London (and elsewhere, hopefully) Calling

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  • edited September 2012
    We just got to our hotel. I need to drop some suit cases off at the venue at 5:30. Then we'll probably want to grab some food near by before heading back to the venue. I'll come outside between dropping the cases off and getting food to see who is around. Probably at 5:45. I believe seats are assigned tonight.
  • Well it took me half an hour to connect to the Orange WiFi hotspot at the hotel, so now that I am here I may as well say something. There is now a hand symbol for the obligatory 'whoop' every time Robert C. Baker (whoop!) is mentioned. JoCo played Drinking With You and I Crush Everything, which he hadn't done in London, so that was nice. On the other hand, in London he opened with Not About You, which surprised me, and he didn't do that here. He hasn't done Redshirt at all this tour, perhaps because he needs the band for it. He's been doing Sticking It To Myself, maybe the only times without the band, I don't know. Also Want You Gone (he did that last time he was in the UK, but he didn't do it on the cruise so I thought maybe he'd stopped. Actually it seemed like Paul and Storm had stopped doing Nugget Man for a while, but it's back this tour.)

    I thought I'd accidentally deleted the first 20 minutes of footage, but it turned out I didn't, so I am happy about that. It was from straight on, which is rare since there isn't usually a good place to put the camera where they can both be seen properly. I made a few other minor filming mistakes and have yet to get all of this tour. But I think the new D20 camera is working okay. Critical Hit!

    I met all the people I had planned to meet, I think, and a guy who had a CERN T-shirt that he didn't get from me. Yay!
  • edited September 2012
    Good to meet you Angela, and hope you enjoy the Bristol and Manchester shows too! I'm very tempted to attend the Marian Call CERN show next month, but need to save every penny if I'm going to have any chance of becoming a SeaMonkey next year :)

    Also, I'll take responsibility for the initial whoop when P&S first mentioned Robert C. Baker (whoop!), as I too thought they'd stopped playing Nugget Man and was about as overjoyed as a stereotypically reserved British person can be at the news of its return!

    Edit: Whilst I know there are better quality recordings of the entire show to come, I couldn't help but upload my one and only recording of the aforementioned Nugget Man performance, complete with the hand gesture to be used in place of whooping in future...
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C1EuLmd-0k
  • Oh great; I actually missed just the part where they showed us the gesture, because I restarted recording to avoid hitting the 4GB file size limit.
  • edited September 2012
    Holy crap, Bristol was a great show and a very enthusiastic audience. JoCo did a lot of songs he hadn't done this tour yet: Better, You Ruined Everything (for fake encore, instead of A Talk With George) Now I Am an Arsonist, Soft Rocked By Me (at the end of which he broke a string, and replaced it himself instead of getting Storm to as he used to, while Storm sang a song a cappella which sounded familiar and I think JoCo called it Brown Sugar.)

    Also, I guess Paul and Storm were afraid of laughing at the thought of whoops during Nugget Man, because instead of that they played the Ballad of Eddie Praeger! I've never seen them do that one. Paul killed on the penny whistle, probably literally. It reminded me of Chris Patterson (keeping the tradition alive!) of The Arrogant Worms on Gaelic Song. During Jonathan's set, Paul scratched his nose and made it bleed, and staunched the blood with some panties while extolling the virtues of the nose panty for distinguished gentlemen, in a hilarious voice/accent. Bristol is now known as Sneezetown, and its new currency is liquorice penises.

    This show and the last I tried my hand at starting the clapping during Shop Vac. I'm not that confident about when to start, or rather I am confident about when I should have started just after I don't start, but I know when to stop.

    The Swedish friend I dragged along (who only knew a couple of songs of each of theirs) loved it and bought two T-shirts.

    ETA: I forgot to mention he sang Je Suis Rick Springfield for the first time in the tour, which was most amusing for the aforementioned Swedish friend, a language geek who knows French quite well.
  • is it time yet? me and him will be in Manchester pretty much all afternoon and should be getting to the student union for about 6 ish... 

    hopefully see some of you there! 

