Nothing To See Here...

I'm no longer blogging here - but you can find me at hazelsheffield.com/

Richard Hawley Interview

There’s a lyric on Truelove’s Gutter that ends: “blundered into the abyss”. Is that where we are, The Abyss? Two and a half million unemployed; our little island lagging behind all the bigger fishes and fatter cats in the semi-recovering global economy; clinging onto other people’s politicians and our own half-remembered glory days. If that’s where we are, then blunder we did.

Only Hawley wasn’t talking about the economy, or politics, or society. He was talking about falling in love. That’s the thing about Richard Hawley. Big things have gone to shit – Britain has forgotten what it is, where it’s going – but there are still voices of reason out there. And Hawley’s one of them. His sixth solo LP doesn’t directly reference the recession. But dashed hopes, damaged dreams and half-forgotten ambitions penetrate every weird sound and subtle lyric of its fifty-one minutes. His songs aren’t about boom and bust, but “the fall out of that, I suppose, and the way that people are affected by it. My family was deeply affected by the last major recession with the closure of the steel works. It cost my parents their marriage.”

That’s what it comes down to. Not statistics and politics, but the people you love and the streets you tread – something that Hawley has never forgotten. “My family has lived [in Sheffield] for 150 years, you know,” he says. “We live in a very transient, migratory age, but I really, really am rooted in Sheffield, and that’s important to me. Not in a stick in the mud kind of way, but because I know why I’m here.”

Hawley’s never made a secret of his love for his hometown. His Mercury-nominated fourth album, Cole’s Corner, told the story of one of the city’s famous meeting places, while Truelove’s Gutter is the ancient name of Sheffield’s Castle Street, so-called after Thomas Truelove, an inn-keeper there. “The juxtaposition of the two names seems to sum the record up perfectly,” he offers by explanation.

Hawley’s father was a steel worker, his step-father a miner, so he’s well-placed to remind people of a time when community still existed and work was anchored to identity. “It’s the people I love more than anything,” he says of the city. “When the steel works were open people lived really hard lives, but they had a right good sense of humour. Very self-deprecating, not taking yourself too seriously. And people would definitely stick together, you know?”

The people Hawley writes about on Truelove’s Gutter came unstuck, they lost themselves in the mire of modernity. They forgot where they came from. In ‘Don’t Get Hung Up In Your Soul’, Hawley recounts the story of a friend who spent a lot of time in institutions for mental problems because she found it safer in there than being out in the world. “You have to know something before you can really sing about it,” he explains. “It’s not about holding onto things for the sake of it, it’s about holding onto things because they mean something. And I think that’s the point. Because once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

He speaks of how he takes his children to see the old steel works where their grandfather, the late Dave Hawley, worked, and about the museum in Sheffield dedicated to the industry. “In twenty years’ time or even ten years’ time I can’t imagine there being a call centre museum, can you?” And then, laughing: “‘This is where I plug my modem in, this is where I charge my mobile…’ Do you know what I mean?”

Coming from anyone else, it might seem worthy: a successful rock star championing the working class. But Hawley’s done his time. His career started when he was still at school, in a band called Treebound Story; when they broke up he found success with nineties Britpop act The Longpigs, and then, seven years later, with fellow Sheffield-natives, Pulp. “The ideas for a lot of the solo stuff had kind of been fermenting in my mind for a long time,” he says. “I wasn’t frustrated or anything, I was more than happy sat at the back watching someone else singing, that was great. But it just got to the point where I was 32 years old… And now I’ve been making solo albums for a decade, that’s longer than I was ever with any of my bands…

“I was completely shocked where I ended up and it completely threw me – I never expected that at all. But the music’s mine to be made. I’m sick of music being made for commercial purposes. I think that music can serve a different purpose.” For Hawley, music is his livelihood; it’s his trade, just as much as steel was for his ancestors.

“Music is a craft,” he explains. “If you pick up an instrument to become famous and rich, more than likely you will be very sorely disappointed. But if you pick it up because you love it… I’m very clear about what I set out to do and I’ve never lost that.”

He goes on: “At a time like this it’s not great commercial sense to make an album full of ten minute strung out pieces of music. But I don’t think it’s the time, either, for creative characters just to play it safe and play the game. That’s another thing that’s important for me as well, to make a record where I stretch myself as a writer, musician and producer.”

Truelove’s Gutter still features that same molten vocal that earned Hawley a reputation as ‘the Elvis of the north’, but this time it’s soundtracked by a whole host of instruments so unusual they could almost be made up: the glass harmonica, musical saw, megabass waterphone and crystal baschet. What should sound, from this description, like some kind of hellish modernist racket, actually rumbles and glides with similar classical precision as his previous work – testament to the man’s propensity for integrating innovation and tradition.

Hawley’s a man who’ll remind you just where you came from, and why things went awry. But he’ll also tell you that now, more than ever, is the time to push on with the future. “At the time I decided that I wanted to make music as a way of making a living, things were a bit like they are now. You’re not going to say, ‘don’t do that, get a job,’ because where are the fucking jobs?! You might as well do something that you believe in.” For a working lad from Sheffield, he’s not done too badly, after all.

Jefferson Airplane: White Rabbit

Released in 1967 following ‘Somebody To Love’, ‘White Rabbit’ is arguably Jefferson Airplane’s finest achievement. It was written and performed by Grace Slick whilst she was vocalist for The Great Society (as was ‘Somebody To Love’), and was part of the reason that bassist Jack Casady asked her to join Jefferson Airplane in 1966. ‘White Rabbit’ came from their sophomore LP ‘Surrealist Pillow’, although it was only featured on the US version of the album, and peaked at number 8 on the US billboard charts.

Slick is rumoured to have written the song in an hour, as a reflection of the drug-addled sixties counterculture and based on ideas in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’. The original included an oboe solo played by Slick herself, but it was her haunting, sturdy contralto vocal in ‘White Rabbit’ that was to go some way in establishing the solo female vocal in rock music (most vocalists were male at this time) and influence numerous female vocalists throughout the seventies and beyond, including Stevie Nicks and Patti Smith.

The music itself is has a strong Spanish rhythm that Slick claims to have taken from Ravel’s famous ‘Bolero’, the idea for which came to her after taking LSD and listening to Miles Davis’ album ‘Sketches Of Spain’. The propulsive, hypnotic quality of the music climaxes in a terrific crescendo, at which point Dr Gonza demands that Raoul Duke throws the tapedeck into the bathtub with him during a nasty acid trip in Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’. The ‘one pill makes you larger, one makes you small’ refrain is also an idea rumoured to have influenced the dilemma faced by Neo in the 1999 film ‘The Matrix’.

In reality, ‘White Rabbit’ became the soundtrack to the 1967 Summer Of Love. It represented the lysergic euphoria of a generation of young people who turned to drugs to escape from the horrors of Vietnam and Nixon, as the seventies approached and America began to rot from the inside.

