Skip to main content

The Kings of Leon

Sheffield is in the North and things, well people, are very different in the North. They’re friendlier than other places. They apologise in a friendly way when they knock into you and several people run after your ticket when it blows away in the wind after you’ve been through security.

Given the recent events in Manchester security was tight at Sheffield Arena. There were plenty of police, some of them visibly armed. You weren’t allowed to take in a bag any bigger than A4 and everyone was searched before they could enter the arena foyer. Having said that, we had no problems parking (getting out of the car park was a different matter) and were through the security check in no time. Everyone there, including the security, was friendly! Even the armed police were posing for selfies and chatting at the end of the night.

I’m not a fan of the Kings of Leon. They’ve got a few good songs, I mean who doesn’t like having their sex on fire? I find them bland, monotonous and a bit boring. Live it’s a different story. They’ve still only got one sound, but it’s much more palatable and they’re very good at it. The lead guitarist can play, but is nothing special, the bass player looks like Billy Idol on a good day and the drummer spent most of the show chewing gum and blowing bubbles, but the singer, his range and the effortless delivery were incredible. He just needs to work on his interaction and eye contact with the crowd.


What was also quite cool was, about halfway through, a complete stage rearrange, the moving of the drum riser and the introduction of a third guitarist and a keyboard player all performed behind a curtain with sometimes just the front man and sometimes all of the main band playing out the front. It was fun, exciting and interesting to see.

They played most of the hits, as far as I could tell and didn’t do an encore, which always makes things easier and means you get more music and less messing around.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I, Robot

The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...