AU Magazine Issue 73

WWW.IHEARTAU.COM

MAY 2011 CAN YOU DIG IT?

MUSIC & REVIEWS

CURRENT AFFAIRS

GIGS & EVENTS

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

FREE

- featuring -

AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR The Gang Mentality

Marching Against The Tide AU reports from the anti-cuts March in London

READY, CASSETTE, GO! Tapes are back, but what the hell for?

Suede Brett Anderson on the reunion of a reenergised band Joe Cornish The first-time director on his new movie and life back with Adam Mojo Fury The NI alt.rockers finally unleash their debut album Limerick Scene Report Life beyond The Rubberbandits

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART | IAN SVENONIUS | TOKIMONSTA | ANDREW TRIMBLE | BELLA UNION | SONIC THE HEDGEHOG | STAR WARS

my inspiration Mona

Well, the pressure’s down the boss ain’t here he gone North for a while they say that vanity got the best of him but he sure left here in style by the way, that’s a cute hat and that smile’s so hard to resist but what’s a sweetheart like you doin’ in a dump like this?

Mona - Mona

album released 16 May

Bob Dylan

Sweetheart Like You

Photography by Colin Lane.

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SWEETHEART LIKE YOU by Bob Dylan.

Published by Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

MAGAZINE ISSUE 73 | CONTENTS EDITORIAL There are some people out there who think that we’re a bit overenthusiastic about Northern Irish music. They’re under the impression that we just love stuff because it is from NI. This is nonsense. It just turns out that there are a fair number of bands that we like that hail from this region, and we like giving them coverage and support. What has happened lately, though, is that the cream of the crop have risen to the point where they’re not really ‘local’ bands any more. They spend most of their time on tour, playing to audiences around the world. There is the occasional hometown show, but they’re invariably on an altogether different level. This is great, and it is how things should be. However, the main problem now is that there hasn’t been a new wave of bands coming through who might take up that mantle in the future. We’re convinced that these bands either out there, or on the way, so we have teamed up with Belfast Calling to present a new regular showcase night called New Blood. The idea behind the event is to focus on brand new, fresh talent. We want to help break new bands and give them oxygen. You never know where the next And So I Watch You From Afar or Two Door Cinema Club might come from. Keep ‘em peeled.. Jonny

UP FRONT – News and views from the world of AU

REVIEWS – Albums, gigs movies and games: The AU Verdict Page 47 – Album Reviews Page 53 – Young Blood Page 54 – Live Reviews

ROLL CALL Publisher / Editor-in-Chief – Jonny Tiernan Editor – Chris Jones Business Manager – Andrew Scott Contributing Editors – Francis Jones, Ross Thompson Album Reviews Sub-editor – Patrick Conboy Photography Manager – Will Neill Design – Tim Farrell Illustration – Mark Reihill.

Photography – Carrie Davenport, Hollie Leddy-Flood, Gary McCall, Suzie McCracken, Will Neill, Vince Philbert, Phil Sharp, Gavin Sloan.

Contributors Kiran Acharya, Josh Baines, Niall Byrne, Patrick Conboy, Brian Coney, Neill Dougan, John Freeman, Lee Gorman, Shane Harrington, Daniel Harrison, James Hendicott, Andrew Johnston, Adam Lacey, Stevie Lennox, Catherine Maguire, Darragh McCausland, Karl McDonald, Edwin McFee, Mike McGrathBryan, Sarah Millar, Kenny Murdock, Lauren Murphy, Steven Rainey, Eamonn Seoige, Jeremy Shields, Dean Van Nguyen.

STUPID THINGS SAID THIS MONTH Shy like deers, but still, you know, raunchy.

Is that The Flower Of Scotland? Oh, no it’s Danny Boy. Oh wait, it’s Amazing Grace.

He smelt like hammers. He wasn’t a nice boy.

