Death Disco - Notting Hill Arts Club

Decisions are made by those who turn up. History is written by the winners. There's no such thing as a free lunch, unless you're a goldfish.

This evening (or last night, depending on your perspective) I'm in darkest Notting Hill, at Alan McGee's Death Disco. You know how you find yersel chatting to random people at parties, then you bump into them time and time again and cos they're in a band you inevitably go to one of their shows, well here I am.

Three bands on tonight, my acquaintance's band are headlining, on stage at 22:45.

I have to get up for work six hours later.

The database state is bad enough, but here at the cool Notting Hill Arts Club, they demand photo ID at the door then scan it "So we know who's inside". My attractive young ladyfriend mutters something about being stored in a database. The guy on the door overhears and denies there's any database involved. So the point of scanning is?

I'm not taking an international flight. I'm not opening a new bank account. I'm not even taking photos of iconic landmarks in the proximity of a PCSO. I'm just trying to get in to a shitty little indie club night, so why do I need to show my papers?

I don't care that its not the doorman's fault, just management policy, or an alternative to form 696, or the Met Police policy or the local authority or health and safety for our own protection. It stinks.

Its understandable how such a system was introduced, someone clearly though we were living in East Germany. But how to turn it round? How to get rid of having to have you papers scanned for visiting an indie club?

When the management told the doorman, he should have said no fucking way. When the punters told McGee, he should have said no fucking way. When the police/authority/health and safety told the management they should have said no fucking way. When the powers that be sat in a meeting and decided it, the room should have rose up and said no fucking way. Whoever suggested it should have been sacked on the spot, escorted from the building, dowsed in petrol and set fire to, caught on camera, uploaded to YouTube and tagged accordingly.

Maybe I'm being hypocritical with my love of gig-tracking and Songkick. But I do those things by choice, not everyone does. Its linked to my Twitter and Facebook with my permission. God knows what the Notting Hill Arts Club's Clubscan is connected to, but no one asked me.

"Excuse me sir, do you mind if we scan your ID before entry?" That would have been an improvement.

Anyhoo, the entry process left a bad taste in the mouth and if this review ends up grim, that's why. Mr McGee, your precious Labour government have cultivated this, you must share responsibility.

Last time I was here was for a Scottish mob, Q Without U, they were okay, it must have been over a year ago. My ladyfriend was last here before the English smoking ban, the vibe is different. Hear that McGee, your mob have broken it. They've broken it all.

First band on are This Is Munich. One of their piano lines sounds just like Pocketbooks' Autumn Leaves, but the rest of it has Suede vocals, leaning a little towards Bowie. Geneva? I bet the keyboard player cites Coldplay as an influence, he was inspired to form the band after seeing Coldplay at Wembley Arena.

Scratchy samples of 1940s 33s. Then the guitar, bass and drums kick in again, epic soaring lead guitar. Aw man, I used to be able to remember exactly who these guys sound like, now after 543 gigs, its all a blur, a companion suggests The Kills. I think I once saw Coldplay third on the bill at King Tuts.

Tonight, This Is Munich are an odd looking bunch, nineties clothes, stupid hair. They were very competent, they certainly knew how to play their instruments.

Not sure what the deal is with Death Disco, is Alan McGee here? If he's not, it either cos he's too old or cos he's mourning the death of Michael Foot, either way, he's a cunt.

Next up are/is Sangeeta, some keyboard girl with drum-guitar-bass backing. Jazzy rock Kate Bush or Lapsus Linguae for another gender I reckon. Feist and PJ Harvey reckons my attractive young ladyfriend, she's on the money with the latter.

Love the plinky plonk piano at the end of every song. Extra points cos she sure can holler and cos the guitar sound is huge.

The audience are a bit disinterested, chatting throughout over their glasses of house red and tins of Red Stripe.

The headliners, Wonderful World of Cactapuss, take to the stage, spending 24 minutes setting up a vast array of keyboards, effects boxes and colour-changing chicken lights. Truly they are gods.

