Looking forward to Iron and Wine tomorrow night and The Decemberists in Bexhill on Saturday. Already shaping up to be another vintage year for gigs...
Warming up for The Decemberists, I came upon a (legitimately) downloadable audience tape of a performance in their home town of Portland just last month. Click here if you're interested - my appetite's now suitably whetted.
The Internet Archive site that it comes from seems an amazing venture which will need months to explore properly - hundreds of concerts from the likes of Alejandro Escovedo and Chuck Prophet, as well as a million people I've never heard of.
Opening for The Decemberists will be Blind Pilot, another Portland outfit. The first thing of theirs I listened to was a cover of 'Look At Miss Ohio' - anyone with the taste and chutzpah to cover a Gillian Welch song and the chops to pull it off has to be worth a bit of anyone's time. Watch this space...
A little further ahead, May is looking strenuous with both the Brighton Festival and a concentrated burst of 3 solid days of new music in the Great Escape. Already booked for Sufjan Stevens, John Cale, Laurie Anderson and Mulatu Astatke in the Festival - and targeting Brasstronaut and Cloud Control in particular in the Great Escape.