As it turns out, it was quite lucky we bought our tickets when we did, because the gig sold out only a day or two later – pretty impressive for an act that’s only troubled the top 20 twice.

We arranged for my mum to pop over and babysit Aimee, and we toddled off to the bus stop for the bus to town – a little later than we’d planned, but we weren’t really bothered too much as we figured the first support act, ‘Toddla T’ (no, really) would be toss anyhow. If we’d could catch some ‘Smokers Die Younger’, the other support act, that’d be great. However, due to First South Yorkshire’s dire bus service (our ‘every 15 minutes’ service arrived after standing at the bus stop for nearly 50 minutes) and our mixed up assumption of the running order, we arrived at the Academy mid-way through ‘Toddla T’s set. Joy.

AMG claim to have spent £3 million in refurbing the ‘Roxy’ – and we were quite apprehensive as to what was awaiting us – having been past the building a few times in the week and seeing it look very much like a building site. However, once inside we were greeted with a fairly open auditorium, with balcony above. The stage is suitably impressive – I can’t help thinking that it is a little too big for the room, though.

I’m not sure what ‘Toddla T’ are up to. Is it a comedy act or serious musical venture? There’s a rapper/MC guy ostensibly rapping away whilst a DJ fuses some bleep/synth with dancehall drum and bass. Pretty ordinary pop-jungly-bollocks, really – apart from the guy robot-dancing with a cardboard box on his head, oh, and the two white girls done-up like a pair of Ali G’s ‘biatches’ (replete with bling and ridiculous sunglasses) just… being there. Very, very odd.

It being a ‘Carling’ venue, there is some focus on selling as much lager as possible – and, indeed, the four-person deep queues at all three of the bars I found inside indicated that there were plenty of thirsty people – just a pity that there were nowhere near enough bar staff, and their ‘time saving’ barcode scanning tills seemed to be having some teething problems. All in all, it took us a good 30 minutes to get a drink whilst putting up with the mighty ‘T’s jibber-jabber drum and bass. Not a great start.

However, it isn’t long before the Reverend & co are on-stage – curiously launching into it with a new song followed by their biggest hit, Heavyweight Champion of the World. They blitz through the setlist with a mixture of album tracks, and quite a few ‘new’ numbers – one in particular was introduced by Jon (the ‘Reverend’) McClure lighting up a ciggie on-stage and proclaiming that “Gordon Brown can’t tell me when I can have a fag!” before giving us a taste of a cynical, political track – telling us to “think for yourselves” and that the government can’t tell you what to do. All very hackneyed ‘indie’ concepts, but delivered in such a frantic, euphoric way, you’d almost start believing him.

If there’s one band the Makers are the polar opposites of, it’s Manc giants, Oasis. When going to an Oasis gig, you may as well just put some cardboard cutouts on the stage and stick a copy of “Definitely Maybe” on the PA – not so for these guys. They fling themselves round the stage with such haphazard abandon that their careless demeanor becomes infectious, and the happy vibes pass through the crowd. It’s not just the tracks, either – Jon unleashes spontaneous bursts of poetry between his interplay with the audience (“That fag’s just cost me 2 grand”) – sure, some of it is indie-rock-band-101, but the wheat outweighs the chaff. If there’s a dictionary definition of “Party Band”, this is it.

By the time the final number is on – “He Said He Loved Me”, the crowd are so hyped that after the track finishes, McClure takes the mic and explains that “we’re all going outside” and grabs a parka and is seen rushing off the stage. Cue; 2500 people all heading for the exit at once. It’s one way of avoiding an encore, anyhow! There’s quite a crush getting out, and we’re literally carried along by the weight of the sheer number of bodies and are deposited on the street along with everyone else – hanging around waiting for an impromptu appearance of the band. However, it doesn’t happen, and eventually everyone decamps and disappears into the city.

An excellent gig, and – once they get their staffing and logistics act together – a great venue.

My job, managing a team of sysadmins, DBAs and support staff for ‘a large internet retailer’ means that I get to be the lucky punter whose phone number appears on DNS WHOIS records. This is something that ICANN stipulate should always be present in WHOIS data, and as a responsible retailer, we provide a working, real number. It happens to be mine.

These details are ostensibly a ‘Technical Contact’ – supposedly used by other internet professionals to report issues and other operational problems with that particular domain name. The trouble is, I get a fair amount of non-technical calls from it. Everything from customers wanting to place orders, to returns, to complaints, to Chinese people wanting to sell us stock, to recruitment agencies wanting to sell us people. Everything. Everything, that is, except Technical issues.

It got so bad a while ago that I got our phone guy to record a polite message which gets played before the phone rings at my end, which tells callers exactly what this number is for. It even gives them our dedicated Customer Services number. This is great, and the number of ‘fake’ calls has dropped significantly, but we still get people ringing through wanting anything other than technical assistance.

For some, I guess it’s that they think they’ve found some ‘magic’ number into the company, which will bypass any form of queuing and will get their order-related problem dealt with quicker. This is wrong! We can be as sympathetic as possible with reference to any problem, but, unfortunately – ultimately – we can’t actually help. Really, we can’t. The best we can do is to transfer you to our Customer Services team, and you’ll land right at the back of the queue.