"Good evenin' earthlin's"

Are they London's answer to Air or Daft Punk. Great big crunchy rhythms, stuff you can not only get your teeth into, but could probably build a shithouse out of, if necessary.

Earlier the two of them were discussing their flashing LED specs, genuine artifacts from the eighties, do they even make them any more. Mark, the one on the left, had dropped his pair on the floor so they were now held together with masking tape.

Finally, for the first time this evening the crowd start moving, the place is packed and the kids are making weird shapes. Tall chap in the middle casting some shoulder moves, heavily make-uped girls on the right doing the cheekbone thrust, and front left a couple who've been snogging throughout, really face-chewing stuff.

In fourteen years time, this'll be the soundtrack to the Hull Olympics.

SongKick Dreams

I used to go to lots of gigs, hundreds of them, four or five a month, just any live music really, friends' bands, bands people talked about, regular promoter's nights. But I have a job, and my hours are grim, I need to be up at 4:30am in the morning sometimes, and I'm too old to be able to handle going out the night before.

So instead of going out, I stay online, scanning SongKick, and have SongKick Dreams.

At some point I'm going to start another blog, running commentry about SongKick, answering questions like:-

• How much traffic does SK get?
• How many members do they have?
• How many users?
• How fast is SK's membership growing?
• What's the spread of gig counts like?
• What's the spread of band tracking?
• What sort of messages to people leave each other?
• Why sign up to the site without clicking on any gigs you've been to?

That sort of thing.

It'll be neat if it was on a site of it's own, a blog about SongKick instead of a blog by SongKick, like you get blogs about Facebook or about Twitter, but this one will be mine, I made this.

But can I really be bothered?
Would it get much traffic?
After answering those initial questions would there be any 'news' to report or interesting 'mash-ups' that people have created?
Is writing about the posts on SK blog acceptable?

Is there more to life than this?

Probably been to more gigs than you

Aw man, I'm exhausted, I'm snotty, and I'm gazing at numbers.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, the whole point of me going to gigs was mostly to pass the time, love of music, with maybe a little smidgin of loyalty to friends in bands, and the hope that one day I'll again be at a gig like Ash and China Drum playing Manchester University Student's Union in 1995 or the Boo Radleys at Manchester Academy that same year.

It hasn't happened, I've never been to gigs like that since. I've been to some good shows, but never found what I've been seeking. I'll continue to look, but right now I can't even afford the bus fare to get to a free gig, anywhere.

Anyhoo, I've clocked up an inordinate number of gigs in my life. More than most people. And its only been in the last few months with the invention of Songkick that I've a) been able to catalogue all the gigs I've been to and b) compare this with other people.

The comparing's not so easy, the site tell you how many past concerts you've been to and you can see how many past concerts other people on the site have been to, but in terms of your rank, I've tried to find that myself, the hard way. Regular blog readers here will already know this. I reckon with SongKick the size it is now, I'm in the Top 50 gig goers.

The top chappie is RayGigs (gig security) with 3,000 or so shows under his belt. There may be other people in the world with more, they just haven't signed up or spent weeks checking off all their shows. SoapCompany is second with around 1066 gigs, but KittenPainting is catching up really quickly with 930 or so shows, when she finds her lost gig diary of doom... So, bear in mind only two people out of the thousands who've signed up have more than a thousand gigs.

But to find how this compares to the rest of SongKick users, I've indulged in some random sampling. I search for common names and go through the results for users, noting down how many shows each has been to.

So out of a sample of a few hundred people, if you ignore the folk who signed up and didn't check off any gigs, I can churn out a normal distributiony graph thing.

(The y-axis has a logarithmic scale to make it all work)

So, from this graph you can say if you've checked off eighty gigs on SongKick, then 80% of SongKick users have been to fewer gigs. If you've only checked off ten gigs, that's still better than 40% of Songkick users. Over 200 gigs and you tower over 94%, and over 500 gigs puts you in the top percentile of users.

Capiche?

