The bloke who was sitting in front of me seems to have shot this footage.

Went to the Nick Cave gig in Vicar Street last night.  Fucking superb.

Picked up a signed copy of the new book and even snagged some free sachets of Bunny Munro brand hand cream on the way out!

A brilliant, brilliant gig. So good that it couldn’t even be ruined by the caustic Australian woman who, during the extended Q&A, rather rudely asked Cave whether he thought his new book was misogynistic or not, before being forced to admit that she hadn’t in fact read the book at all, but, not to be outdone, then tried to back up her misogyny accusation by referring disparagingly to the projected backdrop of a fully clothed woman dancing.

Cave was very polite, but eventually told her that he was “fucking offended” by her accusation. She continued to caterwaul from the balcony for a few more seconds before eventually being booed into silence by the crowd.

I was a bit drunk . . . but I’m almost certain this actually happened.

Went to see Tom Waits on Friday night in the Phoenix Park. Sweet-fucking-Jesus-having-a-wank-up-on-the-cross was it amazing. He came on at 8.25pm and played until after 11. Just brilliant with a nice mix of old numbers and his later brand of insane, grinding, fucked up noise.

Found this footage on youtube, sound quality is pretty awful.

When he played Tom Traubert’s Blues the audience creamed their jeans (even the women!).

This is from 1977 . . .

My brother Gerry sent me this great video of Seasick Steve calling out a guy in the audience for being a cunt.

We were at this gig. It was in Tripod, which must be the worst venue in the whole of fucking Dublin (actually, no, it ties with The Academy on Middle Abbey Street – they are both entirely shit, but in subtly different ways).

Tripod is basically a nightclub that sometimes has live music. This means that whenever a good band or act comes to play, you can be sure that at east 30% of the audience are there only because of the nightclub vibe.

It was Seasick Steve for fucks sake and every second person at the gig was dressed in their best clubbing gear – I saw dozens of feather haired pricks wearing fitted black shirts with white collar and cuffs (always the hallmark of a complete cunt) actually standing with their backs to the stage while they talked really loudly about whatever big-titted retard they happened to be polishing their wilted, poisoned cocks to that week.

We saw one ridiculously short twat actually standing on his tip-toes at the bar beside a much taller girl. What did he think, that if stood on his tip-toes for the rest of his life she might never notice.

I’ve no problem with people who want to get dressed up and jump about like a bunch of epileptic fuckwits and wave glowsticks around like a fifteen year old at his first Scooter concert . . . just don’t come to a fucking blues gig to do it.

So, that’s why Tripod is shit.

The Academy is shit because it used to be called HQ and back then it was the best venue in town – just a really fucking great place to watch a gig – great beer, cool crowd of people who really cared about seeing the gig and who knew to shut the fuck up when the band was on. I saw some great acts there: Buddy Guy, Peter Green, John Paul Jones playing old Led Zep tracks on his eight string bass, Robert Plant and The Priory Of Brion, Big Bill Morganfield.

But of course they had to fuck with it and rip out all the seats so they could fit more in and rearrange it and these days it’s just a complete clusterfuck with really bad acoustics.

Gigs these days seem to be full of people who don’t like music.

I was at an Australian Pink Floyd gig in the Olympia a few years back and when we got there we realised that they had sold most of the balcony seats to some corporate event, there were hundreds of middle-aged pricks in dinner jackets all standing around drinking wine from plastic glasses. They all sat down then (we were completely surrounded by them) and spent the next two hours taking the piss out of the music and rolling their eyes and having a chat.

Who are these people? Where do the come from? And why don’t they fuck off with themselves?