by Marjorie Cardwell

David, Joel (our eldest son) and I were at the ABC show tonight.

It was a little sterile of course, but like a few others, it has somewhat restored my faith in my little man (that's Neil, BTW). I always had a hunch that a lot of these new songs would be better live and a bit more straightforward and they were. Particularly "Loose Tongue" and "Souvenir," which had Liam's very good drumming, if I remember rightly. It would have been "Loose Tongue" that he did the brilliant Bonzo-type drumming on, wouldn't it? And he was impressive on guitar too. Not a nerve in sight. What a credit to his parents. I hope Joel was inspired.

A couple of the really boring songs were just as boring live, ("Astro," "Twisty Bass," and "Addicted" spring to mind -- or should that be lumber to mind) but it was generally very heartening and I am really looking forward to the proper shows now. Like I wasn't before. Like.

Kevin out of Largest Living Things was in the audience and some of the other usual suspects were in the studio too including Arlo and Jules. Jules was working. I'm not sure what Arlo was doing.

"Private Universe" was really good with this new band -- it had a different wee bit towards the end. "Fall At Your Feet" with just Neil was great and better when you do your own backing vocals (because you do miss them). "I Got You" was stirring, although we were just commenting the previous night how nice the drums were on that original record so I sort of missed them. If I hadn't been listening to it and thinking about it, I probably wouldn't have noticed.

But yeah -- it was good. It's not Crowded House of course. Or the Finn brothers. They haven't quite developed much in the way of personality up there -- although again it was a TV recording so they hadn't really much of a chance.