Interview: Frightened Rabbit

Few Scottish bands these days can say they’ve sold out huge venues in the states, garnered a celebrity following and written an article for a British national newspaper. Especially while retaining a level of relative anonymity on home soil that makes it possible for them to gig in tiny pubs in their neighbourhood without so much as turning a few heads. Yet Selkirk natives Frightened Rabbit find themselves in this unusual predicament.

Their latest album, The Midnight Organ Fight, released back in April, is already big news stateside. Early blog support saw it spread like wildfire and has propelled the band to the prestigious ranks of Pitchfork darlings – an enviable if not impossible feat for most British rock bands. This side of the pond, they fill huge venues with ambitiously instrumented layers of sound, if not always people. On top of intricately woven guitars and keys, lead vocalist and songwriter Scott Hutchison, who was the first, lone Frightened Rabbit back in 2003, splutters a cracked and plaintive brogue, by turns desperate, bitter and brave, about a break up that happened some years ago, to him at least.

These days, he’s found someone new, someone who calls over to him to hurry up as we squeeze onto an open table for our interview in the frozen winter night. His brother, Frightened Rabbit drummer Grant Hutchison, comes too, and it is striking how tired they both look this evening. Grant’s drumming is part of what makes Frightened Rabbit one of the singular most exciting British rock acts of the moment. On stage he is transformed into a deranged yeti, teeth bared, shoulders squared, fists clenching drumsticks that he has been known to snap in seconds.

“We haven’t been off the road for months and months,” Scott offers by way of excuse for their exhaustion, “but why would you be in a band and not do all the gigs you can?” Plenty of bands have bemoaned life on the road – few have been invited by The Guardian to write about it. I ask Scott about this recent journalistic triumph. “I’ve actually had loads of e-mails requesting I do more!” he exclaims, clearly delighted. “It’s hard to write about life on the road without coming across as if we’re moaning, because it is great. We’re lucky: I know hundreds of thousands of other people would want to be doing what we’re doing, but sometimes it is just like, fuck this, this is ridiculous! I’m taking years off my life living like this.”

It must be exhausting, too, to relive the trauma of losing someone every night in front of a whole load of new people, I suggest of The Midnight Organ Fight and its barefaced, wounded account of a breakup. “There’s no rawness anymore,” Scott says. “It was two and a half years ago, and I wrote it six months after it all happened, so I could tie a knot over everything, as closure. If you hammer out a song over a hundred times, a lot of the emotion is going to fade away.”

Nonetheless, Scott still manages to recreate the confusion and hurt of that time live. He explains: “We still love playing live. A lot of the audiences, especially on this tour [they are currently supporting Death Cab For Cutie], are new to our songs, and that makes us feel new to them as well, in a way. And maybe our new audiences have just had their big ‘thing’ that happened to them recently, and that’s great, that people can walk into our songs and become the person that I’m singing about.”

Maybe its Scott’s lyrical frankness when dealing with the private universalisms of love, loss and sex that explains Frightened Rabbit’s disproportionate success stateside. “It’s different the way that music spreads in the US. They’re really big on blogs over there – I know we have blogs here as well – but in the US that’s kind of how you find out about new music, whereas over here it tends to be the NME and the music press,” he tells me. It was those faceless, secretive creatures – bloggers – who caught wind of Frightened Rabbit early on in the states and propelled them to the front of their ones to watch. “The Americans have this romantic view of the Scottish,” Scott tries to explain, meekly. Or, just maybe, Frightened Rabbit are really very, very good.

Frightened Rabbit seem perfectly happy with the way things are going, anyway, even if a lot of people ‘over here’ have never heard of them. (“It’s weird to say ‘over here’ as if we’re not from the UK!” they laugh.) But all that could change with their current and upcoming tours with Death Cab For Cutie, of which Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer are huge fans, and fellow Scot, Biffy Clyro. They’re re-releasing a Christmas single, ‘It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop’, which stings with the broken humour of putting grudges aside ‘just for one day’, and they hope to start working on new material in the new year, if they ever stop touring. I tell Scott that I hope we don’t have to wait for him to go through another messy breakup before he can write a new album. “Speaking of which,” he smiles, motioning behind me where his girlfriend waits, “I’d probably better go.”

DOWNLOAD (that's right kids, my first ever download) Frightened Rabbit - It's Christmas So We'll Stop

Some Tracks I Liked In 2008

There may well be more to come, but it's getting to that list time of year again. And there's nothing I like better than a good list, so I'm getting mine in early. Jamie dabbles in that sort of thing, too...

The Dodos – Ashley (Visiter)

There was something about the biting cold of early spring that I found within the music of The Dodos. I was heading towards my finals at uni and each day entailed an uphill hike to the library for hours of silent reading, and something about the cross rhythms in Ashley seemed a part of the heavy momentum of that time. Coupled with which, the exponential improvement in this band’s live shows over the course of the year make them worthy of an end of year accolade, if nothing else.

Laura Marling – Blackberry Stone (Cross Your Fingers EP)

Alas, I Cannot Swim blew the large majority of the music press, including myself, away, even earning Miss Marling a Mercury nomination. (“I’ve no idea what all this is about,” she later confessed to me at the awards ceremony.) But it is in ‘Blackberry Stone’, originally the B-side to single ‘Cross Your Fingers’, that Marling’s astounding vocal range and the mesmerising ache in her lyrics really comes to the fore.

Frightened Rabbit – Backwards Walk (The Midnight Organ Fight)

The Midnight Organ Fight seems one of those albums that people can form an almost unspeakably personal relationship with – even bloggers who usually muster prolific jive on any given subject. Scott Hutchison’s broken Scottish brogue and the band’s epic approach to instrumentation express a kind of red-blooded hurt that is severed before it really takes off in Backwards Walk, a musical manifestation of the frustrated lyrics. The Daytrotter session of this track is a must.



MGMT – Kids (Oracular Spectacular)

Maybe one day, I will be able to listen to this song again. Right now it’s still more irritating than Katy Perry. It became the inescapable summer anthem of 2008, and it was rammed down my throat almost hourly at every festival I went to. But it’s for that reason it makes the top five, too, because one day I’ll hear it and remember chasing mediocre pop stars around Glastonbury and climbing midnight trees in Benicassim and drinking whisky with boys in bands at Roskilde.






Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (Fleet Foxes)

It was actually stumbling upon a First Aid Kit cover of this that I fell in love with it, leading me to properly listen to Fleet Foxes’ much lauded debut album. Baroque pop? The saviours of American music? Sounds overblown, but in a strange way Fleet Foxes deserve it for reinventing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young for a new generation, for sounding so unlike everything else that was released this year, and for the best Jesus facial hair this side of the bible. Amen.





