Tuesday was spent heading off to the zoo to see the new elephant enclosure (and the rest). The elephants must be a lot happier, now having a larger and more interesting enclosure with a pool, as well as the chance to have a walk every day. It isn't all all what I expected though (it's pretty much the same as before only bigger), I believe it still has a long way before it's finished.
Walken gig on Friday at Laundry with Meebar and The Kits. I'm looking forward to seeing Meebah. We should have two new songs for the fans.
See Dave's review (and Josh and Damien) for more technical details of the night. This is a fan's ranting.
Richard Wilkins should not be allowed near anything, ever.
The live show was filmed "last night" in the UK, so in theory around 11 hours before we saw it. It doesn't take much thinking to know the whole show is a huge advertisement for the latest album and little else. David Bowie nor Sony would have made any money out of such an elaborate exersise.
It's extreamly brave for any artist to get in front of a crowd and play an entire album of new material that no one has heard before. In one way it's easier because no one will be aware of any mistakes having never heard the song... but on the other hand a song needs to be absolutely fantastic to break through the never-heard-it barier. You end up with a crowd of careful listeners and polite claps. Not great viewing.
As a fan of Bowie's later works (I mainly enjoy Earthling and Heathen, his 80's work leaves me cold, only his very early work being interesting) I'm thinking this album will be good, with around four songs grabbing my attention.
Although it's hard to judge an album on a live viewing with such terrible sound. As interesting an idea it is to view the show less than a day after it happened in a nice cinema, they obviously didn't have time to mix the sound. It began as you'd expect the show to sound if you were sitting in the nose-bleed seats at a stadium show, and finished not much better than an OK mixed pub show. Not what I expected for the advertisied Dolby 5.1 experience.
After playing the new album, David appeared live on screen (really live this time) and answered pre selected questions from the audience in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. The questions tended to be your usual boring marketing questions ("are you playing Australia on this tour?" "how's the baby?") and this part of the show made me want to crawl away and cry. The sound was terrible (think a phone quality conversation amped to explosion level in a cinema).
Following the live link we got to see the five/six song encore of "Bowie classics", apparently voted for on BowieNet by fans. The old stuff played was played well and noisely and the crowd obviously had much more fun hearing stuff they knew. Good version of Hallo Spaceboy and a Heathen track I can't think of the name of right now.
I had fun, the album sounds like it'll be good but not great, I felt a bit like I was being used in a huge marketing experiment but didn't mind.
In reality (haha) it (the cinema experience) isn't that huge a deal. We've been doing live crosses on TV for decades. It's just bigger and $25. Actually... it wasn't even live for most of it...