It’s been a very musical weekend around here. Friday evening saw us visiting a wonderfully buzzing and lively Louisiana, a couple of our friends are playing in Amelia Tuckers band, we’d missed a couple of gigs by them recently and had been hearing good things about the shows, so it was time to check them out.

Three other bands were in action as well, because of the early start we missed Rob Sharples completely, Caught a bit of Roger Tarry, who sounded ok without quite having the killer melody lines which his sort of music requires. Seven Days Til Sunday make big confident rock music, which would suit the lighters in the air brigade, not really my sort of thing but other people seemed to enjoy it.

Onto Amelia Tucker, well as I mentioned a lot of positive things have been said about Amelia over the last few months, but after hearing the songs on her myspace site I was not so sure. Pleased to say that the live show had much more of a positive impact of me, vocally much more like Tracey Thorn from the Love not Money period than I had anticipated some of the songs in the short set were excellent. There was an element of over politeness about the show, but you do the get feeling that she could produce something special if she if she could really lose herself in the music and turn up the intensity a notch or two. One to watch.

Saturday dawned wonderfully clear, crisp and cold. I spent the afternoon at Ashton Gate watching a rather messy game of football between City and Notts Forest. At the start of the season, I think that most people thought that we would both be at the top half of the table, slugging in out for promotion, as we all know things have not worked out like that. A change of manager for both clubs has bought improved results of late, but the 1-1 all draw should way both clubs are no better than mid table at the moment.


On Saturday evening we were back at The Cube for another helping of musical dynamite, in the form of Charlie Parr. First up were the now expanded My Two Toms, playing last night as a 4 piece, they were at their melodic best as than ran through a set of splendid instrumental’s with the banjo at the heart of the action. Once again Adrian Cowley played a low key bit in the middle, before the wonderful Mr Parr took the stage.

He played a blistering set, tearing into what some would call folk, or country-blues with the vigour, energy and passion of The Ramones. His big gravely voice can bellow ferociously or whisper with disbelieving horror of mans ill treatment of his fellow souls. He really is the stuff of legend, word is that when he returns to Duluth, the beard of 13 years will be removed, can’t see it diminishing his powers though in any sort of Samson type way as he jokingly mentioned during his set. Let’s hope it’s not too long before we see him back here again.

Next up is King Creoste on Wednesday.