And the shortlist: The Acorn – Oh Napoleon (Glory Hope Mountain) / British Sea Power – Canvey Island (Do You Like Rock Music) / Deerhunter – Saved By Old Times (Microcastle) / The Kills – Cheep and Cheerful (Midnight Boom) / The Last Shadow Puppets – Meeting Place (The Age Of The Understatement) / Mystery Jets – Flakes (Twenty-One) / Raconteurs – Many Shades Of Black (Consolers Of The Lonely) / Tokyo Police Club – In A Cave (Elephant Shell) / TV On The Radio – Halfway Home (Dear Science)

The Smiths - 'What Difference Does It Make?' (1984)

Like the second sibling, floundering in the shadow of its predecessor, ‘What Difference...’ had a tough act to follow in the shape of 1983’s ‘This Charming Man’. Both Morrissey and Marr have spoken of it as the song that got away. “‘What Difference Does It Make’, I thought was absolutely awful the day after the record was pressed,” Morrissey confessed in an interview with Q magazine in 1992, whereas Marr put its relative chart success – it peaked at a very respectable 12 in the UK – down to it being part of ‘the peak’ that followed ‘This Charming Man’.

In fact, ‘What Difference…’ was the first single to come off The Smiths eponymous debut album, released just a few weeks later in February 1984. And while its opening riff wasn’t as brashly distinctive as that of ‘This Charming Man’, or its lyrics so boldly poetic, it is significant for its rambling catchiness, as evidence of just how early on in their career The Smiths honed their singular style.

The opening guitar riff was based on Jo Jo Gunne’s ‘Run Run Run’ of 1972, indicative of the importance of Marr in bringing the guitar-based sounds of the seventies back into vogue in a climate saturated in dance music. If you listen carefully to the recording, you’ll also hear a sample of children playing just before the final bridge, the reason for which is somewhat unclear given the lyrical theme of unrequited love.

It might have been panned, but on today’s ears ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ seems to embody more than ever that mordant humour and social realism that was so important when The Smiths emerged in the 80s. Their very name was chosen as the antidote to fanciful names found in 80s dance music, like Spandau Ballet and Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark. ‘What difference…’ is musically humdrum and lyrically fatalistic, and yet as one of the five most commercially successful Smiths songs ever released, the difference it made in the course of rock music history is immeasurable.

Album Review: Pavement 'Brighten The Corners - Nicene Credence Ed.' released 18/11/08

Completists rejoice, Domino have kept up with their millennium promise of a Pavement reissue every two years with reissue no. 4, ‘Brighten The Corners: Nicene Credence Edition’.

The original Brighten The Corners was released back in 1997, as Pavement hit their early thirties. They were all living in different cities by this time and made the exception to come together for recording, which evidences itself in the aural completeness of this, their fourth album. In true Pavement fashion, the record is snailpaced, embracing a kind of lazy lysergia that washes over rather than arrests. In many ways Malkmus et al were the underground band of the nineties – they embodied a kind of commercially unconcerned, stoner-rock materialist discontent with modern life, that manifested itself in Malkmus’ dry wit and Kannberg’s deliciously cyclical, unhurried guitar work. The British musical underground were to draw extensively from their intentionally lo-fi sound, with many bands including Blur and Radiohead citing Pavement as a major influence.

Unlike Pavement’s fifth and final album, Terror Twilight, which was completely written (and almost completely credited to) frontman Stephen Malkmus, two of Kannberg’s best contributions to the Pavement compendium appear here in ‘Date With IKEA’ and ‘Passat Dream’. That the duo were still working under the guise of a songwriting partnership during ‘Brighten The Corners’ sessions manifests itself in the balance of band components, with ample space given to instrumental noodling that is indelibly stamped with a heady Californian languor. It was as Malkmus began to overshadow his bandmates towards the end of the decade, with Terror Twilight, that Pavement began to fall apart.

Brighten The Corners, featuring perhaps Pavement’s best known work in ‘Shady Lane’ and ‘Stereo’, showcases the band at its most cohesive. This year’s reissue features two discs containing the whole of the 1997 record remastered from the original tapes, plus all the B-sides and compilation tracks from that period, and a plethora of unreleased live and studio tracks, numbering an impressive 43 tracks in total. Some of the most exciting new material to surface is in the outtakes and live recordings of Pavement’s 1997 John Peel Live Sessions – evidence of Peel’s continued support of a band that he championed right from their roots in the early nineties. The CDs come in an embossed slipcase with a 62-page book containing photos, ephemera, writings and more. Just in time for Christmas...

Television: 'Marquee Moon' (single), 1977

Punk music was all about doing it yourself, and making the music you wanted with the tools you had. It was ramshackle and raw, and that became its signature: a doing-away with the need for co-ordination and complication in favour of sometimes piecemeal musicality but a professed unwavering inclusivity.

Yet something about the whole movement was ferociously protectionist, from the maverick nastiness of the Pistols to the purer, punched-up bite of The Clash. The Wire perfected a storming yelp and The Ramones made mince meat of eardrums with their unforgiving preoccupation for volume, but all of them snarled that punk belonged to them, and to you, if you only dared to take it.

In their early, Brian Eno-produced sessions, Television showed little sign of being any different. The taught pleading of Tom Verlaine’s vocal comes off wafer thin and grating back then, the balance all wrong. But by the time they recorded Marquee Moon in 1977, Television stood apart from their peers. There is an artistic purity in what they managed to achieve with 'Marquee Moon' that signposted the evolution of new wave and post punk.

The title track from their debut longplayer is Television distilled. There is a subtle artistry behind the musical textures here that goes beyond the simplicity of trademark punk, and yet Verlaine’s desperately reaching vocal alone would have you believe that Television just happened upon the careful progressions of their sound, that anyone could have it that way, if they wanted.

‘Marquee Moon’ rests on the casual groove of Fred Smith’s bassline, and percussion so impeccably placed that it barely registers. Verlaine’s solos meld twisted upturned riffs with noodling motifs, but are always executed with a steely conviction that makes them stand firm against the abstract tension of Richard Lloyd's rhythm guitar. Lloyd refused to sit pretty on rhythm: he had a knack for creating totally unexpected tonalities that coloured Verlaine’s confident solo work with an intense unpredictability.

Television took up Sunday residency at New York’s CBGB in 1974, the first rock band to perform at the club, which soon became the epicentre of the New York punk scene. Later that year Blondie, The Ramones and Talking Heads, to name but a few, would appear in that same venue. There at its inception, Television took punk’s magnetic filth and made it aesthetic – no where is this apotheosis more apparent than in ‘Marquee Moon’.

Album Review: Castanets 'City Of Refuge' released 10/11/08

City Of Refuge is by turns twitching and soothing, awash with experimentalism and the upturned familiarity of American alt-folk. It was recorded in three weeks in a motel in the Nevada desert by one Ray Raposta, in a burst of creative solitude that resounds within the confines of the fifteen tracks.

Most of the themes within City Of Refuge are fleeting, ephemeral glimpses into the mind of a man alone in the vastness of the dustbowl landscape and the hollowed plains of his own consciousness. ‘Celestial Shore’ introduces the City with a guitar fanfare that resounds with sun-bright reverb and a melodic warmth. From thereon in, however, there is probing sparseness about the soundscape that Raposta has created in the City Of Refuge, which manifests itself as a mind creeping into forgotten corners of memory and undiscovered rifts of thought. Some of the time, Rasposta’s compositions are completely abstract. The ‘High Plain’ trio are pointillist experiments in the echo of crystal drops of synthesised sound, left to reverb as though in a goldfish bowl, or the outer layers of the earth’s atmosphere.

