Copenhagen

“Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town”

I’ve never been to Denmark before. I’ve never been this far north before. Will it be cold? Will they all be tall and thin? Will they all speak better English than I do? Will Radiohead do good? So many questions, and we’d not even left Heathrow. We’re catching an evening flight, so we’ll have all Friday to explore the city before the gig on Saturday and flying back home on Sunday.

The first person to speak to us in Copenhagen is the guy at passport control. The second, our taxi driver. The third, a black prostitute hanging around outside our hotel – the centrally located Comfort Inn Europa. “Hello boys!” she calls to us as we unload our baggage. She’s ignored. She looks like she can handle it. After checking in, we crash. It’s gone midnight and it’s been an exhausting few hours.

Friday morning and we awake to a brilliantly sunny day. We leave the hotel after choosing to skip breakfast electing to find some in the town instead. Copenhagen is quiet at this time of day. It’s barely 10 o’clock, and shops haven’t really opened up yet. There’s hardly anyone about in the main square, and the only form of breakfast we can find is in the form of Baressa – Denmark’s answer to Starbucks (whose actual absence from the city is noted, somewhat ambivalently). Choosing to depart from the path up Stroget – Copenhagen’s shopping district – that we’d unconciously taken, we stumble across some university buildings and the Round Tower. The Round Tower, is basically that. It’s a big round tower on one end of a church. Inside, is a steepless spiral walkway – a steady gradient until the top from where the views over the city are magnificent.

We are enticed into a shop called Tiger. I can’t remember why now, but inside it can best be described as a cross between Poundland and Muji. It’s really quite great and tacky in equal proportions selling a bizarre range of goods as diverse as make up, herbs, dodgy dvd-only films, to semi-decent kitchenware. If there was a Tiger in London, I should imagine it’d be quite popular.

Swans. Sortendams So had lots of Swans. As we wandered along the bank of the man made lake – a detour on the way to the Statens Museum for Kunst art gallery – they seems to follow us. Statens Museum for Kunst is a great building – a combination of new and old architecture – the two buildings literally combine in a central atrium. It’s quite nice, as galleries go, and our visit was made even better by the great meal at the cafe. Peugot salt and pepper mills, and a really friendly waiter who seems distraught when we tell him the reason for our trip. Seems like the Radiohead gig is a hot ticket.

The afternoon we wander up to Kastellet – which are army barracks. I thought it meant castle, so was a little bit disappointed. There was a nice windmill there though, and a wedding was taking place of one of the army boys. An organ grinder was providing the entertainment. He didn’t have a monkey.

Onward to the Little mermaid. There wasn’t much to see or say about it, really. It’s a small bit of metal perched on a rock. It’s really nothing special. So we take the opportunity to get an ice cream, before getting on the train back to Central Station – conveniently next door to our hotel. After freshening up, we head up to the canel – where we do as the locals are doing – and grab some beer and crips from the Seven Eleven (Spar, Alldays, etc) and dangle our feet over the canalside. My choice of 10.?% viking beer doesn’t go down well, so I revert to the far tastier Turok. Then it’s on to Nyhavn, where we finally manage to stick into steak and prawn skewers. Tom wanted to go to the Jailhouse – a themed bar where the bar staff are ‘dressed’ in uniform, and fake prison bars partion the drinking area. It was just all a bit too naff/seedy, really. So we left.

Saturday, and it’s Baressa for breakfast again, before spending a bit more time in Stroget and it’s huge Bodum store. By now, we’re getting used to the fact that everyone speaks English, and the trouble is that “Hi” is the same in English and Danish, so your preferred language isn’t always obvious from the first thing you say. Anyway… the intersting thing was a street performer – his act was entirely in English – apart from when he was addressing his young Danish helper plucked from the audience – who had obviously not been through English lessons.

