A gig too far....

Yes, maybe I did try to pack in too much yesterday.

Tim Garton Ash overran slightly at The Bookworm, so I had to duck out before the Q&A began.

Got to Yugong just in time for the start of Panjir's set, kicking off improbably promptly at 8.30 (well, I missed the first 5 minutes or so).

Yugong was, yet again, a disappointment. The venue was uncomfortably heaved out, and it was difficult to get close enough to hear, let alone see the band. I can't imagine why the organisers didn't choose Star Live instead, a venue which could cope comfortably with much bigger numbers, and has way better sound.

Far too many tickets had been distributed (and security on the door didn't seem to be too challenging; I ran into a couple of acquaintances who'd managed to blag their way in ticketless): attendance was well beyond a comfortable capacity for Yugong. And the acoustics problem - the echoing babble of chatterers at the rear of the room overwhelming the sound of the musicians - was thus particularly bad last night.

Panjir were excellent, as always; but they only played for an hour or so.

They were a tough act for the visiting Fethi Tabet to follow. (Thanks to the heavy censoring and general crapness of the Chinese Internet at the moment, I still have no idea if that is the name of the band or only of the frontman.) And he/they did not impress. Well, the band were fine; very good, in fact. But it was a rather bland mismatch of musical styles, and their 'star' leader had a weak voice and a severe absence of charisma. (Unfortunate mismatch of fashion sense too: he teamed a panama hat with an aged pair of leather trousers that looked like some of Jim Morrison's castoffs.) He struck me as a rather 'easy listening' version of North African music; a musician capable of gaining broad appeal in France perhaps mainly because he's jolly and unthreatening and un-Arab-looking.

I was told that the set got better later on, and was positively rocking for the last few songs when Panjir joined to jam (I'm not sure how there was room for them all on stage??). I'm sorry I missed that - but the unpleasant throng and the crappy sound quality had sapped my enthusiasm after half an hour or so of Fethi's set.

However, that did enable me to get to Jianghu just in time to catch the last couple of numbers in Dan and Nico's opening set. Alas, they were on something of a work-to-rule last night (since this was the first time they've ever managed to negotiate a fee for appearing there) and only played two sets, rather than the three or four we had come to expect from them in the past. And again, there was rather a big crowd (Tianxiao's actually getting into promotion now: there's a kind of festival on there this month, with some sort of live act playing almost every night); not oppressively so, but it was not so cosy and intimate as the great Thursday night sessions of yore.

Ah well, not a bad night, though. And I managed to get home only a little after 1am.