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Going Out or Staying In

Page 8 – Hot Topic – Ready, Cassette, Go! Page 10 – Scene Spirit: Limerick Page 11 – Mouthing Off Page 12 – Mojo Fury Page 13 – Season’s Eatings Page 14 – Playing For Laughs Page 16 – The Great Escape / Wii 2 Page 17 – The Arcade Archive Page 18 – Cut O’ Ye! Page 19 – Unknown Pleasures Page 20 – Hero For Hire Page 21 – Label Profile: Bella Union Page 22 – Back Of The Net Page 24 – Incoming: Chrissy Murderbot / EMA

/ Smith Westerns / Tokimonsta

Better to wait for the green man than the ambulance.

Noodles on a Monday, that’s mental talk.

That is the definition of cunt soup.

His personality was flaccid.

FE FEATURES

Must go. Nikki is calling me to come down to watch American Idol.

55 DVD & Game Reviews

REWIND – AU rolls back the years Page 56 – Flashback: Star Wars: The Phantom

Menace Page 57 – Classic Game: Sonic The Hedgehog Page 58 – History Lesson: Ian Svenonius Page 60 – In Pictures: Record Store Day / The

Empire Laughs Back

Think I’ve nailed the editorial.

It’s probably just behind a cloud.

If you’d like to stock AU in your business, or you live in an area where AU isn’t currently stocked, but you’d like to see it available, then drop info@iheartau.com a line. We’ll sort you out.

To advertise in AU Magazine contact the sales team Tel: 028 9032 4888 or via email: andrew@iheartau.com The opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editor or the publisher. Copyright remains with the author / photographer / designer.

Send demos / mail / material to: AU Magazine, 2nd Floor, 21 Ormeau Avenue, Belfast, BT2 8HD For more info contact: info@iheartau.com For all general and editorial enquiries call: 028 9032 4455 AU Magazine graciously acknowledges funding support from the Arts Council Of Northern Ireland

26 A to Z of Festivals Page 30 – And So I Watch You From Afar Page 36 – The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart Page 38 – Joe Cornish Page 40 – Marching Against The Tide Page 44 – Suede

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62 The Last Word: Andrew

Trimble

THE ALBUM

BEASTIE BOYS HOT SAUCE COMMITTEE PT. 2 It’s been a long road back for the Beastie Boys. After an interminable wait since 2004’s To The Five Boroughs (not counting instrumental album The Mix-Up), the rap veterans were all set to unleash Hot Sauce Committee Pts. 1 and 2 in 2009. That was until MCA was diagnosed with throat cancer.

Now recovered, Part 2 (it’s confusing) is out at the start of May. Go and buy it, it rules. And check the video for ‘Make Some Noise’, featuring a galaxy of stars, including Elijah Wood, Seth Rogen and Danny McBride playing the boys circa 1987. CJ

STAYING

IN

Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2 is out on May 2 via EMI.

WAKE WOOD THE DVD

After several false starts (a bit like the false endings of most slasher movies), Hammer Films has finally risen from the grave. Shot in rural Fermanagh and Donegal, Wake Wood has echoes of Sixties classics The Plague Of The Zombies and The Reptile.

The low-grade shocker has it all: crazed dogs, pagan rituals, Timothy Spall… It’s another undead lurch in the right direction for ‘the studio that dripped blood’. AJ

Wake Wood is out now on DVD.

Game Of Thrones THE TV SHOW

Beheadings. Betrayals. Blue-eyed demons with a lust for blood. Oh, and plenty of bonking. Sounds like just another Saturday night in Belfast? Maybe that’s what TV network HBO were thinking when they were scouting locations for their new series, Game of Thrones.

Largely filmed in Norn Iron, the series documents the struggle for power between several nobilities on fictional continent Westeros, and treads a thin line between fantasy, thriller and good ol’ fashioned medieval gore. We’re sold. LM

Game Of Thrones is now showing on Sky Atlantic.

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Fancy a night cocooned at home? This lot should keep you busy…

The Game: Portal 2 THE GAME

THE BOOK

Black Swan

This very welcome follow-up to a surprise bonus on the Orange Box compilation epitomises what makes Valve Corporation releases so justly vaunted: elegant level design, crisp graphics and droll humour turn what is ostensibly a puzzle-based platform game into a funny, brain-bending treat.

