Guns n Roses

Oh bloody hell. Channel One, or whatever Virgin’s calling itself these days has just ruined my evening by prefixing every ad break with something about Christmas. Give us a break guys. It’s not even Halloween yet and I absolutely, steadfastly refuse to even think about anything Jingle Bells-related until after I’ve been to see Alice Cooper!

So last night Mrs H3 and I went to see Guns n’ Roses at the O2. It was a weird experience in more ways than one.

If you remember, I was heading off to see I Am Kloot, in Nottingham a week ago. Although I had a fantastic time (understandably), due to terrible traffic and crap hotel service from Premier Inns (who, in a continuation of their crap service, still haven’t bothered to reply to my e-mail of complaint), I actually missed half an hour of the concert as they had to take to the stage early. This meant that, very strangely, they were finished and off by 10pm, which coincidentally was the time that Axl Rose and his chums went on stage last night.

Now I must admit I’ve been a bit surprised by the reviews I’ve read of the concerts that were held over the last two days at the O2. They seem to be generally rather anti-GnR and cover the same four topics: that Axl has got fat; that they were late on stage; that Axl had to use an autocue to remember the words of his hit songs and that Slash wasn’t there. In several cases, you could actually be forgiven for thinking that the reviewers hadn’t actually been at the concert as their views of the evening differed so wildly from a majority of the people that were there (and there were huge amounts of comments attached to the reviews proving this, certainly far more than one would normally expect).

Well, sorry reviewers, Mrs H3 and I had a bloody good evening.

Guns n Roses were late on stage: Oh my, really? Anyone who knows anything about GnR, knows that they don’t start early. They never have done. In fact their timekeeping seems to have improved somewhat compared to previous concerts Mrs H3 has attended. Anyway, O2 sent warnings that they were likely to be on late and therefore over-run and even laid on an extra train and buses to help people to get home, so how was this a problem? Everyone going already knew they were going to be late so the 10pm start wasn’t exactly a surprise. Okay, I’ll admit that it was a bit inconvenient being on a work night. But surely when you book the ticket for a concert during the week, you take this into account. You know whether you can hack a late finish and plan accordingly – and lots of people did leave before the end, but Mrs H3 and I were there for the duration even though we knew that meant not leaving the O2 until 1am.

The thing is that whilst they may have gone on late, they put on a brilliant show and can definitely be considered value for money as they were on stage for almost three hours non-stop. No mean feat for any band, especially one of advancing years. Talking of value for money, we’re wondering what Tony Hadley is going to be doing at his O2 Indigo show to make the ticket price of £80+ worth paying.

Axl Rose is getting fat: Is this a crime? We’re all getting older, and part of getting older is gaining weight – except for me for whom the fat has always been an issue. So Axl’s gained a few pounds; so what? So had a lot of the audience! More of a crime for me was his porno ‘tache, reminiscent of Rufus Hound’s excellent facial hair. But unlike Rufus it didn’t suit him and needs to go...now.

I thought Axl was entertaining, both with his fabulous voice, which really shone out last night, and with his constant wardrobe changes which way outdid anything Shirley Bassey would attempt (that man must have the world’s biggest collection of scarves and dodgy jackets), and his enthusiasm and energy was enough to override any interesting taste choices.

Axl had to use an autocue: Well if he did, good for him for wanting to get the words right. I’ve been to many a concert where ‘big’ stars have forgotten the words to their songs (actually, this is a regular occurrence with IAK and part of their quirky charm), and I’m not surprised that he’d want to have a back up there, just in case, when we’re talking about songs over twenty years old. He’s not alone in that and at least he wasn’t miming and still has the power in his voice to carry off the songs.

Slash wasn’t there: The other big thing that the reviewers made mention of was the fact that GnR now has 4 guitarists, and none of them match up to Slash, although all try. This is true. But rather than bemoan the fact that they don’t match up, they could have at least acknowledged that they are fine musicians.

