Fairwell to the Fairground

Don't be fooled by the slightly sombre title, today was in fact a rather good day as far as things go. The title of course relates to the song of the same name by White Lies who I went to see in concert this evening. More about that later, but first off, Paradox started on BBC One this week so I'd better give that a quick review first.

It's quite difficult to view this programme objectivly in its own right without trying to compare it to its US counterpart - FlashForward. Doing so will always mean that it comes in second place because the Beeb haven't got nearly as much cash to splash around on these things as they have over the pond so it can never really compare. That aside however, it is much more The Bill than it is about the science and the uproar that FlashForward is. The team working on it is a small three man (and woman) team who are ordinary on the beet cops. Nothing special, no special forces or MI5, just regular cops. They then get thrown into another world when a world renowned physicist shows them pictures from a major incident approximately eighteen hours into the future. This is where the wtwo programs differ because rather than everyone seeing the forthcoming events, they are only seen (so far as we know) by this one physicist when they are transmitted to his lab computer where he is studying solar flares. The other main difference is the time-scale. Whilst FlashForward focuses on events six months into the future, this is same day events and therefore the team have far less time to first of all get to grips with the whole situation and then understand the picture clues and piece them together to try and avert the disaster.

Because this is the first time they have encountered the phenomenon, everything gets off to a bit of a slow start. We are introduced to the main characters, the DI and her team, the slightly creepy Scottish physicist and then short clips of members of the public who's paths cross at the culmination of the event. The first half of the episode sees the team reluctantly investigating whilst maintaining that the whole thing is a hoax, the physicist seems to go from cooperating to being stubborn and silent which seems very odd. Once the clues all start getting pieced together however, it dawns on them that this is actually going to happen and in the final few minutes, they knew that they were too late. Now that they have established that the threats are real however, they can start to investigate the next set of clues right from the off without faffing around with trying to establish their validity. I'm hoping that more of a story is going to develop around the whole thing rather than just treating each episode as a new mystery to solve each time the computer downloads the next set of picture clues because I can see that getting very boring very quickly although it would seem that there will only be five episodes in this series so perhaps that won't be a problem.

So another night out and to the O2 Academy this time to see White Lies. An amazing gig really, and two not too shabby support bands as well. The first were the Violens hailing from New York and whilst the music was alright, as musicians they seemed like novices. They were concentrating quite hard on playing their instruments and one of the guitarists managed to break strings on two guitars whilst playing them pretty violently. The second band were Asobi Seksu and for the first couple of songs they played I wasn't even sure the words were in English, they were completely incomprehensible and I'm not sure that style of high pitched music really works as a live set.


As soon as the main band came on however, the crowd started to warm up and the atmosphere got miles better. They opened with Fairwell to the Fairground played at a much quicker pace than the single version which is a shame because it is my second favourite song of theirs and speeding it up only means it doesn't last as long. They played pretty much every song from the album along with Taxidermy and a song from way back before they were well known. There were a couple of idiots in the crowd pushing and shoving their way towards the front but overall, the pushing and showing was kept to a minimum. They did a cover of a Talking Heads song and one of the guys who had pushed his way forward (and must have been about 40 years old and 20 stone) turned around to the girl next to him and just said "they were a band from the 80's" as if we were all completely naive and had never heard of them. Even if we hadn't, it seemed a bit weird for him to just randomly blurt it out like that.

They ended their set with the obvious choice, Death and I managed to get a video of it despite the crowd going frankly mental - as you will be able to see from the less than brilliant intro and chorus. There was nothing much I could do about the camera shake during these bits but the sound quality is pretty good so hopefully that will make up for it.