It's a wig!

The missus and I went to see Slash at the end of last month.
It was excellent, although AsiaWorld isn't really a good venue. It's miles out of town, costs a bomb to get to, has no atmosphere, isn't organised very well (if you're going to have a 20 minute break between the support act and the headliners, tell us - we promise to spend cash on beer and souvenirs) etc etc.

But the concert was great. I actually found the new stuff more fun than the classics. Slash knows his audience well, the 'play it like on the album!' crowd, and so while it's still very cool to see the Original Guy doing the solos from Nightrain, Paradise City, Rocket Queen and so forth (and that wah solo on Civil War really is very good), there's none of the enjoyment you get from the unexpected - a creative phrasing, something innovative in a tune, just new songs, I suppose.

As an aside, Slash's singer for the tour was Myles Kennedy, whom I had never heard of before. He is top notch and I don't know why he isn't more famous.

More interesting than my pedestrian opinions on his gig, though, is what Slash did the night before the gig. He went out. Specifically, he went to the Wanch, a music venue in Wanchai I've played at a few times and which is managed by John Prymmer, a very cool guy without whom live music in HK would be a fraction of its current shadow of a self. John met Slash. John did not believe he was really Slash.

Or so I read via the Dark Side:

"Much to Slash’s surprise however, Prymmer was somehow unconvinced that the performer was who he claimed to be. “Slash? Sure you’re Slash,” he noted, with a rye (sic) smile on his face. “Just not in this lifetime.”

Despite the mosaic of Slash posters covering the bar’s outer façade, Prymmer’s mistake was perhaps forgivable, given the uncharacteristic beard and ponytail the artist was sporting that night."

I caught up with John last Friday after the Transnoodle gig at Rockschool down the road. I mentioned that I heard he'd met a celebrity recently.
"Oh man," he said. "That dude's hair is as grey as mine! That black hair you see on stage? It's a wig, it's gotta be a wig."

The whole episode just proves my claim to my wife that Slash would be hard to recognise on the street without the trademark gear. It also provides a tiny amount more evidence to back up my suspicion that the Hat, Glasses and Hair are all joined together as a unified, removable piece of I Am Slash apparel.
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Post-mortem evidence

Video of the gig is now up on Youtube, so you can make your own judgements.
Due to camera limitations, the set had to be videoed one songs at a time, so you miss out some interesting bits between songs, such as where I take five attempts to get a capo on the second fret of my guitar.

Gig post-mortem

We played BC Unplugged at the Wanch last night. Good gig, and a lot of fun. We had some issues with it being acoustic - we had to drop half our songs for one thing, and playing lots of barre chords on an acoustic knackers my wrist.

The new songs were pretty good. Of the two, Liquidator works well, but we shouldn't have played it second, as it sounded too similar to Guerrero, the opener. The electric version should be more distinctive, anyway. A decent first outing for that one.
Sun Coming Up is a more upbeat tune but was basically just filler. With no breaks in the chord progression it doesn't really go anywhere. Needs work if we're going to use it again.

Notable triumphs: Walk This Earth is top stuff unplugged, becoming 'jaunty' rather than 'early Metallica-y', which is nice. Might play the electric version more like this in future.
Guns of Brixton was popular, plenty of people singing along. We still had difficulty ending the bloody thing but hey. China Girl was more of a niche hit (none of the singalongers knew all the words), and I think we played it a bit too slowly, plus I didn't sing it as well as I did in practice. Top bass line, though, and everyone loved Ben's upright bass no matter what he was playing.

Great reaction, as expected for Luka's Dream as the encore, a retooled Chas & Dave cover, which I'd promised to play if 'enough' Spurs fans turned up. Six or seven was enough, I determined. Common People was also well received although I stuffed up the chords in the middle again.

Cloud in the Stars was merely OK; I think this was to do with its placement in the running order, too slow after the first two numbers. Green Hat Man ("And now we'll lighten the mood with a song about multiple homicide!") got its usual reaction of applause, slightly stunned expressions, and the audience appearing to edge slightly away from me.

Good gig. Would play BC Unplugged again, but with a bit of refinement on the playlist. In fairness, we did only have two acoustic-only rehearsals, and the shambolicity is part of the charm, or so we keep claiming.

Sports casual

The capoeira future is a little uncertain - I helped our teacher do her visa application last week. I think she'll probably get it, but she's not helped by having been here about a year on a tourist visa, and having been serially let down by people saying they'd sponsor her for a work visa (she was working for them, after all) and then not doing it. Primarily, I suspect, as a tax dodge.
If she has to leave HK, our options aren't great. As Canario said before he returned to Brazil, "You have to help with the visa and everything, because if Jo has to leave she'll be OK, but where are you guys going to find a teacher as good as her?"
I'm paraphrasing, of course.

I may end up playing more football, I suppose.
Speaking of which, I had the rare privilege on Saturday of playing alongside an internationally-capped player, apparently valued at 10,000 euro. Sadly, he was a one-off ringer, but it was brilliant ot have him in the team for one match. Definitely the best player to appear in the Tomotachi League.

We won 2-1, by the way. It would have been more, but my couple of excellent crosses were wasted by Andrea who was having one of those broad-side-of-a-barn days. Thus denying me an assist credit, the swine.
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There was a particularly chatty old lady in the lift this morning.
"Going to work?" she said.
I said I was.
"I'm going to have dim sum!" she announced, cheerily ignoring my almost complete inability to speak Cantonese.
"That's good!" I said. I wanted to say 'your morning is better than mine' but didn't have the vocab.

I will have to look up comparatives in my Canto-grammar book when I get home. A nice start to the day, at any rate.
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Pub quiz pub quiz pub quiz pub quiz

We went to a pub quiz last night at the bar in the Excelsior hotel.
Before it started, Danny and I were discussing how you can reasonably guess a lot of answers based on what you know of the setters, which is how you win at University Challenge, for example. "Mozart's too obvious, it must be Schubert", that kind of thing.

"Sometimes you know the answer before you've heard the question," he quipped.
This later turned out to be true. We received the question sheet for the audio round, which told us all the songs would be UK number 1s from 1989-1998.

"Rhythm is a Dancer by Snap!," I joked, prophetically as it turned out. It was song number four.
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Photos and things are now up from our set as part of the Underground music night at Rockschool last month.