William Shatner sings "Rocket Man"

'Nuff said.

I quite like this one, too...

OK, I'll stop this now. It's getting silly.

I suspect my geek gland will be working overtime this summer...

Slight return

"We met a crazed speed garage afficianado from Northampton, who advised us not to buy a double gin and Red Bull (and not because of the taste), and told the most uninteresting interesting anecdote about the Astoria. It’s a bit scary to get stuck talking to somebody like that, but looking back it means that I’ll remember the Breeders gig as the gig with the nutter. It fits."

Steve Miller remembers the Breeders gig with his far more succinct (and possibly far more accurate) account of the evening here.

How cool is this?

The Breeders, Birmingham Academy, 13th April 2008

So here I am, and there I was - enjoying a sticky-floored Sunday evening at Birmingham's bijou Academy 2. I was there to see The Breeders and it was all thanks to my friend - macaroon chomping Friend-of-Garfield Jez Higgins - who generously gave me the ticket that he bought just seconds before he realised the gig clashed with his Wedding Anniversary. These things happen, and lucky for me they do. Thanks for the ticket, Jez and Nat. Hope you had a Happy Anniversary.

I got to the venue fairly late as I'd spent most of the day recovering from the previous night, which happened to be my Mum's 70th Birthday Party. I'll write about that some other time, assuming my dangerous dance moves don't end up on YouTube first.

Anyhow, the dramatis personae for the evening were my friends Sal, Dave, Pete & Steve. When I arrived at The Academy, Sal - who'd travelled all the way up from Bristol - was nowhere to be found while Dave (who works at the venue) was, um, working at the venue. I caught up with Pete and Steve shortly after catching the tail-end of Jim Noir, the support act. Jim Noir seemed like fun, or at least their tail-end did. I can't comment about their top-side, let alone their midsection.

Anyhow, we were all there to see The Breeders - and mighty fine they were, too.
The Deal twins, Kim and Kelley, were on top form. Bookending the stage with the rest of the band in between, they provided a steady stream of betwixt-song banter and oblique sisterly in-jokes that entertained the huddled masses no end. With delicate ferocity they blasted through tracks from their new album, Mountain Battles, as well as enough vintage material to keep decrepit old farts like me happy and content. The new stuff was well received, their classics like Cannonball really lit up the crowd, but for me the highlight was their sublime cover of The Beatles' Happiness is a Warm Gun. I'm not a big fan of Beatles' covers, but this was an exceptional exception.

All in all, then, a good gig by a band I'd always wanted to see live. To some in the crowd, though, it was more than just that. To alt-rock fans of a certain age - and, let's be honest, I'm talking specifically about my age here - there's something quite special about Kim Deal. Sure, as the effortlessly hip frontwoman of The Breeders for 18-odd years she's earned her rock and roll stripes. As the bass guitarist, backing singer and sometimes co-songwriter with the seminal band Pixies, however, she's long since been elevated to the status of living goddamn legend. I got the impression that a few hardliners had only turned up at the gig to get a quick fix of idol worship to tie them over until the next Pixies reunion. It was a bit like Beatlemaniacs at a 'Wings' concert, I suppose.

Of course, that sort of stuff can sometimes get embarrassing.

Somewhere between the tail-end of Jim Noir and the front-end of The Breeders I was catching up with Pete and Steve and looking out for Sal. We were nattering away about nothing untoward when a tall, 30-something, intense-looking chap in a Ramones T-shirt muscled-in on the small talk and - with an edge of inappropriate urgency - blurted out to Pete: "I like your Parka, mate."

"Um, thanks," said Pete, suddenly aware of his parka.

"Yeah," said Ramones T-shirt man (let's call him 'Joey'). "I love parkas I do. F*****g brilliant, they are, The King of Coats. I hope you pull some fit bird in a Lambretta tonight. Some fit bird (Right?) who drives her Lambretta into the Acadamy (Right?) and f*****g pulls you 'cos of your Parka, (Right?)."

"Ummm, right..." said Pete.

Joey was speaking in that unmistakable, uninterruptable tempo that's commonly associated with those with a penchant for industrial-strength Colombian Marching Powder. He was, I'd decided, a victim of substances beyond his control. Being stone cold sober I wasn't equipped to deal with this and decided to exuent stage left at the first opportunity. 'Joey' must have been reading my mind, because just at these thoughts were crystallising in my cranium he jabbed a gnarly finger at me and said:

"Your jacket's shit, man."