Songkick Meetup

I'm so tired. I was up at 4:30am this morning to get to work, it's barely a life, and last night I was running non-stop since I finished work. A desperate sprint to the underground station to get across town for a users meetup at Songkick Towers.

Songkick, as I've previously spieled on about is this huge websitey database of almost every gig ever, you can log on and check off which shows you've been to. According to Pete Smith, one of the founders, they're all gig geeks and they want the website to make going to gigs on the same level as going to the cinema. Its an interesting take on the phenomenom, and I guess I've embraced it, probably averaging more gigs than cinema trips over the years.

But I don't see the gig-going experience like that, I'd compare it more to football. I've only seen Man United play once, I'm not much of a football fan. But I was reading highbrow blogoir Charles Crawford this morning, he was rattling on about how the invention of broadcast football...

..meant that there were two categories of sports fans. Those who had to make their way to the event and pay to watch it in person. And everyone else who got to see it in effect for free via TV.

I reckon its the same deal with music now, recorded/broadcast music is essentially free, you don't pay to listen to the radio or spotify, and there are those of us who make our way to the gigs and pay to watch the bands in person.

Enough pontificating, on with the meetup writeup blogposts...

We'd been issued with name badges and name clouds of people in the room who we may have seen at other gigs. So there was much wandering around looking for familiar-ish faces and people who's username's we'd seen online.

There was free beer and cakes and crisps and vodka and stuff and badges, there was a short presentation of new and exciting features they're hoping to add to the site, I'm not quite comfortable blabbing on about every on my blog, but later I was chatting with a fellow songkicker about how difficult it would be to pick your own Top Five favourite gigs of all time, torturously so even.

And if such a thing top five gigs had to be shown, I'd want it to be computer generated, some kind of algorithm that picks the top five gigs out of every one you've been to, not necessarily the biggest gigs, but some kind of complicated formular. My mind's been boggling about it all day at the factory today, and what I figure would be neat, is a rotating selection of different top fives, every time you click refresh it changes the algorithm, so you never know what it's going to be:-

• Top five biggest gigs
• Oldest five gigs
• Top five biggest attended shows by your favourite band
• Top five gigs at your top venue
• Top five shows by bands beginning with 'B'
• Top five shows with one word band names
• Top five shows biggest shows this year
• Top five shows you went to on your own
• Top five shows outside your safety zone
• ... and so on

I don't know about you, but I'd be clicking refresh for hours and hours.

Then again, mind boggling some more, how would you choose your Top Five gigs? Well, by comparing one to another. Was Cast at The Boardwalk better than The Loves at The Cavern? Were Friends of the Bride at The Buffalo Bar better than The Gresham Flyers at Jamm? It would be a seperate corner of the website, but it just pings up a load of these choices, and after a while the alogrithm knows enough to say my favourite gig was The Just Joans at The Enterprise.

What would be a tiny bit more interesting would be if other people could pick your top gig, so anyone visiting your profile gets to chose which show was better, even if they've never heard of the bands. Nathan Persad at the 13th Note better than The Mighty Sunch at The Captain's Rest?

Anyhoo, I digress again, I ought not to, I need to sleep.

As is my wont in these meetup blogposts, here's a list of people who were there, and for the sake of being fiercely competitve, they are listed by the number og gigs they're been to.

1. soapcompany - 1066 past events
   
2. triturus - 353 past events
3. bootzilla - 308 past events
4. bumblebee - 305 past events
5. bookarooble - 218 past events
6. dawnkitten - 191 past events
7. outspaced - 171 past events
8. AnthonyChalmers - 164 past events
9. natalie_shaw - 137 past events
10. brightslumber - 121 past events
11. saleandro - 118 past events
12. gideon - 115 past events
    
13. ian - 103 past events
14. kaz.patwa - 103 past events
15. jesstherese - 96 past events
16. mash1982 - 90 past events
17. michelle - 89 past events
    
18. deathwarmedover - 83 past events
19. EmilyS - 64 past events
20. phil - 44 past events
21. gtvone - 43 past events
22. ssaint - 32 past events
23. Craigtmackenzie - 18 past events
24. funky - 9 past events
25. marc - 6 past events
    

Apologies to anyone I've missed, my bad. I haven't included myself, my profile's here if you're passing through.

