what the hell. We will do this in alphabetical order because it pleases the eye.

Borough Market: Tour, enjoy, pay through the nose.
Camden Town: Tribal student clothing and cheap didgeridoos.
Covent Garden: Mostly irritating.
East London: Don't bother straying from the river.
Greenwich: Why won't dogs leave me alone?
Kew Gardens: It's under a fucking flight path.
London Eye: Goes round in a big circle.
Notting Hill Carnival: Funky despite being squashed to fuck
Old Kent Road: Traffic lights and takeaways.
Oxford Street: Some shops.
Putney: Not Richmond, except the bar prices.
Richmond: Clue's in the title.
Shoreditch / Hoxton: A rich, dribbling and spent phallus.
Soho: Both refreshingly cheap and crushingly expensive.
South East London: Absolutely fuck all south of SE1.

Ye gods, once I have deleted all the white space there is little left. Which, since it is a bank holiday, will give you all the more time to decorate the spare room. Get to it, you idle fox.

A Little Bit of Knowledge

A strange compulsion is ensuring that I bang on about bad science until my fingers bleed. Today I am compelled to link to this Guardian story. On the chopping block today is homeopathy; a working definition of which is that water drinking bollocks.

"The theory is that a tiny dose of whatever is the source of the problem, diluted in many parts water, will stimulate the body into combating it." -- the Guardian.

Seems reasonable? Hmm, well, some poor Joe who struggled with GCSE science and knows vaguely how innoculations work may be thinking they have a point. Or have read books about poison immunity training by ninjas... or whatever scraps of semi-knowledge have been brushed off the table this week. And in the bearpit of pub arguments where both sides are armed with modest weaponry, how can the opponent demolish this without a full grasp of the subject?

Ah, but the homeopaths make it easy for us at this point.

"...the remedies are so dilute that it is unlikely they can have any effect on the body at all. Some do not contain even one molecule of the original herb. Homeopaths argue that the water retains the memory of the herb or mineral's 'vital essence'". -- the Guardian.

Bang!

Water memory! The train has come off the rails. It is now plummeting down the gorge towards the rocky river and will be smashed up on impact, killing all on board. Water memory! Fucking hell. There is no shred of evidence to back this up. Not a shred. We are left with the placebo effect and nothing more.

In its own way the placebo effect is a powerful thing...but as far as homeopathy is concerned, we could equally say we were bottling moon magic and, provided the patient believed in moon magic, then whammo! We have a spanking new body of Genuine Science to play with and bait the boffins, right?

The reason homeopathy is so revered is twofold. First, the placebo effect is significant here. People truly believe in it because it combines belief and science which, as the execrable What the Bleep Do We Know inadvertantly proves, is a powerful persuasion indeed. Crucially, the explanation for how it works contains common sense arguments... "I may not know much about science but this makes sense..." No, you don't know much about science, so shut the hell up before I rip out your windpipe. You took a nugget of truth -- some fraction of well-known scientific knowledge -- and diluted it in water...diluted it to a millionth of its original strength. Then drank it right up...and there you have your proof.

Second, it does no harm. Astrology has the same basis...what's the harm in a bit of positive thinking?

Well, we all enjoy things that, nevertheless, we do not take seriously. CSI:Miami is a wonderful show but I would not believe for a second that real CSIs are so efficient...and so eager to put on and remove their sunglasses every other scene. But...and I'm buggered if I can find the article now...there is a phenomenon in America where everyone who has seen the show now expects their real-life counterparts to perform the same magic, use the same voodoo software that enhances photographs to such an extent that you can see the murderer in the reflection of the photographed person's eyes...and so on. If we started to pull on that thread, the show would collapse.

Jesus, what was the point of that tangent? Ah yes...belief in these things can get out of hand and adversely affect our lives. People refuse conventional medicine because they believe...believe in an alternative medicine. Ye gods. Belief is not the same thing as scientific fact, they are not interchangeable. Intelligent Design is not a theory to rival Darwin's. It is belief dressed up in a lab coat bought on eBay for a tenner. At least nobody is going to die because of astrology, it merely allows us to make shit jokes about uranus. Because we are all, after all, a bunch of children dressed up in adult disguise. Otherwise how else would we swallow homeopathy so easily?

