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I watched about as much as I could stand on television last night. Did anyone else find even mildly amusing to see bands playing to a crowd of thousands and a message scrolled behind them on a video wall that gave advice on saving energy around the home. This on a stage backed by a enormous wall of dazzling lights (the sun was still out) and amplifiers. Highlight of the whole thing was definitely Metallica playing ten-year old songs (because everything they’ve done since the turn of the century is pretty much unlistenable to) backed by imagery of an elephant and then a Jumbo jet. JUMBO jet. Get it. ahahah oh wow.

God help us if our idea of helping climate change is listening to Keane tell us about keeping a low carbon foot-print at a concert that “will produce about 74,500 tons of the gas“. I’m not sure if that includes the carbon produced by the movement of everyone driving and flying to and from the concerts. All I know is that someone, somewhere, has completely missed the point.

On Sunday, it was brought to my attention by a friend that once a year, the kindly folk of Haigh Hall throw a free music festival for those in the area, presumably by way of compensation for them being in Wigan. I rolled up half smashed to find out what was going down with my homies.
Haigh Hall is a genuinely beautiful place, and I’ve come to the opinion that all music festivals should be held in the grounds of stately homes if simply for the reason that, surrounded by two or three square miles of semi-landscaped woodland, there was no problems with the toilet arrangements.

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Everyone should be pretty much aware of not only the musical Genius of Mark E. Smith, but his unwillingness to co-operate and knuckle down for (usually feckless) presenter-led interviews. This Guardian arts blog round-up of the most horrid interviews is a perfect way to celebrate. It includes, of course, the infamous Newsnight appearance after Peel died.

One of my favourites is a recent interview by the lovely, if not a bit soft in the head, Lauren Laverne. So uncomfortable, yet enticing, to watch. Her poor treatment wasn’t very surprising. She introduced him by reciting the same old boring tale that the Fall wouldn’t have been stirred into action, were it not for the famous Sex Pistols Manchester Free Trade Hall gig in 1976. Shockingly, there was actually music in the North of England before the Sex Pistols came to play to a couple of hundred Mancunians. So I heard anyway.

That’s not a typo. This is a new comedy about a folk-pop band composed of two New Zealanders in New York. Wikipedia tells me that the act was created before the HBO show, but it’s so hard to tell what’s genuine these days isn’t it? I blame the internet. You can see the 1st full episode in lovely streaming flash video here. It features the oldest Fleetwood Mac joke ever, mockery of the New Zealand tourist board and peripheral ‘Peep Show’ actor Rachel Blanchard. Watch for hipster-friendly music references and cringe-worthy relationship development and a promise of Welsh legend, Rob Brydon.

It’s been low-blog count limbo round here for a while. I’ve been over-rung with websites to maul at work so I’ve been somewhat terrified to even look at a TinyMCE text entry box. What else have I done? Well, I’ve been all the way to Westminster in London Village to try and help raise some more funds for soon to be internet-sensation Catch21 Productions. Well, we hope. We’re certainly going to try. I reckon we could do some pretty exciting stuff with it anyway. More on that, hopefully much more, later in the year.

I’ve also been to a wedding, a stag do, paintballing (ouch), go-karting (crunch) and to see some downright awesome bands like 65daysofstatic (for the 4th time!) and A Silver Mt. Zion (for the second time, but this time wasn’t half as good – slackers). I went to watch ‘28 Weeks Later‘ which was disappointing, but not surprisingly so. I just loved the prequel far too much and naturally the usual disappointment in a sequel followed. I also watched the start of Big Brother UK Series 384, but I’m too ashamed to talk about that…

BBQ this weekend down ‘sarf. Maybe next week I’ll reveal some shiny new website designs I’ve been working on. Oh larks oh lawdy! Hurrah!

I’d sworn to myself that I’d get round to seeing Mr. Scruff; DJ, artist and all round leg-end. Fortunately, last week a friend invited me back once again to Hull to see him at the uni. What a brilliant night. Such a fun DJ! Plenty of people dancing, very early in the night and such great visuals from the VJ as well. Lots of fluffy animals. Lots of pie. He drew everyone into it with some of his classic tunes, a drop of tweeness, a bit of a Rooty-toot Manuva, some more bass and then British geek-anthem, Ug. Go to a party where Mr. Scruff is playing. It will make you very, very happy.

