I never signed up for a pay account for Last.fm because they wouldn’t make their iPhone app available outside the UK/US/Germany. Without that I just wasn’t interested. It wasn’t helped by the fact that they removed radio for free accounts either because, I think, of some licencing issue in other countries. In my view, it was a shockingly short sighted position of music licensing authorities to take; while I had radio recommendations from Last.fm I spent a lot of money on iTunes.

More often than not I listen to music via Radio IO or, lately, Chilltrax.com. Chilltrax.com is without ads and mostly, I really like the selection of music.

We7 is coming across as very like last.fm in some ways. I’ve a free subscription and it’s doing stuff I wanted it to do which is namely a) play music based on artist and it’s largely been good at that b) play albums I want to hear more of (it would appear incidentally that 7Digital are the only online sales channel with one album they’ve introduced me to which is a drag since I have emusic and itunes on permanent readytobuyness) which means it’s easier to make decisions about music.

They have an iPhone app as well and that would typically interest me in that I like the idea of being able to plug this into my stereo. You can only get it, however, if you have a premium plus account which is 9.99 per month. I’m not finding it easy to navigate their about and help pages but that account does apparently allow you to download stuff off line as well. You can buy music through it, but I can’t figure out if you have to have a premium account to do that or not – online help does not suggest it’s necessary.

It may be that it’s album specific, however.

It’ll be interesting to see how I get on with it for the next month or so…I like the idea of radio recommendations and that’s why I missed last.fm (I wouldn’t subscribe unless the iphone app as part of the deal) and its recommodations.

The one thing I would say is the music industry is changing; why the participants could not embrace this five years ago with last.fm I do not know. But it’s nice to think that now, things are improving.

I sort of bought the Loreena McKennitt Live at the Alhambra DVD in France the last time I was there. Mainly because it wasn’t too expensive, it had a free CD and I quite like The Mystic’s Dream. I watched it, thought the sound was great and then Christmas/snow and lots of bad things happened. I never quite got around to watching it again. The CD has started turning up on my iPod playlists and this song has stood out for me.

I never quite got her; the word is very much ethereal and she reminds me of Brittany in some odd way. They go nuts for her in a way that I don’t think we quite manage here. But I have to say that DVD/CD has been a revelation. I like it a lot. This song stands out though because there are a bundle of different versions of what is a fairly blood thirsty song around. I’m pretty sure Clannad do a version of it but I can’t remember if they call it the same name, and I think I’ve heard Triona Ni Dhomhnaill have a go at it too.

The story is fairly simple. A few sisters go walking by the river, one pushes another in so as to carry out a little boyfriend swapping, and later, via some means or other, a harper makes a harp of the drowned girl’s body and when the harp is played, the false nasty boyfriend stealing bitch sister is fingered for the crime. I have problems with the whole story on a lot of fronts; basically I like people to be nice to one another and I don’t believe sisters should be falling out over men. This may be because I’m a lot younger than my two sisters and so never really competed with them for male attention.

Either way, even if you were to fall out with your sister over Donny down the road, murder seems a bit radical. Me, I’d probably let the sap go if she wanted him enough and he didn’t really want to stay with me. There’s bound to be someone a bit more worthwhile around after all. I couldn’t see myself shoving my sister into a river just in order to grab some lust – I doubt love is involved at that level really – and I’m pretty sure neither of my sisters would see it worth all the hassle at home shoving me into the river Maigue either.

No, what got me was the whole harp making affair. You come across a body on the side of the river, be it put there by swans or whatever mystical forces you care to imagine, and your first thought is to hack the body to bits to make a harp out of it? What the hell was the harpist thinking? Is this some form of CSI that the crowd in America haven’t come up with yet?

in a way, I wonder if being too old for fairy stories is a good thing.

Anyway, he was terrific. A lot of stuff off Nightbook which I didn’t have, and Divenire, which I did. There’s something quite special about the sound of a real Steinway grand that has been played a lot – very soft and rich. I loved it. Not absolutely certain really about the newer stuff – it’s a bit spiky and having listened to the album since, I’d be of the opinion that I prefer it unaccompanied….still.

