The Thin White Duke gets Petersham singing

Another conversation with another mate in another pub (Willoughby Arms) led me to see The Thin White Duke at the Fox and Duck in Petersham where they delighted us with highlights from David Bowie's long, illustrious and varied career.

Bowie had the advantage of changing bands every time that he changed moods but The Thin White Dukes does a pretty fine job of imitating those styles with a single line-up. There is a tendency to go for the later, funkier versions of songs like The Jean Genie and Rebel Rebel but there's nothing wrong with that.

The set list is stuffed full of Bowie classics, like a teenage girl's handbag, and over a couple of hours we were treated to songs like Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars, Changes, Fame, Fashion, Let's Dance and Heroes.

But there were a few surprises in there too, like Time, The Man Who Sold the World (a hit for Lulu!) and Five Years.

A surprise omission was Station to Station which is where the term "the thin white duke" comes from but it would be churlish to criticise them for this when there are so many good songs to choose from that many favourites were bound to be left out.

The songs were delivered with precision and infectious enthusiasm and it was not long before we were all singing along; even me, and I don't do singing.

The set ended with Starman which is where Bowie and I started with his Top of The Pops performance back in July 1972. From there it was a short step to Ziggy Stardust, the farewell tour, a lifetime of buying all his albums and finding things to appreciate in all of them, even Tin Machine!

The Thin White Duke compress all that love and excitement in to a couple of magical hours.

Echoes of Pink Floyd

A mate in one pub alerted me to a concert at another one that led me going to see the band play at a third one; the three pubs being the Hand and Flower, Fox and Duck, and Alexandra Tavern.

The band are Echoes who play Pink Floyd covers but not, oddly, Echoes.

The Alexandra Tavern has gone through some changes recently so it was good to see it packed on a Friday night.

And it was even better to see quite a few familiar faces from the days when I lived around the corner in Kings Road.

But, the beer and pleasantries aside, it was the music that I went for and that worked out very well too.

Echoes opened with the familiar words "So you thought you might like to go to the show" from In The Flesh? off of The Wall and stayed comfortably in that zone for the next couple of hours or so to the clear delight of the fans and casual observers alike.

Echoes are a five piece band, rising to six when a saxophone is required, though the cramped setting meant that the poor drummer was only visible when he moved away from his cage for the interval.

They sound a lot like Pink Floyd too, which is definitely a good thing.

Their set plunders The Wall and Dark Side to a predictable extent but their are a few surprises in their too, like Pigs.

It was a lot of fun to be able to sing lines like "Hey you, Whitehouse, ha ha charade you are" once again.

It's hard to fault a band playing good music well; so I won't. They were spot-on with their song selection and their delivery and it was an excellent evening. So much so that I will be doing it all again in a couple of weeks.

Next time I'll try and pay more attention to the set list and less to the singing!

Opening the information floodgates

An unexpectedly quick return to the Royal Society was again caused by the word "information".

This time it was bundled up in the phrase "Opening the information floodgates: the technologies and challenges of a web of linked data", which is enough to get any geek moist with anticipation.

Rising to that challenge was Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton (which is where I learnt all the maths that I have now forgotten) who gave us a view of how the web is evolving to encompass structured data.

Along the way he gave us this illuminating star system for assessing connectivity:

1. Put your data on the web (any format)
2. Make it available as structured data, e.g. csv
3. Use open, standard data formats
4. Use URLs to point to your data (so that people and machines can get to it)
5. Link your data to other people's data

This is the essence of the semantic web where the content has meaning allowing new deeper connections to be exploited. Some examples were given, such as the ASBOrometer iPhone app, but these were the familiar mash-ups of geographical data against one other set of data that have been around for years.

So far so good, but there is a big problem. And that's quality.

The example Professor Shadbolt gave us was the official data on the location of bus stops which has 5% error records in it.

This problem, while admitted, was rather glossed over with the enthusiastic claim that the crowd will fix the problem, as it has with matter-of-fact issues in Wikipedia.

