Friday, June 17, 2005

Ambulance Ltd

On Thursday I went to see Ambulance Ltd at the Joiner's Arms with Scott. They're a band from New York that take their styles from many influences spanning several decades of various genres ranging from Motown to Rock, Psycadelia to Blues. I'd heard them round Scotts a couple of times, he has the CD and been meaning to get myself a copy (all above board and from a regular retail outlet of course! Wouldn't dream of burning a copy. *ahem*)

The beginning part of Thursday was a usual uneventful day at work. Boring, monotonous and made me nearly fall asleep. The only thing that was keeping me awake was the fact I was off to The Joiner's that night - this would be my first visit to the venue and was actually quite excited about it! As soon as it came to about 4:45 I decided not to start anything new at work, got changed into my casual clothes and surfed the net for a couple of minutes til it got to 5. Then I walked straight to Scotts to settle down to a beer and some hot-dogs and catch up on the weeks events (which wasn't that much) but we also shared some of our photography. My camera's memory card was ram packed with pics spanning several weeks - they still had the pics from our last London visit! We set off for the train station at about 6:50 to get the train at around 7:10 from Pokesdown Station. I love Pokesdown Station, it's got so much character (hense the arty-ness of the following pictures!)...




Pokesdown Station ... marvelous!



The Journey

When we finally got to Southampton we made our way to the pub just around the corner from the Joiners - I forget the name but it's on the corner of Palmerston Road and South Front (I think it's called) En route we got talking about how the first Bottom Live video was made at Southampton Guildhall. Scott said "Yeah, I was at that show. That was the day before my 18th Birthday!!" Pretty spooky as this was the day before his 30th birthday!! When we got to that pub we had about 3 or 4 games of pool and a couple of JD & Cokes - the second round was actually a double, but I think it was just over a double - if not a tripple - cos the bottle was emptied as one and a half shots per glass and then the barman had to get a new bottle of JD and poured out another full shot into each glass!! Man, it tasted well strong, and yes it got us both completely fucked!




Our pool game rivalled
that of the pros!!

Time was starting to press and our drunkedness levels were starting to increase so we decided to hit the road to crawl our way to The Joiners. The place was pretty empty when we got there - we thought that there might not be that many people there as Ambulance Ltd were still a relatively unknown band. We weren't too sure about whether we should get in another drink, in fact Scott said he wasn't going to but then I told him that if we had a pint of something gassy (like lager) then it would take us longer to drink it and we should have sorted our heads out by then. So Carlsberg it was. I found a table to stick my jacket under (cos I didn't want to carry it around) and we took a wonder around the place. Man, it's small, but it's cool. After being given a guided tour of the venue we made our way back to the bar area where we were pretty stunned to see that the place had actually packed out!

The first band came up on stage. They were called The Cinematics, a four-piece band from Glasgow. They weren't bad actually, they weren't that special but they had some really good tunes but the bass player looked like a total prick and was embarrasing to watch - he had his t-shirt tucked in for Christ's sake!! We stuck around for about half of their set then went to the bar to get a refill and pretty much stayed there until they finished. There was a merchandise table giving away free badges so we both took one each - well, you never know do ya!




The Cinematics

Eventually the main reason for being here came on stage. We managed to get a good spot just at the front and over to the left of the stage, right by the stage stairs and all the cases for their equipment!! They played most of the best tracks from their debut album, including the singles, and 2 new tracks. It was absolutely roasting in there and the band basically broke out in a sweat after the first song!






Ambulance Ltd

They, totally rocked and were definitely worth seeing. The only bad point about the night was that we kept running into these really annoying bunch of groupies who were surrounding themselves around each and every band member one at a time gushing all over them and saying things like "You were much better than the other band" or "That guitar bit you did was sooo cool" or whatever. And when they saw that they weren't getting anywhere with the band member they had snared they'd move on to the next one and try again with THE SAME CHEESY LINES!!! They were putting my off my pint. One of them managed to sneak into one of my photos. Here is that photo with the girl in question....


minger!

Shortly after the gig the clock rang 12 and so it was Scott's Birthday. So I wished him a happy 30th (that makes me the first to do so!) and got the train home. It was really late by the time we got back so I crashed on his sofa.

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