Driving Home For Christmas

I love Christmas! It's been a busy final week at Uni but early tomorrow morning I'll be boarding the train, laden with bags and suitcases and presents and heading off back to Glastonbury :)

On Wednesday night we had our Uni-course gig at a cool venue in Southampton. It was our first real chance to check out all the other musicians properly in a live setting, and was certainly a lot of fun to play. It's been ages since I've gigged, and going from gigging regularly to literally nothing but a couple of open mics in the past 4/5 months hasn't been easy! The passion in my playing was a long time coming but it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders as I walked offstage. Our band played 'Sweet Disposition' by The Temper Trap, 'Waiting on the World to Change' by John Mayer, 2 originals of which I wrote lyrics for one and finished with U2's 'With or Without You'. My request to do 'You Give Love a Bad Name' was of course shot down, but I hate naff Jovi covers anyway and I doubt we'd have got it close enough to the original!

Tomorrow I'm braving the elements and am playing a short set with my old band on Glastonbury highstreet as part of the annual Frost Fayre where they shut off the highstreet and have bands, jugglers, stalls, that kind of thing and it's a cold but fun day :) Then I'll spend the two weeks left leading up to Christmas catching up with old friends, visiting family and, of course, eating and drinking far too much. I'm very excited to be going home!

It's the calm before the storm in Jovi-land right now, all the plugging here in the UK is long done and I'm sure most have forgotten about the short-lived hype. The X Factor was I think a good appearance but shows like GMTV, This Morning and The National Lotto were a little old hat. Had they been on, for example, T4 Music, Jools Holland, etc they might have branched out to a younger, and more interested, audience but as I've said before, they can't be winning over as many new fans as they did back in 2000. At that time they were playing CD:UK and Top of the Pops, and it obviously worked well.

Anyway, it's another long one; I tend to write less often but with more words but that kinda works for me. I'll try and find time at home over Christmas to write if I so feel the desire; I tend to prefer writing when I've got some inspiration and a reason to rather than thinking I better had for the sake of it.

I can hear the sickly drones East 17's attempt at a Christmas song in the room next door. Apart from The Darkness' attempt a couple of years ago we don't really have any new Christmas songs coming through; it's the old ones that have stood the test of time and are pumped out year on year. Our 'Christmas songs' are those that are just happened to be released over the festive period and generally have nothing to do with Christmas, but it's nice I think to have Christmas-specific songs. Everyone likes Christmas songs and movies, especially new ones, and it's not like they're going to get old. Maybe they should make the X Factor winner prove their worth and their first release must be a self-penned Christmas number. That'd seperate the cheese from the downright awful. On that bombshell, I think I'll sign off.