The NCH was pretty much sold out. I have to say that in times of trouble, that’s great to see.

I was listening to Acoustic Cafe on Radio Io today, through my iPhone. I tend to do it through the phone more often than not because the iphone application currently doesnt’ have ads, and while the Radio IO ads are not particularly annoying, it’s nice not to have them at all. I went to Radio IO, by the way, when Last.fm got messy about radio outside the UK, US and Germany. Anyway, this afternoon at some stage, Radio IO fed me a couple of noteworthy things, one by Richard Thompson called Beeswing from the album Mirror Blue. It’s a lovely song which you can find on youtube although in the best tradition of Richard Thompson, hauntingly bitter sweet.

You don’t often hear Richard Thompson on the radio in Ireland and in fact, the last time I heard him it was probably 20 years ago on the Andy Kershaw show on BBC Radio 1 when he still had a Saturday evening show. I know it was that long ago because he played a song in the studio that night which I demoed as part of a college project when I was 19. That’s still on my iPod too because I still like what I did to it. Absolutely not sure what the legalities are about licensing it so it will not wind up anywhere on the web before anyone asks. Acoustic Café plays some interesting stuff though, stuff that I don’t hear very many places. Some Luka Bloom, some Crowded House. Like its sister channel, Radio IO Chill, it occasionally costs me money. Anyway, shortly after that, they played something I’d never heard before, by someone I’d never heard of before.

Cary Brothers. Apparently he has made a career out of getting his stuff out onto sound tracks. I loved this when it turned up in my headphones this afternoon, so I went to grooveshark and listened to some more. And I loved that too, so I went and downloaded two of his albums from emusic.com. I’d never heard of him before today.

It strikes me as winter evening music, a bit. It’s more middle of the road than the chill/electronica that I have been listening to a lot lately, more rocked up than the jazz piano. I don’t understand why I don’t get to hear so much of this on the radio, and then I remember that I turned on Irish radio for the first time yesterday hoping to hear Andrew Cotton interviewed and realised why I don’t ever listen to Irish radio. John Murray’s piece straight after the news yesterday about Olli Rehn and Finland was excruciatingly embarrassing. It is entirely possible that some specialist show has picked up on this guy.

When I was hunting around grooveshark this evening, I came across this song, called Honestly which has featured on some soundtrack or other. The arrival of the piano did funny things to my senses, as in, it made me go and get both albums.

Why isn’t this guy a superstar?

This is one of my favourite pieces of music; it’s about 10 minutes long, and it dates from 1975. I am not typically a fan of Keith Jarrett, or too much in the way of jazz, but I think this is something special.

Admittedly I have some notions of playing the piano…so that my colour my opinion.

I fell in love with Jean-Michel Jarre when I was just 14 years old. When I was 15, I got to go to Destination Docklands and that’s almost 22 years ago to the day last night when I went and got to see him for a fourth time. I still love him.

Last night was great fun. He didn’t quite sell out the O2, but he did one hell of a show. You take certain stuff for granted with him, and he always delivers. When I close my eyes listening to the piece above, I am 15 years old again, standing in the cold rain in London watching the lights dribbling down off buildings I’ll never see again, and watching the stunningly timed fireworks.

When someone playing a concert can take 22 years off your life…that’s no small achievement. I’m not going to try and even go through a set list for him. Suffice to say, apart from no Vintage from Teo & Tea, I cannot fault the selection he played given that it included the above and the original non-Aero-ised version of Chronologie VI.

Still a very happy camper. Still a fan. And still hope that when I am his age I have his energy.

So I booked tickets for myself and my sister and her husband and their son; they drove from Cork, and last night, off we went.

The gig was small and intimate and brilliant. And they played Lord Mayo so I was happy.

In comparison to the debacle that was Guns’n'Roses, they showed up on time, had good fun on stage, played superlatively, and left everyone happy at the end. Cost – 20E.

They don’t appear to play together all that often any more but if you get a chance…

go. That is all there is to be said. It was fantastic.