Before I had a chance to defend the reputation of the Levi Strauss Company or say something witty, clever and self-effacing like "I prefer to think of it as à la merde...", our new gig-pest pal-apparent immediately launched into a high-tempo verbal rampage that went something like this:

"The Pixies, man, they changed my life. They changed my f*****g life. When I first heard the Pixies, man, I was listening to them with this mate from Leeds (he's into dance now - he only listens to Dance now, but he was well into the Pixies back in the day - he's a DJ in Leeds) and the Pixies, man, they sounded like nothing else we'd ever heard. Seriously, man, like nothing else. I couldn't listen to any other music, man, not after listening to the Pixies. That's how much they changed my life."

There was a contemplative pause that lasted for about a beat.

"I got Title TK when it came out," he continued. "I haven't listened to it yet. It's still in the cellophane wrapper. I'm afraid of listening to it. I don't want it to ruin the memories..."'

Title TK' was an album by The Breeders. It was released six years' ago.

The monologue continued for quite some time, lurching in many directions but never straying too far from the key anchor words of "Pixies", "Changed" and "Life". While all this was going on, I was desperately trying to make my excuses and leg it. After all, I had a legitimate excuse: I had to find my good friend Sal. She was a stranger to Birmingham and I didn't know whether she was a gig-MIA or at an NIA-gig. But every time I started to say "Must dash - I've got to go and find my friend from Bristol" Joey trampled the words to death before my very ears. This happened on numerous occasions and I never made it past the first adverb.

"You were talking about gigs at Camden Palace, weren't you, right?" said Joey, after we specifically did not talk about gigs at Camden Palace. "I've been to Camden Palace," he continued. "London's really mad, innit? I've got this anecdote about Camden Palace: I was going to a gig at Camden Palace (can't remember who it was - I was really f*****g wasted) and I'd never been there before and I got off at Camden Tube Station and I didn't know where I was going so I asked this taxi driver 'Where's Camden Palace?' and he said 'Cor Blimey, stone the crows, mate - that's about a mile and a half away' and I said 'Mile-and-a-half? That's how far I walk to the corner shop every day!"

And that, it seemed, was his anecdote.

He told us many things. He told us that he wasn't from Stoke but people from Stoke have told him you can't get grass in Stoke. He told us about a t-shirt he was going to make especially for the Breeders' gig: "I made a t-shirt (Right?). I made this f*****g t-shirt. F*****g hilarious it is. Wait 'til you see it. Shit - I forgot to bring it. I meant to bring it tonight. I made it for tonight. It reads: 'What's the Deal, Kim and Kelley?' Geddit? Deal... Kim Deal? Geddit? 'Kim and Kelley'? D'ya geddit? Geddit? Geddit? Geddit? Geddit? Geddit?"

We got it.

"But, man," he sighed, "I love the Pixies." Something had suddenly changed in Joey's voice. His tempo had slowed down. Uh oh, I thought. This can only mean trouble.

"Yeah, the Pixies really changed my life. And Kim changed my life, too. There will always be a special place in my heart for that woman." There was a pause. Joey took a deep breath. You could just tell that this is the moment was what his whole, weird monologue of wrong was building up to. There was a tangible sense the was going wrap things up by saying something profound, something that would give us an insight into this odd, tortured soul.

Then, at the top of his voice, he bellowed: "I've thought about Kim Deal whilst wanking myself silly more than any other woman on this planet."

My jaw dropped. Others' did, too. Despite being a packed venue, the place seemed to suddenly go very, very quiet. All eyes were fixed on Joey, and then all eyes were fixed on us. Accusing looks that seemed to say: "We hope you're proud of yourselves! You must have put this poor, easily-led simpleton up to it, you shower of shites!."

At this exact point my friend Dave - who works at the venue - walked by and shot me one of those unmistakable is-he-with-you? looks. I responded with my unmistakable don't-be-so-f*****g-ridiculous look.

I think it might have got lost in translation. I need to work on my don't-be-so-f*****g-ridiculous look.

Orphanage in Bruges

Well, I didn't manage to catch the Jaws night at The Electric, but I did venture out to the picture palace twice in the last week.

