THE MUSIC SCENE IN PORTLAND, OREGON

...is not as good as Moscow's, apparently. That's what I've learnt this week.

I met a girl from Portland, an intern at my company, who has a very similar taste in music to me. Willfully obscure, in other words. She'd been asking me to take her to 'a show', as she called it, for a while. Obviously I don't like socialising with young, attractive, interesting women, but eventually I succumbed and took her to see my favourite Russian band, 'Zveri', play on Saturday.

After taking the tram in the wrong direction, (oops), we arrived at 8.55. The band, unbelievably, came on at 9 on the dot, without any support - so we had to desperately fight our way to the front throwing small teenage girls hither and thither. That was fun.

Zveri, meanwhile, came on with a troupe of dancing girls and spraying big magnums of champagne into the crowd. That might give you a good impression of the kind of show it was.

Apart from that, my favourite moment was the encore. The crowd was shouting 'Zveri, Zveri, Zveri!'. After a couple of minutes the band came back on, but instead of playing anything, just started chanting 'crowd, crowd, crowd!' Well, that made me laugh.

And actually, it was just nice to have a night out where nobody got arrested.