Through a Lens, Darkly

Look, a shutter doth click. Or at least a bad replica sound effect is activated. On the journey to, through and from Hyde Park yesterday I walked uneasily as photograph after photograph was taken of every last thing... and the furiously unglamorous tube escalator must be one of the most snapped constructs in the city of London.

Everywhere I walked I was intruding in the conical territory of an imminent photograph, and only a few such instances were tourists. There is an obligation to sidestep this space, to allow people the time they need to take the picture. But this is happening every ten yards and it requires supreme restraint not to fuck about, make with the bunnies ears or simply stick two fingers at the camera whilst blowing a gloriously ripe raspberry.

The ubiquity of cheap camera phones and video cameras is chiefly behind this marked increase in visual documentation. As a result we are all unpaid actors in other people's autobiographical films. No longer the preserve of inner monologues..."that person over there, who does he think he is?"...now these thoughts have busted out into the physical world. And I am uneasy at this continual photography. Not from the traditional "why do they bother?" angle. No, this is more a neurosis. These people are putting me on my guard... scratching one's balls in public is a glorious right passed down from Queen Elizabeth I herself, but if I see another bunch of leering lenses combing the street like a POW camp spotlight then the itch will remain unscratched.

Ah, this is going to wander off into realms of privacy, civility and snide comments along the lines of "what's the problem, you're scared the camera will steal your soul?" These arguments can make themselves without reiteration on my behalf. For myself I have no case to make because I do not believe there is a problem to solve per se. What I dislike is the irritating attitude of the people involved, the expectation, the presumption that the passer-by has no complaint about being forcibly included. There is the stench of the "gotcha" prankster about it; acts of photography that are sudden and candid and frequently surreptitious, with the same awful implication that one must behave as the photographer wants. You are the Grateful Victim and must laugh along with the joke lest you want to risk being further ridiculed.

The irony is that there is an identical irritation on the photographer's side of the fence, where a perfectly pleasant shot of your friends is ruined by a drunken stranger sticking two fingers at the camera, blowing a raspberry and then laughing like a twat...

So what of CCTV? Is this any better or worse? We have to make a distinction here. The invasion of privacy that CCTV enforces is a philosophical, rather than a practical, problem... unless you believe it is one big act of well-crafted government synergy to have on-tap information about us at all times (bearing in mind that the technological talents of our authorities is on par with a caveman trying to reassemble a personal stereo he just clubbed to bits for kicks; see every government IT project in existence for details). It is a passive invasion of privacy with few pragmatic consequences and unless you want everybody on the same street as you to disappear in order that you cannot be seen at all, then it remains more of a fear of technology than an issue of rights.

Ye gods...was that an argument for CCTV? No. I do not want my life to be recorded in such a manner as much as the next person, but since there is no active damage to our lives here I am willing to live with them. And there is a paradox here that the same people who complain about invasive CCTV are happy enough to hold a camera themselves, taking candid shots of strangers and laughing about them later.

I feel more uneasy about everyone actively photographing everyone else the whole time than I do about an eye in the sky passively recording images onto videotapes that will never be seen. I do not want to have to be self-conscious the whole time, feeling the silly paranoia that I may appear on a stranger's roll of film mid-yawn. But what the hell. We are judged and mocked, loved and hated, pointed at and highlighted throughout life and if we want to be part of society we cannot shut out the bits we find disagreeable. Just make damn sure you wait until I've finished scratching before pressing that button otherwise I will tear your hair out.

Old Feet New Walking Boots

I barely have time to touch the keyboard when a radio voice interjects to tell me this, 2005, is a summer of love. What the hell? Are we really that in thrall to the nostalgia of a version of the sixties that barely existed? It is a soundbite phrase, one that drips with the filthy liquid produced by a baby boomer turned corporate marketing whore. Balls to these smug liars.

Anyway. Before I find myself spiralling off on a further tangent about Puff the Magic Dragon, let us get to the point here.

I walked home a different route the other day after it dawned on me at last minute that there was a reason why they were selling such cheap fish and chips... To hell with lunch, I thought, turning on the proverbial dime and heading home.

As I took this new route I began how little I knew the area. I had walked up and down the usual hill every day and never deviated from the trail...I was Sysyphus's shadow with a packed lunch instead of a boulder. On this day, however, I turned right instead of left and I was immediately surrounded by the unfamiliar.

But who cares? In this case 'unfamiliar' means another row of identical Victorian terraces with a fucking dream catcher in the window. The family name may be different but the people on the steps are just as gobby as the ones on the next street along. This is not a fertile corner of the country for sightseeing and I have no desire to waste shoe leather just because the road on which I walk has a different name to normal.