Others seem to use the line as a backdoor into the company, even saying things like “Oh, I know this is the wrong department, but could you please transfer me to your ‘X’ department” – If you actually needed that department in the first place, you’d have a number. Don’t call me, I won’t put you through.

From a frustrated customer’s point of view, I can see the logic – you ain’t getting the result you want from regular CS, and any other method is viewed as a possible other route into the company. It’s something I’ve experienced myself – with the likes of BT and Barclays. Someone’s fucked up and dropped the ball, and you want answers. The trouble is, it’s almost always a fruitless exercise – all you end up is angrier and no further on in your quest to solve whatever clusterfuck has happened.

In short, don’t do it. Please.

Ended up working a little late and got home after Aimee’s bedtime. A depressingly frequent occurrence. Today, I’ve spent only around an hour with her this morning when she got up, and for most of that, she was bouncing on the bed, and, invariably – on my head. Her energy first thing in the morning puts us both to shame, when we wake up bleary-eyed and unable to crawl out of bed in the morning. Perhaps I should take something from it, really.

The Kaisers are one of her favourite bands, so she jumped at the chance and made sure she was in front of the Seetickets website at the moment of release. As happens a lot with these ‘last minute’ and ‘secret’ gigs, the online ticketing vendors can’t cope with the demand, and their websites go into meltdown – and Seetickets was no exception! Half-way through her purchase, the site ballsed up, so she resubmitted. The end result was that she got billed twice, and received 4 tickets instead of 2.

This wasn’t really a problem, as it meant that Emma’s best mate Catriona could come, and we had no trouble at all hawking the spare ticket on eBay for fun and profit!

Anyhow, we trudged very slowly up the M18 to Donny on a very, very dark and snowy Friday evening. The directions from the Dome website were spot on, and we found ourselves in the hopelessly small car park in no time.

The Doncaster Dome is a multipurpose sports venue, it seems. Having had never been there before, I didn’t really know what to expect, but it turns out that it’s a very drably decorated glorified sports centre, with a weirdly-shaped ice-rink attached to it. The venue really isn’t geared up for several thousand people wanting to watch a music gig though.

The gig was held in a sports hall, which initially rang alarm bells for me – poor acoustics ahoy! But, this proved to be unfounded – the sound was really very good – I guess probably due in part to the presence of the BBC, who were recording the gig both for radio and television broadcast.

Shortly after we made our way into the hall, the support act, The Twang, were introduced by Radio 1′s professional twat – Zane Lowe.

The Twang have been described as being some kind of cross between The Stone Roses and The Streets. Having seen them, I can see that’s what they’d *like* to be known as. But, in actuality, they are very very average and their songs are pretty forgettable. The music itself isn’t bad – the guitarist really does think that he’s John Squire, but the duo of fucked-up-Brummy singer/rappers are *terrible*. The cliched shouts of ‘Fuck the BBC’ and the crappy shout-along choruses got boring quite quickly. Their set was thankfully short, and they left the stage to a lukewarm clap from a bored audience.

A red curtain drew over the stage, with the initials K and C on each side. After a long delay – probably about half an hour – of roadies setting up kit and soundchecking, the lights went down and Twat Lowe was on the stage again. Thankfully someone had the foresight to save up their pint-and-a-half plastic cup (is this a Doncaster speciality? Who’dve thunk of a pint-and-a-half cup?!) of lager and covered the twat with Carling.

The Kaiser Chiefs take the stage and open with the rousing new single, ‘Ruby’. After the recent Chris Moyles ‘Donny’ cover, we’re half-hoping for Ricky to launch into a ‘Donny, Donny, Donny!’ chorus, but we have to settle for the original version instead. Not that this is bad thing – from this first tune on, it’s clear that this is going to be a barnstormer of a gig.

Things hit the high point when they launch into ‘I Predict A Riot’ – predictably, there almost is one as a good 2500 of the 3000 attendees begin pogoing like mad. It’s obviously having a good effect on the band, and Ricky vaults into the crowd two thirds through, a moment I scrambled to capture on my Ixus, but only left me with a few blurred shots of peoples hands.

The band really are on form, and whilst I can’t claim to be familiar with some of their new songs, they do meet with rapturous approval from the crowd – particular stand outs include ‘The Angry Mob’ and ‘Everything is Average Nowadays’. The band finish with another new song, ‘Retirement’, which seems an odd track to leave us with. Unsurprisingly, the encore is called for and the boys come out for a rendition of ‘Na Na Na Na Nah’ and an energetic work out of ‘Oh My God’ before finally calling it a night.

A great gig, made even better when turning to leave, the crowd spot Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles attempting to depart quickly from the balcony. Cue 3000 people screaming ‘You Fat Bastard’ to the bemused ‘tubby-funster’ DJ. The next morning on Moyles’ show, he claimed that the crowd were *cheering* him when he left! Somehow, Mr Moyles, I remember it differently!

But, yes, in short – a great night and 8/10 for the Kaisers.

This’ll be my, <counts> fourth attempt at entering the unbelievably wankily named ‘Blogosphere’. I’m sure it’ll be interesting, informative and fun. A journey through the mind of an addled sysadmin, bored-beyond-belief with the politics, wankery and machiavellian antics of his cow-orkers and colleagues.

Of course, it won’t always be about work. There’ll be nice stuff too.

We’ll see.