Here's everyone graphed and broken into percentiles.

I knew you would.

They had whiteboards for people to add suggestions, features they'd like added and stuff they don't like. I scrawled a couple of things, rambling and misguided, I think if I was thinking more clearly, I'd have written 'rank'. For every datum, I'd like to know the rank compared to the rest of the database. Number of photies added, how does that compare to everyone else; number of gigs a band has played, how does that compare to every other band; number of past concerts at a venue how does that compare to every other venue.

Sure, there's a bit of that rankinginess around, the site, but I want more of it. And aure, it'll give the game away for how big the database is an how many people are signed up, but like when technorati does it for blogs, it demonstrates how authoritative the datum is.

Hmm, where was I? ah yeas. I drank too much, chatted to lots of people, but not half as many as I wanted to. I had to leave.

It was a bit of a frantic sprint afterwards too, to the Buffalo Bar to catch The Primitives playing Twee As Fuck. I bumped into Dave from the Just Joans in the queue, down from Glasgow. Sadly my night was cut short as I had to leave before the headline act in order to get the last train home and get to work the next day.

Anyhoo, looking at the songkick page for the gig and the seven people who were there, they're mostly hardcore gig-going songkickers:-

1. illandancient - 529 past events
   
2. OddBox - 343 past events
3. darve - 204 past events
4. RockerRosehip - 116 past events
5. rewsan - 106 past events
6. emml - 105 past events
7. RorySoTough - 1 past events

Gigmates

I've been ploughing through my gigography on Songkick, figuring out who goes to the most of the same gigs as me, where our gigographies overlap.

2009
FarrellFace - 11 shows
Oddbox - 8 shows
Darve - 7 shows
Miss Ladybug - 7 shows
Nik Vestberg - 5 shows
Out of 33 shows, mostly London

Not surprising really

2008
Oddbox - 30 shows
Darve - 23 shows
Saleandro - 9 shows
KittenPainting - 7 shows
BobUnderexposed - 7 shows
Out of 60 shows, mostly London

A mighty overlap with Oddbox and Darve there

2007
Oddbox - 14 shows
Darve - 5 shows
Jona - 5 shows
Nastily - 3 shows
BobUnderexposed - 3 shows
Out of 89 shows, divided between London and Glasgow

Nastily was my female companion at the time, and for the rest of the Scottish gigs it was almost like I was the only person there registered on Songkick.

For 2004 to 2006 the only folk who are on the site who went to more than one of the same gig as me are Jona, Katrina and Ink Wilson.

I think this would be more interesting if more of the Glasgow set were there.

Rummaging

After remembering a few old old gigs from Glasgow, my gigography on Songkick is up to 518 shows since 12th July 1995.

The bands that I've seen more than anyone else on Songkick are:-

1. Plimptons - 50 shows
2. MJ Hibbett (solo) - 19 shows
3. The Hector Collectors - 14 shows
4. Camera Obscura - 9 shows
5. The Just Joans - 9 shows
6. The School - 9 shows
7. Flyer - 8 shows
8. The Gresham Flyers - 8 shows
9. The Deirdres - 6 shows
10. MJ Hibbett and the Validators - 6 shows
11. Scunner - 6 shows
12. Superstar - 6 shows
13. The Bobby McGees - 6 shows
14. The Give It Ups - 5 shows
15. My Legendary Girlfriend - 5 shows
16. Ballboy - 4 shows

There's also a couple of bands that I've seen the second most times on Songkick:-

• Pete Green - 10 times
  
• Allo Darlin - 7 times
  
• Stars of Aviation - 6 times
  
• Wintergreen - 5 times
  

And, rather more interestingly I think, these are bands that I've seen three or more times, that no one else on Songkick has seen:-

• Ally Kerr - 6 times
• Soundbuggy - 6 times
• Dot to Dot - 5 times
• Ceylan - 3 times
• The Hate Brigade - 3 times
• The Owsley Sunshine - 3 times
• Tiny Little Hearts - 3 times

They are mostly Glasgow bands, so its possible I imagined the whole thing. There's also Flyer who I saw eight times at school, Songkick has another chap seeingt hem at a music festival at some point, that that couldn't possibly be the same band.