But I found myself wondering about how much we know about where we live. If we move to an area as an adult, we are not tourists and do not explore any more than is necessary to find the local pub. We only really get to know an area if we live there as children. At the age of eighteen the exploration gene tends to suck its own cock so hard it gobbles itself up and disappears with a pop.

Well...sort of. We are happy to explore once we have put on the traveller's coat during the designated few weeks per year we allow ourselves to be get deliberately lost and immersed in something about which we know nothing. Call it a holiday, a gap year, whatever...we switch these feelings and attitudes on and off like a goddamn machine. Today is the day I'll be Open to Other Cultures. Tomorrow I'll get pissed and slag off Islam with my mates an' that.

We know its fashionable and expected of us to do certain things in our lives, and we do it not because it is Good and feels the Right Thing to Do...but because it gets us the kudos equivalent of a Cub Scout badge. We collect experiences like we each have our own I-Spy book. I went to a developing country for three weeks...tick. I bought a poverty wristband and did not make a big deal of it because I'm, like, always this good...tick. I bought a bottle of Pinot Noir because Sideways pointed out how good it is...tick. We scuttle to our tribes like flies landing on shit. And we never quite reach that place of contentness...even if we do "make it" we are stressed to the tits and find ourselves longing for a little place in the country to pursue whatever downshifting lifestyle the Guardian wrote about last week.

Everything must be compartmentalised. Friends, work, home life, fun, whatever... a lifetime of having Good Lifestyle shit thrown at us from all possible media, and so we can never be content. We end up fearful of pieces of our lives overlapping, and we end up letting life pass by as we make up endless detailed plans, go to events we feel will be Good for Us, and worry about whether we are making the most of our supposed time poor cash rich existence, blah fucking blah.

But that is shouting into the darkness to little effect. I have no answer, no solution to this. Why should it even be a problem to be solved? This is the only we can realistically live in a world where there are a billion more experiences than we can fit into a lifetime. And everything needs a system, right?

The point was...the point was, that as children we have endless evenings and summers to roam our neighbourhoods, seeing all the places we should and many of the ones we should not. The local roads and paths through the woods are as familiar as anything. We know the shortcuts to the rec ground, the routes behind the golf course that leads to the secret fields, where the rope swing is and where be the dragons.

Whereas as adults we just about know which local kebab shop breaks the fewest health and safety regulations. And we don't, and probably shouldn't, care. Exploration is a kind of play, a game, for nobody's benefit for your own. And that is practically the definition of childhood. No wonder we all yearn after some kind of summer of love as espoused by the man on the radio. It is not the apocryphal shagging for which we ache, but the idea of the endless childhood days of sunshine and fun. We look to the past to give meaning to the present.

Oh, now what the hell am I talking about? Fuck this, I'm going to make a cup of tea.

Sometimes the Sun (part four)

The fourth and final part of this Sundae on the Common review. (Parts one, two, three)

The Thrills

Ten minutes into the Thrills and somebody nudges me to point out that Bernard Butler, previously of Suede, is standing behind us. It is hard to miss him...this is not an indie gig full of black-haired shoegazers after all. Not having feelings either way on the man, I shrug and go back to pretending to care about another summery guitar band.

Like BSP, The Thrills performed a set that proved they had the right to be on their stage. I offer them a handful of praise because they sound a cut above yer average shower of angular guitars, replacing the punkier aspects with a dreamier, 60s summer vibe. But the retro tune to which they dance is frustrating and mires them in a swamp of like-minded and ephemeral bands they will find hard to escape. Even with the increased ballsiness that had characterised recent live performances.

We watch and enjoy today's set with a faintly detached air. The pogoing kids at the front are bouncing happily but the common is hardly set on fire here. The songs for which they are not famous pass by with a confident but workmanlike air. Occasionally I hear comments from people around me that go "oh yeah, I recognise this one...it's, you know, thingy."

Thingy indeed. Around this point Bernard Butler wanders off to the sound of phone cameras making their absurd and artificial shutter sound. Was he as touched by indifference as we were? Ah, but what the hell. How could we be wowed by their jubilant charms when the sound system was barely turned up to 3? The band seemed to be far, far away despite physically being close enough to see the sweat on their brows.