We find ourselves in Nyhavn again. The thing about this city, is that everything is so close together. And there are hardly any slopes, which makes for a lot of cyclists. We pick up a couple of the bikes on the ‘free’ bike scheme, which works in the same way a shopping trolley works at the super market, and cycle down to Christiana, and around. Christiana is a big social experient, started about 30 years ago when a load of hippies reclaimed some derelict land and workhouses. It feels a lot like Camden. Or the market place at Glastonbury festival.

We meet up with Nikolaj and have a few beers on a barge bar, before catching the Metro back to the hotel for a quick shower and heading out to see Radiohead.

They were ace.

Sunday breakfast sees our final trip to Baressa before going to the Design centre, with a couple of fun exhibitions. Then it’s across the road to Tivoli – a theme park in the middle of the city – where a ride on a rollercoaster awaits. Lunch is Snorrebrod, which it topped off with more cycling to try and fit in a final bout of sight seeing. Making it down to the harbour wall – pretty close to where we were for the Little Mermaid – Tom catches sight of a seal and I manage a quick snap before it darts off. Then it’s a whistle-stop bike ride back to the city centre, where we drop off the bikes and I manage to get my must-have souvenir – a hairy viking.

I liked Copenhagen a lot. I think I’ll go back there sometime…

Radiohead – Copenhagen KB Hallen – 06.05.06

In some kind of teenage fanatical show of devotion, I’m off to see Radiohead three times this year. Tonight was the first time – later in the year it’ll be V Festival in Chelmsford, and Dublin’s Marley Park. A combination of not being in London when they’ll be playing here, and (probably) not being able to get tickets anyhow, combined with the temptation of visting a European city I’ve never been to before and the fact that the venue is likely to be just that little bit more intimate, led to the choice of Copenhagen’s KB Hallen.

It’s the very first night of the tour, and the very first time that anyone outside of the band’s circle is going to hear what lies in store from the dreaded ‘new material’. It’s a nervous time. Splinters of new stuff have already been distributed (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played Koko the previous weekend, which was inevitabley bootlegged and posted online) but tonight is their first outing with the full band.

It doesn’t seem accidental that ‘Everything In It’s Right Place’ starts the set. It was the closer of the Hail To The Theif tour, and so is the last song that I’d heard them play live. It’s like they’re picking up the baton and running agin – albeit with a two and a half year break. I am instantly reminded of the intensity of this band on a live stage, and it’s truely awesome – I’m overwhelmed, and it’s only the first song. So when it’s followed by ‘Planet Telex’ thobbing gowl, I’m lost. It seems to have taken on a new life – a far more powerful beast than the recorded version. And so beings two and a half hours of bliss. The new songs are nothing short of magnificent – highlights for me being ‘Bangers + Mash’, ‘Bodysnatchers’ and the ‘lost classic’, ‘Nude’. I was hoping for ‘Arpeggi’ – as I’d heard it as far back as a recording from the Ether festival. But it was not to be. Instead, we were treated to a rare performance of ‘Black Star’ amongst a set that almost seemed drenched in classics, ending with seminal OK Computer track ‘Lucky’. I can’t wait for V.

Full set list went:
‘Everything In Its Right Place’
‘Planet Telex’
‘Bangers ‘N’ Mash’
‘Open Pick’
‘Karma Police’
‘Black Star’
‘Nude’
’15 Step’
‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’
‘A Wolf At The Door’
‘The Bends’
’4 Minute Warning’
‘Pyramid Song’
‘House Of Cards’
‘Idioteque’
‘Spooks’
‘There There’

Encore:
‘Bodysnatchers’
‘You And Whose Army’
‘Let Down’
‘Paranoid Android’

Second Encore:
‘Lucky’

I also took a fair few photos, which you can see here.

Sounds like: “Uncle Fucka”

I ‘learned’ Obla-dee-obla-daa by The Beatles’ at the weekend. And a sterling work of musicianship it was. In my learning journey, I have noticed how the verse sounds remarkably similar to the Uncle Fucka song, as popularised by the South Park movie, ‘South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut’. McCartney must be proud.

