Toomey to you! (From Thisisdorset)

Toomey to you!

10:18am Friday 3rd February 2012 in Leisure By Nick Horton

ASK anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you the one same thing: I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to modern technology.

For example, I don’t have a mobile phone, I can’t work the timer on the microwave and, as for that satnav system I got second-hand from Bonnie Tyler, it’s useless: Keeps telling me to turn around and every now and then it falls apart.

But one gizmo I would like to be invented before tomorrow night is a sort of Sky+ for real life when you need to be in two places at the same time.

That way, you could witness the god-like guitar genius of Tom Toomey, who is at The Appletree in Dorchester tomorrow night, Saturday, February 4, AND also get your freakin’ funk on with the Chuck Farley Band at the Dorchester Arts Centre on the same night.

Tom, as any fule nose, is the plank spanker of considerable nift with The Zombies, having replaced Keith Airey a couple of years ago, and has just completed touring the world with the band’s rather excellent Breathe In Breathe Out album.

He’s been Zombies’ singer Colin Blunstone’s axeman of choice for his solo band for the past 18 years and has worked with such luminaries as Sir Cliff Richard, Leo Sayer and Don McLean so is clearly no slouch. So how come he’s at The Appletree?

“A friend of mine on Facebook suggested it would be a good idea to play there and, as I only live over the border in Somerset and I had a free night in my diary, why not?” Tom tells me.

It’ll certainly make a contrast to his recent six-week tour of America with The Zombies.

“We were getting three or four standing ovations every night.

“It was just so rewarding,” Tom says. “And it’s such a joy to play songs from their back catalogue, such as Time of the Season and Care of Cell 44.”

Tom is promising an unusual mixture of jazz-folk, rocking originals and covers tomorrow night with plenty of surprises.

But be warned, he can’t be held responsible for any injuries sustained when your jaw hits the floor at his virtuosity.

You can see what I mean at the online version of this page at www.dorsetecho.co.uk/leisure/ livemusicandclubs.

Okay, come back now.

Now then, those county towners who moan there’s nothing to do on a Saturday night in Dorchester need to put down the remote control and step away from Take Me Out and get yourself out.

Tom Hopkins’s Bluesnights are celebrating an incredible 13 years of rip-roaring live gigs and to mark this impressive achievement, the Chuck Farley Band will be tearing the roof off Dorchester Arts Centre tomorrow night.

The band of Steve Simpson (guitar, mandolin, fiddle), Poli Palmer (vibes), Peter Stroud (bass) and drum maestro Sam Kelly crank out old school R&B with hints of Ry Cooder, Little Feat and The Band. And, in my view, any band with a vibes player has to be off the scale on the coolometer.

But which one’s Chuck?

Tickets, and you’d better be quick, are £12 (£13 on the door) and are available from 01305 266926. Concessions available. Again, you can check Chuck out online at www.dorsetecho.co.uk/ leisure/livemusic to have a look and listen.

Moving on, I was cleaning out our microwave the other day and I thought to myself: “What I really need is more electronic grime.”

Well, chase me round and call me Barbara, what should happen but electro-grime superstars Hadouken go and announce a show at the Weymouth Pavilion on Friday, April 27.

This is part of their UK tour promoting their latest CD which is due out in April and forelocks are tugged in the general direction of the lovely people at Hourglass Promotions who have pulled yet another enormous musical rabbit out of their seemingly bottomless magic hat. Good work, fellas.

Tickets, which are flying out the door like hot cakes on motorbikes, are available from the Pavilion box office on 01305 783225 or online at ticketweb.com.

And finally, I hope we all raised a glass to sound engineers and gear lumpers everywhere yesterday as it was International Roadie Day on February 2, 2012. Or as they would have it: Two, two, one two.

Right, that’s it for this week. I’m off to see that Bill Gates about my invention of getting smell over the internet. ’Till next time...