I mentioned yesterday’s that I was just off to see The Hold Steady at the Islington Academy and I duly went and they were, as ever, duly brilliant – urgent, incendiary, delirious, a symphonic juggernaut, a hurtling thing, a wholly rousing noise.
In the email newsletter I send out every Monday (you can subscribe to it on www.uncut.co.uk), I wrote about the number of great gigs looming over the next few weeks, starting tonight, in fact, with The Hold Steady at the Islington Academy. I'm going to that, but wasn't sure how many of the others shows I'd be able to make it to. I therefore invited any readers of the newsletter who had either recently seen or were going to see any of the bands I mentioned to write in with their thoughts on the gig.
Traditionally, August is something of a slow news month. Anything, however apparently inappropriate, seems to be used to fill in valuable airtime or column space during the holiday season. You might, for instance, have happened to hear yesterday morning Evan Davies interviewing august cricket commentator Henry Blofeld on the BBC’s flagship radio news programme Today about whether he’d prefer to commentate on the 100 metres at the World Athletics Championships. Today, it seems everyone’s got in a palaver about Avatar, James Cameron’s 3D sci-fi epic of which 15 minutes was shown during a series of screenings rolled out at hundreds of cinemas round the world.