And I'm trying to remember the name of Wee Patrick and Lucy's band who played the Winchester Club once, they played the theme tune from The Raccoons.

Long game competition

Its been a while since I posted about SongKick, the new startupish gig database websitey thing.

Here's an updated list of the top twenty folk with the most gigs, I'm holding on at number 8.

Rank	Name	Total gigs	Total bands
1	raysgigs	3804	2604
2	SoapCompany	809	912
3	bobunderexposed	712	1172
4	skif45	691	1301
5	sonofhal	647	1238
6	ghbradshaw	487	878
7	mahoney	471	722
8	illandancient	445	674
9	gloomboy	441	536
10	citizenmeh	409	942
11	Killer McHann	375	884
12	liveon35mm	360	579
13	iheartmusic	348	640
14	OddBox	324	543
15	mellowdoubt	319	725
16	trackaghost	319	449
17	ian21	314	483
18	bootzilla	305	368
19	Maddix85	286	578
20	bumblebee	280	395

So the 400 Gig Club has 5 members, the 300 Gig Club has 8 members, and the 200 Gig Club has 12 folk in it. There's probably hundreds of folk in the 100 Gig Club and thousands with less than a hundred shows under their collective belts. All this is based on guess-work and having spent a little too long surfing round the SongKick site.

It took me a while to get past Gloomboy, but thanks to a bit of detective work chasing up gigs from five years back, I think I did it. I've got my sights set on Mahoney next, but it looks like he bags gigs a lot more frequently than me, this could be difficult.

Right now I'm catching one show a week, in the days before Indietracks that cranks up a wee bit, but its still going to be months before I'm on Mahoney's coat tales, this is going to be a long game.

Unless of course I can find the dates to half-remembered gigs from the past...

• Superstar - The Attic, Edinburgh
• Pumpkin Nuts - Fat Boabs, Glasgow
• Pumpkin Nuts - The Arena, Glasgow
• Hate brigade - The Box, Glasgow
• The AMs - The Box, Glasgow
• Bloodhound Gang - Garage, Glasgow
• Kasino/quiz - 13th Note, Glasgow
• Plimptons - rasmd, Glasgow
• Poppadoms - 13th note, Glasgow (same night as previous)
• The Plimptons - Tchai Ovna Southside
  
• Akira, The Chicks - Nice n Sleazy, Glasgow
• St. Jude's Infirmary - The Winchester Club, The Woodside Social Club, Glasgow
• Bricolage - The Winchester Club, The Woodside Social Club, Glasgow
• No Way Sis - Hull University, Hull
• Hector Collectors, The Smiths - Manchester
• Arrested Development - King Tuts, Glasgow
• The Soul Destroyers - The Arches, Glasgow
• Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings - The Arches, Glasgow
• Lee Fields - The Arches, Glasgow
• The Gents - King Tuts, Glasgow
  
• The Tough Alliance - Classic Grand, Glasgow
• ... And you will know by the trail of dead - King Tuts, Glasgow
• some bands - The Gig, Los Angeles
• same night as London Popfest - Last Days of Decadance, London
• some rockabilly bands near midsummer's day - Debaser, Sweden, 2005

Any help warmly appreciated.

Still early doors

Back in the early days of Last.fm, it was easy to game the system, you could rename MP3s and they'd show up on the track lists for bands, you could leave your puter playing the same artist overnight and you'd be the biggest fan in the morning. I remember Belle and Sebastian's most popular tune being a Plimptons cover.