    Nic
  • How was the Manchester gig guys? After how awesome Birmingham was I was incredibly tempted to get a last minute ticket and drive up there, but in the end decided it probably was for the best if I didn't since I have an early start today :(

    Also big thanks to everyone who came to the Birmingham gig, it was awesome to meet some new faces. I was a bit worried that I'd be bored and alone before/ after the show since it's my first (full) JoCo concert alone, but that wasn't the case. Thanks to @Kerrin for helping with the merch and @Angelastic for my awesome Cern wristband, I'v been loudly proclaiming it's magical properties and how it's giving me super powers to those who ask about it (and those who don't). Hopefully see you all next year when JoCo returns!
  • edited September 2012
    Kerrin and I arrived late in Manchester so didn't really have time to socialise with people before the show. We got the Ballad of Eddie Praeger again, Millionaire Girlfriend and, by request, the acoustic debut of Glasses. There was a big barrier in front of the stage so no chance for Frogger, which they also didn't do in Bristol. Anyway, I briefly met @St_Trousers. There was someone wearing great zombie makeup and someone else wearing some other kind of makeup which I am ashamed to say I couldn't identify with a JoCo song in the brief time I saw it.

    Does anyone know who drew the picture of Paul with the nosepanty in Bristol? I happened to see (and furtively take a photo of [ETA which I decided to not-so-furtively upload to Flickr]) it after the Manchester show and I think it's great. That's probably my favourite moment of the tour. "Where is your nose panty, Jonathan?"
  • @Daised I don't know if I met you or not. I was wearing a Jayne hat for most of the show and talked to quite a few people without actually introducing myself. If I did meet you hello again and if I didn't well just hello. Must try harder next time.

    @angelastic I was so happy to hear glasses. I had jsut been telling someone in the queue how it was my favourite JoCo song but doubted he would play it as it isn't really a gig song. I was wrong on both counts and very happily so. Wish I had been in Bristol now too.
  • I happened to walk in on him doing Glasses in the soundcheck, so that was a bit of a spoiler, but I hadn't realised it was the first time without the band. :) I had actually been considering bringing my MC Frontalot glasses to wear in case he played that.
  • @st_Trousers no you didn't speak to us, although we did see someone wearing a Jayne hat sitting a few rows in front of us.... so that was probably you, on the right hand side... 


    Didn't actually get to speak\meet anyone :( we were a little disorganised and ended up getting to the SU after they had let the queue in. 

    really enjoyed the gig though, and glad I made the effort to go out despite being jetlagged and feeling like crap! 
    I am now even more mega excited about the cruise (I didn't think this was possible but it is) 
  • Aha, I've just been catching up on the guys' Twitters to see what they were saying about us while I didn't have much internet access, and as I suspected, Paul tweeted that drawing I mentioned.
  • @Daised That was probably me, we were probably about 4 rows back in the middle of the row. I also have a fairly noticeable beard if you need further identification. Might have to try and meet up on the cruise. Yeah let's travel half way round the planet to meet someone who lives in the next city! Glad to have shared the gig with you though, it was particularly awesome and one of the best I have been to.
  • @St_Trousers or we'll have to find some other geeky event between now and the cruise in the north west to meet up at! 

    I must admit I was looking forward to meeting some of you in Manchester so that when we got to the cruise there would be at least one or two friendly faces in the sea of monkeys... but I shall just have to get to know everyone virtually and let it all be a big surprise when we get to the Jocotel!
  • Don't worry, @Daised. I hadn't met any of the sea monkeys in real life (except JoCo and Paul and Storm) before the first cruise, and I loved the sensation of stepping into the internet and seeing all those people I'd got to know virtually. Maybe it's even better that way. Now it's really trippy watching the collaborative videos the forum people made for JoCo's birthdays and realising I have now met a large proportion of the participants in real life.

    Anyway... I've uploaded videos of most of Paul and Storm's set at the London show, and I'm starting on JoCo's. You know what's great about the acoustics in Union Chapel, apart from the amazing resounding arrrs and Shop Vac claps? You (and JoCo) can actually hear a single audience member whispering 'Hey, Mr. Fancy Pants' when JoCo gets out his iPhone (which was actually for Nobody Loves You Like Me.) I didn't hear it well enough at the time but I can make it out on my video.

