We recently picked up a weekly magazine called TimeOut: London, which we first encountered in Mumbai, that keeps you up to date on what’s going on in the city from arts to plays and everything in between. This is where we came face to face with how many quality bands play London. Now obviously it makes sense being a world class city, but it still boggles our mind. You can honestly find a concert you’d like to see everyday of the week. The amount of good bands playing here is in that large of quantity. Jessica soon saw The Secret Sisters were playing here (we saw them at the Edmonton Folk fest this past August) and Aaron saw a local act King Krule that interested him. We didn’t end up going to any of those two, but we did break the London concert ice by going to the English dub step producer James Blake’s concert the following week.
The venue James Blake played in was a unique old theater with high red ceilings and Roman looking art work done in gold. It was a type of venue you would not find in Edmonton or even Canada for that matter! The show was good, a young London based band named after the Amsterdam park, Vondelpark, opened up and put on a good show. James Blake set was good playing his major hits like The Wilhelm Scream, CMYK and his cover of Canadian artist Feist’s song Limit To Your Love. His music is mostly electronic ballads that carefully build up in intensity, so the crowd vibe was not high energy. Some people were even sitting on the floor!
Rapper Big Daddy Kane sporting the infamous hi-top fade.
Once the concert bug bite, we soon went to another concert this time to see Toro Y Moi. His music wasn’t Jessica’s cuppa tea, but he plays an lo-fi electronic/pop, garage, chillwave type genre. If that makes any sense to anybody. Sometimes at these show, especially the indie/hipster crowd, people watching over takes the show. At the Toro Y Moi show there was this tall guy with a huge hi-top fade that would make 90’s hip-hop artist green with jealously. This guy just happened to get the front middle spot for the show too. His head and hi-top rose above the crowd like a mountain peaking through the clouds.
After we bought some drinks we tried to make our way to the stage and wound up pretty close to the guy with the hi-top fade and his buddy. Out of the corner of our eyes we peaked over at them here and there and noticed they were huffing and passing a paper bag back and forth. Some peoples children. All the openers and Toro Y Moi put on an enjoyable show. With that second concert it sort of started a Wednesday date night tradition for us. Where we have tried to do something special every Wednesday to spice things up a bit. Other then that it’s the same old, same old in London. We moved out of the Guesthouse into a place her son rents out down the street and it’s been nice so far. We only have 2 roommates, a washing machine, kitchen to our selves pretty much, our own private bathroom and shower. Can’t complain!
Toro Y Moi in the flesh
What Aaron was trying to take a picture of
One last thing, at our new place the bedroom window looks onto a small backyard and one day Aaron saw a bunch of birds lined up on a roof. Wanting to take a picture he quickly ran out the basement door and started clicking away through the gap between the wood gate and stone fence in the backyard. When all of a sudden somebody yelled ‘there’s a pervert’. Just thinking that this pervert must be somewhere down the street or something, Aaron continued taking pictures. Then he heard it again, so Aaron put down the camera and saw a group of 6 or 7 people walking down the street. Someone in the group asked ‘where? where?’ and at that moment Aaron made eye contact with the boy who cried pervert. Sorry mom, the pervert was Aaron. Quickly Aaron yelled at them ‘no, no, no, no I was just taking pictures of the birds up there’ and pointed to the roof. The group of them collectively looked up, went ‘ohhhh’, said sorry and continued on walking.
The shot that got Aaron called a pervert.
Here’s a song by each band we went and saw if you are interested:
Abroad With Aaron 