(p.s. big thanks to Jon for basically driving me and my kit round all weekend)

After keeping the gaming/geek community on edge for so long, Rockstar Games finally released the trailer for GTA IV this week. I actually spent enough time with the last two GTA games that I finished them. They’re great fun. Plus when they get released, it’s great to read the Daily Mail columns complaining about how they are corrupting our youth. arf. Not entirely sure when (or even if) we’ll see this on the PC. I hope we do; I don’t fancy selling a kidney so I can afford to buy a PS3 (seems no one else does either). The trailer isn’t all that action-packed, it’s more tantalising; drawing fans in to make a load of predictions about what absolutely every little bit means. Interestingly (well, for me anyway) it uses Philip Glass as a soundtrack, complete with trade mark formulaic cadences. Guess it makes a change from the expected Kim Wilde/Grandmaster Flash (and anything in-between) of the previous games.

View the video here. Warning though; the huge hi-def copy almost crippled my (admitedly long in the tooth) computer; low-res copies are also available.

Sheffield’s Plug is a club I’m only just becoming familiar with. It definitely thinks its trendy, what with its minimalistic urban branding and all. Whatever, they bagged Four Tet and a Luke Vibert DJ set all in one night. That got my attention and I dragged along my poor friend Mark, who’d been visiting from out of town. The Four Tet guy (Kieran Hebden) brought along Steve Reid who (I now know after internets research) is some sort of jazz drumming-god. I know sod all about jazz (or drumming) but boy could this dude play. He had an advantageous position at the front of the stage and I’ve never seen anyone so into their instrument (yeah, even more than James Murphy last week). Certainly not a 60 year old anyway. I mean that in a nice way, y’know? He seemed to take point while Hebden worked his way through an array of electronic gizmos (that’s an industry-standard description of what he was doing, okay?) I love Four Tet and Hebdens other project of note; Fridge but I found this gig really hard going. I mean, the guys on the stage were masterful at what they were doing but I definitely think at the end of my week I wasn’t mentally ready for the bombarding that my ears and mind took. I’m pretty familiar with most of Four Tet/Fridge stuff, but on Friday it was all about improvisation and so nothing sounded familiar. Nothing wrong with that of course, just I personally felt like I wanted to hear something safe and recotlgnisable! I’m still glad I saw ‘em though, but the whole event felt like I was trapped in a Hawkwind intro. When would Lemmys vocals kick in? “I just took a ride in a silver machine…“

That’s the name of the current LCD Soundsystem single by the way, this isn’t the beginning of a xenophobic rant. I popped across the pennies yet again (this time on a bus; thanks to some genius envisaging that a rail link between two of Britain’s biggest cities isn’t particularly important at the weekends) to meet up with a fine young bunch of Mancunians who accompanied me to a very busy gig at the Manchester Academy. Quite an interesting crowd were present; the most annoying of which were people on pills and the (so stereotypically true to form, it hurt) MySpace hipster-types. Both seemed to spend most of the gig facing away from the musicians. This was either through confusion or through obsessive chimping, respectively (the likes of which I’ve not seen since I saw Death Cab for Cutie a couple of months back *shudders*) [thoughts on the gig itself after the jump...]

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Well okay it’s just 17 years actually and according to them it’s due to ‘musical similarities’. ha ha. Everybody’s ’2nd favourite band’ have split after many years of producing the sort of music that, personally, I find pretty boring but which no well-minded person can really bring themselves to hate. Their music was inoffensive but not entirely soul-less. They were a generally seemingly honest band without any air of pretension about ‘em and I know a guy who said he had a lovely chat with the leader once… Plus they were the one thing that came from Hull that didn’t generally cause repulsion amongst the wider populace.

Without them the charts might just feel a little different. A little.

Instead of a predictable yearly moan about Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2006 list like the pretentious hipster-wannabe I am, I’m just going to link to this, the Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2006: The Drinking Game. Everyone wins. Especially people who think along the lines of this startlingly honest commentary at Coke Machine Glow.

