Wasting Time
Ale, music and enjoying life.
Manic Street Preachers – Leeds Town & Country Club 8th April 1996 “Leeds Sound City”
The Manic Street Preachers first gig proper after the disappearance of band member Richey Edwards. (I think just prior to this gig they did some support thing to The Stone Roses at Wembley)
Onwards
To be honest I didn’t think they’d continue. I remember buying the NME around the time and week after week the drama unfolded. My mate had just passed his driving test and we drove out to Meadowhall (as you do when you’re young and in the North of England). There was an article with an update on the band in the NME which I bought at one of the many newsagents. In the car home I flung the paper open and read that they’d decided to continue after writing some new songs that were too good to ignore.
Leeds Sound City 96
A few weeks later they’d been announced to headline one of the gigs at “Leeds Sound City”. I somehow managed to bag a ticket to this (they sold out within minutes – mates weren’t so lucky so I was on me own). It was the turn of Leeds to host the “Sound City” event which meant that the city played host to a number of bands playing the various venues scattered across the city over the course of a couple of days.
The Support
On entering the venue I chanced upon Cast who were providing the support. Although I didn’t really notice if I’m honest (not a fan). I was on me own so I got chatting to someone who claimed he was the brother of the guitarist (“I like the Manics mate but me brothers band are great”).
In between Cast disappearing and The Manics taking to the stage we were treated to a live link up with the Terrorvision gig which was happening down the road at Leeds Uni. If I recall there were 2 large screens at each side of the stage showing the gig. Most of us were propping up the bar if I’m honest.
Eventually, the Terrorvision footage ends and the Manics appear. Nicky Wire opens with “Thank fuck that’s over!” (or words to that effect) in reference to the end of Terrorvision’s set.
The New Songs
And we’re off. The set wasn’t the standard full gig’s worth due to the festival feel to Sound City and the amount of bands that had been on that day. But nonetheless we were treated to a Manics greatest hits so far. “From Despair To Where”, the jangly guitar new one (and unreleased at this stage) “Design For Life”, “Faster” and several other crowd pleasers. Then it was the turn of new songs taken from the yet to be released “Everything Must Go” album.
Setlist here – I’d set the tape running to record Radio 1’s live broadcast of the gig and when I got home I was happy to find out the gig had recorded fine. Still have the tape somewhere.
Not too long after this gig – “Design For Life” was released and this “punk band” were about to go mainstream, which was evident the next time I saw them at Manchester’s Nynex Arena in 1997.
The Stranglers @ Sheffield O2 7th March 2015
I’ve lost count of the amount of Stranglers gigs I’ve attended now. It started in 1990 and I’ve seen the (on average) at least twice a year. Somewhere in the region of 50 then.
Got the train down and immediately struck up conversation with an old bloke who sat opposite me (I was wearing me Stranglers T-Shirt). “Oh I was a Jam fan” he said. Despite that, we had a good old chat for the entire journey. Much to the annoyance of everyone else in the carriage – I happened to notice we were in the “quiet carriage”.
After having a few delightful ales with friends in Sheffield’s Tap (just outside the station) we made our way to the venue. Not quite a sold out crowd there tonight but pretty packed. The setlist is definitely a fans setlist on this tour. “Four Horsemen” from The Gospel According To The Meninblack and “The Man They Love To Hate” from La Folie being very enjoyable this evening. Even the 80s poptastic “Nice In Nice” sounded good.
Nokia Denim update rolling out to Lumia 920 this evening.
Just received the update. You’ll need at least 50% power.
Octopus Deploy with Team City
Working with one other developer on a greenfield project we had no CI in place. Somehow over the course of a couple of sprints (and mainly off plan) I managed to get TeamCity configured and Octopus deploy to push out the 3 main apps we were building to Dev and 2 Test VMs.
I’d had some experience with TeamCity in the past so was up and running with build configurations pretty quickly. I was unaware of TeamCity’s Nuget server support and spent a bit of time working with that to publish artifacts from the build (earlier blog post here) . This was a great move as we had a class library which became a dependency for just about every other app we were building.
That done, we still had no way of pushing the build apps out to our dev/test servers. I toyed with the idea of powershell scripting but thought this could get quite messy. Plus the VM boxes (although reachable via IP) were not on our domain.
I’d read about Octopus deploy and thought it would be worth spending an hour or 2 investigating a proof of concept. Within a couple of hours I had the Octopus Server sat on a VM and the client/agents “Tentacles” listening on the deployment VM servers (dev and 2 test boxes).
From there it was a case of configuring an “environment”, a machine and roles. I went down the route of firstly, specifying the Nuget server then configuring the Octopus Server with a new Project based on one of the Test VMs – specifying the package Id to push and adding a Custom install location (rather than the “C:OctopusApps” standard location). Within around 30 mins I was watching files being deployed out to the Test VM as expected. Incredibly easy. It becomes even easier if you install the Nuget “Octopack” package into your Projects that you wish to deploy out and configure accordingly through TeamCity (this saves an extra build step of “Nuget Pack”).
There’s plenty of helpful vids over at http://octopusdeploy.com/learn/videos
Wire @ Wakefield Unity Hall 20th February 2015
Walking into the venue no one checks our tickets – coulda saved £30 there (only joking of course).
One third full at best, the newly revamped Unity Hall looks fantastic but feels a bit empty this evening. The sound mix is horrific. Possibly the worst sound I’ve ever witnessed at a gig (apart from possibly Buzzcocks at Leeds Uni a few years back).
Vocals echo off and bounce around a spacious hall, constant feedback and distortion. I’m dead centre in the hall and it feels like they’re taking the piss a little. That said, always good to see Wire and the setlist (new album heavy) is pretty decent. The new songs sound great “In Manchester” and “Swallow” are particular highlights. “Spent” sounding great this evening as well. The sound does improve towards the end. Booking tickets for Leeds in April.