The lovely people over at Sonic Cathedral, who some of you may know from their Rock n Roll Soul summer specials on the Island over the last couple of years, are out on a small tour with Mark Gardner, who used to sing for the very wonderful Ride back in the day. There are three dates but of particular interest to us is the Liverpool gig as Paperlung are playing, which is Sice from the very wonderful and sadly lamented Boo Radleys’ new band. You can download their demos from Paperlung website, it starts at 10pm goes on till 3am and it’s at Korova, a very nice new bar/venue co-owned by Ladytron.

Sad to see that our friends Dave Metaxas and Sandra will be leaving the Island next week, they are moving to Prague to live after some travelling, sure everyone who knows them (who could forget Teccy’s fine Lobster Boy costume from the Ballagroove party at the Creg Malin some years ago !!) will join us in wishing them all the best for the future, have fun folks !!

Thought it was about time I joined in on the “New Blog Action”!

Not really one for Top 10 lists and that type of thing but just thought I’d make mention of some of my highlights of 2005 and things I’m looking forward to in 2006.

Most memorable moments of 2005:

• The Earlies – Twisted Folk Tour. I’d been looking forward to seeing them so much, and they were even better than I expected!
• Super Furry Animals – The Liverpool gig was insane, thought that the Douglas one would be a let down but it was amazing, took a while to recover!!
• Green Man Festival – So many memories of this, King Creosote, Lone Pigeon, Joanne Newsome, Domino Records DJ’s, The Earlies, Adem, Absentee, bumping into lots of friends, has to be the friendliest festival in the world. If you like rolling around in mud and getting bladdered on lager then this one definitely isn’t for you!
• Shambala Festival – The fancy dress party on the Saturday night, completely insane!!! The Bees were ace too!
• Chris T-T – Returned to the Isle of Man for another ace gig.
• Broken Social Scene – Ibi Dreams of Pavement. My favourite song of the year
• Chas Fest – A great end to a fabulous summer.
• Wickerman Festival – Bumping into Chas and the boys down the front for Neville Staples. SKA!
• Sigur Rós – Live in Liverpool. I hate sit down gigs generally, and I would have preferred to have been able to get close / encompassed, but it was still ace!
• Tighten Up – Xmas party at the Rovers. Quality sounds and Star Wars fancy dress, madness!!
• Grant and Sue’s wedding – What a lovely day and a crackin’ gig from the Keepers great to see them again.

Looking forward to 2006, so far:

• Broken Social Scene tour.
• The festival season. So many bands I’m hoping will be playing at some I go to, but I’m not going to tempt fate!
• Finishing the new Rhysical Pheck album – must do it this year!!!
• New King Creosote Album hopefully.
• New Grandaddy album, their last 🙁
• Super Furry Animals – return to the IoM 🙂
• Future Ballagroove releases from ‘Ingie, Gratiz 3, Tholtan Builders and Cocahiba.
• More Shameless and My Name is Earle 🙂

and finally…

• Getting our house sorted (been in ten years its about time it was done !)

and most importantly…

• The world calming down a bit, please!!