I laughed anyway.

…is what it should of been called. I’ve been a big fan of DJ Shadow for a while. It’s through his collaborations with people like Mos Def that I got  listening to a whole range of hip-hop and other electronic music. To me, Endtroducing is one of the most important albums ever. Shadow has released a hell of a lotta stuff (a great deal of which I’ve listened to) and he always kept it fresh and exciting; working with different MCs and experimenting with different styles. A musician can’t dwell on his first album but to much of his fanbase (who managed to close down his forum due to excessive angst) his new album, The Outsider, is disappointing. Sure; he did something different, but imho it was mediocre at best. Embracing the ‘Hyphy’ bay-area hip-hop sound meant that the complex, lush, alt-hip-hop soundscapes that fans loved Shadow for were replaced by… god knows, basically. It just sounded like any other bling-heavy hip-hop trash and I nearly didn’t bother getting tickets when I found he’d be performing near my new home in Sheffield.

I’m glad I did. Very glad. As were my two mates; Ed (who bullied me into buying tickets) and Ste. We got into the venue; the Sheffield Octagon, in time to catch the last couple of songs by the 1st support. Not worth mentioning here. The 2nd support however went by the name of Akala and from the start seemed determined to put us in a good mood…

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I like Banksy. Okay, sometimes it feels like everything he does is “a pathetic cry for help” but it’s a consistently funny pathetic cry for help. His latest stunt? Replacing copies of Paris Hilton’s new album with a doctored copy. 500 copies apparently, spread across the UK. The changes are a little less than subtle but he’s left the original barcode on so they can still be purchased. The music has been replaced by a basic beat and some choice Paris Hilton ‘catchphrases’. The cd cover and inlay are all doctored and include Paris with a dogs head and some choice wording, my favourites being “Every CD you buy puts me even further out of your league” (qft!) and “Why am I famous? What have I done? What am I for?” Poor Paris. She is taking rather a bit of flak recently. I wonder why that is? Jealousy over her fortune? Her well-photoshopped good looks? Musically I’ve heard worse pop-music but maybe she just personifies all that people hate about the current state of celebrity? Hey, I guess this means Jennifer Lopez can continue unchecked now then.

Picture shown is not the Banksy job, I should warn you that his is a little NSFW. More details in the Indie and thanks to Flickr user Sharl for this wonderful set where you can see Banksy’s alterations in the flesh (as it were).

I’ve just returned from a terribly pleasant weekend in Manchester. It’s a city that’s tantalisingly close, yet is just far away enough from me to be inconvenient to visit. A pal of mine, Ste, is a resident and like me is a recent graduate from the University of Hull. He (or perhaps more accurately; his unbelievably accommodating parents) were kind enough to put me up all weekend (or should that be ‘put up with’?). Aside from visiting Ste, the reason for visits to Manchester usually revolve around one thing: seeing bands.

The band in question this time were biro-artists extraordinaire, ‘Marmaduke Jinks‘. They were friends of Stes, but I’d heard very little of them. Still, they turned out to be one of the most delightful bands I’ve seen for quite a while. I always feel somewhat uncomfortable trying to describe bands by comparison and I know I really shouldn’t do it, but hard cheese. I’m going to; It was all rather Belle & Sebastian meets the Divine Comedy… oh, y’know what? I think I had someone else in mind but I’ve completely forgotten. Sod it. There we go, another clumsy comparison. Regardless, they were pretty damn competent musicians and their songs were genuinely funny. Well, I giggled anyway. I wouldn’t completely rule out some real success, they certainly deserve it (doubly so since we ended up at the bassists house, drinking his beer). Being a fiercely anti-Murdoch sort of chap, I’m not planning of making a habit of this, but here is a link to their MySpace page on which you can listen to some of their songs. Do so. Perhaps whilst sipping some red wine and nibbling on a bit of camembert. That’s a serving suggestion by the way.

The rest of the weekend involved meeting some of the lovely, friendly, but perhaps the slightest bit crazy, folk of Bury. I’ve been a bit nomadic recently (Gloucestershire, Derby, Nottingham), where next? I feel the mighty H calling again….