(Click on the thumbnails to see the full-sized pictures.)

New York - 24/3/2001

New York, where other cities a driver would use his brakes and here they just use the hooter and keep going ..... this happened several times today, but wasn't as dangerous as the looking the wrong way for traffic which also happened several times ...... life on the edge of the volcano ..... or something ......

Robyn woke up at 9 this morning with a new set list in his head and it is a whole new can of eels ..... sideways, pulse of my heart, tonight, rhymney, pervert, connected, airscape, kingdom of love, destroy you, evil guy, leppo, sudden town , then jealous ....... then the encores .... plus Train Round the Bend sounds great again at soundcheck so I hope we do that one soon ..... Robyn's written another couple of new ones ....... in fact the real thing to bootleg nowadays is the soundchecks and talking about bootlegs one of the really great things about this tour has been meeting the bootleggers, for example Ferris who gave me the missing tracks from Washington and we’ll put them up on the site soon ... it is such bullshit, this precious "you are raping my creative vision stuff" - bootlegging mp3’s is nothing to do with records and it is not napster, it is a whole new area, or rather a whole old one, since the Grateful Dead (as someone pointed out backstage tonight) - we definitely do not mind ..... I mean, this is only making permanent what would otherwise be up in smoke - JOIN IN, get the message ... all the creeps are is people who charge money for bootlegs because that is not the point either ..... except us, because we can!

At 4 we meet in manny’s on 48t St to go off and do a photo shoot in a nearby subway for a 'zine in San Francisco and an interview for someone else when we get to the Plaza .... apparently, Ben says the New York Times had nice things to say about us in SxSW ...... Morris is almost purring now his family is here .... and his family are almost purring back ....... they remember the old days, those of them that were born at the time (i.e Sheila) ......

I decide to take the camera to the gig tonight and take piccies of the YFF set, so let me talk you through what came out ...

... this is Scott in a cloud of smoke,

and this is them underneath the chandelier .......

this is the drummer, Tad, who you should notice is laughing whilst he is playing

but this is more what he is like really
and this is Kurt who decided to try and sell his guitar midway through the gig,

meanwhile this is Kurt and Jim and you should also notice Kurt's feet are not on the ground ......

they are great and the building bricks of rock and roll and/or art and/or pop music and we love them ....

Wow. Well, more precisely, we can get better, and it is only just beginning ...... but still, w-w-WOW ...... Gig was sold out and some things did really "happen" tonight and that FELT (I don't know what it sounds like but it FELT) like the ultimate versions of Kingdom of Love and Destroy You, and Insanely Jealous and Queen of Eyes (with the YFF) were not bad either, nor were the new ones, specially Mind Is Connected, and Robyn also did an amazing rap about people being mirrors so they can crack but if they do it'll be 7 years bad luck if it's your fault ....... also Kim was totally amazing tonight too, he is just incredible, in-cer-edible, a complete one-off ... YFF want to do a song with him, and meanwhile they did our second encore for us tonight and came on and played give it to the soft boys ...... then we all did queen of eyes together which was a complete laugh and somewhere in amongst all that Robyn publicly addressed the subjects of fulham and football for which I said a deep thank you afterwards .... this was the "Maxwells" of the tour so far ........ and Frank, Belinda and Carmen (in that order, names purposefully dislodged - flew from London to see it so I'm glad it was OK ..... the set list, incidentally, was as per Robyn’s waking vision except we did stones instead of astronomy domine, despite all these balloons telling us not to (you would have to have been there ...)

There are live photos from this gig on the Tour Photos page.

Nice to see Patrick the Matadorian and say thank you . He seemed happy. Meanwhile Ira from Yo La Tengo gives me two vinyl 7-inches which is quite amazing, remembering the excitement of feeling a RECORD in your hands ... more WOW ...... but as for "After the gig" beyond that (i.e. bars and oblivion), no way. No point destroying a memory whilst it is still warm. So back to the hotel and the laptop and the TD instead will do me fine ...... this warm happy feeling tells me everything must have been at least OK .....

— Matthew