Gorillaz live featuring Robert Smith - Strange Timez

[dsanchez]

[Ulrich]

Last night (11/8/21) Robert guested at a Gorillaz show:

Nice glittering shirt. 

[SueC]

Nice to see live music back somewhere in Europe! 

Also hugs outside the household bubble. 

[Ulrich]

From what I gathered since yesterday, it was 2 shows, one especially for NHS workers!

https://www.brooklynvegan.com/gorillaz-brought-out-robert-smith-peter-hook-slowthai-more-o2-arena-pics-video-setlist/

Gorillaz made their return to live music on Tuesday night (8/10), the first of two big London shows at O2 Arena. Tuesday's show was a free show for NHS workers and their families, as a thank you for all they've done through the pandemic. Damon Albarn and crew pulled out all the stops and hit up all their contacts for what was an especially guest-filled evening.

The Cure's Robert Smith was on hand to sing "Strange Timez," Peter Hook of New Order and Joy Division brought his distinctive bass stylings to "Aries"...

Gorillaz play O2 again on Wednesday.

[dsanchez]

Seeing Bob with white hair makes me realise I am in the last lap of my life :/

[SueC]

Seeing Bob with white hair makes me realise I am in the last lap of my life :/

YOU are in the last lap??? Man, statistically you're only just at the start of the third quarter. I'm over half a decade older than you and I certainly don't feel I am in the last lap of life - I'd consider that to be the case if I was around 75, 80. Which is near the end of the last quarter, and then you may or may not get extra time (or you might have been retired to the bench before half-time, in some cases).

So personally I have well over 25 years to go before I reach what I consider to be the last lap. 25 years of adulthood, which is like the time from 25 to 50 - it's a pretty long time. If you look after your body, it will look after you - and @dsanchez, your bicycle miles are super useful for this, and judging by the recipes you posted around here, I'd say you have pretty healthy tastes nutritionally. The one thing that seems to be your obvious Achilles heel is your attitude to ageing, and thankfully that is something you can change - which would reduce your stress about things that are beyond your control, so you can redirect the extra energy to making positive changes in things that are in your control (e.g. more bicycle riding, more listening to music, more reading books, more hanging out with friends, etc).

I'm telling you this because my own parents had terrible attitudes to ageing - my own father was snivelling to me when he was 39 and I was 7 about how terribly old he was and how I was so lucky to have everything in front of me. When I got to 39 I felt I was only just peaking - I felt enormously well and could climb a mountain as fast as I'd ever done, my wits were sharper than ever, and I much preferred the way I looked to the way I'd looked at 21. My own mother decided when she turned 50 that she was now too ancient to drive, which is completely ludicrous. Of course, she was "old" well before she was 40 as well, and moaning over every grey hair, but then calling people who use hair dye "vain" (so why aren't people who use foundation vain?).

And the thing is, it's their attitude that made them seem old, and made them waste a lot of potential happiness. I was lucky to have significantly older friends from around age 30 onwards, who were incredibly positive role models for ageing. First of all, I could see that much of the out-of-shapeness I'd incorrectly associated with ageing was down to inactivity and poor nutrition and not age itself. Secondly, I could see that my older friends (who like all my friends are avid readers etc) had a heck of a lot of useful extra experience and understanding in their brains and were in better possession of themselves than younger people. Thirdly, they were all beautiful and interesting - beautiful inside and out. Not with stereotypical airbrushed magazine beauty, but with a real beauty which isn't sabotaged by wrinkles any more than an elephant's beauty is. Interesting because they took an interest in lots of things. Fourthly, they showed me you can be primarily yourself and not an age. And last of all, they refused to conform to ridiculous stereotypes about ageing - they didn't stop doing the things they loved in exchange for playing lawnbowls or taking up embroidery, they didn't moan about how old they were getting but enjoyed being alive, they saw life as a gift and they appreciated it, they didn't suddenly stop talking about things that are ludicrously considered "unseemly" in older people (mostly by ultra-young people who imagine that people stop having sex at 30), they were just who they were. And unlike my parents, they were happy, and they were living well.

Got reading glasses yet? You're about the right age to start to need backup for loss of lens elasticity. The up side to this is that you will no longer notice your wrinkles much when you look in the mirror ('cos you don't do that with reading glasses on!).

You won't need a walking stick until around 80, but Brett is planning to get his at age 75, primarily so he can berate young people in a creaky voice (he's practicing that voice already) and hit them with it. 

[SueC]

For @dsanchez. Hope you feel better.

