The Police played the final show of their world tour last Thursday in New York and my man and I flew out there to see them and all the bright lights a’ spangling. An NYPD marching band came out on stage with them and banged away on their drums as hard
as they possibly could right at the front of the stage. The expressions of joy on their faces my favourite part of the whole gig….. oh, and then I met Tony Soprano….
Being in NY for only two days we didn’t want to keep it low-key. We followed the Sumner kids to The Box
where the last vestiges of the little girl in me were painfully extracted by the show stopping show. I couldn’t begin to mention what happened in there on this public blog but let me just tell you it was all ugly and you’d have your mouth agape the entire time if it weren’t for fear of flying excrement. Apparently those trendy New Yorkers have seen it all.
The following day we hit Central Park, a burger joint, and the Diesel Store before catching a ferry to Liberty Island to watch Radiohead playing at All Points West (AKA Coachella East).
Good golly gosh- as if their light show wasn’t enough, the huge stage backed by Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty really was a sight to behold. Too bad we spent the whole time searching for the bar (which we never found). After the video work I’ve done for the Police, it was cool to check out the Radiohead video screens- they used only six or so static cameras and split the screens up to show them all simultaneously- the result was what I’d call a juxtaposition of the honest and the arty.
After a quick ferry back and a disheartening 2 hour struggle to find a cab downtown, we were safely on our way across the bridge into Brooklyn. The previous night at the Box, while I had been sharing inane and obscene words with two hot gay men, the gloriously straight man in my life had been chatting with Brooke, the owner of the Glasslands Gallery. The place is what you might call a Brooklyn Jazz Club with a giant shrimp on the wall.
We headed there to hear Jon Spencer (of the Blues Explosion) playing with other band, Heavy Trash whose Myspace page declares they sound like:
Despite disabling bouts of jet lag induced open-eye dreaming I could tell the gig was rocking and Jon seemed like a pretty straight up guy when we talked to him later. Jon was even so kind as to offer us his sweaty signature on the CD we bought. Particularly kind as we’d bought it at the Radiohead gig.
Ami x