Album Review: The Flaming Lips – The Terror, track by track
30 years ago the world was a very different place. The brinks matt robbery took place at Heathrow Airport, wearing a seat-belt became law, cabbage patch dolls were all the rage, and Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. The charts were filled with Phil Collins, The Police and Michael Jackson. Somewhere in Oklahoma, …
News: Tru Thoughts reveal London Posse Gangster Chronicle / Money Mad Reissues
Just as the generation before listened to The Beatles, Stones Animals et al do their versions of the American RnB classics, before making their own versions of them, and indeed taking the Americans on at their own game (so to speak) so in those first exciting days of hip-hop many British groups from all over …
Meet – The Last Skeptik, plus new album and video
In my day as a youth, the only producer I knew was that one that Ronnie Corbett used to use to give his funny stories some credence. And even when I started to take notice of what producers really were, then they were all these fancy American types, that drove huge cars and stood in …
Album Review: Mudhoney – Vanishing Point Track by Track
I always had to be cooler than my brother, musically speaking. At just 18 months younger than me there was always this sort of competitive edge to everything we did. I felt in this respect I was always on the front foot. Having comitted several crimes against music in his record buying (slippery when wet/europe …
Exclusive: Dan Clayton records Backseat Mafia a bespoke DJ Mix
There’s something about House music that I find so attractive on a Friday night. Of course in the dim and distant past when I was not too old to look vaguely embarrassing in a night club, I went across to the Hacienda in Manchester, and Passion and outside raves and……ahem, Johnny’s in Huddersfield. And it …
Album Review: Blue Angel – Departures
Fate, it seems played its part with Blue Angel. The first piece of fate happened at rehearsal rooms, the now defunct Backstreet Studios on Holloway Road in London , when producer/Instrumentalist Jason Newton heard Bella Bennett in the next room, rehearsing for a wedding, and he knew he’d found the voice he’d been looking for. The other piece …
News: Tom Hickox to join Richard Hawley, Band Of Horse and others at Somerset House ‘Summer Series’
In my day it was called YTS. When you wanted to learn a ‘trade’ like plumbing, or typewriting, or being a zookeeper (probably) or a footballer, you signed up on a course that was part schooling and part learning on the job, and they (the government that is) paid you something like £17.50 per week …
EP: Ty – Kick Snare and an idea (Part One)
I didn’t come from the slums, in fact there’s very little about me that is even remotely ‘urban’. When I was at school we had to do this tracing your family tree thing. There were others in my class where there parents had been involved in exciting jobs, like in the army or merchant navy, …
Album Review: British Sea Power – Machineries of Joy track by track
Have British Sea Power really been around a decade? It doesn’t seem that since, shortly after the release of their second album, Open Season I saw them in London, as support for the much missed (in my house anyway) Electric Soft Parade. They wore odd costumes, paraded around the stage on each-others shoulders, made a …
Meet: A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and You have already gone to the Other World
There’s something unique, and beautiful about A Hawk and a Hacksaw. In these days of X-Factor and formulaic unit-obsessed drivel, the Albuquerque, New Mexico duo have furrowed if not a lonely path, then a reasonably empty one. After playing drums in the much missed Natural Milk Hotel, Jeremy Barnes passed through several bands, before travelling …