No geek
is an island

So I went to see Franz Ferdinand’s Leeds gig on their tour, or rather their second Leeds gig: they played a secret set the night before under the cunning pseudonym The Black Hands. Except news got out and a thousand people tried to get in to a venue fitting three hundred.

The less eventful gig I attended was at the Blank Canvas, an apt description of an unfurnished (save for a bar and stage) tunnel in railway arches under Leeds City Station. Uneventful also describes the two support acts, who weren’t helped by a feedback-infested sound system (which surprisingly fixed itself for the headliners). Sons and Daughters were hard to hear and didn’t leave the impression of being anything special. The Fiery Furnaces (I think that’s what they were called) were a little better, but used the cunning ploy of segueing their songs together to avoid unenthusiastic applause between them. As a result we weren’t sure if they played ten similar songs or one slightly odd one.

Franz Ferdinand themselves dwarfed their support. They were confident, clear (impressive given the acoustics), and classy. The crowd, who took little warming up, bounced away to Take Me Out and their other two singles. After a long and pretty exhaustive set, they returned for an encore of This Fire and Shopping for Blood. The combination of different vocalists works well live (unsurprising for a band that grew as part of their own live music scene in Glasgow) and the songs were was, needless to say, terrific.

This was my first gig since I said goodbye to Suede. The musical invention, wry lyrics and live performance showed promise that Franz Ferdinand can lead the renaissance of British indie. Their challenge now is to produce a second album that builds on, rather than just repeats, the first.

Went to see Kill Bill Vol. 2 on Sunday. I had been surprised how much I’d enjoyed the first half and the second half didn’t disappoint. As other reviews have noted, the second part is more character based with less of the audacious action scenes of the first, but it retains its fair share of comic book violence (and yay to that). I’m not a film studies scholar so I won’t even pretend to be able to witter about the intertextuality (see Martyn, who makes some interesting points), but suffice it to say that the film is sumptuously photographed and thoroughly enjoyable. The very ending was a little obvious but that didn’t matter, and in the few moments where it almost started to drag, Tarantino’s non-chronological style jumped in to hold things together. Darryl Hannah was very good (I’d only seen her previously in Splash) and the fantastically OTT Pai Mei should get his own series (as Bill, of course, had).

I’ve never been keen on her performances, but with Kill Bill Uma Thurman has redeemed herself. Her conviction for The Avengers is finally spent.

It’s been a fair while since I was on a team that won a pub quiz, so I was particularly chuffed at our success in the University of Leeds Centenary Quiz, hosted by former Leeds Student editor and fellow Leeds alumnus Nicholas Witchell. The team consisted entirely of former student union sabbatical officers. Trust Kathryn to know that the Union sells a million pints of beer a year. Our prize was a copy of University of Leeds Monopoly, which I helped to design a couple of years ago, and tickets to that evening’s alumni club night in the Union.

Been ridiculously busy over the last week. Tune in later for tales of Franz Ferdinand, Uma Thurman and Nicholas Witchell.

Very disappointing news from the Electoral Commission, who have rejected the idea of lowering the UK voting age to 16. One of the more ridiculous reasons for this was that 16- and 17-year-olds might (or even would) use their votes less than the average and this would lower turnout. What they would actually be doing would be lowering percentage turnout - the number of people turning out to vote would go up!

If you follow this logic, the Electoral Commission shouldn’t run voter registration campaigns in case the people they register don’t use their votes. We should, in fact, kick off the electoral register anyone who hasn’t used their vote in, say, the last four years. That would dramatically increase turnout in future elections. What a success.

While percentage turnout is a useful measure for comparing individual elections, of course it depends on the current level of enfranchisement. (That’s why turnout in 2001 was only compared in the media to elections back to 1918.) Turnout might drop (or it could go up) the year the change is made, but from then on you have a new baseline.

And, as many people have written many times, it is neither fancy gimmicks nor fixing the way it’s counted that will resolve the issue of falling turnouts, it is engendering in the population the feeling that their vote actually matters. That means a voting system that doesn’t treat you as an irrelevance if you live in a safe seat and a Government that doesn’t introduce policies that directly contradict explicit manifesto commitments.

Been away in London (with no PC) for an LDYS Exec meeting this weekend. Got back to find the Franz Ferdinand tickets are here so I’m off tomorrow to see them.