Sweltering....

It's hot. Damned hot
*sweats*
Anyway, it's been a few days, so what have I been doing? A quick trawl of the boot sales on Sunday turned up some great old Balearic vinyl : "Afro Dizzy Act", that sort of thing...So Sunday night saw me at the decks, pretending I was back at Shoom :)
Sunday was also a time for swimming: nice and late in the evening, just when the sun dips towards the horizon is exactly the right time to swim in the sea at Brighton...The water may be FREEZING when you get in, but after a while you don't really notice (or maybe it's just that you can't feel your extremities any more)
This week has been ridiculously hot: nights filled with cold showers; days spent wilting on the Tube. But there's quite a (cliche alert) Blitz spirit to the whole thing: we struggle on, secretly proud of ourselves for coping.
Monday was Palace Fires at the Barfly, they were excellent: assured, languid and relaxed, yet focused completely on what they were doing. I spent most of the gig trying to work out who they reminded me of (with little success);at the end of the night I told Steve (guitarist) that fragments reminded me of The Stars Of Heaven (and BTW, ignore that review, they were an AWESOME band) only for Steve to tell me he loved TSOH, making him the only other fan of the band I've met in 15 years.
Yesterday night was The Sleepy Jackson at the Scala: he's a cocky little bastard and no mistake about it...But it's no understatement to say that Luke Steele is a genius. Last night he veered between feeback excess (including some heroic guitar-tossing antics and lots of windmilling axe-hero shapes) and impossibly frail episodes that counterbalanced the squall of noise and ideas that always swarm around his head. There were a couple of moments which bordered on the spiritual: I could feel my spirits rise in tandem with the goosebumps on my arms. Can't just have been the cider, can it?