f4f3 | "When a man is tired off Edinburgh, he is tired of traffic jams."

Went off through to Edinburgh last night to see The Black Seeds, at

psychochickenprompting. And very glad of the prompting I was too. I’d listened to their second album on the way over (I was sensible and took the train through) and it is very fine New Zealand roots reggae, so laid back that it’s horizontal in places. So I was surprised at the sheer level of funk washing off the stage last night. At times James Brown could have been parachuted in from heaven and slid seamlessly into the mix. Great stuff, that had me bopping around. Oh, ok, it had me hopping from one foot to another and swaying gently.
The venue helped – The Liquid Room is a nice shape and size, and it seemed to be home to half of Kiwi-Land last night. I was a bit put off by a shaven headed guy in front of me over-using his “head-butt” move, until I realised that he was activating my long-dormant pogo reflex, and that I wanted to be able to slam into him with reckless abandon. I considered this for a couple of minutes, but decided that it would have been out of keeping with my Ganesha t-shirt, which was getting a rare outing last night.
I got home sometime around 1.00, and I'm feeling a bit ragged today - some ringing in the ears, a bit of a sore throat. Did I mention that it was loud?

Tonight I’m going back through to Auld Reekie to see Neil Gaiman read from his latest, “The Graveyard Book”. I’m looking forward to it, even if I’ve decided to renege on my hideous oath never to drive into Edinburgh again. If you hear some swearing tonight, that will be me regretting the decision…