Duff McKagan was there last night, apparently the first ‘original’ GnR members to reconcile and now talk is rife about the others returning. But I think it’s fair to say that the chances of an Axl/Slash reunion are non-existent, based on comments made by both of them, and rather than harp on about how much better it would have been with Slash there, the reviewers would have served the public better by giving the current line up a fair hearing.

Regardless of type of music, I applaud any band that takes the time to leave the stage and go and talk to their disabled fans, as was the case last night and I was disappointed at how negative the reviews came across to most people, as almost every person I told today about the concert said they’d heard how crap they were.

Admittedly, they could have cut the show short by an hour, if they’d not given each member of the band a solo and cut down on the tracks from Chinese Democracy. But as the tour is promoting the album it was always likely that a majority of the set list would come from that album, and I suspect that the lulls in attention/enjoyment were mainly due to lack of knowledge of the material. Certainly, a man in front of us was having a fantastic time, and his enjoyment, and sometimes rather literal dance interpretation of the music kept the entertainment value at a premium, even during those CD moments.

I was pleased that they were happy to have played such a long set and clearly enjoyed doing so, and would have had no problem with letting them carry on all night if it had been the weekend. I am sure that had they been on stage at 8.30pm and performed the same set, everyone would have lauded them, but the late time changed perceptions of what, really was, a great concert.

Zynga Games – Addictive and Annoying

I was supposed to be watching the England game, but to be honest it’s so boring I’ve decided to update my blog instead.

I’ve just been trying to play a few of my Facebook games and am feeling pretty pissed off at how long they take to play. Partially this is due to my crap broadband connection (thanks TalkTalk for being so bloody rubbish) but partially it’s because of the games themselves. Like a majority of gamers on FB I, for my sins, mainly play Zynga games – a good way to feel frustrated really fast.

The game I play most is Farmville and I freely admit that I love it. I’ve invested a hell of a lot of time, and an awful lot of money, upgrading and buying and have a fine collection of animals and water features that I can’t display because I don’t have the room due to wanting to continue to actually farm.

When I first began to play the game about a year ago, there was little to do except plough and plant your fields and reap your harvests. As time has gone on there are so many parts to the game it’s almost impossible to keep track of what you’re doing. Not only can you do collective jobs to gain items (I don’t bother), you can do collective jobs to gain items for your spa/bakery/winery (I don’t bother). Even though they’ve introduced vehicle after vehicle to save you time with planting, ploughing and harvesting (the latest being the all-in-one combine), you still have to remember to fertilize and then use a previously harvested bushel to improve your mastery stats when harvesting. And then you can make things in the spa using all those bushels you’ve harvested. And all the while you’re collecting vehicle parts and building materials to make the latest shed/nursery/botanical garden etc.

Every few weeks there are new limited edition items to tempt you and I am easily tempted – especially when it comes to animals that can be bred (and strange shaped rocks for some reason). However, this is an area that is really beginning to annoy me. I buy a limited edition horse and put it in my stable. A few days/weeks later my horse gives birth to cute little limited edition foals BUT instead of me getting the reward for this, I have to give the foal away to my neighbours. This pattern is followed for limited edition eggs, truffles, and whatever other ideas they’ve come up with this week.

This would be all well and good if I was getting the equivalent type items back in return. But I’m not. I have a rainbow chicken that lays rainbow eggs which I regularly have to give away. I’ve never seen another rainbow egg on offer from any of my neighbours, nor do I ever seem to get the rarer type of eggs – Rhode Island, Cornish, Scots etc. as they’ve all already gone whenever I try to collect. I even have trouble getting the gold or black eggs. How can it be fair that after the amount I’ve invested and shared, that all I get in return is a brown or white egg containing a white chicken?

It would be much fairer if the things I harvest to go to me, with the option to share another with others, as happens with the special offer trade-ins.

Talking of sharing, this is another incredibly frustrating part of farming. Now, almost every click of the mouse brings up a button asking me to share stuff with my neighbours. Whether it be the aforementioned eggs, or fuel that I found whilst ploughing, bushels of goods I’ve just harvested, or collection items, you can’t get away from the bloody messages. And now, every time you level up or gain mastery you can send various people fuel to gloat that you’ve just beaten them too.