The learning curve may at times be demanding but every conundrum is leavened by a genuinely laugh-outloud script delivered with precision comic timing by Stephen Merchant’s nervy ‘personality core’ droid. It’s the ideal tonic to the slew of war-based shooters currently available. RT

THE DVD

Few recent films have been more divisive than this psychotropic thriller. While many questioned its unabashed plagiarism of Suspiria and Lost Highway, hammy acting and exploitative sexual overtones, others adored it for the very same reasons. Essentially the account a young woman’s mental and physical breakdown set to opera, it never makes for comfortable viewing.

In fact, it beggars belief that a film so knowingly outré could permeate the mainstream. At least it won’t be accused of not being interesting. RT

out now on Mac, PC, PS3 & Xbox 360.

released on DVD and Blu-Ray on May 16.

Swamplandia!

NPR Live Concerts

With this compellingly weird yet moving novel, the 29-year-old Karen Russell has announced herself as a writer to notice.

The story centres on a small girl whose crumbling dynastic family were once a big entertainment attraction because of their skills at wrestling alligators.

While various engaging comic plots occur around the Bigtree family, it is the novel’s astonishing prose that ultimately consumes and haunts the reader, conjuring a bubbling world full of glass-eyed reptiles, ripe water flora, occasional oppressive sadness, and fecund splendour gone to seed. DMcC

THE PODCAST

out now, published by Random House.

This could well be the best source of live music on the internet, bar none. NPR supplies content to 800 radio stations across America, and their Live Concerts From All Songs Considered Podcast contains recent gigs from PJ Harvey (pictured), Mount Kimbie, Best Coast, Bright Eyes and far too many others to mention. You can also access the last few years’ worth of podcasts; we particularly recommend Radiohead from 2008 and Broken Social Scene from 2007. Essential listening. AS

Subscribe on iTunes.

BlackBerry PlayBook

THE GADGET

Research In Motion have high hopes for the BlackBerry PlayBook, their take on the tablet computer.

Admittedly, they’re taking a gamble given that they are trying to permeate an already crowded market, not to mention waving goodbye to their trademark buttons, but the strategy might just pay off given the criticism meted to Apple for releasing the iPad 2 with only minimal amendments. The tech load-out includes HD 1080p video playback, a digital camera, software for connecting to a smartphone and WiFi connectivity. RT

The BlackBerry Playbook is out now.

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NO QUARTER GIVEN

FESTIVAL

If there is one thing Belfast does well, it’s festivals. Film festivals, music festivals, cultural celebrations… the city has something for everyone, at most times of the year, and chief among them is the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. Each May, the already buzzing Cathedral Quarter becomes a genuine cultural hub, blending comedy, theatre, music, visual art and pretty much any other kind of cultural mainstay you care to mention. This year is the 12th edition of an event which sits proudly as a jewel in the crown of city’s festival scene.

Running from the April 28 to the May 8, the highlights are many. Musical attractions include Gang Of Four, The Human League, Ska Cubano, James Vincent McMorrow (pictured) and John Grant, but there is much more besides. Comedy from Russell Kane, Scott Capurro and veteran agitators Mark Steel and Jeremy Hardy; spoken word from The Waterboys’ Mike Scott and poet Simon Armitage; screenings of films on William Burroughs, The Magnetic Fields and Lemmy; and a huge range of visual art exhibitions, not to mention a tea dance, art hunt, NI election comedy quiz and the Taste of Polska event if you are after something off the beaten track. Dive in. CJ

GOING OUT

Full details at www.cqaf.com.

GIG

GIG

A Bloody Good Time

Come On Feel The Illinoise!

EVENT

Bullish Behaviour Red Bull’s Flugtag events invariably do an outstanding job of disproving their own slogan: no matter how much energy drink you give these lunatics, they’re not going to fly anywhere. What they will do, though, is dive off a pier in a Superman costume, try to ‘glide’ using the remnants of a two-man tent, or wear feathers… for about half a second. The Dublin event’s point of impact is Dun Laoghaire harbour, and it’s the 100th Flugtag, so expect surprises. JH

Shameless plug warning. We’ve been so ruddy busy with the magazine of late, we haven’t put on any gigs for a while, and frankly we’ve missed it. So, we are glad to announce we will be running New Blood, a series of one-off new band showcases with the guys at Belfast Calling.

