Tag Archives: music

Coldcut @ Electric Proms ’08

As I write this entry, the first fireworks of the year are going off outside. “Bang after bang after bang after bang”, as an accomplished broadcaster once said. On Saturday night I went to the Roundhouse in Camden for my first Electric Proms concert – Coldcut via the Radiophonic Workshop. My brother and I got there early to pick up the tickets, expecting to only be allowed in for the DJ set, rather than the discussion beforehand. Luckily for us, the discussion had been delayed by half an hour, and we managed to get in for that as well.

I won’t bother describing the event in great detail, you can find all the info on the Electric Proms website. Saying that, though, one great thing I’ve just uncovered via that link is a minute by minute record of the gig from Twitter. As an aside, that’s one of the cool things about Twitter, from my experience – conversations between work colleagues that might otherwise go unrecorded, including examples of collaboration and idea-building, are preserved. Equally, live experiences which, unless ‘taped’, will eventually be forgotten, can be preserved in some fashion here – including, crucially, the emotions and feelings of the people experiencing the event. (I wonder – what about supplementing the football ‘minute-by-minute’ feeds on matchdays with Twitter feeds as well as 606 comments?)

The DJ set itself was quite good – it’s sometimes hard to ‘get into’ a gig when it’s material you don’t recognise, hence the best part of the performance was when they re-mixed the Doctor Who theme (it got the best reception from the crowd, and it’s a shame that it wasn’t longer, in this fan-boy’s opinion). It would have been interesting to have included more voice sampling in a similar fashion to ‘Doctorin’ The House’ or ‘More Beats and Pieces’, but I can understand why they wanted to concentrate on Radiophonic Workshop material.

Other than that, the night consisted of a house party in Willesden Green, where the floors consisted of a large bed of autumnal leaves, everyone wore increasingly bizarre hats, and Bjork was on the stereo. Not much more to add, I suppose. Oh, and today I started work as an ‘Information Architect’ at BBC Audio & Music, the experiences from which, I hope will inspire me to write future blog posts.