Month: October 2009

  • Bloody Church Night

    Union Chapel

    It is the weekend of All Saints the time of remembering the dead. In a lighter spirit it’s also Halloween and time to scare and be scared. Thursday night Ann and I went to Union Chapel in Islington for a quite extraordinary service.

    Union Chapel is a church built in Victorian Gothic style back in late 19th century. It is a working church with sermons every Sunday but it is also the host of other events. In order to pay for the restoration and upkeep of the building as well as increase access the church opened up for performing arts to use the place in 1991.

    Union Chapel has hosted names like David Byrne, Noel Gallager, Damian Rice and even U2 made a surprise session there (click the links to get an idea of the atmosphere). Thursday night the church was taken over by Dracula!

    Dracula hanging out on stage

    Jameson the whiskey was hosting a Cult Film Club in the church so we got tickets and drinks for free – not a bad deal 🙂

    The film they were showing was the Dracula of 1958 and as you can imagine the church was perfect for a Dracula setting.

    Before the show started while people were getting drinks and popcorn a Dracula was on stage hanging and standing from a metal frame sometimes jumping off stage and sneaking around the back to scare people.
    To top it all off an organ player was setting the right mood on the original Father Willies organ in the church – Spooky – in a very cool way!

    See the official photos here. Yet again the blog/twitter of IanVisits was the one to alert me to an event, cheers!

  • Irish Monday

    Jamie and Allen

    A night of folk music and Guinness – not the worst way to start of a week 🙂

    Monday night we headed to The London Irish Centre in Camden. A festival called The Return to Camden Town celebrating Irish culture is currently going on in Camden and Jamie Smith (who we saw last year as well) was playing with his new band Smith: Byrnes: O’Sullivan and this was the release concert of their first CD.

    There were two bands playing that night, the first one with was a guy playing different a instrument for almost every song with his band. This was a bit more traditional I guess and then there were Jamie and his friends playing a bit more upbeat with a drummer and guitar. I really enjoyed the music, it reminded me of my days back in high school when the folk festival was in town there.

    I shot a video of the first song they played; Exotic Snowball. The sound in the video is not good so if you want to hear what it really sounds like go to their myspace profile and hear the song there.