Like Buses

Today is Daughter’s second Graduation in two years. Yes, you wait 21 years for one and then two come along almost at once. We take the day off and make an early start to get over to the Manchester for the ceremony which starts at 10am.

Things go well, the ceremony is short and sweet. Daughter even puts up with the endless photographs. We take her for lunch before heading back home again.

I have a gig tonight, that I am missing Derby’s 4-0 demolition of Charlton for.

Support comes from 'Stealing Sheep' who I was looking forward to seeing and the three Liverpudlian girls took to the stage dressed as... well I’m not actually sure what they were dressed as, with their technicolour bodysuits, capes and sunglasses. It does though match up with the cover of their latest album 'Get Real', not that that really solves the puzzle.

Psychedelic in look and also psychedelic in sound, at least initially because beyond that they are largely keyboard orientated pop. Perhaps what the Breeders would have sounded like if you'd taken away their guitars. 

After a few songs they take their shades off and get serious but sadly the girls are mainly lost in the darkness/smoke and the vocals are way too quiet meaning they fail to catch the attention of most of the audience. This is a shame because the three of them trading off vocals seems to be their thing.

Then two songs from the end someone seems to notice there is a problem. The lighting is turned up slightly, so that you could at least see their heads poking over their electronic gadgetry, and at the same time the vocals were turned up so that you could hear them. That made a massive difference and the crowd started to notice them. Shame that didn't happen at the start because five minutes later its shades back on and exit stage left. Dressed as whatever they are.

I'm not at all keen on these 'play an entire album in its entirety shows' but I'm actually quite looking forward to this one. I have also been driven to this one because Maxïmo Park have steadfastly refused to play one of my favourite tracks of theirs 'Once, a Glimpse' from their début album 'A Certain Trigger'. It is the only track on said album that I have never seen them play live, so tonight I will finally get to hear it. At least I would hope so as this is the 10^th Anniversary show of that album.

They have also promised some rarities tonight which I had took to mean that they might also play the ‘Missing Songs’ B-sides album from the same era. That they don’t do, at least not in its entirety, but they do play ‘A19’ and ‘A Year of Doubt’ from it and both sound great ten years on. This pair of forgotten gems come in a first set of 11 songs which lead singer Paul Smith describes as a career spanning selection from albums two to five.

They open the set with ‘Girls Who Play Guitars’ and close it with a double header of ‘Our Velocity’ and ‘Books from Boxes’. All three of those come from their second album ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’, as does the possible stand out track from this first section the splendid ‘Russian Literature’ which sort of highlights their problems of late. In that their last three albums can’t really hold a candle to the first two. That said ‘Midnight on the Hill’ from last year’s ‘Too Much Information’ is another stand out moment tonight.

 After this first set they wander off stage for all of about two minutes before returning. This is just enough time for Smith to change his shirt and put a tie on for the occasion.

I wasn’t sure just how highly rated ‘A Certain Trigger’ was by their fan base but now I am sure. Very highly. Its opening track ‘Signal and Sign’ is greeted like a long lost friend.

Suddenly the crowd are even more up for the night than they were before but then so too are the band as they throw themselves into this near classic album.

‘Apply Some Pressure’ is followed by the excellent ‘Graffiti’, then an epic ‘Postcard of a Painting’. It’s excellent stuff and that’s before we get to ‘Going Missing’, probably their finest moment.

Eventually, thankfully, ‘Once, a Glimpse’ arrives and it does indeed sound fine. Worth the ten year wait? Not sure about that but hopefully I won’t have to wait another ten years before they play it again.

I’m still recovering from that experience when the always brilliant ‘Acrobat’ arrives. 

Before the final track of the album, Smith announces that the band will not be doing an encore. This is, of course, quite a ‘rock n roll’ thing to do (or not do) but I’m not sure this applies if you apologise in advance.

He gives the excuse that they'd already been off once, I’m not really sure why they did that, and they'd already played all the ‘big ones’. Which would have made their choices for the encore somewhat interesting would it not? Or they could just have delayed one of those ‘big ones’ from earlier. I suppose in mitigation they had already played 24 tracks but there was still 30 minutes to go to curfew. Lightweights.

Despite that slight let down at the end, it’s still a rather excellent evening. As I said I hate entire album shows... but that was rather good.

(Tuesday 15^th December)

Something To Disrupt

There’s another cross country race on the park for the dogs and I to disrupt this morning and this one seems rather important. It’s the Midland Counties Cross Country Championships.

I would have stayed to watch it and disrupt it some more but it’s the FA Cup 4th Round today. A rare treat in these parts, although they’ll be no 5th round treat as Derby lose 2-0 at home to Premier League Stoke City. This is no disgrace of course but I didn’t feel we really gave it a go. Reverting to one up front, after such a good run playing with two strikers, was initially perhaps tactically astute against a Premier League team but then having gone a goal down in only four minutes... not changing the system until fifteen minutes to go seemed rather unambitious to me.

In the evening we partake of the ‘Margaret Thatcher’ film, the ‘Iron Lady’ which is on in the cosy romantic confines of the Paul Smith screen at Broadway. Well it would have been romantic had it not been a total sell out and I suppose not a film about Margaret Thatcher/dementia.

The film opens with an old lady complaining about the price of milk in her local shop. That lady is Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) who has given the security cordon around her flat the slip. Thatcher is now in her mid 80’s and growing physically and mentally frail. This is the focus for the majority of the film, an old lady in her twilight years, wandering around her flat, conversing with her daughter and her few staff, whilst sorting out the belongings of her late husband Dennis who died in 2003. Someone whom she seems to struggling to cope without because Dennis pops up regularly in her imagination, and in the ghostlike form of Jim Broadbent. This is at first confusing and then eventually quite annoying.

Interspersed with these present day scenes are flashbacks of the rest of her life. From growing up as a Greengrocer's Daughter to being inspired by her father and building a career in politics.

This is the real strength of the film as key events, such as the 1979 Election, the assassination of Airey Neave (Nicholas Farrell), the Brighton bombing, the miners' strike, the Poll Tax and the Falklands War vie for screen time. All of these scenes leave you gagging for more and while there were political omissions, personally I wanted more back story, of her life before politics, at university or while working as a barrister.

I also wanted to see the fight for the leadership of the party but her story is a vast one and there wouldn’t be enough time in any film for everything. Which makes it just the more annoying that after these too brief scenes we are returned repeatedly and rather frustratingly back to the present day.

It’s been a commonly expressed opinion, and I totally agree, that the film focuses on the wrong thing. A massive two-thirds of the film is set in the present day, which isn’t terribly interesting and actually makes me feel a bit uncomfortable for being a fly on the wall during somebody else’s declining health. Although it did achieve one thing and that was to humanise a woman who many people thought was anything but. Still, I got to the stage that if I saw Jim Broadbent's ghost one more time I was ready to stand up and punch him.

I can’t help feeling that if you want to make a film about an elderly person’s slide into dementia, then make one but you don’t need to focus on a famous figure to do that. Equally, if you going to make a film about Margaret Thatcher's life, make one. One day somebody will make a great one but unfortunately this isn't it. Two great story ideas do not together make one great film. An opportunity missed.

It’s still very enjoyable though, Dennis aside, with some great performances. Michael Pennington is hilarious as Michael Foot but then Michael Foot always was hilarious but Richard E Grant makes an odd Michael Heseltine. Meryl Streep meanwhile is outstanding as MT, but if we’re talking best Actress statuettes... is her Thatcher as good as Michelle Williams' Monroe? Probably not.

(Saturday 28th January)