Blog: Croydon

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Having gone on about how GRATE it is to go ABROAD and get fed and watered at gigs, I do have to draw back slightly and say there is at least ONE place in England you can ROCK where they DO feed and water you: The Green Dragon in Croydon. For LO! that is where the glamorous trail of ROCK took me last night, and I enjoyed an EXTREMELY nice Vegetable Kiev. Ooh, I've not had anything like that for AGES and it was DELICIOUS.

As was the BEER, or at least the beer they had left, as there'd been a BEER FESTIVAL over the weekend which had been rather more popular than expected. There was a lot of CIDER left over tho!

The gig itself all went swimmingly - two bands had had to drop out, but Liz Crawford stepped in, introduced by a CROW. I think the crow may actually have been some sort of PUPPETRY, but the ILLUSION was made slightly spooky by the fact that they'd set it up with a MICROPHONE. Even when I was on stage myself and could see BEHIND THE MYSTERY the fact that the crow was talking into its own microphone was enough to slightly FREAK me OUT.

It MAY be that that's why I was slightly nervous, or that may be because I wasn't expecting to go straight on and spent a sizeable part of the gig needing a WEE, but that's how I felt as I attempted to do an abbreviated version of Dinosaur Planet. It SEEMED to go OK - I cut out a couple of songs, which was fine, but cutting out half the TALKING and JOKES made it feel very strange indeed, especially in the first half where there's LOTS of it. By the time we got into the second half and the ROCK EPIC things felt a lot smoother, and although i DID forget a couple of words it was nice to know MOST of it is safely in my BRANE ready for Friday.

After that there was just time for a quick chat with a few delightful people who'd come along special and then it was Superman Revenge Squad, who was FANTASTIC. I've seen him several times and he's always been GRATE but i think this was probably the best I've seen him - it may be the Crow Introduction that did it, but he seemed even MORE Urgent and Angry than usual, and there were LOADS of brilliant new songs. Afterwards he said they were less funny and more SAD, but I seemed to have listened to all of it with a big LIFE AFFIRMED GRIN. I'm not sure that that's the idea, but he expresses GLOOM so eloquently and with such FLAIR that I can't help it.

And then it was the long voyage home, full of the knowledge that our next stop for the ROCK TRAIN will FINALLY be Edinburgh. I'd better get packing!

posted 5/8/2009 by MJ Hibbett

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