TheSound
An Englishman in New York
Hi, again!! Sorry to have to bump this thread up, but I feel like I probably need to re-introduce myself! Some of you may remember me from earlier this year, I joined here and posted pretty regularly – 400+ posts over a couple of months – then I sort of vanished with no explanation! My family have had a weird year, lots of commuting between the north west of England where we now live, and Washington DC where we used to live, and where my wife and her family are from, mainly due to family health matters (my wife’s elderly parents are having so many problems) and all of which has been quite disruptive to our 3 kid’s lives, and also to their schooling, and also to my wife’s job (she is a professional classical orchestral musician) and so I really haven’t been around the internet much at all for some months, other than just checking my emails - and I'm afraid booking endless airline flights between Manchester and Washington Dulles Airport! So we are now debating whether to return to live back in the US, as in some ways it would make life easier. Anyway, I thought I’d check back in here, as music is still my greatest interest and passion, though even that has taken a back seat. I have only been to I think 3 concerts this year, or at least since I last posted on here – I saw the ever phenomenal/unrivalled Rush on the ‘Time Machine’ tour back in May (which was by far the best show I have ever seen Rush give, and I first saw them on the Farewell to Kings tour, so bring on the new live 'Time Machine' DVD!!), and I saw the Roger Waters ‘The Wall’ show, which was also in May (not a bad show at all, though I do need to ask just for how much longer is RW going to continue flogging to death and financially milking an album that he wrote 32 years ago??) and finally I saw Mark Knopfler and his band just last week, all 3 shows were at the huge MEN Arena in Manchester. In fact I maybe boring you all to death with Knopfler for some weeks/months to come!!...Knopfler’s set was actually something of a ‘road-to-Damascus’ experience for me, as I’d completely forgotten just what a peerless singer/guitarist/songwriter Mark Knopfler is, IMO he is right up there with the very best, and the next day I immediately bought up his entire back catalogue of albums from Amazon.com (and mostly only for about £3-4 each!) that I didn’t already own…few solo albums, and with Dire Straits. Unfortunately though MK was on the same bill as Bob Dylan, who we had to suffer through until our ears almost bled, Dylan and his band were just too hideous and awful for words, a deafening racket of distorted over-amplified re-inventions of once great songs that were just totally unreocgnisable, Dylan doesn’t even sing these days, he sort of spits and grunts out every line like he’s about to vomit up his breakfast, to be honest he makes Tom Waits sound like Pavarotti, he should have had subtitles on a screen over the stage for anyone to understand a single word he sang. And he never communicates with the audience at all, so I’d say it was easilythe worst live set of ‘music’ I have seen in nearly 40 years (and this coming from somebody who saw Devo supporting Genesis at the Knebworth Festival in 1978, when Devo got bottled off the stage after about 3 songs) I simply couldn’t tell one Dylan song from another, in fact the couple next to us were looking at each other and saying… “Is this ‘Hard Rain’? …or is it ‘Highway 61’?”… and in fact lots of people started walking out after only about 3 or 4 songs, I’ve never seen Dylan live before, so I was determined to do so, even though the tickets were £70 each, but I’ll certainly never see him again. Knopfler by contrast was a consumate performer, a beautifully balanced set with that charming gaelic twist that he adds to his music these days, he was cool and crisp and clear and he outclassed Dylan in every department. Anyway, nice to see the forum is still going strong, and sorry, I still clearly have this habit of never using 100 words where 1,000 will do just as well, but you'll get used to it!! And I hope to re-aquaint myself with some of you guys and meet some new friends over the coming weeks, so see you around.
‘The Sound’
‘The Sound’
Always liked your post and like your reintroduction which made me laugh about the Dylan experience 
I always found you had something interesting to say. 
