May 7th - Day 19

I went to a bar stroke club on Shoreditch High Street called Last Days Of Decadence tonight to have another go at watching Mescal Circus (see Day 10). There were supposed to be first on, but they weren't, so I'll have to find them another time.

Instead I and twenty or thirty others politely stood and watched the fantastic Sunlight Service Group, who played music so up my street it was banging on my front door and screaming "I want to move in now!" through my letterbox.

I was only two years old when Pink Floyd first played at the trailblazing psychedelic club UFO, and I had more important things to do with my life, like not swallow marbles, than be bothered with the embryonic light and sound twiddlings of a future supergroup. But for a short few moments this evening, as SSG grooved through one particularly spaced out track that would have fitted cosily on Pink Floyd's first album, "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" - and despite no oil slide light show - I felt I had my own belated little UFO experience.

July 22nd - Day 95

Bar Music Hall in Shoreditch. First photo shows Ian from the swaggering Assembly Point 3, not long after he'd pointedly thanked the static audience "so much for standing and watching us", making good use of the free floor space. Second photo shows Ghostwalker who did manage to entice the audience forward during their puzzlingly short set (or maybe they just knew more people) and, according to their myspace, sound like "Trent Reznor and Nina Persson's love child getting it on with the offspring of Shirley Manson and Louie Vega, filmed by Billy Corgan with Stevie Wonder as the sound engineer".

September 21st - Day 156

The ten minute walk from Liverpool Street Station, where my bus dropped me off, to Brick Lane, takes in deep-lit pubs, quiet streets lined with Georgian houses and Victorian alleyways lined with Jack The Ripper walks.

The sound of the words "Brick Lane" chimes personally for me, because my father worked there in the 1970's, at The Old Truman Brewery. I visited him on a couple of occasions when I was a boy and was shown around his workplace. The Brewery closed down twenty years ago and the buildings now house over 200 small creative businesses. It also houses bars, one of which I was going to tonight to see some music - I don't know what sort. On the way there I wondered if the venue, 93 Feet East (why that name?), was in one of the old brewery buildings.

I hadn't eaten when I got to Brick Lane, so it was something of an ordeal to walk past thirty Indian restaurants and not go in one of them. I found the venue, forgot to see if it was part of the old brewery, and went in. The barman in a cavernous front bar directed me to a non-windowed back bar of similar size, where a small, but steadily growing crowd awaited in front of a stage for some music.

Tonight I saw some no-nonsense ROCK blasted out by singer/songwriter/guitarist Dana Jade, backed by The McKenzie Brothers providing powerhouse bass and drum, and, apparently, an unseen laptop providing second guitar and backing vocals. This is what Dana said on her "Dana Jade" Facebook wall in answer to why one should come to tonight's gig. "Where else can you find a rocking power trio fronted by a fierce Trinidadian woman who isn't afraid to fuse soca and punk?" Soca, I've just discovered, is a form of Trinidadian dance music that combines the melodic calypso sound with insistent drumming. Knowing that now I'd like to go back and have another listen, but I can't because that'd be altering the course of time itself and really hard to do - I'm finding it hard enough with this quest travelling along the unaltered forward-moving course of time.

When I left the building I remembered to check out its heritage. Above it rose the huge brewery chimney with the word "TRUMAN" still printed vertically down its length. On the wall opposite the venue was a stone plaque. It read, " MESS. TRUMAN HANBURY BUXTON FREEHOLD EXTENDS 93 FEET EAST AND 57 FEET 6 INCHES NORTH OF THIS STONE". As I walked back down Brick Lane I wondered if, 35 years ago, I'd been inside "93 Feet East" before.

myspace.com/danajademusic

October 8th - Day 173

Tonight we, Claire and I, went to Cargo, the same place on Friday night that had a long static queue coiling back from its entrance. No such problem today, but then it wasn't a freebie and we did have tickets. And the main act had already started. They were called The Fiery Furnaces. I love The Fiery Furnaces - this was probably a gig I'd have gone to anyway. I came across them in the fragile and random way that one does sometimes with music, that makes me wonder how much fabulous music I've missed over the years by not stumbling across it. I was at my friend Anne's house, admiring her cd collection when I should had been writing. One of the cds was called The Gallowbird's Bark. It had a mystical looking cover depicting a mellow-coloured drawing of a dog and a goat looking at each other. I'm a bit of a sucker for cd covers that feature dogs AND goats, so I stuck it on. How to describe The Fiery Furnaces...bluesy, poppy, experimental, joyful, strange, swirly, soulful, breathless...I asked Anne what she knew about them. She told me she didn't know much, she'd just bought the cd because she liked the cover. She loved the music too. I checked the band out on the net and discovered that they were fronted by a brother and sister from New York called Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, the former the main songwriter, the latter the breathless singer. And, as luck would have it, they were playing in London in three weeks. So a few of us went. The band (who usually perform as a four-piece) were fabulous and now four years later here they are in London again and here I am again.

Cargo opened in 2000 and is set within three disused railway arches. There is no train track represented on the A-Z near this part of Shoreditch (Rivington Street), so it appears to have been in disuse for some time. Inside it did feel as if one was in an oversized tube tunnel, and it was just as packed as a Northern Line tube at morning rush hour (so I am told), though vastly more enjoyable. Anyway, I've written enough already and I've got some catching up to do. The Fiery Furnaces were joyous, obviously. Claire was impressed. And it was the drummer's birthday.

Dodgy photo coming soon...here it is...

March 1st - Day 317

The Brooklyn-based band Scary Mansion are possibly the world's only thunderstick/bass/drum rock trio. The thunderstick is the thin-necked three-string guitar like instrument barely visible in the hands of singer and songwriter Leah Hayes in the photograph above, taken at The Old Blue Last in Shoreditch. In shape it reminded me of the Chinese erhu that we saw yesterday. Acoustically it is apparently similar to a banjo. Plugged in it sounded more like a...well, like a guitar. Scary Mansion were preceded by a percussion-heavy duo called Hyrst. I like the link with yesterday's music. The central percussive sound of Hyrst mirroring the Lion Dance percussionists and the resemblance of Leah's delicate thunderstick to the elegant erhu.

myspace.com/scarymansion

hyrst.com

viceland.com/pub