Jan Juc and the Niece

I'm currently down at a little town called Jan Juc (which for all intents and purposes is a suburb of Torquay these days) on the coast just past Geelong.

My sister and her husband and my new-born niece Baby X - OK, so her name is Naomi now - have set up home here. It's a long story, they needed an affordable furnished place to rent, of which there are few, possibly zero, in Melbourne. On the other hand, there are lots of beach and holiday houses down this way, so they decided to set up beside the seaside.

My sister and her husband are itinerant, having not lived in one country for more than two years. In fact they met in Afghanistan. So when they had to setting in a first world country for the birth of their first child, they ended up here.

We're here for the long weekend, which was a lucky coincidence of timing - this was when the house was (relatively) free of other visitors.

Having said that, a gaggle of no less than five other relatives have just left, during a downpour!

My niece is very cute. She's not quite a month old, so she's still in the eating and sleeping and eating and sleeping phase. She sleeps up to 17 hours a day! Babies are funny, they like being reminded of being in the womb, so they like being wrapped up tight and with lots of ambient noise. The radio tuned to static for example. Not to mention our awful singing. Old McDonald had a farm, apparently...!

Amanda Fucking Palmer

A couple of Friday's ago (OK, it was February 26th) I finally got to see Amanda Palmer live. Well, when I say "Finally", she has actually toured Australia seven times now, either solo or with her (apparently defunct) band "The Dresden Dolls". I only discovered her last year when I heard "Girl Anachronism" blaring from, of all things, a home-made bicycle mounted stereo system. I was impressed partly because it was a song that appeared lack a chorus.

So about five minutes of internet research revealed who she was and who her band was. I realised I must have heard some of the Dresden Dolls material before, notably "Coin Operated Boy", but didn't think much of it. In fact there's really only one Dresden Dolls album I really like - Yes, Virginia.

But I did go out and buy her solo album "Who Killed Amanda Palmer?" and fell in Rock and Roll love with her. It's OK, my Girlfriend had the same reaction and put the album on repeat as well.

So back to the gig... Amanda played at the Forum. I went with aforementioned girlfriend, and a couple of my friends from Twitter. We also bumped into a number of other folks we knew there.

The show was a bit disjoint, and had some funny moments, for example in the first song where she accidentally flicked her keyboard over to "harpsichord" mode, and then turned on one of the cheesy back beat settings and had to be rescued by one of the other musicians. Amanda would chat and so forth between songs. Most of which I knew, although some where new, and very good.

Amanda has a beautiful voice which she uses to great effect. She mostly played solo, although she had a string section for some songs. And later in the evening she sang a duet with Paul Kelly - one of Kelly's songs that she'd covered live with The Dresden Dolls. Later again she played with one of the support bands and Mick Harvey from The Bad Seeds etc. etc. She likes her collaborations does Miss Palmer!

And one of the last songs she did was the one in the video above, about that "foul death paste" Vegemite! Clearly she can never move here permanently :-)

The day after the gig, she flew to Adelaide to do some recording in a studio there, so hopefully soon she'll have a new album....