Y and I took in two gigs over the weekend; Bill Bailey at the Clyde Auditorium (the "Armadillo") on Friday and Calvin Harris at the Barrowlands last night.

Both were early shows in nationwide tours, Tinselworm and I Created Disco respectively. The latter was my first visit to the legendary Glasgow anachronism that is "ra Barras". That it's taken me thirty years to get there is probably testament to my aforementioned relative indifference to music, and live music in particular. In fact, I honestly think the last time I paid to see a chart-placing artist was in the company of mcgazz, some thirteen years ago, when we took in The Divine Comedy (plus full orchestra) at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

Yesterday's experience was entertaining, but did little to change my mind on the subject. Someone had joked that our party would be the oldest in the crowd and that wasn't very far from the truth. As I looked around at the assembled writhing masses, merrily throwing their drinks at each other and the performers, I found it hard to "let go". Mr Harris' entreaties to put our hands in the air, or jump up and down, or join in on his hits, fell on deaf ears in my case. I don't think it's my age; I don't think I was ever fully on board with the sweaty, cramped, loud, mindless experience of the rock gig. Too up-tight? Too white? My biggest beef remains the inferiority of the aesthetics. Go see a painting in a museum and you'll be rewarded in a way that no reproduction can manage; but such is the process of modern music production that no live performance can ever measure up to the recorded version. Such was the case yesterday. God knows, Calvin is no song bird. His records succeed because of their one-man-band, bedroom-bound retro synth approach. Transferred to the stage, with a full band and CH on lead vocals, the tracks are certainly bigger and louder. But better? Not sure.

Plus, I couldn't help but compare the thing to Bill Bailey's show the night before. BB's gig made extensive use of special effects, short films, digital animation and props (most especially a Corby trouser press/Segway hybrid) as well as his own mix of music and stand-up. He was on stage for about an hour and a half, gave us almost entirely new material and his encore was more of the same, plus a reprise of an old favourite. CH's set lasted fifty minutes at most, was staged in a thoroughly pedestrain manner, conspicuously failed to include all the tracks from his album and the encore was perfomed by his (inferior) support act. Hmm. Double hmm.

Anyway, it got us out of the house and nights like that, were neither of us are working, are running at a premium these days. Speaking of work, I'll be doing some extensive updating on t'other site in the next day or two, so I'll point to that once it's done.