Carlski's Gig Blog: Also Featuring Arbitrary Strangeness!: July 2007

Scorpions - 29/07/07

Scorps at Manchester Apollo. Support from MSG (Michael Schenker Group). Good to see ol'Metal Mickey pissed as a fart as usual, he managed 3 songs before falling over and getting booed off! Ace!

The Scorps then appeared to play the crowd 2+ hours of German "Metaalll!!" With ex guitarist Uli Jon Roth with them to do a few oldies, the crowd got a very mixed bag of classic Scorps tuneage!

They played tracks from nearly all their album except the 3 really shitty 90's albums!

THe highlights being "The Zoo", "Blackout" and a couple of "newies" Some fans kept shouting for Herman "The German" during the drum solo not realising that Herman had left the band and that new drummer James Kottak is neither called Herman, nor is he German!

For encore it was lighters or phones out for the best of the Scorpions ballads - "Still Loving You" and of course the classic "Wind Of Change". For a big sing along finish, it was time to "Rock You Like a Hurricane"! Awesome!

Movie: The Fountain - Dir: Darren Aronofsky

The Fountain is a really f*kin' storming movie! The film is a strange mix of "Apocalypto" meets "2001: A Space Odyssey" It basically features Hugh Jackman (superb performance!) searching for the "Tree of Life" in the new world in 1500 - searching for a cure for his wife's (played by Rachel Weisz) cancer in 2007, and flying around in a spherical spaceship with only a tree (tree of life??) for company in 2500! Yes its pretty damn weird, but pretty damn good! The story is well paced, the photography and editing excellent and the score stirring and moving at the same time! There's also a bit of action and people getting speared and whacked over the head for people who like that shit also :-)

If you have a PlayStation 3 or Blu-Ray Disc Player. The Blu-Ray Disc has way more features than the standard DVD and an absolutely fabulous picture to boot! It has the same 1 hour documentary and deleted scenes, but has an extra 40 mins of VFX and storyboarding stuff thats pretty interesting too! The one let down is no commentary track unlike Darren Aronofsky's previous two movies "Pi" and "Requiem For A Dream"

Basically a good film for Sci-fi fan everywhere! 9.5/10!

Ozzy Osbourne - 06/07/07

Moving on to Friday evening now, and Ozzy's gig at the NIA! The first support band was "Headspace" a band fronted by Ozzy's keyboardist Adam (Son of Rick!)Wakeman, but we missed them by getting to the venue late!

The main support was "Black Label Society" fronted by Ozzy's guitarist Zakk Wylde!

Zakk played roughly 50 mins of fairly firey metal, not heard much before, but was v. enjoyable. Will probably have to check out some BLS albums!

Then it was time for the Prince Of Darkness himself: He came on stage to his usual comedy video which included him nicking Heather Mills' false leg!

Ozzy ran though 13 of his greatest hits, his voice and himself were in suprisingly good form!

Ozzy did his usual throwing copious buckets of water over the front few rows, and did his trademark comedy banter of "Show me your f*-king hands" and "I love you all!"
All in all a great gig!!

Ozzy Osbourne Day! - 06/07/07

Friday 7th July will forever be known as "Ozzy Osbourne Day" in the fair city of Birmingham, for on this day the world's favourite "Brummie" was awarded the first star on the "Birmingham Walk of Fame"!

Around 2000 screaming lunatics turned up in Centenary Square, to watch events unfold!

Th event was host by some useless DJ from the local radio station, and was mercilessly heckled throughout!

The lord mayor then went on about all of Ozzy's achievements, such as staying alive this long, to cries of "f*-k off" from the crowd!

Ozzy was then give a replica of the "star" and the day after the real star was placed in the pavement on Broad Street. Ozzy mumbled a few unintelligible words mentioning something about "Birmingham becoming a bit posh"!