The Guillermo Del Toro produced, Juan Antonia Bayona helmed The Orphanage was rather good. More of a good old-fashioned ghost story than an out-and-out horror pic (despite one visceral scene that was a pure, popcorn-into-the-back-of-head-in-front shocker), it reminded me a bit of The Others. Haunting, atmospheric and melancholic-in-a-good-way, but - in my humble opinion - not really deserving the comparisons to Del Toro's sublime masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth.

The other film was In Bruges, which was tremendous fun. Colin Farrell and the mighty Brendan Gleeson play two hitmen lying low in the Low Countries after a job goes tragically wrong. Painfully funny, jaw-droppingly politically incorrect and highly recommended, it reminds me of those great, edgy British films that George Harrison's Handmade Films used to knock out in the late 1980s.

Go see.

Carry On Carcharodon

I was checking the listings for Birmingham's Electric Cinema today when I saw the following:

Electric Beach Party - Jaws & Roy Scheider Tribute

Friday 18^th

Summer comes early to the Electric with this special tribute to the late, great Roy Scheider and one of the scariest films ever made. The Electric Cinema Film Orchestra will return with a full 22 piece orchestra! £9 standard and £15 sofa with free Pina Coladas!

Sounds like fun and I'll probably go. Jaws, after all, is one of my favourite films and Scheider's death in February has got me thinking a lot about it lately. Jaws wasn't the only great film that Scheider appeared in, of course, and his filmography included numerous supporting roles in undisputed heavyweights of 70s cinema like The French Connection, Marathon Man and Klute. He also turned up in films that, while not quite so critically acclaimed, have endeared themselves to me regardless. John Badham's copter-based conspiracy thriller Blue Thunder [1983] springs to mind; don't ask me why, but I've always had an inordinate weakness for copter-based conspiracy thrillers. One day I'd like to write the definitive book on this hitherto overlooked sub-genre, but that'll have to wait until I can think of more than one example.

Scheider also starred in Peter Hyams' criminally underrated sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], 2010 [1984], but had nothing to do with Steven Spielberg's 1941 [1979], Ridley Scott's 1492 [1992] or the 1984 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four [1984].

Having said all that, there's no getting away from the fact that Scheider shall always be remembered for playing the role of Amity Island's Police Chief Martin Brody . And so it should be. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched Jaws over the years and - like all my favourite films - it is part of who I am. Its images, scenes and characters have seeped into my subconscious mind, inform my imagination and have a tendency to manifest themselves in strange and unusual ways.

To put it another way, I like to quote it a lot.

For instance, when faced with the limited and often insufficient storage capacity of the average supermarket shopping basket, I'll often blurt out a Brodyism and snarl: "We're gonna need a bigger boat." This invariably attracts strange looks from shoppers, shelf stackers and instore security staff, particularly when you say it in the Duty Free compartment of a cross-channel ferry.

While taking photographs of people, I've often substituted the traditional pose-prompt of "Watch the Birdie! or "Say Cheese!" with Chief Brody's more ballsy shark-slaying aphorism: "Smile, you son of a BITCH!" That also tends to get a mixed response, particularly at Weddings.

Finally, I've also been known to blurt out "This was no boating accident" to describe anything that doesn't strictly fit the traditional maritime definition of "boating accident".

In land-locked Birmingham, that tends to include most things.

Latitude

It's early days yet, but the line-up for this year's Latitude Festival is already shaping up rather nicely.

As I've probably mentioned before, Latitude 2007 was one of my favourite festivals ever (and that includes Glastonbury '97). A great location, a brilliant atmosphere, a nice mix of people, a relatively intimate scale, a welcome lack of corporate presence and a veritable smorgasbord of odd, mad and interesting stuff all contributed to the mix, but I think it was the shonky handmade signs that really made the difference. It gave the weekend a nice, old-school homemade feel and I've always had a weakness for shonky handmade signs.

On the music front the main headliners this year will Franz Ferdinand, Sigur Rós and Interpol. I've got mixed feelings about this. Franz Ferdinand will be fun to see live, I like Sigur Rós a lot but I'm not sure of their big(ish)-ass festival headliner potential, and I haven't heard enough by Interpol to care one way or the other. None of them have the same must-go appeal as, say, Arcade Fire, who stole the show last year. Having said that, I enjoyed Latitude 2007 so much that I'd have probably still turned up this year if the headliners were Adamski, Bucks Fizz and The James Last Orchestra.