Where the city becomes more lucid, however, Raposta shows a clarity of concept that vindicates his exploration of abstraction. ‘Refuge 1’ revolves with dark intentions to ‘run to the city of refuge’, which by the time of penultimate sister track, ‘Refuge 2’ seem to have been fulfilled, as the thickly accented vocal drowns in the watery reverb of production. The momentary gospel of ‘Fly Away’ and the dry, spaghetti western guitar riffs of ‘Prettiest Chain’ place this largely experimental album within a musical context. But it is in the lapsarian tribute of final track ‘After The Fall’ that City Of Refuge is most melodic, and that lyrically and musically the finished album is best explained. Raposta writes ‘if I’d known where we were going, I would not have gone at all,’ but this album reverberates with the sense that it is only through journeying to the vast solitude of the Nevada desert that he could properly reflect on the valleys, plains and shores of his inner landscape.

The minimalist musicality and commercially uninterested abstraction of City Of Refuge is unlikely to win Raposta many record sales or a place in the mainstream music industry any time soon. Yet City Of Refuge resounds with musicality and clarity of expression of thought that makes it undeniably a critical success – that rare wonder of an album that manages to convincingly experiment with accepted forms.

Mumford & Sons 'Love Your Ground EP' released 3/11/08

There are only four songs on the Love Your Ground EP, evidence, perhaps of the painstaking meticulousness of Mumford & Sons, who must, surely, have a multitude of publishable tracks to chose from by now.

Each of them is lyrically lachrymose, from the quiet, introverted fury of ‘Little Lion Man’ with its refrain, “I really fucked it up this time,” to the grasping hope of ‘Feel The Tide’, that sings “you and I now, we can be alright.” And yet the words are upended and juxtaposed with banjos and mandolins and ukuleles and those sorts of folk-like, twiddling, inevitably cheery instruments that make the songs themselves seem bright as well as melancholy.

The songwriting here still sounds a little premature and not yet fully formed, and Marcus Mumford is not yet beyond writing lyrics that teeter between trite and touching. There are glimpses of poetry in ‘Hold On To What You Believe’ with the words “we’re young/open flowers in the fields of this war-torn world,” but the chorus is still irritatingly preachy. Similarly the music is heavily circular, risking mudanity, and yet is illuminated by inspired moments, such as in the surprising intrigue of a time-signature change in the same track.

Mumford and Sons have been better known as Laura Marling’s backing band for a good while now, and it is through this musical join-the-dots than they are inextricably interwoven into the fabric of new-folk, inhabiting genre shelf-space alongside Noah and The Whale, Mystery Jets, Marling and Emmy The Great. Their EP reaches for the more artistically sincere side of the new-folk stick, and yet falls just short this time, veering too often towards the predictable and twee. Yet there are moments here that speak of a kind of cold, rattling, expansive folk that needs only to be stretched and refined over time to produce something truly definitive. This will be the task at hand for the band as they put together their debut long player.

Music News

Signed Pink Floyd Guitar To Be Sold In Charity Auction

Fender illustrated by Gerald Scarfe will go for thousands…

Those with a few pennies to spare despite the financial crisis gathered in Kensington last night for the launch of a charity auction of a unique white fender guitar. The instrument is signed by all the members of Pink Floyd and illustrated by ‘The Wall’ cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

The auction is to celebrate the launch of Gerald Scarfe’s book, ‘Scarfe on the Wall’, which details Scarfe’s creation of the artwork for Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, The Wall, a rock opera about the individual’s struggle against society.

The fender is especially valuable as it is possibly the last thing that the late Richard Wright signed before his death from cancer last month. The current bid is £4000.

The only member of Pink Floyd to attend the opening of the auction was drummer Nick Mason. Roger Waters, who resides in New York, was unavailable, while guitarist David Gilmour had to attend a parents’ evening.

Pink Floyd remain one of the most successful rock acts in history, selling over 200million records worldwide since their inception in the late sixties.

The fender will be on auction until the end of the month at www.buyoncegivetwice.co.uk.

Originally published 16/10/08 here.


Arctics Take Apollo Gig To The Big Screen

In one off cinema preview last night...

Fans of the Arctic Monkeys were treated to a feature length film of one of the band’s gigs in one off viewings that took place in selected cinemas across the UK last night.

‘Arctic Monkeys At The Apollo’, a 76-minute long film of the last performance in the band’s 2007 World Tour, was premiered at the Rex cinema in London on the 7th October, and will become available in DVD format on November 3rd.

Directed by Richard Ayoade, the film captures in high definition and surround sound the ability of the Sheffield four piece to reproduce their recorded work, live.

Vocalist Alex Turner fronts the performance with typical dry wit, at one point convincing the Manchester audience that the cameras surrounding the stage are because of a planned ‘live link-up’ with a Berlin audience, prompting hooligan cat-calls of ‘En-ger-land’ to reverberate around the venue, and several self-serving smirks to be passed between band mates.

The set list for the performance numbered nineteen songs from both Arctic Monkeys albums, including favourites ‘Flourescent Adolescent’, ‘I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ and ‘Brianstorm’, and the lesser known ‘Nettles’ and ‘Plastic Tramp’.

Published 15/10/08 here.

Bombay Bicycle Club Interview

“People Treat Us Like A Gimmick...”
Bombay Bicycle Club on the pitfalls of being freshfaced and uber-talented...

It’s busy in the Macbeth in Shoreditch tonight. The pretty and pretentious youth of London’s east end gather on the terrace in the cool evening air of the late summer, puffing resignedly on cigarettes held up to painted lips. There’s a hardened, London look to most of the kids here, which makes it easy to spot three of the Bombay Bicycle Club boys as they shuffle through the smoke for our interview.

Much has been made of their youth by the music press, which is funny because there are lots of young acts about at the moment – Late Of The Pier, Cajun Dance Party, Laura Marling to name but a few. They don’t even look especially young. But there is a kind of sullen reservation in the way they conduct themselves, that soon becomes apparent as shyness. Save for the exuberance of their guitarist, Jamie, bassist Ed and vocalist Jack stare quietly at their shoes, seeming rather endearingly unsure how to answer questions. They might have some confidence yet to gain, but as far as their music is concerned, for a band that have been gigging and writing for over three years, their debut album certainly is a long time coming.

“The last few years have been building towards recording, which is a long time to put together a debut album, especially if you’re semi-well-known,” bassist Jamie says of their plans to record a LP. Semi-well-known is almost an understatement. Bombay Bicycle Club have been a staple festival band since they won Channel 4’s Road To V in 2006, and have been gigging successfully ever since, making quite a name for themselves on the indie circuit as Britain’s baby-faced answer to the Strokes. The only problem being, with their GCSEs only just behind them, there was very little the band could do during term time. “The interest in us was always peaks and troughs,” Jamie explains, “because we’d do festivals in the summer, and then we wouldn’t be able to do anything while we were at school.”

