Bluelemur.org.uk

This post is essentially meant to annoy my brother.

I went to see Jonathan Coulton play in Manchester on Weds (supported by Paul + Storm, who I’d not seen before). It was a pretty good gig. I didn’t think it was quite as good as the one in London at Easter that I went to, because that was just JoCo playing so he did more songs, to a bigger audience. But the Manchester gig had a special guest appearance for the encore.
They played the first verse and chorus of “Creepy Doll”, then stopped and Jonathan said it just wasn’t creepy enough and it needed something else. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he said, “if there was someone in the audience who was perhaps an internationally famous author of creepy stories, who could come up on stage to help us?” This is what happened next:

My favourite author, Neil Gaiman, is doing a talk in Manchester on 29th October, at 7pm. However, my favourite musician, Jonathan Coulton, is also in Manchester playing a gig on the same night at 7:30pm. Nooooooo!

I’ve already bought tickets for the JoCo concert, so I’ll probably go to that, but it would have been good to be able to do both.

I love this animation by Eric Schwartz, to the song “Still alive”, by Jonathan Coulton, from the game Portal.

I’ve just been to see Jonathan Coulton playing live in London, and by the miracles of modern technology I’m now posting this from my mini-laptop on the train back up to Leeds.

For those who don’t know, he’s an American singer/songwriter who’s fairly well known on the internet, and he releases most of his work through his website rather than via traditional methods. See his Wikipedia entry for more info on him.

This was his first concert in Europe, and all 400-odd tickets sold out easily. The atmosphere was possibly the best I’ve ever experienced at a gig, everyone seemed to know most of the words even though these songs have never been in the charts, rarely get played on the radio, and are about such obscure subjects as Mandelbrot fractal patterns, zombies who want to eat your brains, or a Christmas letter from people imprisoned on an asteroid by robots. Oh yeah, it was also by far the geekiest concert audience I’ve ever seen. He seemed taken aback at how well known his music actually is, and hadn’t expected to get more than 100 there, never mind a sellout crowd of die-hard fans.

He played my favourite, Drinking With You, as well as Code Monkey, Re: Your Brains, and the ending song from the cult game Portal. And loads more. Absolutely brilliant, I had a great time.

Videos will follow, as soon as I get chance to edit them together a bit.