Writer's Block

Thursday saw the long awaited return to London of one of my favourite bands, Say Anything. It's a little difficult to describe them to the uninitiated other than to say they combine the best elements of alternative rock, punk and pop to generate a frenetic sound. Their show at xoyo near Old Street was their first in the capital for four years and anticipation was suitably high. Say Anything recently released a new record "Anarchy My Dear" earlier in the year which is somewhat more pop driven than their previous efforts. A couple of songs in, frontman Max Bemis thanks the crowd for buying the album saying " You could have just clung on to what we were in 2004" referring to their breakout record "...Is A Real Boy". The 13 song set remains dominated by that debut record however, opening with the anthemic "Belt" and closing with "Admit It!!!", a glorious middle finger to the posers and sneering critics that remain a blight on the scen...

Football blog alert. As a Manchester United fan who has seen his team surrender an 8 point lead with 5 games of the season to go, I was expecting a routine home victory for Manchester City against Queens Park Rangers, enough to give them the title on goal difference. What transpired was the single most devastating, even cruel finale to a league season that I've ever witnessed. United completed a fairly comfortable (if tense) 1-0 victory against Sunderland at the Stadium of Light (my second team, whose slump in form has been troubling). Entering injury time, City were 2-1 down. Four minutes later, they had won 3-2 against the 10 man QPR. I turned over just in time to see Aguero score the winner. The first thing you are taught when you are playing in goal as a child is to cover your near post. It seemed incredible to me therefore that the QPR goalkeeper Paddy Kenny had left a space at his near post that you could park a car in. I'm also more than a little suspicious...

It's been a while since I blogged here but I feel an urge to start writing again. Mainly because I'm hoping it might springboard me back towards the original purpose, which was to try and inspire myself to write more stand up. It's been a while since I've taken an extended break from comedy and I've been pondering it a lot, but the people around me have convinced me to persist, at least for the time being. The oversaturated London scene is not doing me any favours though and I'm very much looking forward to gigging out of town at the Quadrant in Brighton on Saturday for Laughing Horse. In the meantime, I've been getting back out to a few more gigs of the musical variety. Tellison have been one of my favourite discoveries of recent years. They basically have a string of enormous catchy indie rock songs with more singalongs than you can shake a stick at. I saw them back in October in front of 50 people at the Tunbridge Wells Forum where they were ace. It was...