[Ms_Mephistopheles]

Last night (11/8/21) Robert guested at a Gorillaz show:

Nice glittering shirt. 

RS was really good 😊 That performance was highlighted in the reviews.

Gorillaz are a group that seem to be built on their love of experimenting with sound, so it's really exciting to see Damon Albarn and RS together on stage.

[Ms_Mephistopheles]

Seeing Bob with white hair makes me realise I am in the last lap of my life :/

But he's on stage performing contemporary music to an audience made up of all ages, and the last time that anyone had any sort of substantial interview with him (Meltdown Festival) he was enthused by what was going on around him. This suggests the body may age, but the spirit still has fire in it! This should apply to any of us too.

RS's white hair looks good I think, like some sort of glorious silver dandelion! He's still a striking man and looks so much better without the dye, which actually ages a person more if the colour is too dark. It's always a cooler look if you look comfortable in your own skin.

[SueC]

This suggests the body may age, but the spirit still has fire in it! This should apply to any of us too.

...and just because there's snow on the roof doesn't mean the fire has gone out! 

(And this even applies to the person who at the mere age of 39 wrote, "The fire's almost out and there's nothing left to burn."    Honestly! I was 43 when I first heard that, and it was on what was instantly one of my favourite albums ever, but when it got to this bit I laughed and laughed. Had I been younger than 39 I might have been scared by this. However: Young men think old men are fools. Old men know young men are fools...)

[Ms_Mephistopheles]

"The fire's almost out and there's nothing left to burn."

RS was furrowing his brow over being old since he began it seems. I remember seeing an interview dated around 1984 where he was adamant that he would be retiring imminently because 25 was too old to be working in music. Perhaps it was part of the punk ideology of not wanting to turn into an old dinosaur or something. It would have been a shame though for obvious reasons!

[SueC]

RS was furrowing his brow over being old since he began it seems. I remember seeing an interview dated around 1984 where he was adamant that he would be retiring from music imminently because 25 was too old to be working in music.

Bwahahahaha, yes, I remember that one too! 

Perhaps it was part of the punk ideology of not wanting to turn into an old dinosaur or something. It would have been a shame though for obvious reasons!

Quick, hire a teenager while they still know everything!    (And before they turn into an old dinosaur!)

I guess contemporary music is probably only second to modelling for harbouring extreme ideas about personal use-by dates. Nobody in classical music says, "OMG, I'm nearly 25, I better give up playing in the orchestra!" Of course, some contemporary ilk think orchestra is for fuddy-duddies anyway. Which a fraction of it is, to be honest - you know that long, nothing-happening stuff that's like a chloroform anaesthesia?

In part though, I suspect those youth culture stereotypes got the wind up quite a few of us along the way. I personally felt especially old at 18, 21, 25 and 30 - "OMG! I'm now an adult / I've been an adult three years / I'm a quarter of a century OLD / I'm now over the hill."

And then I realised I was still alive, and in many ways improving, and I met some cool older people, and I realised that the people who were propagating these fears and myths about the life span really had no idea, and that was the end of the matter.

It would be a total shame if people threw it all in at 25 - think of all the wonderful books, CDs and pieces of art we'd not have. Think of the insanity of people throwing away decades of thought and skill and creativity because of this silly way of looking at things.

Brett always wants to stir the pot because of certain attitudes in certain places - if he had a logon, he'd start threads like "Bloodflowers - Peak Cure" and "Jason Cooper - Drumming God" and defend them to the hilt from certain sad people who seem to have very narrow ideas about life. 

[Ulrich]

Perhaps it was part of the punk ideology of not wanting to turn into an old dinosaur or something. It would have been a shame though for obvious reasons!

Yeah I guess that was part of it, but also (maybe) the fear that his wandering "muse" might leave... (It must be frightening for artists sometimes: "what if I run out of ideas?"!)

[Ms_Mephistopheles]

Perhaps it was part of the punk ideology of not wanting to turn into an old dinosaur or something. It would have been a shame though for obvious reasons!

Yeah I guess that was part of it, but also (maybe) the fear that his wandering "muse" might leave... (It must be frightening for artists sometimes: "what if I run out of ideas?"!)

It sounds like RS hit that particular wall with the last lot of recordings they made. It must happen at multiple points thoughout a musicians career?

He had mentioned in the Chvrches interview that he has become increasingly more critical of what he writes, but he has always sounded like a musician who returns to things and rakes through his work exhaustively until he can fiddle no more!

[SueC]

Spammer in previous post already reported. It's so sad that even antisocial people who spam others report liking Cure albums. You'd think thrash metal or boy bands would be more their thing.