Skip to main content

Tool live in 2024

By

Forgive me father, for it has been six months since my last gig.

To be fair, my last gig was The Darkness and they played badly and we ended up next to some idiots in the crowd, so we left well before the end. A week or so before that was My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost at the Shepherds Bush Empire, which was superb! Tool should have been the second gig of the year, but we failed to make it to Myrkur.

I’ve been to the O2 Arena multiple times, but this was only my second time in the Bourne Leisure box - this is one of the perks of working for Haven. The previous time was for the SugarBabes and the sound wasn’t great. Tonight, support came from Night Verses, an American instrumental prog band. When they hit the stage the sound was excellent from the off. I find purely instrumental bands get boring after a while, and although these guys played well, I was glad they didn’t play any longer.

I first saw Tool at the Download Festival in 2003 and I wasn’t a fan then, so didn’t really get what the fuss was about. I re-explored prog rock a few years ago and got into them in a massive way. Then Fear Inoculum came out and I properly fell in love with them - yes, I parted with stupid amounts of money to get the CD as that was the only way!

Mobile phones were banned as the band wanted the audience to be fully immersed in the experience. As a band they’re extremely tight and make a hell of a rich sound for just three instruments and vocals. The songs from Fear Inoculum stood out amongst the older tracks. Unfortunately they didn’t play Stinkfist, as they have on other dates on this tour.


The visuals were as stunning as the sound. It was like seeing Pink Floyd, but on overdrive. Everything was in rich colours and the shapes ranged from skulls and impressions of babies in the womb to indeterminate shapes.

Following the interval, which featured a twelve minute countdown timer, the drummer did a solo which must have gone on for ten minutes and included a section with an unknown, to me at least, electronic device he manipulated somehow and then drummed along with resulting in layers upon layers of sound.

The band finally left the stage after more than two hours of music, and I left exhilarated and with some faith in live music restored.

Comments

  1. Andy Balaam22 August 2024 at 20:35

    I went to the same gig! It was an amazing experience. Probably the best gig I've ever been to.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
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
22 comments
Read more

RESTful Behaviour Guide

By
I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as  Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resources
1 comment
Read more