But no longer. The boys finished their A levels in July (Jamie solemnly admits: “School always came first,”) and have decided to take this year off to concentrate properly on the band. While their friends move away to start uni or fly off on exotic gap years, Jamie, Jack, Ed and Suren are getting used to everyday life in a band. “I don’t know what to do with myself now!” Jamie exclaims, with a happy grin, “When we’re not on tour or recording there’s nothing to do. We came back from a month on tour and we just wanted to take a break, but then you realise you’re just sitting at home all day, and all your friends are going on their gap years to East Asia or wherever.”

With this in mind, the boys are keeping themselves busy this month recording their debut album. Lead singer Jack pipes up behind a long greasy fringe that they’re thinking of calling it ‘Emergency Contraception Blues’, “but that might just be a song on it, we’re not sure yet.” As to the album itself, fans can expect quite a bit of unheard material. Bombay Bicycle Club have been lucky enough to secure Jim Abbiss as producer, the man behind numerous Mercury nominated long players from the likes of Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian. The boys talk excitedly about the prospect of Abbiss’s handiwork on the album. “He’s very versatile,” Jack lauds, before Jamie interrupts, “I think he’s very good at bringing bands like Kasabian and The Arctic Monkeys into the mainstream whilst keeping their edge.”
“Winning a Mercury,” guitarist Ed contributes, finally, “that’s our aim.”

Winning a Mercury is not exactly a one-of-a-kind ambition for a young, gigging band. The difference is, that with the intelligent musicianship and unlikely performing experience of Bombay Bicycle Club, their chances of achieving the outer reaches of British rock celebrity are perhaps not so slight. Each of their tracks combines wide-open-eyed lyrics about adolescence with swirling Bloc Party-esque keyboard and guitar textures and angular, catchy Strokes riffs that stick in the head and induce front row mayhem at gigs.

The only decider for Bombay Bicycle Club, this year, will be for them to get people to finally stop thinking of them as schoolkids and start seeing them for what they are: the most promising act to emerge from North London since Bloc Party. “It sometimes feels as if people aren’t taking us as seriously as if we were older,” vocalist Jack frowns. “People treat us like a gimmick!” Jamie adds, indignantly. “The NME is always saying things like ‘Out of term time, Bombay Bicycle Club are…” he tails off.
Jack adds, “People seem to have picked up on the fact that we’re really young compared to other bands, and have taken advantage of it.”

With school behind them and an album currently in production, Bombay Bicycle Club have a lot to prove in the coming months, especially to those that have underestimated them in the past. For now, as they shuffle off, all awkward handshakes and shy smiles, one can only think that if this young London four-piece can put together an album that is even just a fraction as promising as their early demos, they won’t be quite so unassuming for much longer…

Gig Review: Jonquil, The Shakespeare, Sheffield 26/9/08

See original article here


We’re driving round some kind of industrial wasteland in Sheffield. (This isn’t hard – there’s apparently quite a lot of it.) The taxi driver’s lost, deep in conversation with his satnav, on which he’s spelt our destination wrong, anyway. My gig-going accomplice is telling me about prostitutes and drug-dens and where not to go after dark in the steel city as boarded up grey blurs in my outervision.

Defeat seems imminent, and we’re about to give up and head for the shiny lights of the centre, when a little lit-up pub miraculously appears, with a couple of kids sporting skinnies and shoes smoking on the doorstep. After paying the driver about half of what it says on the meter for the pleasure of the picturesque detour, we order double gins in the sudden noisy glow of The Shakespeare. It’s busy here considering the out of the way location, a concentric hub of plaid shirts and painted eyes that seems to do trade by word of mouth among a fairly clique-y clientele.

Tonight the kids are out for one of the most promisingly obscure faux-folk bands of the moment, Jonquil. Faux-folk because, having warned the aforementioned accomplice that he was in for a few hours of ‘experimental folk’ (for want of a better description) and watched him guzzle several pints in trepid anticipation, Jonquil got about five minutes into their set before he turned to me, toe-tapping, and happily admitted, “they’re pretty good, not too weirdy beardy at all.”

Genre-tagging is something Jonquil have been avoiding for a while now, with frontman Hugo Manuel confessing in a recent interview that the band would rather be associated with rock than folk. Live, it’s obvious why. There’s a spreading energy about each of their tracks, rooted in organically created sounds, but multi-layed and building so that the jubilant swell of their music is neither twiddly nor twee, but kind of noisily cacophonous and catchy. To achieve this they fill the tiny stage with band members (all six of them) and instruments that most rock acts would never have heard of.

Tonight Hugo’s vocals are a little shaky to begin with, as he struggles with falsetto in ‘Sudden Sun’, but he soon warms to the task at hand. Hypnotic unison vocals in the humourously entitled ‘Babe, so why no,’ contrast with the utterly mesmerising orchestration of new track, ‘Parasol’. Jonquil end with the creeping twinkle and bespoke beauty of an extended intro to ‘Lions’, their best known song and the title track from their recently re-released album. It’s a wonderful moment, encompassing oom-pa accordion propulsion with sea-shanty chanting, inciting infectious grinning in the audience in the poky venue.

This talented Oxford six-piece have lyrics that transport to musical Narnias, and instrumentation that colours these landscapes with tumescent exuberance, with solid melodic cheer as its motivation. Tonight, though, with the unresolved ending of ‘Lions’, our out-of-town excursion is over, and we’re stumbling down the stairs and out the door, for the directionless, uphill wander back to the city lights.

Feature: Branded

This week it’s been Levi’s ‘5 Night Revue’, showcasing the best in new and unsigned talent as deemed suitable for the Hoxton clique, by Levi’s (who obviously know exactly what they’re talking about, being jeans manufacturers…)

The line-ups for these nightly Shoreditch showcases have been fairly predictable, with those that made it down to the east end being treated to the raucous promise of recent school-finishers Bombay Bicycle Club, handsome electro duo Iglu and Hartley, and eclectic toy-pop illuminators Metronomy, to name but a few.

Levi’s have been putting on their ‘Ones To Watch’ for over four years now with some success – past winners have included The View (thank you, Levis), Kooks and The Fratellis. Oh, and The Natives. (The Natives who?!)

But it’s clear that not many in the LOTW alumni can lay claim to much more that flash-in-the-pan first album success, followed by a disproportionate trajectory into second album obscurity – so is it really worth their while?

When we asked the Bombay boys about their decision to get involved in the Levi’s sponsored event, their unanimous response was, “We get free jeans!”

The attractive Levi’s promoters, however, confessed that they’re already looking for new ideas of ways to get new music out to the kids, without the stigma of corporate sponsorship. “This has been done now,” one PR said, “we need to change the concept, find new ways to do the same thing.”