In any case, like any good festival it's not really about the headliners: there's lots of other good music lined up, too. Grinderman, The Breeders, Buzzcocks, Elbow and Seasick Steve are currently residing in the archive file-box marked Stuff I Like Lots, while Death Cab For Cutie, The Mars Volta, M.I.A. and Amadou et Mariam are in a neighbouring folder marked Stuff I'm Planning To Listen To Soon. There's a time-honoured migration path in my head in which the contents of the second folder often end up being shuffled into the Stuff I Like boxes. Sadly, I've had to put the process on hold as I'm currently experiencing an administrative backlog.

There's lots of other stuff going on at Latitude besides the music. Last year my brother and I accidentally disrupted a woodland performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest (as opposed to, say, Jacqueline Susann's The Tempest) when my brother loudly barked "Arsenal!" in the style of Eric Morcambe. You don't get stuff like that at a V festival.

The comedy at Latitude is top notch, too. Stand-up standouts last year include Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran and Jeremy Hardy (I missed Stewart Lee, Dammit!). Already, this year's comedy line-up is looking pret-ty, pret-ty good: Bill Bailey and Stewart Lee are back, along with Rich Hall (and Otis Lee Crenshaw...), Lucy Porter, Ross Noble, Omid Djalili, Dave Gorman and the mighty Mark Thomas. More significantly, though, Nicholas Parsons and his cohorts will be recording an edition of Just a Minute from the festival. As a lifelong Radio 4 junky I can think of no better hangover remedy.

Anyhow, if - like me - you're Uncut Magazine-reading Radio 4 listener who's into eclectic music, good comedy and inadvertent acts of theatre disruption, then I encourage - nay, urge you to get your arse to Henham Park in Suffolk between the 17th - 20th July.

I mentioned the shonky handmade signs, didn't I?

Nick Cave

Looks as though I'll be seeing Nick Cave twice this year.

Over the weekend it was announced that Nick Cave would be appearing at this year's bloody marvellous Latitude Festival. As I'm going to Latitude, have already bought a pair of tickets to see him play at the Birmingham Academy next month and am currently so skint I can't pay attention you might think I'd be a bit annoyed by this turn of events. Not so: I'm bloody well delighted.

As a big fan of Nicholas Edward Cave for many, many years I already know how good he is live. Despite of his reputation - unwarranted, in my opinion - for creating dark, brooding, Book of Revelation-tinged songs about love and murder, as a live performer he's a true swaggering God of Rock who kicks arse so hard it farts out of its nose.

If that wasn't enough, the two gigs are under two very different incarnations. The Academy gig is with The Bad Seeds, promoting their latest offering Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (haven't heard it yet, but I've yet to hear a NC album I didn't like) while at Latitude he'll be performing with Grinderman, his Birthday Party-esque, raw noise, gee-tar band. They've got a song called "No Pussy Blues", and another track (Love Bomb) that namechecks Radio 4's Gardener's Question Time. That's how cool he is.

Maybe I should go and see him three times, instead...

Kiss Kiss, Blah Blah

So there we were, Clare and I, watching - nay, re-watching - a DVD of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Shane Black's tremendously fun directorial debut starring Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer.

Midway through the second act I turned to my significant other and said tenderly, yet emphatically: "I think Harry Connick Jr is a great actor."

Clare let several moments of blissful ignorance pass before she turned to me and said: "That's really nice, Tom... but what do you think of Robert Downey Jr?"

Needless to say, this has now become something of a running joke at my expense.

The Dork Knight Returns

So here I am again.

March was my month off from here. I say that as though it was planned or premeditated, but I should come clean and admit that - like most things in my life - there was precious little planned or premeditated about it. Nothing new there, then. I moved house (I think I mentioned that before) and, as a result, didn't have a domestic Internet connection for the best part of last month. To put it another way, I was broken down on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway. As metaphorical dilemmas go, I suppose it's better than being online roadkill.

(Just been interrupted by Lily, Clare's 4 year-old daughter who really should be fast asleep by now. She wants me to help her find her toy unicorn, and who am I to refuse? This is a new thing for me, but I suspect that random toy unicorn searches will become a regular part of my life. So it goes.)

Anyway, I'll keep this brief as (a) I'm tired and my head is fuzzy, and, (b) I haven't quite mastered the knack of picking up from where I left off after a random toy unicorn hunt.

But I'm working on it.