Madness at HMV Oxford Street
I had another one of those moments when I realised how awesome it is living in London.
This morning I was sitting working in the British Library, when I saw a tweet come in from someone I follow mentioning that Madness were playing in store at HMV Oxford Street. Needless to say that I jumped up, ran to the tube and 20 minutes later I walked into the store to hear some music. I couldn’t work out if they were promoting a new album or some new fishfingers.
I think I got there just in time to see the end of them playing the new stuff and they swiftly moved on to playing old songs that I recognised from my dad’s record collection.
It was pretty much an entire gig too - they certainly played more than just a couple of songs. It would have only been more gig like if there wasn’t racks of CDs around me and Nazi security guards weren’t pushing me back and saying “you need to stand in the aisle” rather than on the end of it.
It was slightly disappointing at the end though as afterr they went off stage, the compere said “Want to hear some more?”, whipping up the few-hundred strong audience into cheers and the like… followed by… no encore. After a few minutes he just came back on the mic and said “They’ll be signing some albums”, and then they started dismantling the stage. Bizarre.
The whole thing though underscores how perfect a combination Twitter is with London. The fact that I can hear about an exciting thing and be there within minutes is incredible. I love Twitter.
