inulro | [update]

I've been less than well. Details in an Adventures in Brain Chemistry update, if I ever get round to it.

The good news largely involves the Duke Special gig that I went to on Sunday night. He was wonderful as always, and I purchased the new album and an album of live tracks and studio out-takes. The show was a good mix of old and new songs. Last time I heard the new songs was on his solo tour last year when they were very much works in progress and I wasn't convinced, and while none of them have the immediate impact of, say, Wake Up Scarlett or Brixton Leaves (or all of Songs from the Deep Forest), I've found myself humming several of them this week. He has also written a set of 12 songs based on a set of silent films by an actor whose name escapes me but disappeared just after talkies came out - he did three of these, which were lovely & don't appear to be available anywhere.

Just when you think he's done the most gut-wrenchingly beautiful version of a song ever, he does something like bring on the female vocalist from the support band[1] at the encore to do "Freewheel", and blows away the whole audience all over again.

Note to self: next time he does a full-orchestra concert, I really do need to go. The first time it was in Belfast, and the last one was in London when I had no holiday to take.

[1] Which I heard as "Fern Slippers" but the web page tells me in fact is "Foreign Slippers", so the answer to the question "is Duke Special losing his accent?" is no. Hiberno-English - the dialect in which foreign has one syllable but film has two.

Not much besides that, unless you count the fact that the school in Bristol that's closed because one child has the swine flu is around the corner from my work; I will be utterly unimpressed but not at all surprised if all my staff fail to turn up on Tuesday.