Saw it last night.
Mr Weller - very disappointing.
Gogol wotsit - crazy b@stards!! Enjoyed them immensely, felt like I was watching the Eurovision Song Contest, though :lol:
Villagers - quite enjoyed his first one, second one was a bit boring, reckon a gig longer than two songs would be a bit of trial for me... (I suspect Marina gave him a good seeing to in the green room afterwards... :lol: During his first song, you could see her in the background, she was utterly transfixed by what he was doing, I can see why, it's about the songwriting)
Hot ???? - disliked this lot intensely by the end of their 1st song, subsequent performance did not improve this. I've no idea why... they're musical, inventive, but they're just not for me.
The instrumental lot - quite enjoyed them as well, but the guitar playing was a bit ragged in the second half which spoiled it for me... I'd have been happy seeing it live
Paul Rodgers - legend, er, not much else to say... didn't let hisself down, didn't do anything amazing, wouldn't have been sad if I'd missed it
Marina - having gone so crazy about her yesterday on listening on Spotify, I have to say that I would NOT have got that excited by this performance. It was OK, but she's got some work to do yet... and although those songs are apparently the singles, they're not her strongest songs... One thing though - if I'd seen this performance tuesday, I'd have been quite surprised at how much some folks earlier in the thread were clobbering her - she was not nearly as weird as I was expecting from the comments :lol:
BTW - I hadn't even heard of any of these acts (apart from Weller and Rodgers, obviously) before this thread and episode...
All in all, though, it just seemed an average Jools to me (average as in average, not "poor"). Nothing really sh1tty, one act did not grab me, everything else was ok. Alas, Jools hisself becomes more and more annoying for me... we're all getting old
Do you know what one of the problems is (or at least this is what I suspect) - Later... when it started, was fresh and informal. Bands turned up and played - it was a superb format that kept this informality but gave the acts the security of knowing their sound was likely to be good, also there seemed to be a feeling of togetherness and non-competition. Nowadays, it's just part of the establishment and one of the things you need to do in this country for certain types of music... you can still spot stuff like Marina watching Villagers with her jaw dropped, but otherwise I suspect there's more "speak to my people not me" stuff going on than there was originally. Sad, but it'll never get back to like it was...
