Drive by Truckers

The final installment of my birthday fun, was a trip to the Electric Ballroom in Camden to see one of my favourite bands, Drive By Truckers. For those not in the know, they're a band based in Athens, Georgia, with members mainly hailing from Alabama. They play intelligent, generally southern-fried rock and roll, with a really powerful combo of three lead guitars. Their songs revolve around icons of the American south, the lives and loves of everyday people, whisky and the odd bit of incest.

This is the second time I've seen them, the first time was a couple of years ago at Koko (also in Camden). Koko is a considerably superior venue and I probably enjoyed the first time a bit more. They also seemed to go off the boil slightly during the middle of the set. However, these are minor issues in what was another sustained demonstration in the art of blistering rock and roll. They're a great band.

It's kind of hard to find good footage of them online. There is little of good quality and none that captures the excitement of seeing them live. However, I've pulled up a couple of examples that are OK. The first is Where the Devil Don't Stay:



The second is Women Without Whiskey:



Mike Cooley sings both of these songs, but the band also have other singer/songwriters. Patterson Hood probably writes and sings the majority of their tracks and the bassist Shonna Tucker contributes a couple to their latest album. Jason Isbell was around for their last three albums and wrote some of their best material; he left reasonably amicably in 2007 and has released a great solo album. This combination is one of reasons that makes DBT so great; two or three really really great songwriters in the same band, working pretty harmoniously together to produce albums greater than the sum of their already cool parts.

Some recent pictures

By way of checking that I can post photos, here are a few piccies from my recent trip to Kew Gardens. I popped down on Monday to celebrate my birthday with my girlfriend and some chums. Very nice too and rounded off with some fish and chips.

Kew is a lovely spot. I particularly liked the glasshouses; they are wonderful buildings and though they could probably do with a lick of paint, I quite like the faded grandeur aspect of them. So many of our museums and such places are multimedia experiences as much as anything else. It's nice to see things that aren't quite so shiny. I get a similar feeling at the Natural History Museum; there are all the snazzy graphics and displays, but happily there's still space for a bunch of stuffed birds in a wooden display box.


I took these photos in RAW format and then converted them into JPEGS. This is the way I take all my pictures and it seems to pose a bit of a problem as the file sizes are close to bloggers' limit. We'll see how it goes on this front - I do like taking pictures and hope to post some of my amateurish efforts. Anyway, here is the final one for today:

Welcome to the blog

Hello, welcome to my blog. I started a blog a couple of years ago but got bored and couldn't work out how to delete spam. This time I'm back for good. Although I still don't know how to delete spam.

I intend to talk about science, music, books, films, stuff and things. Mainly as a way of wasting time, but also as a way of getting some of my more profound musings down "on paper" as it were. My other profound musings will be found in my PhD project and I may blog about that at some point.

Anyway, I hope all three of the readers I attract enjoy reading A Pleistocene Person.

Cheers

Steve

PS: I shall be whoring this blog in all corners of the intertube, in order to generate maximum traffic. Don't think less of me for such wanton behaviour.