One more Time

This Posting is English, because – well, sometimes you just have to switch languages, and right here it is appropriate. I’ve just been to a concert, Joe Jackson, which I mentioned already here and here.

And f***ing awesome it was! On my gum-scale of concerts (In the beginnig I put in some gum – and the more often I think about changing the gum – that usually tastes like shit after 20 minutes – the more boring the concert has been.) this was a 1.
The opening act was nice (Some girl from Massachusets, nice from a far, but far from nice, if you catch my drift) but sounded like the illegitimate child of Mellissa Etheridge and Bette Midler, but, what the fuck, it was OK.

Then: half an hour of waiting for the man to come out. The folks at Central Station deemed it appropriate to play some Macarena-like noise, which pissed me off pretty good. But, there HE was – Joe Jackson. And as strange-appearing as he is (tall, skinny, pale), as extraordinary is his music. The band was Graham Maby on bass and some other fellow, whose name I can’t remember right now on the drums, who completed his piano quite nice, and the sound had more energy as a fully grown Big Band, which shows again that technique matters, not size.

Size would have mattered on a few people – I wished for a bigger stick than the match I had with me, because I had the full meschpoke of annoyances:
– Garlic Man, over the left shoulder (which can’t smell anymore)
– Middle-aged housewives who want to be critics and can’t do so silent, even if the can’t tell the difference between a bass and a guitar (I am not making this up!!)
– bloody danicing boy going nuts all the time – if there was music or not,
– and the classic: drunk yelling lady, who doesn’t speak english, but shouts inappropriate shit nevertheless. Maybe she has tourette’s Syndrome, but I have an extremly low threshold for annoyances during stuff I genuinely like. SO she came close to a to a spanking from yours truly, her compainon and a few other people standing around.

I had the second best seat (OK, standing spot) in the house (the best would have been right on his piano), which meant I was almost near enough to hear his voice for real (which I did at some points) and NOT over the speakers. Seriously – I was about 2 meters away from him, He has this rather unusal idea for this tour: He playes mostly new songs which haven’t been released on an album YET, and AFTER the tour, he’ll do the record. And man, the new songs are amazing – he comes full circle to the beginnig (Like this album) but with 30 years of experience. Simply awesome! And yes, he played some of the old favourites, „One more time“, „You can’t get what you want (till you know what you want)“ and, as the closing song, a mindblowing 15-minute version of the „Slow Song“.

Now I’m gonna recommend: Buy his records, ya tossers! (For example here) and VISITE his website.