But that is to gloss over the examples that go against this.

For example, if you Google "Slovak Currency" you are still told that "1 Slovak koruna = 0.0280875591 British pounds", almost two years after the Slovaks upgraded to the Euro.

And I've pointed out problems with map data previously.

Data interpretation, or Information Literacy if you prefer, is another big issue that has yet to be addressed too. Sharing data makes lots of assumptions about what it means, as anybody who has tried benchmarking knows.

For examples, to compare data about hospitals you need to know about any specialities that they have (more people die of cancer in hospitals that specialise in cancer simply because they take proportionally more cancer patients) and the catchment areas they serve (proportionally more people die in hospitals that serve unhealthy regions).

These concerns were obvious to the audience and most of the questions that were asked at the end were about quality or interpretation of data.

The semantic web sounds a good idea in principle but there is an awfully long way to go from PowerPoint to implementation.

Kingston Townscape and Greenscape awards

Every other year the Kingston upon Thames Society presents Townscape Awards in recognition of new buildings, landscaping and artworks that in the Society's view have done the most to enhance Kingston.

This year they also added Greenscape awards for the spaces between the buildings.

When I wrote about the awards two years ago I said that they were struggling to find something nice in Kingston. This year was worse.

The first award winner, a church hall, was little more than a standard garage/shed with a glass wall at one end. Other winners and nominees included a wall and a sign. Nothing much to crow about at all.

The one exception, i.e. a building I actually like, is the sympathetic restoration of 133 London Road (pictured), just along the road from Tiffin School where the meeting was held.

The Victorian industrial heritage is obvious, and that's a good thing.

That stretch of London Road has mixed industrial use which makes it all rather scruffy so a bright refurbishment like is welcome.

We learned that the building was originally part of the power supply to the trams. Another good thing.

The Greenscape awards were a little better, but only a little. Kingston Hospital has done a good job with trees in a neglected corner of their large prominent site, the new site managers for Charter Quay have spruced the area up, residents have reclaimed a forgotten spot in their road and a local curry house has made their welcome grander through palm trees and flower beds.

But the good news stories cannot disguise the fact that there has been very little to cheer about regarding developments in Kingston.

Strawberry Hill is a Gothic delight

The first look at Strawberry Hill tells you that it is something special.

The official website tells us that Strawberry Hill was created by Horace Walpole in the 18th century and is internationally famous as Britain’s finest example of Georgian Gothic revival architecture.

Now we can see for ourselves how true this is because the house has just reopened after an extensive period of restoration which is still in progress.

Outside diggers are hard at work in the garden (sadly it looks as though it's to build a car park) and inside some of the rooms are still closed suggesting that further delights are to come.

The tour of the house starts with a short film and then it's on with the overshoes and the exploration begins.

The star attraction is the main stateroom that occupies most of the first floor on the side of the house that overlooks the garden. Here the ceiling is simply stunning and compels you to look upwards and then to follow the decoration as it drips down the wall where the obscenely decorated fireplaces then demand attention.

The long wall on the other side has a series of windows (you can see them in the picture above) that entice the sunlight in to dampen the effect of the dark read walls and give the eye something else to look at if they ever tire of the internal decorations.

The other rooms are in various states of restoration.

Some are bare apart from a couple of features, e.g. a fireplace or the windows, while others have ornate plasterwork and screens.

Stained glass windows are everywhere, apparently bought as a job-lot from Holland, adding a splash of colour and interest to even the most modest room - though "modest" in a Gothic folly is obviously a relative term.

The house is large but not enormous and a tour takes around half an hour, maybe forty minutes. The website suggests it should be one and a half hours but I can only assume that they have factored in a generous amount of time in the museum room, shop and cafe.

Strawberry Hill is a unique house and has to be seen close up and in person to appreciate the detail of the original conceit and the way that this has been painstakingly restored. This closer look confirms the first impression that the house is special.