With still more time to kill, we attend "Artists: Recording Vs. Performance". Again, my apologies for the crappiness of the panel pictures, but still, I felt it was important to capture some sort essence of the event for posterity.

Left to Right: Dave Wakeling, Sally Timms, Ike Turner, the moderator, Ron Sexsmith, Neko Case, Thomas Mapfuno.

And no, Ike Turner didn't smack anybody.

...and I've had this silly grin stuck on my face ever since. Nice melodic punk-pop. Highly energetic. The vocalist likes to climb stuff. The "guitarist" (and token male, not pictured) plays a weird "bassomatic" or "bassorama" or "bassoon" or some such, which is a hybrid bass / guitar thing. It LOOKS like a bass, but sounds like a grunge guitar. Highlights were their cover of the love theme from Titanic, and that time when the vocalist showed us her expensive new underwear. Big fun band. Go see them.

Next we headed to the Copper Tank Brewpub and saw an interesting band from Finland, which I *think* might have been Janne Haavisto & the Farangs.

The guy in the white cap who looks like he's working a turntable? That's actually some sort of synth-bongo-thingy. Waycool.

We were out of must-see acts for the evening, but we did return to the Iron Cactus briefly to see if the showcase was still maintaining its earlier momentum. I *think* this band was The Numbers... if not, sorry for the mixup...

They were a fairly tight Replacements-wannabe. Their web site is worth checking out, if only for the humor value of all the broken links that refer to files on somebody's C:\ drive. A decent band, but I was getting tired and cranky by this time.

Finally, we tried to make it to the Japan showcase at "Mercury Entertainment at Jazz" (never could quite figure out what was up with that club name) to see a band called Bleach because dammit, we wanted to see more cute chicks rock. But we were too late.