Bombing Run My old mucker Ant has put together …
Bombing Run
My old mucker Ant has put together a fascinating website about his time as an extra in the film Pearl Harbor, currently rewriting history as a series of explosions (both orgasmic and ordinance) at a cinema near you. Ant’s site has lots of pictures, anecdotes and it’s immaculately laid out to boot. This puts me in something of a quandary - Pearl Harbor is the epitomy of everything evil about films as far as I’m concerned, but I have to go and see the damn thing just to laugh at Ant mincing around playing an RAF officer. Apparently he’s in the spin off “making of” book too.
I went to see Henry Rollins again last night doing a spoken word show at the Astoria. It was fun but it wasn’t the same, savage Rollins you encounter on the Boxed Life album or indeed, the same Rollins I saw last year at the Jongleurs club in Camden. He spoke for 3 hours and his show suffered as a result - it wasn’t tight and only easy targets were dealt with. I still enjoyed it and had a few good laughs, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. Maybe it was just a bad night, although the rest of the audience loved it.
One gig I did thoroughly enjoy and inexplicably failed to mention here before was seeing Soft Cell a couple of months ago at the newly opened Hackney Ocean. Marc Almond looked resplendent in freshly peroxided hair and suitably seedy black leather, and he and Dave Ball took great delight in ripping through all their classics - to the point where Almond simply stopped singing during “Torch” and let the audience do it for him, which was a curiously moving moment. Best of all, Dave Ball obviously revelled in being able to rearrange his tunes with the wonders of modern technology, and the sheer level of noise the pair managed to produce was superb - their love of Suicide was at the fore, which, coupled with Almond pushing his voice to its operatic limits, made for a glorious set. Total diseased cabaret. It wasn’t all retrowonder, though - they played several new tunes which held up very well against the classics - not bad for a band who’ve been away for 17 years. When the new album will emerge - or indeed, more UK gigs - is still not known, but you can always fill in with Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and keep an eye on AlmondNet in the meantime.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Black Flag Henry Rollins releases "Smile, You’r…
- Light Holiday Reading Whilst away I got through…
- Henry Rollins Blog
- Will Self Competition: Win The Book Of Dave
- Hexstatic Their new album Rewind has been bubbl…
