The post half in Esperanto will have a wait a day, because I'm too exhausted to ramble in anything but English. Which is odd really, because English is so complicated and inconsistant it shouldn't be possible to speak it at all. However...
Tonight was the first round of Portsmouth's "Battle of the Bands" contest. Five bands played two songs each to an audiance and a panel of three judges, in a school classroom.
The first band was The Three Stooges - three cleancut teenage boys who namechecked Green Day and White Stripes, but sounded like The Monkees. Except neither of the singers could sing in tune. They had some good and varied musical ideas, but not the skill or talent to put them into practice.
You are a Beautiful Robot were the opposite - three hairy teenage boys with a lot of skill and no imagination. Very competently performed grungy skatepunk-influenced rock, with rhythms, chord changes and lyrics as interesting and original as...well, as most of what you hear on the radio.
There's always one band who don't turn up, and tonight it was Promise Unknown. But I imagine they were three teenage boys with guitars - just a wild guess.
Fourth on were...Strict Machines! Three of them, but not teenagers, only one guitar...and one is a girl! I know I'm biased, being their friend (and producer), but even when badly amplified and improvising to cover up each other's mistakes - as happened here - they have both the breadth of ideas and the mechanical skill to make them work.
Finally, Misunderstood admit quite candidly that they can't sing or play, but like The Three Stooges they were willing to experiment. They got the best audiance reaction - possibly because they had brought along a dozen friends to cheer them wildly.
It may have also helped that one of the judges looked suspiciously like the lead singer with an extra 25 years, and led the applause enthusiastically. Not that I'm suggesting nepotism. Not at all.
The judges were split between You are a Beautiful Robot (competent but forgettable) and Strict Machines (inventive but underrehearsed) - and surprised everyone by not playing safe. Strict Machines are through to the next round - same time, next week.
We went for celebratory drinks in the local "continental style" bar, which is why I am currently full of two pints of hot chocolate with whipped cream and extra chocolate, and Anna the singer is sleeping off quite a lot of beer.
Do, nun mi devas dormi, ĉar mi estas laca, nepova skribi plu, kaj plena da tro ĉokolado. Bonan nokton.
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«Well, now I must sleep, because I'm tired, cannot write any longer, and I'm full of too much chocolate. Good night.»
ReplyDeleteOn your words about the English language: I know only of two natural languages where logics mean something – Ancient Greek and German (in a smaller extent than Greek). Portuguese? It's a rich idiom indeed, with quite subtle nuances in meaning, and so on, but logics? No way! Sometimes it's even chaotic…
Bonan nokton por vi ankaŭ.