Jonathan Coulton - Bristol last night

So, last night was the eagerly awaited (by me) Jonathan Coulton (w/Paul and Storm) concert in sunny Bristol. Thankfully, to spare me a solo trip, Cerys decided to come along. I double checked (by tweeting the artists, twitter makes the whole world a bit weird) that the concert was seated so the foot wasn't a massive issue beyond walking round to get something to eat first, still looked sore though.

Paul and Storm opened and I'm sure they only managed to actually get through about 6 or 7 songs in 45 minutes. By no means a bad thing as to be fair they were consistently funny and got good level of interaction going from the (very geeky) crowd. All in all a excellent support act!

Not quite sure why Paul was so obsessed with the time, but hey, OCD manifests itself in many ways.

Then it was time for the main event, well I missed him actually coming on, as I queued for a drink for aaaages, and decided to hold off on a pee, no sign of him, still holding, nothing, holding, run to toilet. Come back and he's up there. Hadn't started though!

After a bit of faffing he got underway with Millionaire Girlfriend, Ikea etc. I'm not going to give you the full setlist as:
a) I can't remember it
b) At that type of concert it'll be up by lunchtime today anyway! Probably here or here.

He played a few songs off his upcoming album, Artificial Heart,, including a weird one done with some kind of harmonies app on his iPhone/Macbook. To be fair with the exception of Good Morning Tucson which didn't seem to sit quite right, they were good! He of course rolled out a few 'classics' and got the crowd singing to Skullcrusher Mountain, the 2 portal songs and Re: Your Brains, ablelly assisted for about 1/3rd of the set by Paul and Storm again (arrr).

He came back for an encore containing sweary song First of May (including a bit of freebird) and closed with a rosing rendition of Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline. Before throwing his guitar plectrum perfectly down the aisle between the seating (hell of a shot to be fair), far to fast and far away for anyone on either side of the centre (including myself) to react to catch it. I'm guessing someone just picked it up!

Overall was a cracking show, good blend between music and humour. What would have made it perfect, if Storm had caught the tambourine at the end, not his fault though, poor throw by Paul. Would also have liked better or I'm Your Moon on the setlist, but hey ho.

I also purchased myself a fetching 'Code Monkey' T-Shirt. Which was nice, if a little pricey, but what concert t-shirt isn't?

JoCo comes to the UK!

Some very exciting news (I think anyway) broke last night! Jonathan Coulton will be, briefly, in the UK in June! For those who have no idea who he is he's a singer! A singer of a highly geeky nature and to be fair has done some cracking songs in his time. He's best known (among geeks and gamers) for writing the song 'Still Alive' from the quite simply awesome game Portal. He also performs a good version of the song himself (in game it's sung by one of the characters) which is on the official orange box soundtrack. Go find, it's worth it.

Yesterday evening he announced via a blog via twitter (Jesus who would plug a blog via twitter, loser) that he'll be playing 3 dates in the UK! Now, there's no Cardiff date, I'm fairly sure he doesn't know Cardiff even exists and funnily enough he's not down to play Merthyr either. I have thoughts on bands who skip an entire country as I've posted previously. But I have travelled to see the likes on Ben Folds, Green Day, Barenaked Ladies so I clearly will do it. Coulton is playing Bristol so I'm thinking, as it's a small tour, I've never seen him before, I can let this one slide and take a trip over the bridge to see his acoustic delights!

This isn't of course a random trip, he has a new album due out any time now called Artificial Heart, which to be fair I'm also looking forward too. I can only urge everyone to check out his best of, it's surprisingly good, but as he doesn't own it, neither version of Still Alive is included. Valve have the rights as the game publishers.

He's also done a song for Portal 2, I'd imagine to take the same role as Still Alive, and my enthusiasm for this game is very high, as I may have mentioned. Only a 8 days to go! Plus I have to finish Fallout 3 before then!

So JoCo, when are the tickets out??