commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

Gig last Sunday at Manchester Academy.

Sonic Boom Six opened promptly with an energetic set. I wasn’t familiar with their music before, but being a local band they received plenty of good feedback from the crowd. Taking elements from punk/ska, but also in places rapping like House of Pain or a far-more-aggressive Massive Attack. Definitely to be checked out.

Next, Streetlight Manifesto provided some high-quality (if slightly generic) ska/punk. I got the impression afterwards that these were expected to deliver more (they’d been hyped up to me no end), but they just struck me as a competent ska outfit.

Finally, Reel Big Fish took the stage. Opening with Sell Out, the crowd were immediately responsive, though the band came off as incredibly tame to begin with, especially compared to SB6. Later, SB6’s lead (female) vocalist Laila Khan returned to sing on She Has A Girlfriend Now, much to everyone’s delight.

I’ve been waiting a long time to see RBF live, and they didn’t disappoint. For the second time in a week, I was also reminded of what a great punk crowd there is in Manchester - the previous week’s Bomb Ibiza was also a great success.

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Audio from George Galloway’s speech this afternoon at Luther King House in Manchester.
Some elements are taken from from his confrontation with the US senate in 2005 (video is well worth watching, despite it’s length - Galloway is unshaken and resolute throughout).

MP3 audio (40kbps, 11.1MB download) / Ogg Vorbis (32kbps, 5.5MB download)
Note that quality is similar in both files, go with Ogg Vorbis if you can to save on bandwidth.

Apologies for the poor audio quality, the recording was made on my mobile phone, which saves to the AMR format. I cleaned it up (or tried to) using Audacity.

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So I’ve been back in Manchester about a month, it feels great to be back in a proper city. While Peterborough had it’s charms, I find I prefer to be in a city with a larger feel to it - just walking through Manchester there is a buzz which I knew I’d been missing, but without quite knowing what it was.

Studying rather than “working” is a larger change though. Even though I have a fraction of the hours allocated for study/classes as I was working last year, it feels like I’m now working with greater intensity. I sense I’m also likely to miss the satisfaction of working for a client and having a product to produce - even if I did no work this year, few would even notice, let alone worry. It’s not that I need constant reassurance, but there is something to be said for a client who is vocal about their opinion on the results they’re seeing for a project.

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Now that there is finally some content up there, it seems like a good time to introduce my most recent photo project, A Picture of Manchester. This is intended to be extremely light-weight, that is, I’m not desperately worried about the technical merit, more the content and feeling a shot provides. I’m not going so far as to call it gonzo, but that style is definitely part of the inspiration behind the project.

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