They soon tightened up their software, and the sheer weight of people signed up meant there was always a bigger and more legit fan out there in the ether, someone who listened to the artist more without and skulduggery.

But its still early days on Songkick, and for a few of the bands I've seen, I'm the person who's seen then more times than anyone else in the world on Songkick, I'm the biggest fan. Not you, not some guy from the forum, just me.

Its not going to last forever, I can think of dozens of people who've seen my favourite acts more often than I have, but they're not signed up yet. So I'm the biggest fan.

These are acts that I've seen more often than anyone else on Songkick:-

The Plimptons - 50 times
MJ Hibbett and/or The Validators - 22 times
Pocketbooks - 13 times (surpassed by Trev OddBox -Jun-2009)
Pete Green - 10 times (surpassed by Trev OddBox -Jun-2009)
Belle and Sebastian - 8 times (surpassed by Katrina75 -Jun-2009)
Flyer - 8 times
The Hector Collectors - 8 times
The School - 8 times
Camera Obscura - 7 times
Idlewild - 7 times
The Just Joans - 7 times
The Stars of Aviation - 7 times
The Gresham Flyers - 7 times
The Give It Ups - 5 times

This won't last long.

The lost shows

Still logging gigs into songkick, but I think I'm getting to the bottom of it now. There's just a couple of shows I remember, but can't find any trace of their dates online...

• Plimptons, My Tiny Robots - Teviot Underground, Edinburgh
• Superstar - The Attic, Edinburgh
• The Plimpton's Symposium of Pomp - Tchai Ovna, Glasgow (which ones did I go to?)
• Bozilla eotmc - 13th Note, Glasgow (which ones did I go to?)
• Pumpkin Nuts - Fat Boabs, Glasgow
• Pumpkin Nuts - The Arena, Glasgow
• Hate Brigade - Nice n Sleazy, Glasgow
• Hate brigade - The Box, Glasgow
• The AMs - The Box, Glasgow
• The Only Ones - Garage, Glasgow
• Fishbone - Garage, Glasgow
• Fountains of Wayne - Garage, Glasgow
• Snuff - Garage, Glasgow
• Bloodhound Gang - Garage, Glasgow
• Kasino/quiz - 13th Note, Glasgow
• Plimptons - rasmd, Glasgow
• Poppadoms - 13th note, Glasgow
• Akira, The Chicks - Nice n Sleazy, Glasgow
• My Vitriol - QMU, Glasgow
• Any Owsley Sunshine gigs - Glasgow
• St. Jude's Infirmary - The Winchester Club, The Woodside Social Club, Glasgow
• Bricolage - The Winchester Club, The Woodside Social Club, Glasgow
• No Way Sis - Hull University, Hull
• Hector Collectors, The Smiths - Manchester
• Arrested Development - King Tuts, Glasgow
• Kings of Leon - Viper Room, Los Angeles
• ??? - The Gig, Los Angeles
• The Tough Alliance - Classic Grand, Glasgow
• ... And you will know by the trail of dead - King Tuts, Glasgow
• same night as London Popfest - Last Days of Decadance, London
  

Any help on dates greatly appreciated.

Early doors

God knows how many people have signed up to Songkick so far, but it my sort of website, a great big user-generated (kind of) database of gigs. Its only been going for a week, so its safe to assume that the people on it right now are enthusiastic early adopter types.

I've been browsing, and by my reckoning the top ten most prolific gig-goers are thus:-

Rank	Name	Total gigs	Total bands
1	raysgigs	3793	2604
2	SoapCompany	736	810
3	bobunderexposed	710	1170
4	sonofhal	639	1209
5	ghbradshaw	472	845
6	skif45	446	1014
7	citizenmeh	403	957
8	illandancient	345	529
9	iheartmusic	337	620
10	mellowdoubt	316	712

I guess 'raysgigs' is one Ray Morrissey, the BBC covered him a few months back.

If you think anything like me, you'll be wanting to know what the average sort of multiple of gigs to bands is. For the most prolific of the gig going people on Songkick, they've seen about one and a half times as many bands as gigs they've been to. More precisely 153 different bands for every 100 gigs. Sure, that's on average, but what does the spread look like?

