Oh man I loooove de cake

Saw Little Britain live last night at the Brisbane Convention Centre, and it was excellent. Very clever and imaginative production, incredibly fast costume changes, hilarious sketches and even more hilarious ad lib work when the scripts got left behind. We had expensive tickets, but it was worth every cent (despite the annoying screeching laugh of the idiotic woman behind us who must have pissed herself she screamed and laughed and repeated the lines so much!!)

Thinking about it today, they are a really complimentary comic duo. I couldn't say which of them is my favourite, and there doesn't seem to be any in-fighting between them over who's the dominant one. I think that's a rare and valuable thing in entertainment, I just wonder what they'll do next.

Some of my highlights from the show:

• Marjorie Dawes picking a fattie from the audience to humiliate on stage, then telling us that cake is low in fat if you have a slice of it on a Ryvita (and sprinkle a bit of dust on top)
• Seeing the Dennis Waterman sketch live - it's even funnier when they have to make the props work without clever camera cuts
• Matt Lucas and David Walliams falling out of character in a shop sketch and just ad lib'ing about Matt being gay.
  
• David Walliams apologising to the kids in the audience for the rude content "to all you kids out there, I'm fucking sorry, ok?"
• During the interval, and for 15 minutes before the show started, the cameramen picked out people in the audience and showed them on the big screens - hilarious!
  

It was a pretty big venue, and with the big screens on either side of the stage it was realistically easier to watch those rather than the stage itself - which felt a bit more like watching TV than being at a live show, or perhaps more like watching a DVD of a live show. I guess the same was true at the Eric Clapton gig too.

I think we did go and see a fair few gigs when we were in London, but one of the differences here is that there are only top quality gigs every now and again, rather than every day of the week, so when they come along everyone gets tickets for them. I reckon that's quite a nice balance - there were almost too many things to see and do in London, it was hard to filter through all the static and find the things you wanted. With less choice here, but with top class acts typically including Brisbane on their tours, the stand-out gigs are clear to see.

...and we've got some more tickets to wicked live comedy coming up - Dylan Moran in May, and then we've got tickets for seats about 6 rows from the front for Ross Noble actually on my birthday in June :) Both of those gigs will be in more intimate venues, which will be nice.

Great surf this weekend

Really enjoyed having a surf this weekend :) Skye and I headed down to Currumbin fairly early on sunday, getting there for 7:30-ish to find that the carparks were jam-packed, the swell was 5ft+ and there was an offshore wind leaving the water glassy and smooth. Lovely.

Now, 5ft swell is pretty big, and tends to come with strong currents and crowds of surfers - it's been a bit beyond me up until this weekend. But I paddled out despite the trepidation, and had a great time. The direction of the swell meant that the waves came marching around the point like a row of ominously unstoppable walls - and more to the point, the waves broke in a long line right across the width of the bay, meaning that there was plenty of room to paddle out wide to get away from the crowds.

The first wave cleaned me right up - I eskimo-rolled to get through and under it, but my board was just ripped out of my hands and I (and the board!) got sucked up inside the wave and rolled over the falls. My longest hold-down yet, and despite sucking in a lungful before rolling over, I was swimming up to the surface to catch a breath before the wave had let me go. It had probably only been a few seconds, but it felt like longer and thinking about it now, I guess I was quite puffed from paddling out before I took the lungful, and tense from the trepidation. The wave took my hairband with it, so for the rest of the surf I must have looked like a mop-headed fool instead of just a pony-tailed fool :)

In all seriousness, those rare moments when you feel the strength of one of the forces of nature put things in perspective. I guess this is one of the reasons people surf - certainly it's one of the reasons I'm enjoying it. I felt very, very small struggling to the surface of the ocean, and I was stunned by how solidly and impersonally the wave had ripped control away from me and had held me underwater. I've had that feeling whilst surfing before, and a top 10 tips in one of the surf magazines was to never underestimate the power of the ocean - because guaranteed that the moment you think you've got it licked, there's a monster wave building up somewhere just out of sight with your name written all over it...