Firstly, these pop-ups are really bloody annoying, but especially when I’m in the middle of trying to harvest my crop. I like to have the farm open at full screen and every time the pop up posts it reduces the screen size. I’m sorry Zynga, but it doesn’t matter what I’ve found/am offering, if it happens during my harvest it doesn’t get posted. And stop with taking me to the gift page every time I open my gift box. If I wanted to send a gift I’d be at the gift page not attempting to get into my gift box. And while we’re on the subject, no I don’t want to post one of those crappy “common” collection items to a selection of people. No one wants or needs these items, we all have hundreds. What we need are the rarer items coming out more regularly – I haven’t seen a red feather or a swallowtail butterfly for months!

And now we have the added excitement of truffle farming. The idea is you send your pigs off, they find a truffle and, yep you’ve guessed it, you give it away. Now if your neighbours are decent, they’ll click the button to accept the truffle and send you one back. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen often. Due to successful collecting on my part, most of my pigs collect either gold or white truffles, but it appears that the people I share with have no interest in sharing back. Surely better is that because my pigs collected, I get one automatically and the other goes to the person whose farm it was on. Then we both win.

Also frustrating is that those of us who play who aren’t in the US get to miss out on all sorts of promotions and offers for limited edition items, although we do get the opportunity to take part in the cross-game offers.

This brings me onto another game I play regularly Yoville. I love this game because you can actually do as much or as little as you want. If you have the urge to collect everything in sight you can, or you can buy a house and spend years decorating it to your style. There are incentives for visiting every day, but if you don’t visit for a month you haven’t lost anything apart from the opportunity to buy furniture from whatever limited edition theme was on during the time you were away. There are things you can make with widgets or things you can click on to share with others like animals, keys, drinks etc. but generally you can ignore them if you want.

Zynga, in an attempt to get people playing their new game, are currently doing a cross-promotion with Treasure Isle. If you play that for a few levels you (apparently) get a lotus pond for Yoville. So far I’ve been playing this game for 3 days and got to level 7 and I’ve still seen no sign of the pond. And I can tell you that Treasure Isle is quite possibly one of the most boring gems I’ve ever played. I shall keep going till level 10, after that it will be another complaint to Zynga.

The other Zynga game I play regularly, although not so much since I’ve come back from Spain is Vampire Wars. Before I went away I had a clan of approximately 3,000 vamps who I looked after, helped and voted for regularly. But lack of time has reduced my time to get involved and so currently it’s pretty much on the back burner. I still enter as often as possible to take my spins etc. but everything else has been scaled back for the time being.

Mafia Wars is the one game that has taken a huge hit in my gaming time. Again I originally started playing only as a cross-over for Farmville, but soon became engrossed in the game. However, this really is a complex game and there are so many different things to do to play it properly that I just don’t have time. As a major amount of my free time these days seems to be taken up with accepting and sending gifts for the various games, now everyone can ask for gifts as well as send them the inbox has increased hugely, I’ve found myself visiting Mafia Wars less and less. I usually visit once a day because of the VW/MW cross-over, but no longer accept gifts for the game, nor do I take part in anyone’s crime sprees etc. In fact, I think it would be fair to say it’s a game I no longer play.

Well I'm Back....

Hi there. Remember me?

I know, it’s been forever since I last published a blog, but in my defence I’ve actually been rather busy. Pretty much most of my Summer was spent in Spain with my family and since I’ve been back (3 weeks) everything seems to have been a bit of a blur.

In part this is because I’m having trouble settling back into a normal routine after so long spent doing other things and partially because there have been a spate of concerts to attend, beginning with the ever-wonderful Muse at Wembley Stadium and ending with a sublime and utterly perfect evening of wonder with I Am Kloot at the Union Chapel.