For the limited data available, its pretty much a bell curve. I reckon the outliers are folk who have either seen the same bands far more often than is healthy (who goes to see The Automatic 76 times?), or folk who go to lots of festivals and not many individual gigs.

What about those folk who just see the same bands over and over again? Well for me, about 5% of the gigs I've been to in my life are for the same act, no prizes for guessing who, but how does that compare to the other enthusiastic early adopty gig-going folk on songkick? Well, its about the same. Joe Normal me.

But what's the spread like?
Just like that.

I think in very real terms the outliers here are what's general known as 'hipsters', whilst the folk in the main <5% spike, they're scenesters.

This finally, in graphical form, displays the difference between the two types of gig-goers.

Found photos

I'm still populating my gigography on Songkick, determined to break an average of two gigs a month. At the moment I'm on about 1.8 or 344 over a 14 year period.

They've already automatically ported over all the gigs I'd said I'd gone to on Last.fm, and now I'm trying to fill in the gaps.

Half-remembered shows from bands during dry spells in Glasgow. Trying my damnedest to find the exact date and venue. Was I there? At that gig? or just a similar one a month later?

Some famous people and me!
Originally uploaded by tomory

Luckily in some obscure corners there's incontrovertible evidence I was there then. Like this photo for example which I just discovered on some random chap's flickr account, neatly labelled by Paul Pahtotheworld.

If you look real hard you can find Gerry from Teenage Fanclub, Eugene Kelly and Stephen Pastel in the back of the shot. That's Pat Nevin on my right basking in the glory of his DJ set.

Comments

pahtotheworld says:

that's Chris Gilmour behind your shoulder
Posted 32 months ago. ( permalink )

Those were the days,
Was there then.

My Gigography on Songkick

Aw man, I'm having great fun adding my gigography to SongKick.com

Songkick is this newish social sharingy database of gigs. According to their About Us Page, they've got around a million gigs on the database, so I looked up a few of my favourite gigs and found I was going to have to add them myself.

So far I've logged in 240 gigs in the last fourteen years, by a weird quirk of fate its been exactly fourteen years today since my first gig, Cast with The Longpigs at the Boardwalk in Manchester.

It averages out to about one and a half gigs per month, but I've still got loads more to add.

I think my gig life broadly falls into four epoques

• Manchester schooldays (1995-1997 - 27 gigs)
  
• Glasgow Unidays (1997-2001 - 83 gigs)
  
• Glasgow Working (2001-2004 - 53 gigs)
  
• Glasgow Managing (2004-2007 - 14 gigs)
  
• London (2007-present - 71 gigs)
  

Where that Glasgow Managing is where its bands like The Plimptons and The Deep Fried Wolfknuckles. It looks like I still need to add shows from the last while in Glasgow, but it's going to be difficult, most of the 13th Note and Nice n Sleazy shows didn't have tickets and I'd see the same bands playing again and again, so its hard to be sure.

As it stands right now, my top venues for gigs are as follows

• King Tuts - 46 gigs
• Barrowlands - 22 gigs
• Buffalo Bar - 9 gigs
• Glasgow QMU - 8 gigs
• The Lamb on Conduit Street - 7 gigs
• The Luminaire - 7 gigs

which suggests I need to add more 13th Note shows, I was there almost ever week for months on end, The Cottiers Theatre and Sleazys and Stereo too.

And my top bands are

• MJ Hibbett - 11 gigs
• Belle and Sebastian - 8 gigs
• Pocketbooks - 8 gigs
• Idlewild - 7 gigs
• The School - 6 gigs
• Camera Obscura - 5 gigs
• Darren Hayman - 5 gigs

Somewhat Lacking is evidence of Plimptons shows, am I scared of putting them all on? And The Just Joans, and Owsley Sunshine and Gresham Flyers and aw man, I've missed so much already.

So yeah, Songkick is my new favourite website