I remember just two songs that stood out. One was Wild Wild Thing by the Escape Club. The video was weird. My niece seemed to like it but she was only about 2 anyway. The other was Sweet Child of Mine by Guns’n'Roses. When I got back home, none of my friends had heard of this band, even the so called metalhead. I couldn’t understand why the song wasn’t a huge hit. I can’t remember clearly, but the song had to be released a couple of times before it got adequate airplay to chart and it’s possible that it depended on festival appearances at the time. I didn’t do festivals when I was 15 or 16.

My brother didn’t think too much of Sweet Child of Mine, but when Welcome to the Jungle came along, he went nuts for Guns’n'Roses. For his short life, apart from Bad Religion, Axel Rose was it. He even got my mother interested. We sort of lost interest in Guns’n'Roses at home sometime after the Use Your Illusion albums, so except for the fact that one of my friends was interested in going, I probably wouldn’t have bothered going to the O2 tonight. Or last night. Not sure which as it’s after midnight now.

The support act was some dude from Canada called Danco Jones or something like that. He came on and played for something like an hour. I can’t say we liked him too much to be honest. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I drew the line at songs about oral sex and wanting to fuck girls you really like. I don’t know. Not heartbroken when he went off, despite his huge eulogy about how he loved Thin Lizzy and how Thin Lizzy inspired his band so much. I wasn’t such a fan of TL – maybe a little young for that – but I know enough of their music to feel the inspiration was somewhat filtered by time. Either way, I’ve lived in Dublin for 10 years, and while some dude from Toronto might think I’m amazingly lucky to walk the same streets that were walked by Phil Lynott, I can’t say it has ever weighed too heavily on my mind.

We then waited for over an hour for Guns’n'Roses to appear.

I’m not used to this to be honest. I gather the band has a rep but pretty typically in the O2 gigs start and end on time. They have a regular curfew of around 11pm although I’ve been in club gigs there until well after 1. So they can arrange exceptions on occasion. That club gig, however, started on time where the support played 2 hours and the headliner played for 4. So I didn’t worry about the curfew so much. It was clear, however, the crowd were getting more than antsy. Up in the balcony we had well more than enough time to get bored with Mexican waves and down on the floor, they were starting to boo. Quite vocally as it happens. Twitter started to light up with comments along the lines of “no sign of the band yet”, and “no one is sure quite when Axel Rose is going to turn up on stage”. The people you’d get talking to were increasingly frustrated. I knew that they’d been late on stage the previous night in Belfast, but apart from that had only heard that they played two hours. I assumed it had been a late but great gig. I could possibly have lived with this.

When the band eventually arrived on stage, it was after half past ten. They were not greeted with much by way of adoration. The chorus of boos just got louder and louder and louder and the band didn’t really open with anything that would have set the gig on fire at that stage.

A couple of plastic bottles flew and Axel immediately said one more bottle and they were off stage. To be honest, at that stage, I probably wouldn’t have cared. We were at the venue at 7ish, had sat through a woeful support act, and the highlight of the evening had been the trip up the Dublin Wheel which was quite nice. Great view over the port. Plan to do it with a camera some evening. I never saw the bottle that finished his patience – but it came just 22 minutes after they went on stage.

The tickets cost 75E and Axel Rose, who was nearly 90 ,minutes late for his concert anyway lost patience with the crowd after 22 minutes and walked off the stage. Am inclined to think that those waiting 90 minutes are slightly more entitled to a little anger and frustration. But then, since I was one of them, you can make of that what you will.

It’s fair to say the crowd were unimpressed. I can’t condone the flinging of plastic bottles on the stage; however, I have zero time for a band who troop on stage almost an hour and a half late and there is no way the flinging of bottles would be happening if they showed up when they were expected to by the majority of the crowd. Someone came on stage to tell us they had technical problems. No one really believed that they were technical problems of the nature that a fuse might be gone in the firework display.

I watched the twitter stream about the gig on my phone for about a half an hour. We were basically waiting for someone to come back and say whether the gig was going to end at 22 minutes or what…they did admit they were trying to persuade Axl Rose to come back on stage.