The Branding Stigma is a problem that Jack White’s also suffered from this week after his Bond-theme collaboration with Alicia Keys was pilfered by Coca Cola for prime time TV advertising. “Jack White was commissioned by Sony Pictures to write a theme song for the James Bond film 'Quantum Of Solace', not for Coca Cola,” his management proclaimed in a statement.

Begging the question, is it possible to gain and keep commercial success in the modern music industry without being tainted by the grubby-fingered, money-hungry lure of branding? Answers on a postcard…

***********************************************************************************
All this talk of branding leads us nicely to the recent Converse ad campaign, in which lurid billboards flanking the main stages at major British music festivals and corporate-sponsored gigs proclaim: “Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive.”

Now, I understand that Converse have long been the footwear of choice for the subculturally preoccupied masses. From Kurt Cobain’s endorsement in the mid-nineties (and his posthumous Cobain Converse released earlier this year) to M.I.A and Karen O in the most recent ‘Connectivity’ ads, the colourful classics have carried a long-standing reputation for giving their owner a certain understated yet irrefutable veneer of ‘cool’. Even when they were uncool, Converse were cool. They’re the closest thing alterna-kids have to Chanel.

But just when did it become possible to convince the large majority of converse-sporting gig- and festival-goers that the star on their footwear means that they are, in fact, the unsuspecting vanguard of an impending cultural revolution?

Has everyone forgotten that Nike has owned Converse since they saved the brand from liquidation in 2003?

Comfy and colourful they might be, but nonconformist and original Converse certainly are not…

London Airwaves Festival - 19/9/08

Music festivals, as the mainstay of the revelrous masses, have come a long way in the last five years. The well-worn formula of a long weekend dedicated to rural rebelliousness of the most extreme and exhausting variety has become pummelled, condensed and morphed into newly enticing manifestations. One such variety, the urban one-day event, has become vastly popular, this year especially, as a way of getting some of the best in new and smaller acts onto a festival bill for just a fraction of typical prices for the punter.

Airwaves is but one example of the one-day festivals that have emerged in this climate of live music diversification. Planned to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Iceland’s veteran Airwaves Festival, which has featured a range of high-calibre headline acts including everyone from Klaxons to The Kills, Airwaves branded itself as ‘an all-day extravaganza of cutting-edge music and culture’. But the reality of the event was somewhat different. Plagued with entry queues, schedule-clashes and street-level congestion, most ticket-holders were left feeling more than a little frustrated at a line-up that promised top-end entertainment, without much regard for the practicalities involved.

Even for those who managed to rock up straight from work, the eight venues earmarked for the night stretched right across London’s trendy East End – from Hoxton to Brick Lane – a fair distance on foot. Gigwise spoke to one girl who, in a fix about to get from Metronomy’s 9.30pm set at Hoxton Bar and Grill to Young Knives at Vibe in Brick Lane by 11pm, jumped in a taxi, only to find herself paying an extortionate £18 fare at the end of the five minute drive. For newcomers to the East End the risk of getting lost in a back lane and missing nearly every act on the bill was a very real possibility.

As such, gig-goers found themselves pigeon-holed into one or two similarly-located venues. For Gigwise, this meant missing the illuminated electro-pop innovation of Metronomy and the entrancing sequenced electronica of A. Human so that we were in the right place to see Young Knives at 11pm, which rather unfortunately meant suffering the poker-faced pouting of These New Puritans for a good half a set. Their heavily punctuated art-rock was lost on the dingy confines of the upstairs at Vibe, where clean lines of sound blurred and fuzzed into the humid central space of the sparsely populated venue, rendering the set messy-sounding and underwhelming.

The same sound issues plagued Young Knives’ subsequent set. With a band like Young Knives, however, personality alone is enough to counter technical imperfections. The unlikely-looking trio, done up in an assortment of clownishly large trousers, oversized specs and handlebar moustaches, played a set of overdone enthusiasm and unpretentious, commercial hooks and harmonies that induced a sudden bout of joyous, if not slightly odd, dancing on the floor. Between songs, lead vocalist Harry Darthall spouted comedic one-liners of varying profanity, at one point declaring, “The only fucking reason we’re here is because we get to go to Iceland –we’ll send you a postcard!” But their live set belied their proclaimed apathy, characterised largely by monosyllabic staccato nonsense held together by impeccable rhythm. They ended on a cacophonous blend of vocal and distorted guitar that was somewhat lost on the Shoreditch audience, who, in various states of inebriation, was only vaguely listening.

Last minute line-up addition, Digitalism, raised the festival spirit of the evening with their DJ set opposite, at 93 Feet East. The venue was soon bulging at the exits as people squeezed their way onto the dancefloor, overspilling onto the main stage and infesting tables and chairs in a jubilant and unrestrained display of nocturnal festivity. Musically, though, Digitalism offered little by way of interest, instead choosing to utilise their undoubted talent to mix crowd-pleasing fodder like Run D.M.C. and Nirvana into more enticing digital dance-numbers. It went down well, but critically did little but cement Digitalism as the poor man’s Justice in the electro pecking order.

For those still standing at the witching hour, there was little to do but trek to Hewitt Street carpark for an organised rave. Organised being the operative word, as kids queued in their fancy outfits to get through the barriers, queued for drinks tokens, queued for drinks, and then sat huddled in corners by corrugated metal fences, looking fashionably bored. We took the safer option, and headed for home.

On paper Airwaves and its urban festival cousins look like the ideal way of getting new music out to the consuming masses in one dense evening line-up. But in practice, the implications of switching venues eight times in a night to see just a fraction of what’s on offer left most punters wishing they’d spent their twenty quid on a proper gig, instead. Unlike Young Knives, we didn’t even get a trip to Iceland for the trouble…

Mercury Music Prize 2008: Exclusive Interviews

Colin Greenwood: “It would be embarrassing if Radiohead won the Mercury Prize”
In exclusive interview at the awards show...

Radiohead's Colin Greenwood told Gigwise in an exclusive interview last night that the band would be “embarrassed” to win the Mercury Prize.

“The music’s great, the line-up’s really strong and diverse, so just to be included is pretty special,” Colin said at the awards show. “But Radiohead are not new, so we're being involved in something we don’t feel we should be.”
Radiohead recently returned from a huge tour of the US and Canada, from which bassist Greenwood seemed a little groggy. “This is my big night out,” he said. “but I've got a head cold! I think I caught it from my kids.”

“I already miss touring.” Colin admitted. He said of their time away: “It was wonderful. We played a cricket match with the crew and everyone in Vancouver. And Thom and Johnny played a cover of a Neil Young song, ‘After The Gold Rush’, in LA two weeks ago, in front of Americans and they didn’t lynch us!”

Radiohead embark on a tour of Japan in the October.



Laura Marling Calls Mercury Prize “Weird”
In Gigwise exclusive at the awards show...

Elusive folk songstress Laura Marling confessed to Gigwise in a very special interview last night that she though the Mercury Prize was “weird”.

“I’ve no idea what this is all about,” Marling said from a balcony overlooking the ceremony, below, just moments before her performance.

