You Me At Six – Brixton Academy 15-10-11

Support: Lower Than Atlantis and Deaf Havana

I don’t really know how to review a gig, because I tend to come out with a strong emotion but very little in the way of coherent thought. For example, when I stepped out of Camden Roundhouse this year having seen Taking Back Sunday (one of the few bands on my ‘I need to see them immediately-right-now-yesterday-thank-you-please’  list) I had a strong feeling of disappointment over what was ultimately a very average show in a largely unsuitable venue. Conversely, when I stepped out of Incubus (a band I have seen more than any other, by some margin) at Kentish Town Forum more recently this year, I stepped out with a sense of absolute happiness, with them having played plenty of my old favourites at an unusually small venue.

I rather like Brixton Academy. With The Astoria gone, it’s one of the few traditional mid-sized venues left and it’s got a big sloping floor, so no matter where you stand you can usually find a good view.

So, precursor done, perhaps the most honest thing I can say about this is that when I left this concert I was as happy as I’ve been in a long time (that’s not to say I’m a sad person, far from it) and I was absolutely gagging for more.

You Me At Six are one of those bands I just want to do well, probably because I love their music, but they seem so genuine, hard working and talented that they just deserve any success that comes their way. They are also from Weybridge, a town I lived in for a while and not the sort of place you’d immediately expect a rock band to come from! The support from Deaf Havana was also really good although I don’t know their music really, it was obviously ideal for You Me At Six, I didn’t really hear Lower Than Atlantis because I was queuing and buying a t-shirt! (Support your favourite rock bands by buying their shit!)

Set List

• The Consequence
• Jaws On The Floor
• Safer To Hate Her
• Save It For The Bedroom
• Liquid Confidence
• Trophy Eyes
• Contagious Chemistry
• Bite My Tongue
• Playing The Blame Game
• Fireworks
• Little Death
• Tigers And Sharks

Encore

• Loverboy
• Stay With Me
• Underdog

All in all a good set with some bouncy tunes, a great performance and a good atmosphere. Despite having one foot in the commercial music side of things (You’ll notice how their music has changed if you find ‘Noises’ on You Tube, a cracking song which could happily be given some more live outings) You Me At Six put on a proper rock music show. Which is a testament to their general appeal really, because the crowd is largely Female (and probably teenaged, justifying previous comments thrown at me that I listen to teenage girl music). But that really isn’t true. There was a hint of screamo during the show and you’ll find some more on the new album.

So yeah, you can probably see that there is a decent mix and not too many songs from the new album, although that was a bit of a shame for me because I’ve been listening to it almost non-stop since it came out. They also played Tigers & Sharks, which is a personal favourite, so that kept me happy!

What else can I tell you? Well, I can tell you that although you’ve missed out, because this was the last show of the tour before they fly out to America, You Me At Six, have today announced a new tour next year, the dates being as follows: –

March

17th  Leicester, O2 Academy
18th  Nottingham, Rock City
20th  Bournemouth, O2 Academy
21st  Yeovil, Westland Centre
23rd  Cardiff, The Great Hall
24th  Liverpool, University
25th  Newcastle, Academy
27th  Glasgow, SECC Hall 3
28th  Manchester, O2 Apollo 3

April

1st  Birmingham, Ballroom
2nd  London, O2 Brixton Academy

Josh mentioned last night that they’d be doing 2 shows at Brixton, so expect a second date to be announced when sales for the first go well. This tour is a full tour in support of the new album Sinners Never Sleep, so you can probably expect a few more songs of that album in the set, which also means you need to buy it and listen to it immediately!

4.5/5

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The £2 coin

2 Pounds Sterling

I don’t know if there was a specific day when Mervin King (or MerKing as I will be calling him from now on) sat down in front of… whoever it is he sits down in front of, and decided that the £1 coin wasn’t quite cutting it anymore and that the answer to all of the country’s problems was the £2 coin.

I guess it is inflation, the fact that where once you might have bought a bottle of coke using just one £1 coin and now you find that would almost certainly be insufficient.

I don’t even have any £2 coins at the moment, so I’m not entirely sure how they popped into my head, but they have and now you, whoever you are, have the lucky experience of reading about it.

I can still remember a time, when France’s currency of choice was the Franc and Bergerac was as far as I’d ever travelled from home. It was a special time, an innocent time, when Santa might still have been real and birthdays were occasions of excitement rather than dread. What I am getting at here is about 10 or 15 years ago, you’d go on holiday, with the parents, and before long you’d be handed a wondrous coin by some sweet shop assistant or crepe vendor. Yes, you knew that there would no longer be pounds and pence in your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wallet, but never could you have anticipated a coin which is 2 different colours. Oh yes, this was a special thing, something to be treasured; the 10 Franc coin was unlike anything we had at home, despite being broadly similar in both size and value to a £1 coin. The 20 Franc was even more special, offering gold around the outside and as a spot in the middle, these were even rarer finds.