    I have a few more videos that I took with my old camera just in case the hastily-purchased new one wasn't good enough, but I haven't watched them yet. In the end I think the new camera worked alright, despite being optimised for ruggedness rather than concert-filming goodness. But maybe the other videos have nicer angles at points. Angles at points? What is this, geometry?
  • @Daised are you going to be at the Marian Call gig in the Nexus? I will be there all things willing with Jayne hat in tow so you know what it looks like!
  • I just noticed something somewhat interesting. JoCo did Mandelbrot Set all by himself in London (and yet, I swear I can hear some kind of harmony during 'change the world in a tiny way'; could it be an audience member, or just weird Union Chapel acoustics?) but with Paul and Storm at the other venues. The other three times I've filmed him singing that, he did it with Paul and Storm, and the three times I only recorded audio (well, with accidentally-timelapse video in one case) of him singing that, it was solo. On Best. Concert. Ever he sings it solo.

    Does he just sort of choose randomly whether Paul and Storm should sing on that song, or is it a function of whether I'm filming with a camera that I know how to use? ;) Are there other songs which are only sometimes performed with Paul and Storm? (Not counting band shows where he has other people to do harmonies.)
  • @St_Trousers I'm not sure at the moment. depends if I'm in the country and I can convince Andy it'll be a good way to spend one of our few evenings together! 

    I should really check the dates...
  • @Angelastic Cool, he's doing Mandelbrot Set with P&S these days? That's great! How long have they been doing that, does anyone know?

    That's how they did it in New York four years ago (wow, that's a long time!) as an impromptu second encore; I thought the "Mandelbrot set" backing vocals in the chorus were awesome, and I'd been waiting for them to bring it back. But this is the first time between then and now that I've been aware of them doing it that way.

  • @Bry: My infallible memory tells me they did it on JoCo Cruise Crazy 2011, London 2011, and Amsterdam 2011. My fallible memory tells me they did it at at least two of the shows (not London) during this year's England tour. I remember him saying something to Paul and Storm to the effect, 'You remember the change to the [something]th verse, right?' and I thought maybe he'd actually written something new for the 'Mandelbrot's in heaven' part, but maybe it was just the lack of lyrics. I also remember thinking the "Mandelbrot set" backing vocals were awesome, so I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same thing, and they haven't changed the way they do it. (Incidentally, they seem to have gone back to the old way of doing backup vocals for Birdhouse in Your Soul, which I like better than the new way they did a few times.)

    Perhaps he doesn't do it much with them any more because he has a band to do backing vocals now; man it was weird and fascinating seeing that (in general, not specifically Mandelbrot Set, which he didn't do) on the second cruise. (Who are these people singing harmonies that aren't Paul and Storm? What are these strange instrument-noises this guy is making with that instrument thing? Why are there no panties hanging from the microphone stand? How on Earth did I come to be sitting next to Marian Call?) Does he do Mandelbrot Set with the band?
  • Don't know the answer to all of those questions, but it's pretty clear how you came to be sitting next to Marian Call. (It's the same way I found myself next to Vi Hart, having a long, interesting discussion....)
  • I have been too busy for the forum much lately because Marian Call was here (I know how, this time! It's because I wanted her to be! Lots of people helped a lot but without me there would have been nothing to help with. How did I get so much power?! Watch me go mad and take over the world with your help), but my computer was still faithfully uploading the whole time, so here's the Birmingham show. This has better video because I could attach the camera to the arm of my chair, for a more central, slightly stage-Paul viewpoint, exactly how I like it.

    I noticed another song that he only sometimes had Paul and Storm on, but I can't remember which it was now. Oh yeah, maybe it was Code Monkey; with Paul and Storm in London, solo in Birmingham. Also, going by the Birmingham banter (I didn't check) Storm eschewed the tambourine for one of the songs (I don't remember which), in London, but not Birmingham. Showers did not improve between London and Birmingham.
  • Hello! I've finished uploading the Bristol show (my favourite of the tour; there's a terrifying sneeze, Paul's nose panty and Storm singing what turns out to have been Baggy Trousers by Madness [I guess I should add Madness to the huge list of things I should listen to. Sometimes I wish the world weren't so mind-bogglingly big, but I don't hold it against Disney for lying to me] Also I was there with a friend I hadn't seen for a few months who only knew about two of Paul and Storm's songs and two of Jonathan's, and also knows French so could understand the only time he sang Je suis Rick Springfield this tour, so that made it even more fun, and meant I was not directly to blame for the liquorice penises thrown at that show) and the Manchester one (shorter because there was a curfew, but colourful and fun and with some random Proclaimers, ribbing about a plus sign song, and the acoustic debut of Glasses.)

    Now I just have two Marian Call shows and a Wax Mannequin show to upload. My poor modem gets no rest. But it's about time I did. Goodnight!
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