“With your own gigs, you’re playing to people who’ve come to see you and want to listen to your songs and have a nice evening, where as this, it’s great, but it is a huge commercial deal. It’s not got as much soul as a gig, but it’s great…” she said, unconvincingly, before adding quietly, “it’s weird.”

When asked if she minded being nominated for the prize she replied: “Music isn’t all about music anymore. The only thing that keeps me going is the community of it, and this hasn’t got anything to do with that, but it’s part of it.”

Marling, alongside Adele and Estelle, was one of three solo female artists to be nominated for the prize, which was awarded to Elbow at last night's ceremony.

Gig Review: Laura Marling at the Star of Bethnal Green 3/9/08

Read the original here


“I've been here for two hours,” a smiling redhead confesses at the door of the Star of Bethnal Green. Inside, the tiny pub is brimming with the well-coiffed and music-savy. The doorman is arguing with the Scruffy Bird promoter, trying to get him to stop letting people in as the venue reached capacity some time ago. There is a queue of pretty indie kids that winds its way down the street for half a mile. Which is why the redhead is smiling: she's made it to the front; she might just get in.

The reason for such commotion? One diminutive eighteen-year old by the name of Laura Marling. With her pale elfin featues and boyish white-blonde crop, Marling has a voice that defies contemporary comparison and a strength of principle and direction that has revived the underground folk scene's anti-commercial, music-concentric resolve.

Just over a year ago, in a performance on Jools Holland, Laura was a rabbit in headlights: her blue eyes never left the ground, her fingers trembled through delicate bedroom compositions. The ethereal creature before us this evening, make-up-less as ever and shrouded in a large, nondescript shirt, has evolved from that early terror, garnering a steady, steely confidence over the course of two years of hard graft and steady gigging. Marling weaves her way through the crowd to take to the stage, she smiles, she chats amiably with her hushed and waiting audience, and finally, she sings.

She is without her Mumford and Sons backing band tonight, and with the absence of musical support her songs - the earlier love-forlorn acoustic tracks and the more recent, fiddle-featuring folk-tales - are stripped of complications, sounding all the better for it, especially is such an intimate environment. 'Ghosts' and 'My Manic And I' are interspersed with a b-side, 'Blackberry Stone'. The latter, one of Marling's finest songs and rarely heard save from live, smoulders with a rhythmic and melodic ire that echos in the dim confines of the pub. The earlier part of the set is interrupted slightly by the sound technician fiddling with the levels, but in many ways this just adds to the personal feel of the gig, as tiny smiles and giggles slip through Marling's usual cold, fixated stage persona.

We are treated to some new material, two new songs to be precise. “It's terribly self indulgent to play new songs,” Marling apologises, before adding lightly, “so I will.” The first, 'Rambling Man', showcases a melodic line and vocal agility of uniqueness that strikes of Joni Mitchell. There are but glimpses of facile lyrics at moments in the new, unpolished tracks that remind how young Marling still is. The audience is awe-struck and respectfully still, until the 'Crawled Out Of The Sea' interlude, where an irrepresible sing-a-long begins accidentally, endorsed by a glimmer of a smile from onstage. "I wish more people would do that," Marling murmurs afterwards. "No one does that anymore: this is what music is all about." And as her voice winds its way through to the melodic reaches of her handstitched, humble folk songs, we can't help but agree.

Metallica 'Death Magnetic' released 12/9/08

This album review became the most read album review in Gigwise's history. It has had over 35,000 hits, and 111 people have commented on it.
You can read the original here

Metallica pretty much defined heavy metal with 1986's 'Master Of Puppets' and their self-titled 1991 album. Then they went a bit commercial in the nineties and suffered amid controversy over file-sharing this decade, and it seemed for a time like the glory days might be over. And now? With an average age of 45 and families to boot, you'd expect America's greatest metal export to be taking it steady a little. Not so, as Gigwise discovered at a very special preview of their ninth studio album...

'Death Magnetic' descends upon the thrash metal world on September 12th as one of the most seamless and ferocious Metallica albums to date. It's kind of a wonder that they can still hack it, but after 2003's 'St Anger' suggested that Metallica was tailing in the headlights of younger bands that cited them as a major influence, 'Death Magnetic' demonstrates a band back to reclaim their proverbial metal crown.

It's a headlong, balls-out, instrument-led eighty minutes long, something that newcomers might find pretty exhausting. A thudding heartbeat percussion introduction, overlaid with a haunting guitar-riff, lasts just seconds before Hammett smashes through without a smidgen of subtlety with leaden chords that set the tone for the rest of the album. 'Death Magnetic' is unmistakably a Metallica album, soaked in Hammett's guitar flourishes and Ulrich's propulsive percussion as it is, but it's one that shows a marked progression, especially musically. Several tracks hit the eight minute mark, but there isn't a structual component in any that lasts longer than ninety seconds or so before Ulrich switches tempo or Hammett slides effortlessly into another electric vein. The preoccupation here is in the transparent musical dexterity and thrash metal mastery that Metallica have managed to achieve.

There are middle-eastern overtones in the twisting guitar-solo opening of 'All Nightmare Long', while 'Cyanide' features a much cleaner, distortion-free 'bouncing' bass, evidence of Robert Trujillo's contribution in his first recorded album performance. What is most striking is the departure from vocal-led writing as on 'Load' and 'Reload', a hangover from 'St Anger', perhaps, and a welcome one at that. Nearly every track oscillates between distorted power chords of ferocious, if not generic, weightiness, into guitar solos that are both plaintive and beguiling, with vocals and lyrics very much the afterthought.

Notable exceptions to the above are evident in the lead single 'The Day That Never Comes'. A divergence from high-octane, heavier tracks that are vicious and lyrically empowering, this Metallica-ballad attempts political commentary with its dolorous anti-war vocal. Meanwhile, 'The Unforgiven III' features a full length orchestra and piano prelude, and is undoubtedly an album highlight.

Hetfield is back to singing about death and devilry, with themes of suicide, betrayal and torture, that sometimes seem slightly overdone, especially by a band aged in their mid-forties. There are moments, too, when co-ordination slightly slips and the overall effect is a little too contrived, perhaps most evident in 'The Judas Kiss'.

Nonetheless, Metallica have exceeded themselves in producing an album that is indelibly stamped with their eponymous sound, whilst allowing for breathing space that demonstrates musical deftness and innovation on a par with their best work. Each varying component of each track is as brief as it is carefully inserted into the wider cacophonous whole, so that choppy tempos, changes in sound and structure, and transitional keys dissolve seamlessly into the magnetic propulsion of their genre-dominating prowess.

Leeds Festival: Day 3

Sunday 24th August 2008

British Sea Power is the perfect start to a Sunday at Leeds. Their eccentric and elusive media personality quickly becomes irrelevant in the face of a set composed almost entirely of new material from their 2008 LP ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’ as they push forward into the future with carefully pieced together musical soundspheres of the most consuming and absorbing variety. The Brighton four-piece are unhurried and unassuming, making no attempt to crowd-please with theatrics or musical acrobatics. They come off best in prolonged intros and outros that drift and swell into the blue skies of the early festival day.