So...they may be better than many of their peers, but I fear their future lies squarely in the guitar compilation CD market, Big Sur on CD1 and, er, that other one on CD2.

I went home before the encore to avoid the rush onto the tube. Which is as good a summary as any of my feelings toward the band.

Festival Conclusion

This was not an overwhelming festival and we will not be talking about it for the weeks to come, never mind the years. But we came away soothed and chilled...it was a solid start to what will doubtless be a dependable annual event. Just turn up the music and keep away those goddamn clouds. That's the law, damn it.

Sometimes the Sun (part three)

This is the third part of the neverending Sundae on the Common review. Part one is here and part two is here.

Alabama 3

When you are whooping it up with the boys in a band modelled jokily on the American Deep South, you have every right to demand a roadie to supply you with lit fags as you fiddle around on your keyboard. But on stage? Hell yeah.

Alabama 3 can get away with this where lesser bands would wither under the collective skunk eye of a cynical generation. With their preference for funky, pseudo-religious country rhythms, they soon win you over and leave you a helpless junkie for their diverse yet distintive songs. Their number is somewhere in the region of six, but today a million people appeared to come and go during the set...rappers, sexy female dancers in orange shirts, roadies supplying cigarettes... it was a party and they wanted to share.

Their most recent single is Hello, I'm Johnny Cash; played live, this potent tribute to the Man in Black sounds more driving, more celebratory and more convincing than it does through a pair of living room speakers. The toe-tappin' country bounciness, with just a hint of the goofy hillbilly, comes across as a gospel-like blast of energy from the sort of church you would actually pay to join.

Smiles of recognition greeted Woke Up This Morning...all the partying inverted on itself and the band became an easy-going force of nature in supercool shades and self-assured swagger. The games were over, this was serious... Further joy came from the soulful up-yours that is Ain't Goin' To Goa, and the joy blossomed into laughter with the knowing and wry U Don't Dans 2 Tekno Anymore.

But no matter what they did, some of the crowd were visibly frustrated. Not enough skinny boys playing guitars for these recidivist dullards. I realised then that whilst I saw this event as a chilled out festival at which to spend the day in sonic reverie... but many others were here because a fiver to see the Thrills is as good as it gets. Without missing a beat and without saying a word I shot these idiots dead with my special gun and went back to saluting my own new favourite band.

I have since listened to a few of their tracks on CD and realise how important it is to see Alabama 3 live. Their music gains a hell of a lot from the atmosphere they create and so I urge you to track down where they are next headed. And if you don't, the Alabama 3 will be praying for your soul tonight.

Sometimes the Sun (part two)

Today we continue this sprawling and hopeless review of Sundae on the Common from August 7th, following on from part one.

British Sea Power

Oh shit. I am going to struggle here after writing four hundred words for Yeti. I barely paid attention to British Sea Power, who were next up the bill, so this review may be a little threadbare.

To distract the reader, then, I will indulge in a little sleight of hand and start at the end. BSP came to their roaring finale, teasing ever more protracted noise from their beleagured instruments as the ten foot bear shambled around the stage to ambush them. As the climax swelled and finally waned they rode on a wave of cheers and fists that couldn't stop punching the air. They were having fun and looked for all the world like they deserved their ending here. Nobody would begrudge them this moment.

They left the stage and the world's worst compere returned. The fists in the air became, as if compelled by some supernatural force of filth, the traditional English mime for wanker. All the energy that was on the Common was destroyed by the appearance of this one man. Yes, destroyed. Fuck the first law of thermodynamics.

This was beginning to bother us. This man, this prick of a man, was he really asking us to perform a mexican wave on cue? The useless son of a bitch. He was! And...oh god...he was telling us to "make some noise". For what? In celebration of his vomit-coloured pastiche of the bad dance DJ patter that polluted Radio One in the nineties? No. Band comes on...we like band...we cheer. That is how it works. Prick comes on...we don't like prick...we make wanker signals. That is also how it works. Now kindly leave the stage.

But no matter how hard he tried, the memory of the British Sea Power performance remained. Except for me, who had stumbled off mid-set, faintly bored, for a piss and a buffalo burger. I had never seen the band before despite wallowing in a hundred column inches about their music. They had intrigued me as apparently crafting clever and literate songs that held in their hands a sense of history, art and occasion, bearing repeated listening to appreciate what they were trying to convey.