Anyway - I did get nailed by a few other girthy waves, but I also caught a couple of big, clean, powerful faces and managed the takeoff and bottom turn. And a real first for me - I took off down a face, looked up and saw that I'd have to steer around some other guy paddling up the face, and I managed to do it! Luckily for him, I had to steer right (which I can do). If I'd had to have steered left, he would have ended up with 9 foot of surfboard and 5 foot 7 of mop-headed fool in his face :)

To top it off, for my last wave I caught a beaut right into the beach, literally jumping off the board into knee-deep water and taking two steps to get out of the surf and onto the sand. Turns out I had been surfing for a good 2 hours, which is a long session for me, and I hadn't even noticed. After a late breakfast with friends, we went back to the beach and just relaxed, had a snooze, messed about in the calm cool water of the inlet, then went to Rainbow Bay surf club for lunch.

Rainbow Bay was really buzzing - the Quikky Pro starts there in a few weeks time, which is the first event of the world pro surfing tour. We had a great spot on the verandah at the surfclub looking right out over Snapper Rocks, which is exactly where the competition will be held.

Nice food, a couple of very cold beers, and I bumped in Mark Occhilupo (ex-world surfing champ, and general Aussie legend) at the bar - I didn't bother him, just did a quick double-take and let him get on with his lunch.

When we got home, I turned on the TV to watch the end of the second final in the Commonwealth bank one day cricket series, and would you believe it - we won! So, as a fantastic day drew to a close I happily sent a text message to all the Aussies who've been ribbing me about the cricket, simply one word: "sweet"

Is Clapton God?

well, the famous graffiti was probably over-stating how good a guitarist he is, but he is a pretty damn good guitarist nonetheless!

We saw EC at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Weds night, and it was quite an experience. I've never been to a gig at an arena or stadium before, as I much prefer a more intimate, smaller venue. But, you'll never get to see someone like EC at a small venue, so I guess you just have to roll with the punches.

We got to the BEC on the train, which was nice and easy. It's then 600 metres walk from the station to the venue through some lovely bushland - very nice, and no snakes / spiders / great white sharks attacked and ate us :) The weird thing was the age group of everyone else that got off the train there.... a *lot* of grandparents!

The warm-up act was Mia Dyson, and she was good. Nice bluesy voice, she sings and plays guitar in a 3 piece band, and her guitar playing was smooth and chunky. I was nicely warmed up for the main event. We had silver class tickets (I think) which meant that although they cost quite a bit of money, they weren't stupidly expensive and we had fairly good seats. From where we sat, we had a pretty good view down onto the stage, and the sound quality was clear. Danm loud though! :)



But. Even though EC was very, very good for some reason his band had *3* lead guitarists. Now, some bands have got away with having 2 lead guitarists (Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden) but never 3. And we didn't pay all that money to hear these other, unknown, guys play - we only wanted to hear Eric play. This meant that we all were niggled throughout the gig by these guys, who, although they were fairly good, showed absolutely no emotion and feel in either their playing or their body language. Their body language of standing stationary, with virtually no change to their facial expressions just said "oh, here I am again swapping solos with Eric Clapton in front of 10,000 people, what a drag". Boring to watch, and boring to hear. And being a blues band there were plenty of solos over a 12 bar blues - but this band had to give all bloody 3 guitarists their solos.... I really could continue ranting about this, but I'll stop there :)

That aside, when Eric sat down with just an acoustic and played "Rambling on my mind" off the John Mayall's Blues Breakers album, it was just magic. And he did play Layla (of course!), Cocaine, Crossroads and even a stunningly beautiful rendition of "Wonderful Tonight". The drummer, bass player and keys guys were all amazing, and EC himself was simply stunning. If I were giving marks out of 10, I'd only be able to deduct points for the 2 extra guitarists.

I don't know if I'd be up for another "guitar legend" gig like that - EC tipped the balance on the positive side against the negative weight of the arena venue, the stupid quantity of lead guitarists in the band and the cost of the ticket. But if he'd been anything less than stunningly amazing, I don't think it would have been worth it.

Anyway - the next gig is Little Britain Live a week on Monday, looking forward to that!