Mystery Jets follow the seamless, urban-inspired dramatics of Santogold a little later on the Radio 1 stage. Having played Reading the day before, they are obviously a little worse for wear, and arrive twenty minutes late, only leaving them time for a fraction of their set. Just at the Eel Pie Island pop-innovators are about to launch into sing-a-long favourite ‘Two Doors Down’, they are informed that they’ve run out of time. It looks for a moment like it might all kick off, with guitarist William Rees verbally abusing the festival organisers and then smashing up his microphone stand in disappointed protest, but the Leeds crowd doesn’t really seem that bothered, save for a smattering of token booing and bottling of onstage security. It’s a shame, but Mystery Jets with their self-conscious candy-coloured suits and shamelessly melodic pop are more of a Reading band anyway.

For the rest of the afternoon we make like one should at Leeds and trudge around the arena swilling warm lager with no where to sit, since the whole field is now a waterlogged muddy pitch, while mediocre indie from We Are Scientists and Dirty Pretty Things reverberates in the warm air.

Just before seven, The Raconteurs emerge, and it suddenly becomes apparent just quite how ahead of the game Brandon and Jack really are in comparison to their main stage predecessors. Their set has evolved over their summer festival appearances to become refined to the point of perfection. They slip between ‘Old Enough’ and ‘Broken Boy Soldier’ with an astounding drumming interlude that reveals the musicians behind the frontmen to be as outstanding as their more famous bandmates. Jack White is more solemn than on any other occasion this summer, especially during the prolonged piano riff of ‘You Don’t Understand Me’, yet the sound that emanates from Leeds’ dodgy speakers is more ferocious and convincing than ever. They are faux-humble, White muttering “We have one more song, then we’ll be out of your way,” before finishing on ‘Salute Your Solution’, privy to their own incomparable musical ability. Easily the highlight of the whole weekend, The Raconteurs are the kind of band that make you feel lucky just to have seen them play, as though a little bit of their greatness might just be contagious.

Bloc Party can’t match this musically, but they are on home turf and have happily managed to fill every inch of the hill infront of the main stage with an alcoholically-lubricated crowd of dry and well-disposed punters, ready to give the last of the British acts at the festival a proper reception. Kele is obviously a little bit drunk, but it in no way affects his delivery, instead adding to the general jubilant sentiment as they make their way through a well-paced, hour-long set that includes some new material. Though still indelibly in the same Bloc Party vein, added samples and electronic effects enhance their well-established trademark sound on the new tracks, which is promising for new album ‘Intimacy’. Towards the end of the set, however, Kele says that the gig could be the band’s last live performance for a while, raising questions as to how they plan to promote the new stuff.

For those that would rather hack off their own ears with a rusty penknife than watch The Killers close the festival, there is very little else to do. We try The Manic Street Preachers, quickly get bored, and then, with nowhere to sit and nothing to do except watch kids get high on old fairground rides and narcotics, take solace in the campsite and a bottle of whisky with friends, where aerosol cans and flares illuminate tired faces around makeshift campfires. It seems the only thing to do at Leeds, a lot of the time. As other weekenders move in with fancy organic food, hand-tailored decorations and more home-comforts, it remains to be seen how much longer Leeds can hold its own, especially if they don’t sort out the basics in sound quality and security. But then, for those that want nothing more than to get smashed and smash things, it would be hard to imagine Leeds any other way.

Leeds Festival: Day 2

Saturday 23rd August 2008


It’s a young crowd that make it out of the campsite in time for Dizzee Rascal at 2pm, probably because they’re the only ones with enough hungover resilience to drag themselves though the foot-deep muddy ditches that have formed a moat in front of the arena entrance, or maybe because Dizzee and Leeds go together like, well, an east London grime artist at a luke-warm Tuborg-swilling Yorkshire festival. There’s a large amount of tongue-in-cheek bouncing along in the crowd, especially for ‘Fix Up Look Sharp’, as is to be expected, but the rest of the set is largely spurious fodder.

Over at the Lock-Up Stage Frank Turner is proving himself as Dizzee’s cultural antithesis. His band have stepped straight out of Napoleon Dynamite: the guitarist is visibly terrified by the crowd before him while the bassist attempts nonchalance by leaning on an amp, looking every inch like a mathematics lecturer. The keyboardist is just a mass of hair on a stool. And the music is almost unbearably cheesy in the most wonderful, northern, sing-a-long way imaginable. Everyone is singing. Everyone knows all the words. Frank shamelessly instigates as much audience participation as possible (at one point getting everyone to do-si-do), cites the experience as the highlight of his career, gives a shout out to his little sister, and then leaves the stage grinning.


Which is much more than MGMT can muster over at the Radio 1 stage. Today the Brooklyn duo look and sound like a pretty nasty comedown, perhaps due to their previous night’s success at Reading. They have pulled in a huge turnout, unsurprising considering MGMT’s astronomical leap into psychedelic-rock stardom this year. Their set does very little to excite the punters, not helped by Ben Goldwasser appearing utterly vacant, his baby-face pallid and clammy. Album tracks and downtempo numbers such as ‘The Youth’ and ‘Pieces Of What’ disappear into the ether, while even ‘Kids’ is entirely driven by the defiant energy of the tipsy mid-afternoon crowd.

Saturday night boasts the double bill of Queens Of The Stone Age and Rage Against The Machine. It has the potential to be a defining moment of the summer festival season, but technicalities complicate both performances, and festival greatness proves elusive. Queens Of The Stone Age suffer from shockingly poor sound during their 8pm set on the main stage, both patchy and too quiet to do justice to the awesome, polished American rock that exudes from up front. Favourites ‘No One Knows’, ‘Go With The Flow’ and ‘Little Sister’ are dispersed between tracks from last year’s Era Vulgaris album, all delivered with a slick ease that cements Josh Homme’s place among the American rock greats.


Rage are thirty minutes late, and do not give Leeds the same theatrical performance as the previous night’s set at Reading, where they emerged onstage sporting Guantanamo boiler suits. Instead, the cameraman up front keeps rather pointedly zooming in on frontman Zack de la Rocha’s Nike trainers, as if to demonstrate his artistic hypocrisy. Which is almost criminal considering that the sound technicians and security alike should be doing a much more professional job than they evidently are. Rage only make it to fourth track, ‘Bombtrack’, before the sound dies. Moments later de la Rocha begins to plead with the crowd to move backwards so that the people at the front can breathe, saying, “We don’t want to have to stop the show.” Eventually they plunge straight back in where they left off. There is a huge, moshing, metal contingent up front, but most of the crowd are clearly loitering on the fringes, waiting to hear ‘Killing In The Name’. Again, Rage prove themselves masters of their craft, especially with Tom Morello’s driving guitar work, but their set irretrievably suffers from technical problems that mar its impact.