act 6 scene 1

Yesterday had a surprise in store. After finishing lectures early (by over an hour) I was catching up with some e-mails and Timmy said that Jose Gonzalez was playing in Cape Town that evening. He was keen to go and whilst not being overenthusiastic I wasn’t against the idea.

So at 4pm we headed off, bought the last two tickets from a look ‘n’ listen, perused the local Apple store lustfully and went to Tim’s house for a beautiful meal prepared by his mum.

We turned up at the venue at exactly 7pm when the doors were due to open. We queue jumped thanks to a friend of Tims and got seats about ten rows from the front from which I went and hid in the insane two stage pay for tokens then buy your drinks with tokens scheme for a while.

Harris Tweed were supporting. I bought their CD afterwards and the set they did on stage was very much acoustic and beautiful. The first couple of songs were marked out by a beautiful voice and smiles from the bassist but no particularly great songs. It then picked up markedly when she moved over to the keyboard and another microphone. I think that mic had much better reverb set up for the room and keyboard worked very well in the songs they did. There was some very delicate bass playing :-)

Then we had a break for half an hour, standing in the street with people. A pleasant time in the evening air. Looking up the road was a 30-odd storey tower block with table mountain as a backdrop towering over it. A peculiar picture that distorted the height of both the mountain and building.

Jose Gonzalez was next. During the majority of the performance you could hear a pin drop in the hall. He was enchanting and the highlight was a cover of the Massive Attack song Teardrop. Speaking to him afterwards he said that he plans to record it next month.

I have to admit that Jose Gonzalez fans in Cape Town are an attractive bunch of people.

It was really good to get to know Tim better. He surfs, he parties, he goes to punk and hardcore shows and he also likes Jose Gonzalez. Amazing how easy it is to judge people.