I do feel a little aggrieved that being away I missed the opportunity to crow wildly about I Am Kloot being nominated for this year’s Mercury Music Award for their latest album ‘Sky at Night’, so I’ll do it now instead. They didn’t win as they were far too talented and we don’t want them disappearing without trace as most previous prize winners have tended to do. However, it did rob me of the opportunity to remind everyone over and over again that I’ve been touting Kloot as the perfect band for years.

Last week saw Mrs H3 (whom I have missed as badly as if half my soul was missing) and I at two I Am Kloot concerts; the first at Komedia in Brighton, where we have previously seen them and then at the Union Chapel in London, a new and absolutely stunning venue.

Now obviously I always get a little over-excited when I get to see Kloot play live and Monday night was no exception, especially once I realised that they weren’t playing the new album accompanied with all the stringy stuff that Elbow added on as they had at Bush Hall and which we hadn’t particularly enjoyed, and this made my heart beat just that little bit faster.

Whilst I would agree that the new album is worthy of Mercury nomination, to my mind I’m just not sure that as an album it’s any better than any of their previous offerings. I think the reason for this is partially that Guy and his chums have over-influenced the album. Yes, it’s a lovely sounding thing, but Kloot are Kloot, not Elbow and I don’t want them sounding like Elbow. I am aware that Mrs H3’s feelings on this are the same as mine as she gave a huge sigh every time the strings appeared on Wednesday night.

Although the strings were missing on Monday, there was plenty of extra instrumentation around in the form of a huge saxophone, trumpet and, at one point, an accordion. There was a huge increase too, in the amount of people at the gig , due to the Mercury nomination and this was especially noticeable when old classics like “Same Deep Water” didn’t even get a cheer, whereas the new songs were riotously applauded. What was particularly nice was that the increased crowd didn’t result in increased talking through the songs as has been the problem at several of their previous concerts. A new-found respect for the band? I certainly hope so.

I thoroughly enjoyed the concert, although there were some issues with sound quality, at least where we were standing – noticeably at the end of “Same Deep Water” and especially during “Radiation”, when I actually moved to a different part of the room to see if it sounded any better.

Sound quality definitely wasn’t an issue at the Union Chapel. This place really is the perfect venue for a concert. Fully seated, although the pews weren’t hugely comfortable, especially after about 3 ½ hours, a kitchen selling tea – yep – cups of lovely steaming hot tea, and an ice cream vendor who came to us when we realised there was ice cream available. On top of that the acoustics were amazing and after watching Agnes Obel performing her beautiful ethereal music, I was even more excited than usual to be seeing I Am Kloot at work.

And I wasn’t disappointed. I think I can safely say it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to and certainly the best I Am Kloot concert. Never have they sounded better and Johnny was in fine form with his banter. Even Pete talked!

There was a slightly worrying moment part way through when people began clapping along to one of the songs – no, please don’t people, I’ve already said, Kloot aren’t Elbow – but fortunately that was short-lived and normal service was soon resumed. Until the end when Johnny ditched his guitar to grab the mike and drift around the stage Frank Sinatra-stylee (yep and I’ve got photos to prove it). It seemed to me that Johnny, at least, was as overwhelmed by this fabulous venue as I and many others were.

I think the evening can best be summed up in words from the boys themselves “everything we ever thought we'd ever want, me and you, it just came true” – everything definitely came true at the Union Chapel and I am so glad I was there to witness it!

Unfortunately, I was then reminded that we wouldn’t be seeing them again until January (just after my birthday) and that set off my post-IAK depression/addiction. Remembering that they still had the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham to play, I decided that I just HAD to go there (you’ll recall that this happened last time they played there too).

So, fortunately this is not the end of my current I Am Kloot journey. Tomorrow I get to experience one last moment of bliss, although in a completely different way.

If you want to check out my Youtube channel I’ve actually got round to uploading the songs I videoed from Union Chapel and Komedia, and I’ve also uploaded the footage from the Muse concert and a previous concert at the Jazz Cafe with Marc Almond...who says I’m not being productive?