On No Music Day I listened to Kristin Hersh sing Throwing Muses songs. Tonight she'll be performing her solo repertoire as part of 1980 Forward, a celebration of 25 years of 4AD Records. (4AD = 'forward' pronounced in a rush: starting out with scratchy goth, then the original cathedrals of sound, disrupted by American guitars, exquisitely presented ( Read more... )

The tribute album to John Peel is stuffed with great songs, but putting 'Teenage Kicks' on repeat play totally misses the point. The better tribute, as smallbeds noted last year, is to push our musical comfort zones.

When Janet raved about mashups in her journal, uon provided a pointer to Shitmat, a lunatic (real name Henry) from whose site you can download ( Read more... )

No, I haven't developed blog depression, I've just been busy.

The Cambridge Folk Festival is less scary than Glastonbury because a) with a gate of 12,000 it's a twelfth of the size, b) the drug of choice is mulled cider and c) you can go home every night when you live round the corner. The festival supposedly interprets folk music as 'music for ( Read more... )

The idea of the Glastonbury Festival has always scared me witless with its combination of camping, crowds and hayfever. But this year j4 promised I'd enjoy myself and held my hand through packing, driving and tent-pitching. The 150,000 'students, office workers and menopausal women/men pretending to be hippies' were almost all good-natured rather ( Read more... )

To The Portland Arms in Cambridge, where j4 and I make a hasty choice of pine chips two minutes before the kitchen closes. We have to wait three-quarters of an hour for our food because we've arrived just behind a 'large order'. It's the skinny cool kids on a nearby table with black leather jackets and geek pie haircuts.

They turn out to be VHS Or ( Read more... )

I rushed ( Read more... )

'For the music fan of a certain age, flicking through gig guides has recently become a source of profound discombobulation. Every page delivers a series of cataclysmic jolts from the past: the House of Love, Pop Will Eat Itself, the Wonderstuff, the Wedding Present, Suede, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, they're all back.' [Friday's Guardian] I'm at an ( Read more... )

Kristin Hersh was in London this week, playing two nights at the tiny Camden Barfly with The McCarricks. Martin McCarrick arranged strings for Siouxsie and the Banshees in their later pastoral gothic period. He and his partner Kimberlee accompanied Hersh's acoustic guitar with cello and violin, providing a fuller sound previously heard on the ' ( Read more... )

So, 9 Snogs: a bold attempt to portray the sterility of early 21st century guitar bands through the parallel of nine sex scenes. It opens with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club playing at the Brixton Academy, where boy meets girl and brings her to his dingy flat for an encore. Indie rock alternates with sex for the rest of the film in exactly the way it ( Read more... )

I've always thought of Tom Lehrer as beloved of geeks. He was a mathematician by training, inspiring him to malign the good name of 'Lobachevsky' ('Plagiarise! Let no one else's work evade your eyes! Only please be sure always to call it research.') But really it's the tour de force and party piece 'The Elements' that's to blame.

huskyteer and I went to ( Read more... )