After
Thursday night's antics, I felt a bit like having a long recovery weekend to allow the various toxins poisoning my body to work their way out of my system. I had to call in sick on Friday, but Josh, having avoided my own excesses of champagne and sake, dutifully toddled off to the library after I rolled him out of bed at 8am. In the cold hard light of day, I was able to see quite clearly: mmm, nice bum. My
ladder-based assumptions were proved correct.
Friday itself was a write-off. I got up after Josh left and did some chores in the morning, but then went and lay down on my bed to rest my eyes for a couple of minutes, and woke up to find the clock reading 4pm. I booted up the laptop to do a blog entry on the night before, but found myself massively distracted by the National Library
Matapihi site, and, again, before I knew it, the phone was going and my friend Patty was inviting me around to her place for some Friday night drinkies.
Hair of the dog. The perfect hangover cure. I hung out with Patty and her boy for a bit, admiring some of their gardening they'd been working hard on all afternoon, and then turned down their invitation to join them at a cocktail party they were going to, partly because I was still feeling so sick, but mostly because my new frock that would have been perfect for such an event was currently scrunched up in a messy ball under my bed. I went home, cleaned said frock, watched some bad TV, neglected my blog again, and collapsed into a turbulent night's sleep.
Anyway, the real action happened on Saturday night, when, despite still feeling a bit crap, I headed to town after watching the
NPC rugby final at noizy's. (Victory to 'Caaannn-aaa-breeee!' as the lads were prone to shouting out - if you're interested.) It may have been the site of large men in tight shorts smashing into each other a million miles an hour, but, from having felt like a there wasn't a kilojoule of energy stored anywhere in my body, I was suddenly bursting with vigour. Noizy and I arrived at the venue at about 10pm, and were taken aback at the queue that was snaking its way down the steps and out onto the road. As per his usual gig-going technique, noizy just strolled past the patiently waiting punters with me in his wake, waved at
Blink who was manning the door, and had two pints of Macs Gold sorted for us before I'd even caught my breath. He's blagged us tickets for the
Silver Scroll Music Awards on Tuesday as well. Classic.
I don't do live reviews very well, suffice to say both
Cassette and
the Phoenix Foundation were excellent. Like any local bands whose repertoire I don't know backwards, they occasionally venture into the realms of yawn-inducing, but, for the most of it, they both played fantastic gigs: Cassette did their slacker-Neil-Young-alt-country-rock thing and gradually wound things up to an all out rock-frenzy finale, only to have the power fail two minutes into their last song. Showing full dedication to the cause (or a Spinal Tap ability to be completely unaware of what was actually going on), the drummer kept time while the guitarist/singer threw his guitar to the ground and danced a jig around it. After about a minute of this, the power came back on, the amps kicked back into life, and the band finished things off with a stadium-worthy rock finish: barump, barump .... barrrooooMMMPPHHH!
The Phoenix Foundation are more difficult to describe, as their sound is more all over the place. A bit alt-country, some rock, some pop, whatever. Best trick is to
just have a listen. But, yes, they were good too. More blog reviews of the night are
here and
here.
I managed to meet a couple of hitherto internet-only buddies as well, which was nice. Hi Jess! Hi Hugh! Nice to put names to faces finally.
Josh was there (Hi Josh!), but it was so crowded that I didn't get a chance to say hello until I was virtually walking out the door. He told me he was expecting some blog action on our previous exploits sometime soon, which I promised
I'd deliver at some point, and we parted ways despite my late realisation that he was looking even finer than he had been the other night. Or maybe it was just the post-rugby hormones still flowing.
Yet again, I had totally lost track of time, and as I wandered out onto Cuba Street with the sounds of
Phelps and Munro ringing in my ears, I was amazed to find out it was pushing 3am. Thank god for Labour Day, is all I've got to say. With my day off on Friday, and the public holiday on Monday, I was able to sleep for most of Sunday and Monday and get my energy levels back to somewhere approaching normal for the start of the working week.
Work. Amazing how four days off can make you forget what it's like...
