I managed to get to a sold out Portland Arms to see The Wave Pictures last night. I must've seen them ten or fifteen times over the years but not for quite a while. How much I've enjoyed them has generally depended on how much they play from their first album, which in turn depends on how recently they've had something out (and I guess naturally goes down over time). The gig started well, with "Stay Here and Take Care of The Chickens" and "Spaghetti" and the fact that I'd managed to get out of the house was exciting enough, but, despite some amusing anti-mandolin banter, after about 45 minutes with no more songs I knew and some dorky northerners standing behind me mentioning that they were in a band approximately every 30 seconds I got a little bored. The solos get a bit wearing after a while too, despite any given one being really impressive in isolation. I went to talk to B-Sydes (whose not massively stylistically appropriate support slot I'd unfortunately missed) for a while, waited for another song that I knew and got mistaken for the merch guy. The encore was "Now You Are Pregnant" "Pea Green Coat" and "Friday Night in Loughborough" which made the whole thing worthwhile. 2 hours is a very long set.
In other news the CDs of my new album should be here on Wednesday! That is pretty exciting. I'm completely ballsing up any effort at PR though by procrastinating. I'm not sure whether to put the release date back or just not bother going for anything other than blogs. Not that I'm overly hopefuly of persuading anyone to listen anyway but I do think it's really good. I've not written about the process of making it nearly as much as I did with Scars. I don't think I went anywhere near as crazy, though it did get put back a month or two because I was worrying about the gaps between the songs. Plus ca change.