Thick Creamy Podcast 28-09-2012

Here's the latest Thick Creamy Podcast, bands playing live at a gig the other night, and me talking

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Instead of using SoundCloud or whatever it was I used last time, its up on my own servery thing, ChrisGilmour.co.uk which is kind of neat, but alas there's now streaming player thing so you'll have to right click and save as...

The gig was a Odd Box Records night at The Buffalo Bar featuring two of my favourite bands and two other bands who I'd never heard before who were also pretty ace.

First up were Flowers. I loved their soaring guitars, sounded a bit like a teenage My Blood Valentine practising in their bedroom and a lovely warbling girl sounding like the eighties, Kate Bush, Julee Cruise, Cyndi Lauper.

Flowers playing at The Buffalo Bar 28-SEP-2012

Also, they finished up with a song where the wee girl was playing a one-string bass guitar. Back in '95 when me and Pnos were still learning our instruments, we were tempted by such a thing, but never followed through. Good work Flowers!

Next up were The Choo Choo Trains, who looked pretty cool. I got distracted in their set and didn't get any photos and my recording of it has lots of me talking about bus stops and streetlighting design which isn't quite as musical as the band.

The penultimate band were Town Bike, I hadn't seen them for years, they were awesome.

Town Bike playing at The Buffalo Bar 28-SEP-2012

And then headlining were Tender Trap who fans of my podcast will remember featured in a this podcast from March

Amelia from Tender Trap playing at The Buffalo Bar 28-SEP-2012

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Thick Creamy Podcast 08-09-2012

For possibly the second time ever, legendary Glasgow band The Plimptons played London. I was at a bit of a loose end last Saturday night, so I happened upon The Buffalo Bar in Islington and popped into to catch the Guided Missile night.

I had my recorder with me so I've put together a podcast of the gig. The four bands playing were Summer Hunter, The Plimptons, Keith Top of the Pops and his UK Minor Indie Celebrity Band and Dream Themes.

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Awesomeness all round then. The first act were Summer Hunter, two girls from Shrag and a chap from the Fire Dept, that's a female band there. I only caught their last two songs, but they were pretty exciting sounding, lots of reverb on the vocals, you can never have too much reverb on the vox.

The Plimptons were on second, the Buffalo Bar was packed to the rafters which was quite a relief cos they were getting a bit worried. They were absolutely electric, the songs thoughtful pieces examining the drinking and music culture of their home towns of Glasgow and Motherwell, illustrated with cartoons, costumes and set pieces that had to be seen to be believed.

I was recruited for videographer duties so I didn't get to take any photies, not sure when the video will surface, but I have faith.

Next were Keith TOTP and his UK Minor Indie Celebrity Band, who were up to their usual high standards. Some might say that three guitarists is one too many, but Keith cranks it up to levels not seen since the Reindeer Section played the QMU with a mighty six guitars, only one bass player though. Maybe they could get together with FreeBase and it would all balance out.

That said, its quite possible that the fifth and sixth guitarists weren't plugged in, how would anyone know?

And headlining were Dream Themes. You know that episode of the IT Crowd where they go to the underground Countdown place, well, Dream Themes play live covers of popular TV theme tunes, and they rock. Highlights would be the Addams Family, Blockbusters and of course the sawing epic vistas of Bergerac.

Anyhoo, after spend around three hours trying to upload the podcast to SoundCloud, I gave up and went with another podcast provider, you should be able to download the mp3 from here with a trusty right click and save link as...

About 1 minute and 50 seconds in you can hear Martin from the Plimptons asking where the toilets are. Rock and Roll!!!!

#LonData

So yeah, I was at the #Londata meetup this evening, it was all about Big Data. I was a little out of my depth.

My depth being those job vacancy posts I did in 2009, those libor posts of 2008, and the London rents posts of 2012, all lovingly scraped by hand. Rather than the api-driven professional affairs of tonight's audience.

Anyhoo at #Londata a company called Bloom were showing off some pretty network diagrams illustrating influence on twitter. They look like dandelions and help companies identify who to engage with. Its all to do with who passes on specific messages on twitter and expands the reach of a client's campaign.

One thing I took away from the presentation was that I ought to change my profile details on Twitter to more accurately represent my interests. Or maybe not, maybe I can opt out of being a marketeer's pawn by having my interests as guinea pigs and Dutch politics, things completely incongruous to the content of my tweets.

Anyhoo, I was wondering how Bloom's networky authority stuff could apply to the indiepop music scene. Allo Darlin were playing at Kings College tonight so its kind of topical, and Allo Darlin are both the sort of band who's members go to lots of other gigs and are also the sort of band who played on a train platform at the seminal Indietracks 2008 festival.

There's a handful of bands and a handful of people who all go to the same concerts. Sure some gigs are full of other people and some people go to see other bands gigs, but there is a hard core who are key to the scene. This we already knew.

Maybe if they were diagrammed as nodes, each node is a person, the lines reflect going to gigs, the colours have no relevance.

This diagram is just to illustrate the concept, Alice from The Cosines has probably been to Moustache of Insanity gigs, Bill From Moustache of Insanity has probably reciprocated and Hannah from Owl and Mouse must have been to a Moustache gig at some point too. And Trev OddBox, he puts on most gigs within the scene.

But can twitter be used more intelligently than just spamming the usual suspects, and target people better than just me tugging on people's sleeves?

Information about who goes to what gigs used to be more freely available on songkick, you could look at anyone's gig history and filter it and easy build up an idea of who liked what gigs and who your gigmates are. But now this information is less visible and it takes minds greater than mine to extract it.

Hmm, I'm not quite sure what the point of this blogpost was, just a ramble I guess, with links.