Then, stealing away the excitement of children everywhere at the amazing possibility of foreign currency, The Bank of England, or the Royal Mint, or the Prime Minister, or The Queen, or Santa; decided enough was enough and that we must have a new coin. The £2 was born.

I quite like the thing. I don’t really understand the pattern on the front, most coins in this country have borne some form of coat of arms on one side and a face on the other. For some reason the designer of the 2 coloured £2 instead decided to see what would happen if you cross a zebra, some sandpaper and a range of Archery goals. Apart from that though, it’s pretty useful. A single £2 coin is lighter than 2x £1 coins, generally the main reason for carrying larger denominations.

The downside is, you still come across drinks machines, parking meters and the vast majority of websites that don’t accept the bloody thing. I mean, come on guys, it’s been around for about 11 years, it’s not that hard surely?

Anyway, yeah, the £2 coin. I actually quite like them and I would like to encourage you to post me yours as soon as you can possibly find the time. I will find a very good use for them. 🙂

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I never did manage to slip MerKing in there again… shame.

Giraffe Restaurant @ Heathrow T5

Giraffe, Heathrow T5

It’s a bit of a different one, but since I went there whilst on my travels, I feel like Giraffe deserves a little mention.

I have to admit, going to Giraffe for breakfast turned out to be a bit of an oversight. Not due to the restaurant itself, more because I managed to forget that because I was flying with BA and not Ryanair (other budget carriers are available!), I would be provided with a breakfast on the flight.

First Impressions

I like Giraffe, I’ve been a few times, mainly to the one in Waterloo (which is always rammed and has a half an hour queue… plan ahead) or the one in Guildford, which is not normally rammed, but is equally good.

This particular restaurant is more like a department store concession, mainly because it isn’t in a retail unit or anything like that, it is open plan with the rest of the departures concourse. This is pretty nice, it means you can see what’s going on, both inside the terminal and on the runway, whilst the screens help you to spot when your plane is on ‘last call’ and you still have a sausage left on your plate. It does mean the experience is also a little odd though, as you don’t have the normal restaurant atmosphere.

4/5

Service

It was pretty packed in there and to be honest, the service wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful either. We made a couple of changes to the standard dishes when ordering and they got those totally wrong, so that wasn’t so great, but what can you expect from somewhere like that. The waiter was exceptionally cheery though, especially given how early we were there.

3.5/5

Food

Giraffe’s food is generally interesting because it comes from all over the world, or at least it is inspired by stuff from around the world, a little bit. My breakfast wasn’t, it came from a frying pan, just the way god intended. I can’t really say much about it because it was a typical fried breakfast, a pretty good one at that. If you like that kind of thing and you are indeed flying on a budget airline, you could go a great deal worse than eating here. In terms of the lunch/dinner menu, I don’t suppose it’s much different from the other Giraffes, meaning that it remains a great place to go and grab a bite before your flight. (I’m rhyming now, genius writing crossed with simplistic poetry is just one of my many untapped talents.)

4/5

Price

A restaurant in a location with a captive audience… There isn’t a single moment in all of history where this didn’t mean vastly inflated prices. My Breakfast was over £8, which is far too much, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be the same situation anywhere, so what can you do…

3/5

Overall

Nice restaurant, good food, slightly odd location, decent service, 3x large Giraffes. What more could a soon to be jet-lagged man ask for?

4.5/5

499

A watch that doesn’t need a battery… Genius or just arse? Ted Baker Pentler Watch

Ted Baker Pentler

So, to start with my customary random ramble about nothing to do with the title, you probably haven’t noticed that I’ve not blogged for a while. There’s a couple of reasons for this, partly being busy at work meaning I don’t have lunch-breaks, partly the fact my computer at home has died and partly the need for a little break to keep my motivation up. I don’t suppose that really matters if you’ve found this article from a google search about Ted Baker, but it matters to me. Anyway…

Did you know Ted Baker make watches? Maybe not, but you can probably guess since they aspire to cater to every sartorial need of the modern gentleman. Again, if you are searching the internet for information about Ted Baker’s watches then you probably did know; either way, read on!

I am not generally a fan of brands that plaster their name over everything. Some do it subtly, like Superdry. Well, no, its not subtle, it’s bold and in your face, but invariably it’s a part of a larger motif rather than simply just the name in a particular style. Ted Baker tend to simply print the words ‘Ted Baker’ anywhere and everywhere, particularly on accessories. When it comes to the ‘Pentler’ watch (which I should mention is exactly the same as the ‘Rinker’ and ‘Simber’ styles in all but strap design or colour), they not only have the brand on the watch-face, but also about 324.6 times around the inside edge, which you may be able to spot in the above picture if you click on it and make it a bit bigger. On the plus side, I didn’t notice it before I bought it, so it can’t be that in your face, but I don’t need to see that my watch has been made by Ted Baker 324.6 times every time I look at it.

