A Tribe Called Quest @ Festival Hall 12th August 2010...

What's going on, chaps?

I know, I know, I promised more regular updates and didn't deliver, but what can you do? Life is still bonkers busy here, but I do try and update as frequently as possible.

Amidst the madness of my day-to-day life, Corrie and I scored a rare night away from our beautiful daughter and rocked up to Melbourne's Festival Hall for the once-in-lifetime opportunity to see Native Tongues legends, A Tribe Called Quest perform the first ever Melbourne gig.

On the real, I've been fiending to see Tribe live forever, having missed them when they hit London way back in the day, and when they split in the late '90s I honestly thought I'd never get to see them, so I was mega stoked that they reformed and were touring.

Festival Hall was absolutely jam packed when we got there and Maseo from De La Soul was handling warm-up duties lovely, although a lot of the tracks he dropped seem to go way over the heads of the majority of the crowd - I know Tribe have / had massive crossover appeal, but I was somewhat surprised at the sheer amount of hipsters in attendance - of all the tunes you know will hype a crowd, I'd never imagined I'd hear Jeru's 'Come Clean', Das EFX's 'Real Hip-Hop' or OC's 'Times Up' fall on deaf ears.

The show was incredible. Q-Tip and Phife smashed it, Ali Shaheed represented and even Jarobi put in a surprise appearance while Tribe worked their way through quite a surprising selection of less obvious tracks. The big hits were present too and the night was off the hook.

Corrie, Cricket and I spent most of the show to the back of the venue, choosing not to fight for a spot nearer the stage, but still managed to get a decent enough view. While our viewpoint may have been good, we were bitterly disappointed to have to queue in line for the bar for 20 minutes even though we were only buying water - shocking - speaking of which, I'm not used to Hip Hop jams on a sober tip (and this may or may not be related), but was bothered by the amount of drunken idiots constantly walking into, onto or over me - I'm not a small fella, so not sure why these fools had so much trouble avoiding my personal space, but that shit seriously began to piss me off and almost came to blows with one cretin.

Anyways, here's a bunch of video footage a caught.

Check it out and feel free to leave a comment.

All the best,

Mark 563