I’ve also learned that there is an alternative pronounciation of capo. Having always assumed this to be a one way street, straight up cap-oh, I was slightly disorientated to hear my guitar tutor offer an alternative pronounciation: cape-oh. I’m not sure it actually matters all that much. Tomorrow, I think we’re progressing to Wonderwall. I’m quite looking forward to it.

In other news, I recieved Richard Swift Collection: Volume One in the post today. It’s the first CD I’ve bought since the Jens CD – which has been almost never off my playlist, pushing Mr Lekman right to the top of my last.fm profile. Incidentally, I’m also pleased to report that a sudden recent gush of playing has pushed Radiohead into third place, overtaking ABBA who only really feature that prominently because I kept playing SOS, and forgetting to flick shuffle on before leaving it running.

I’ve decided that what I play doesn’t actually reflect what I like all that much very well. Which is a bit of a paradox, really. This guy has written a lot about the difference between Last.fm and Pandora, which I played about at the weekend for the first time, having deferred doing so assuming that they were more or less the same.

It makes for a good read – I had a similar idea of writing something down that compared all these music-comparision-suggest-something-you’ll-love services, throwing Amazon’s releational-purchasing “people who bought this, also bought that” into the bag too.

I’m generally coming around to the conclusion that it’s not very relevant for a computer to recommend something you’ll die for to listen to again. With a few exceptions, most people who know me can’t recommend me something I’ll fall head over heals in love with, so the chances of having some automated process that can is reaching the near impossible. I got thinking about how I’d got into Jens – who I now rate right up there with some of my favourite artists – and it really was a chance happening across an MP3 blog over Christmas. Jens’ closest match via Pandora is Belle and Sebastian, who although I like, I’m hardly their biggest fan, and it’s not like they’re unchartered land in my musical world.

As Steve Krause pointed out, there’s obviously a need for a mix of both the social upping of Last.fm, and the genetic musical matching of Pandora. However, for true new music discovery, I’m finding that it’s ultimately a matter of hard graft and exposure to more musical avenues. And by that I mean catching more MP3 blogs, podcasts and the like in addition to my usual diet. Something that filters out the noise would be great though…

Can anyone play guitar?: part two

So I finally managed to enrol onto the second run of 10 week guitar courses that I failed to get on to the first time. Tomorrow is week 4 (and 5 – it’s a double lesson to make up for a missing lesson due to the tutor being ill) and I reckon I’m doing ok. I’m safely hammering out the chord changes to Mull Of Kintyre, and I’ve got the reverse pentatonic scale in LinkWray’s Rumble down to a tee. This week, we’ve been promised Yellow and Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz.

I’ve been so impressed, that I thought that I’d get myself a little treat. It’s a cracking little box, and adds the necessary meat n. warmth as required.

Vegetable chilli

I’ve been cooking a lot of asian food recently, largely to the amount of flavour I could get out of essentially just veg. So I thought I’d try a few subtle twists on a vegetable chilli. They’re twists in the sense that I’ve never used them in this kind of recipe before. I think it turned out well.

Ingredients
1 large onion, chopped
2 carrots, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
smallish chunk of ginger, finely chopped
6-7 medium-sized mushrooms, roughly chopped
can of kidney beans
can of chick peas
can of plum tomatos
1 green pepper, roughly sliced
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
2 tsp of tomato puree
handful of oregano
sprinkle of pepper
generous splash of soy sauce
few drops of tabasco to taste
juice of one lime

In a stock pot or large saucepan, cook the onion in a small amount of oil, until browned. Add the chilli, garlic, ginger, oregano and mushrooms and cook unto the mushrooms have softened. To the mixture add the chopped carrots, green pepper, kidney beans, chick peas, tomato and tomato puree, with the soy sauce and enough tabasco to taste. Season with pepper, and ensure there is enough liquid to cook for 20-25 minutes. About half way through, incorporate the juice of one lime. The chilli is cooked when the carrot has softened and the sauce has thickened. Serve with rice, or cous cous, or whatever you’d normally have a chilli with.