I haven’t seen Ben Lee before but Katherine is a big time O2 Pay & Go customer and gets all the deals/surprises while they hold me over a barrel. Granted I do have an iPhone and it’s the best thing I’ve ever bought in my life.
Anyway I digress…
Cool ‘free’ concert at Indigo, which is a ‘club’ venue within The O2 complex. Quite cool actually. There was the South African indie band called The Parlotones – they weren’t half bad, and then New Zzzzzland let us down, again, with two blokes looping beats and their own crap singing voices. They didn’t even announce to the crowd who they were. They were out there and then proceeded to blame it on jet-lag. Nothing to write home about. And then on skipped Ben Lee…
This guy is the epitome of cool, calm, and collected. He makes it look easy – but Katherine and the girls couldn’t believe how short/tiny he was – Claire Danes would’ve towered over him apparently! Well he still dated Claire Danes – that’s one better than the rest of us.
He was on for about an hour-and-a-half and was pulling out his considerable back catalogue of very decent songs. His self-deprecating humour makes half of the B-sides he threw in well worth a listen. I love the song ‘Ben Lee’ and his ‘tribute’ to Jay-Z is quality Australian humour. Hat’s off to him for getting mid-way through ‘Catch My Disease’ where he’s trying to ad-lib lyrics to give it that concert vibe and throw in a few Londonisms and he stops the song dead and proceeds to talk about his visit to a State school in Maroobra in reference to a kid asking him if he’d been on the London Eye.
Just sums up Ben Lee – one quirky character, who just could be a song writing genius.