Two exciting events have occurred since last time I blogged:

1) The Storm

Wednesday morning there was a massive storm here in the East Midlands. I'm not sure how much was right about what happened and what was hearsay. But this is what happened, allegedly... County Hall was struck by lightning! It hit once and the backup power system started coming on. Then it hit again, knocking the backup system offline! The computer network (and the phones) all went down. No-one could contact us, and we couldn't do any work! And then, after a while like that, someone wandered through and told us that the two floors above us had evacuated because the fire alarm had gone off - our alarm wasn't working! So we all had to go outside in the rain. There was a burning smell coming from somewhere, but we weren't told whether there really was a fire. Anyway, it didn't take long to get hooked up to emergency power, then the computers etc. worked again. So I did get some work done in the afternoon.

Don't know if our power went off here or not - the fridge didn't tell us, and it's supposed to, I think. But some of our friends south of the city had lost power. Apparently 54,000 homes were without power. It was a big storm!

2) The Billy Joel Concert at the NEC

I made Rob take me to see Billy Joel last night. It was good, he had a grand piano that came up out of the floor and rotated around so that you could see him (instead of seeing his back all the time). It didn't constantly rotate, just every so often. If it rotated all the time that'd be silly. The band was amazing, one of the guys played sax, trumpet and trombone, one played several different saxes (including soprano) and random percussion. Then there was a guitar player, a bass player, keyboard and drums. And, of course, Billy Joel himself. I think some of the musicians had been playing with him for years.

When we got there our seats had been re-allocated, which was good since we ended up with much better ones. The concert started with a few old songs that I didn't know, but after a certain point I knew them all. They played for two and a half hours! It's hard to say which songs I enjoyed the most, but I was glad they played 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant'. That was one song that's supposed to be one of the best sax songs ever, and the sax solos in it were brilliant. He did the ones that non-fans would probably recognise, like 'Uptown Girl', and 'River of Dreams'. I suppose I only got into his stuff because it's musically very good to play to (with quite varied styles). I know my brother reckons they're good to play drums to, and they're good for bass as well. So that was good - and my first proper concert! Other than that it's just bands I saw at the uni balls. I'm not sure they really count.

Thursday I was listening to the radio and, I think it was Edith, said that you can't expect live singing to be as good as studio recorded stuff. She was talking about festivals. But, wow, Billy Joel's voice really is amazing. And he's way better at the piano than I thought from CD's. Somehow it seems more amazing when he's playing live. He made comments about Madonna making venues turn off air conditioning so she didn't ruin her voice, but he wanted it on so that everyone was comfortable. I think mainly he was being mean about her voice, but it's definitely nowhere near as good as his. I was very impressed!

So I will be off now. Didn't really have time to blog, but thought I should since I may not have time for a while. There are probably plenty more things I could have said about the concert. If I thought about it. :)

Bye!

posted by Fiery Fred @ 5:56 PM