Had a nice time at the NME awards tour gig at the Carling Academy, especially headliners The Killers. The only sore point was that despite smuggling my camera in I only managed to get half-decent shots of the support bands, not the Killers themselves. The image you see here is only sharp because it’s been scaled down by a factor of 10…

The ’support’ bands were pretty good too. First up were the Kaiser Chiefs, then it was time for Bloc Party and finally The Futureheads. I wasn’t too taken with The Futureheads and thought they really should have been on second, but they’re from Sunderland and have cool accents - so you can’t really fault them. I listened to some of their stuff on the iTunes store earlier today and I’m more open to them now, but if a band don’t impress you live, when are they going to impress you? Bloc Party are, however, I think, a band to watch in 2005. They have been getting a great deal of airtime on the radio and on MTV2, so it’s a fair bet that they’ll do well.

The Metro continues to surprise and delight me. After I left my bus pass on a bus in Glasgow, they printed my ‘thank you’ letter after some kind person posted it back to me (the letters page in the Glasgow/Edinburgh Metro has evolved into a forum for hilarious debate on such surreal topics as the likely winner of an imaginary fight to the death between a shark and an alligator) - but they’ve surpassed themselves this time. I noticed an ad in yesterday’s Metro offering tickets to today’s NME Tour date (the 2nd night) just by phoning in or texting (grammar pedants please resist) your contact details before 3pm. I let my friend Lynn know, and she got a call an hour later to let her know she’d won the tickets.