Skip to main content

Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair at the O2 – Worth the Wait?

Image
By

Liz Phair 

When I met my wife, nearly nineteen years ago, she was obsessed with Liz Phair and in particular with the song **** and Run. I’m not sure if she was trying to tell me something…. 

She said she wanted to see Liz Phair live and I assumed we’d have to go to the US for that. Fortunately not! I held out through pure stubbornness / insight / belligerence / incompetence (delete as applicable) and Liz Phair eventually gave in and came to London! Supporting Alanis Morissette no less.

I didn’t know what to expect. Would Liz bring a band or would it just be her and a guitar. Would it be 45 minutes of songs I didn’t know or would it be quite good. To be fair I had Liz Phair down as a talentless screecher, rather like I used to think PJ Harvey was. 

 

Again I was wrong. I think I knew about three songs, but Liz and her band sounded great, for the O2, at least. I could have done without all the Americanisms of how wonderful it was to be there and how inspiring Alanis Morissette had been, but Liz was right, her band were really rocking out.

Alanis Morisette 

I was in my late teens by the mid nineties, so of course I was into Alanis Morisette. I got into Metal in 1992,  just in time to discover it had been killed off (well pushed further underground) by Grunge and the rest of the alternative rock music scene. In the early hours of Saturday mornings there used to be a ‘rock music magazine’ called Raw Power. This was where I first heard You Oughta Know. Raw Power told us Alanis was endorsed by Flee of the Red Hot Chilipeppers and I loved it!


Alanis Morisette is pure talent. She seems to hit every note flawlessly with almost no effort and, if you weren't watching, you wouldn’t know she was running about the stage like a mad thing at the same time. If I’d had the choice, I’d have wanted to hear Jagged Little Pill all the way through and a few of the other songs as well. While the set list was not my choice, we did get most of Jagged Little Pill and the songs from Former Infatuation Junkie and the other albums sounded much better than they do on record. We know, we listened to them on the way there.

The problem was the sound of the band. When they were electric, which they were mostly, the drums and the bass drowned out the guitars which had no definition at all, unless they were playing on their own. For about three songs the whole band came to a little stage closer to the back and played acoustically and you could hear every note, clearly.  How difficult would it be to get the this right all the time? But then it is the O2 and no one goes for the sound quality.

I’ve ticked Alanis Morisette off my imaginary bucket list. It was definitely 30 years too late and it made me happy that I saw Garbage in their prime. 



Comments

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

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
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