YouTube Wednesday

Damien Rice popped into Nigel Godrich's basement some time after Radiohead performed their set there, post-In Rainbows, to good effect. See this sublime solo version of 9 Crimes, a song I never took to like some people, but now I feel strangely converted. The tempo is much slower and the lyrics are sung with emphasis. He seems to have adopted a Thom Yorke-ism as well, singing "no no no" repeatedly over the piano to finish the song. Meanwhile, Blur reunited on stage as a four-piece for the first time in almost ten years in East London's Rough Trade record store a couple of days ago. Here's a short, and yet brilliant clip of the song, This Is A Low. Radiohead fans: feel free to gloat about the fact that when Radiohead announced they'd play a secret gig there in late 2007, there was such a ruckus that they had to move the performance to a larger venue down the road in order to accommodate all the veterans who journeyed in with less than twelve hours notice.

P.S. Now that YouTube have the High Quality button (which I strongly recommend you click), why is there not a function to toggle it on or off indefinitely, rather than click on it every time I open a new video, thus interrupting the flow and causing distortion? Idiots.