With radio friendly guitar bands I tend to have more luck with the albums than with live performances. Perhaps this is just fall out from university where the combination of endless guitar bands and free venue entry permanently fatigued the part of my brain that appreciates this stuff. Although...perhaps I genuinely do not give a toss and are doomed to indifference in the presence of this genre. A terrible thing to realise two thirds of the way through a review of such a band, but what the hell...let us attempt, at least, to be objective.

BSP, on the strength of this performance, are a force and deserved their place here today, even if their summery credentials are dubious. They were confident and had no problems putting on a show for their audience...to the extent that in the middle of one particularly drawn out song, we were stood in our little encampment somewhere in the crowd when we noticed that one of the band was wandering past, banging a drum. The crowd cheered and clapped him as he marched onward, which in its own way was a testament to the good-natured spirit of this event. If this was Reading he would have been doused in piss and has his drum nicked before he made it past the mosh pit.

But no matter how many times the guitarist leapt from his amp and the guy in the yellow hat went AWOL, there were two unassailable problems they had to face here today... the wrong atmosphere and the wrong sound set-up.

The former was the timing, the curse of a hundred mid-bill festival bands. BSP are not a band to watch in the intermittent sunshine of an August afternoon, where the lighting rig seems lost and the crowd are at peace. The latter was because the sound system was too damn quiet, presumably for legal reasons...many houses look directly out onto Clapham Common. This was a genuine problem for this band; we cannot be overcome with massive swells of music if the tide is out.

So I found myself reacting not with disappointment, but with indifference. Soon, I hope to listen to the albums and wallow in the atmosphere intended, perhaps when the rain and wind lash at the windows whilst I sit inside with a good fire and a single malt. But over a few three quid cans of warm Carling on Clapham Common? Pshaw.

Ye gods, so much for struggling to write enough. And Alabama 3 were next and they were fantastic and god only knows whether I'll ever be able to stop writing about that one. We will find out together shortly.

Sometimes The Sun (part one)

Sundae on the Common, August 7th, Clapham Common.

The hog was on the spit, the ice-cream was in the fridge and the music was playing the soundtrack to sunshine. And all for just five of your English...surely this was the perfect day out on the common?

Now this is where it gets vague. It was...well, it was very nice. No more and no less. Trying to flesh out this description is not easy and I can only offer up a handful of reviews to do so. These will be put up here over a few days because my eyes are beginning to bleed after writing just one of these damn things. And for the sake of completeness it should be noted that we missed the first couple of acts, arriving as Yeti were setting up on stage. The acts we did see were Yeti, British Sea Power, Alabama 3 and The Thrills.

Yeti

With the sun sailing from cloud to cloud and the temperature up and down like a loved-up mosher, the world's worst compere bounces onto stage to almost total silence. The lonely cheers from the back fade away once they realise he is Not Important; despite this he proceeds to give it the full fella, introducing Yeti as if reading their biography from the back of a cornflakes packet. He yells that they are the feelgood band of the summer, and we find ourselves flicking through the six volume encyclopedia of feelgood summery bands of 2005 to flesh out the details. But to hell with him. He walks off stage and is engulfed again by obscurity.

Yeti are a six piece band; five human members and a wee little hype dwarf wearing a Libertines T-shirt, following them around and farting into their cornflakes. Which is a shame because the music is good enough to win over anyone who is only here for vocalist John Hassall's musical CV. Hassall, to his credit, understands the game and his first interaction with the audience is an ironic acknowledgement of the "feelgood band of the summer" motif, launching into the set with the confidence that knows the description is justified.

They are cut from a happy cloth that includes fewer bands than at first apparent...one cannot lump them in with the fading sound of garage rock a la The Strokes or even the driving, shambling force of the Libertines. They are compared to the La's, early Beatles, even the Specials...ah, but a nagging feeling remains that whilst those bands soared, Yeti remain on the ground being thoroughly unpretentious, summery and just bouncy enough to claim the feelgood tag without transcending it.

And that's the problem with any such summer band...once the sun goes down they are forgotten to all but their most faithful fans. The La's secured their place in history because they found the source of the sunshine...Yeti merely bask in its rays.

They have a varied and happy old set of songs – Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder in particular -- but they fail in one key respect. Their songs are not infectious enough. The crowd barely nodded their heads in time to the music today. So were we feeling good? Well...perhaps, but when the sun is out you want to feel great. And who wants to be remembered with the word "good" anyway?