I don’t know why I am complaining so much actually, our culture dictates that we display our wealth or status to some extent and wearing a T-shirt with the word ‘Stussy’ emblazoned across it immediately helps to mark you out from a man in a Hugo Boss suit, or wearing a lacoste polo shirt. I am currently wearing my normal work suit and have still managed to include a pair of Ted Baker cufflinks, inevitably with the name embossed on both sides, so I really shouldn’t complain. I still don’t like it though.

Anyway, I have started badly here, because that’s not really the issue I want to talk about. Let me do this properly though before I end up ranting, which you might be able to tell is on the cards?!

Design

You may be able to guess that I love the design of this watch. It’s why I bought the thing and it really comes down to taste, but if you disagree with me, you’re probably wrong. I may not like the abundance of branding, but I can get over that in this case.

The watch is kinetic, which effectively means it has no batteries and is powered by your movement. It’s an extension of the old wind-up approach and it means you can wind the watch up too. This design is a bit of a double-edged sword. It’s cool and means that you need not ever buy batteries, but putting your watch on the bedside table over night and forgetting to wear it for just a day means that it will need the time setting and a quick wind up. A small price to pay, but sometimes annoying nonetheless.

The cool bit is that Ted, in his wisdom, has decided to expose the inner workings of the watch. This equates to a small peep-hole in the front, showing that the cogs are doing their thing and a large window at the back showing the fantastic energy-saving mechanism in action. Something which is both stylish and which appeals to the mega-geek I barely manage to hide under the surface is surely a total winner.

As I have also suggested, there are a couple of other options available. Pentler is the leather strapped version; Rinker is identical, with a metal strap and Simber is identical to Rinker but with an anodised black design.

5/5

Price

In many ways a watch is a watch, but we all know that isn’t really true. There aren’t many other things in this world which have such a vast disparity in price whilst performing exactly the same job. Whether you buy the classic £9.99 Casio Digital watch from Argos or a £20k Rolex, at the end of the day, you’re going to look at your wrist and within a second, you’ll know the time. I’d venture to guess that in reality, most people are willing to spend between £50 and £200 on a day-to-day watch and probably aspire to own a watch in the £1k-£2k price bracket, at least if you care remotely about these things. I probably think this because I own a watch in the first bracket and would very much like a Tag Heuer Aquaracer, which, depending on the model retails at somewhere between £1k and £2k.

This particular watch cost me £125 and depending on the model you choose can be as much as £150, which I think isn’t all that bad for a designer watch, especially one you’ll never need to put a new battery in.

4/5

The catch

I’ve owned this watch for the best part of a year now, which means that something has moved me to write about it today. Yes, it could have been that I glanced down at my wrist, saw my lovely Ted Baker (x 324.6) watch and thought I must tell the world (or at least 30 people who read this article) about my watch. It could have been that. It wasn’t. Over the weekend, whilst I was on a lovely holiday at Center Parcs (stay tuned to this very blog to read more on that soon, in fact, subscribe, there’s a link to the right) my Ted Baker Pentler watch decided it was no longer interested in telling me the correct time. ‘This can’t be right’ I thought, before attempting to re-set the time, before winding the watch up…

“Erm, that’s weird, I want the watch to say 4pm, but when I turn the hour hand to ‘4’ the minute hand seems to be on ‘3’.” Maybe if I wind it up that will help somehow. “Oh, nothing’s happening… Erm… Fuck.”

That’s right, the stupid bloody thing is broken.

I don’t know how a watch can get itself into this state, but suffice to say, I am not best pleased. In fact, the old adage about how a broken watch will still tell the correct time twice a day doesn’t apply here, with the various hands managing to find themselves in completely unrelated positions.

It’s not the first time either. The last Ted Baker watch I owned, a birthday present had a dead battery within a year and then, despite not being worn (due to said battery issue) then had the number 4 actually fall off. I have no doubt this was a manufacturing fault as I have since seen the same style watch advertised on eBay with the same problem.

I’ve not yet taken my watch back to Ted and with that in mind I don’t know what the customer service aspect will be like; however, given my 0% success-rate with the brand’s watches, I will be seeking a refund as opposed to a replacement. I will report back here on how I get one. In the meantime, if anyone from Ted is reading this, I would welcome your comments and I will certainly publish them here in conjunction with this article.

All in all then, regardless of how great the other stuff is, if you can’t find out the time from your watch it is pretty crap. So based on my experiences I recommend that you STEER CLEAR of Ted Baker designer watches and take your £125 to a real watchmaker, or just look at your phone, it’s almost as easy.

0/5

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