Music to my ears

The drought is over!

OK, so in the past six months I've been to three festivals - Glastonbury, Supersonic and Green Man; I've seen Sonic Youth perform Daydream Nation in Camden, !!! conclude their North American tour in Toronto and Patti Plinko in something approaching her natural habitat - an underground venue that resembled a strip joint in 1930s Berlin; and there've also been Los Campesinos!, Creepy Morons and Meltdown gigs in Cardiff.

But I still hadn't been to a gig in Oxford - until tonight.

In the first four months of the year, before leaving Wales for Oxfordshire, I was going to, on average, at least a gig a week, so it was quite a comedown. Moving to Abingdon rather than Oxford didn't help, and neither did the bastardisation of the Zodiac into an Academy venue, the refurbishment entailing its closure from mid May until mid September.

Needless to say that, having made the move into the city over the weekend, I was itching for some hot, sweaty live action. So imagine my disappointment when on Monday, only my second night as a resident of Oxford, I went up to the Jericho Tavern full of hope and expectancy, only to discover that Asobi Seksu had cancelled. And then tonight I found out the reason - not illness or injury or a squabble with the promoter or venue, but the fact that 65 Days Of Static have a soft spot for New York shoegaze and had hand-picked them as support at the Academy instead.

Still, Sons & Daughters went a long way to pacifying me - for it was they who ended up popping my Oxford gigging cherry (full report in due course, naturally) - and there's lots more good stuff on the horizon: The Duke Spirit / Creepy Morons, The Warlocks / Blood Red Shoes, Emma Pollock, CSS... Just a shame Rilo Kiley have cancelled and I'm going to miss out on Ill Ease and The Raveonettes, who are playing on consecutive Fridays later in the month. You can't have it all, I guess...