I felt sorry for them. When I say the crowd was fractious, this is not an exaggeration. Every movement on stage was greeted with an increasing chorus of boos. I’ve been going to concerts regularly since I was 17, some big, small, good bad, a few indifferent. But I’ve never seen a crowd react like this to a gig,. They were furious they’d been forced to wait; they were furious about the walk off. They were furious that no one was actually saying anything.

We waited until about 20 past 11. I don’t think we really believed the band were going to come back on; just kinda wanted it said officially. When we gave up and went to the loo, somehow, someone had persuaded Axel to get himself back on stage. Who knows how. He opened up with Live and Let Die I think. Do I care? Not really. The first 20 minutes hadn’t set my heart on fire; the band didn’t have the support of the crowd; quite the opposite actually. We missed his arrival but I’ve heard he dismissed the fans who hadn’t walked out as being pathetic. I’d like to hope that wasn’t true but…oh well. They played for about 90 minutes nonstop, and yes, they did play Sweet Child of Mine. At some point, they played Paradise City. There seemed to be rather a lot of solo instrumental pieces, one on the piano that sounded somewhat not unlike elevator music and the Pink Panther Theme on the guitars. I’d probably have loved that last one if it had turned up in the middle of a regular concert, and not in the middle of one that was running 2 or 3 hours late, had consisted of the band blaming the crowd for the mess – the mess which could be traced back to the band showing up nearly an hour and a half late for their own gig, but in truth all I felt was that this was just like filler sound.

Only about two thirds of the crowd hung around to hear the rest of the gig. I don’t think they came on board really for it; I thought it was flat. I played with my phone quite a lot; watched the twitter feed. I’d almost have liked to hear the calls to the Adrian Kennedy Phone show on FM104, a station I hardly ever find on the radio dial. At some point they stopped for about 30 seconds and came straight back on. I honestly think they didn’t even dare try to challenge the crowd to demand an encore and anyway, the boos were still echoing around the O2. When they eventually finished, everyone in the auditorium pretty much just left. No major cheering, no major applause. No one seemed to really care all that much. By the time we got out of the building, a car with darkened windows was leaving the O2. The parting crowd assumed it was Axel and voiced their displeasure pretty clearly. I can’t say I really blame them.

Anyone who had to travel from outside Dublin for this gig; I feel a bit gutted for them. It’s clear to me that for some people, Axl Rose is some sort of hero and something like what happened to night has to be somewhat disillusioning. Do I care that Slash wasn’t there? Not really. I’ll be interested to see what MCD have to say tomorrow. A lot of people are going to be looking for money back I suspect.

1. Rain (Acoustic)  – Samantha James
2. Come Through (Acoustic) Samantha James
3. Divinere – Ludovico Einaudi
4. Mad about You – Hooverphonic
5. Club Montepulciano – Hooverphonic
6. Breathe (PC Synergy’s Mellifluous Mix) – Crystal Stafford
7. Innocente – Delerium/Leigh Nashs
8. Love Show – Skye
9. Habla Con Hella – Alberto Iglesias

It’s all kind of downtempo/glass of red wine in front of the fire type music.

Anyone want to add suggestions? Obviously having picked up a Suzanne Vega album last night I’ll throw in Left of Centre as well.

The weather is sort of funny at the moment – it’s been really warm, last night, meaning I couldn’t sleep, and really cold now, meaning I wish I was asleep. It’s been close and not close, wet, sunny and grey, sometimes all at the same time. It leaves me feeling slightly jaded.

This music leaves me feelign a lot better though; I don’t know why. I came across Didier Squiban when he was accompanying Yann Fanch Kemener, Brittany’s answer to Iarla O Lionaird and something about his playing got to me so when I saw a solo album in FNAC in Brussels about 12 years ago, I bought it; no argument. I’ve loved it since. Not all of his things appeal to me – he has a tendency to experimental jazz – but the trilogy of Molene/Porz Gwen and one other album the name of which escapes me is absolutely gorgeous, and sometimes…it’s just what I need. Like today with its psycho season adjusting weather.