The first line-up includes Pixel vs Nanobot, Third Man Theme, one-man wrecking ball Team Horse playing an extremely rare live show, and the excellently named Birthday Sex. It’s good to be back. AS

The Red Bull Flugtag in Dun Laoghaire starts at 11am on May 22.

New Blood takes place at the Spring & Airbrake, Belfast on May 7. £5, doors at 7.30pm.

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Detroit’s multi-instrumentalist and band-leader extraordinaire Sufjan Stevens is one of modern music’s true originals. Stevens made a triumphant return last year with the The Age Of Adz, a diverse record that saw him dabble with many new ideas, including disco and even hip-hop. To date, his magnum opus is undoubtedly Illinois, a sprawling, orchestral, indie-folk album that showcased the staggering breadth of his huge talent. Despite his tender years, Stevens already boasts a considerable back catalogue and is quirky and engaging live performer. Don’t miss the maestro. ES Sufjan Stevens plays The Olympia Theatre, Dublin on May 17.

AU’S PICKS OF THE BEST GIGS, CLUBS AND EVENTS

FESTIVAL

EVENT

FESTIVAL

Photo by Suzie McCracken

Citrus Fresh

How VERY Dare You!

Pig Out

We’re a bit early with this one, but the line-up for the Forbidden Fruit Festival is so ridiculous, we thought we’d give you plenty of notice. Seemingly springing up out of nowhere, this two-day event in the centre of Dublin sees The Flaming Lips (pictured), Yo La Tengo, Battles, Caribou, Jamie xx and most of the Richter Collective roster, playing across three stages. Oh, and Aphex Twin is playing, and we’d go to Timbuktu to see him, except we don’t have to, because he’s playing in Dublin. AS

Fancy the thrill of adventure racing, but would rather stay put in the city? This May, Dublin Dares You will offer adrenaline junkies the unique chance to use Dublin city as their very own adventure playground. Each race will include biking, running, kayaking and even abseiling down a stand of Lansdowne Road stadium. Yikes. There are levels to suit everyone from novice to hardened expert: go on, give it a try! ES

Tucked away near the village of Killinchy, Co. Down, Pigstock Festival continues to go from strength to strength. From 250 people in a marquee in 2008, the festival can now boast a 2500 capacity and a lineup featuring our cover stars And So I Watch You From Afar, LaFaro (pictured), Adebisi Shank, Mojo Fury, Team Fresh and Rams’ Pocket Radio. In all, 32 bands across three stages, plus poetry, spoken word and an open air midnight cinema. A fine way to spend a weekend in the country. CJ

Forbidden Fruit takes place at IMMA, Kilmainham, Dublin on June 4-5

Dublin Dares You takes place in Dublin (of course) on May 2. www.dublindaresyou.com

Pigstock takes place near Killinchy, Co. Down on May 27-28. www.pigstockfestival.co.uk

CINEMA

GIG

DJ SET

Attack The Block

...Killing Is Our Business

Jack Your Body

The QFT is probably our favourite night out in Belfast that doesn’t involve music, and yet again they have delivered. To celebrate a three-year sponsorship deal between Jameson and the QFT, they are showing the new film from AU favourite Joe Cornish (see p.38), Attack The Block, ahead of its general release date. Ever wondered what would happen if aliens invaded a housing estate? ‘Course you have, and thankfully it’s all explained here. AS

The exhaustively named but most excellent Texan rockers ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead return this May for a couple of highly anticipated shows in Belfast and Dublin. A phenomenally energetic live proposition, ...Trail Of Dead often conclude their stage performance by destroying their kit, The Who style. Earlier this year, Austin’s finest released album number seven, Tao Of The Dead, a dynamic alt-rocker to compare with their finest release Source Tags And Codes. If you’ve never had the pleasure, prepare to be blown away. ES

Sometimes you just can’t beat a bit of daft rave. There might not be anything highbrow about Jack Beats’ music or DJ sets, but now and again you just need to leave your pretensions aside and go a wee bit nuts.

Jack Beats are comprised of Plus One (who is also one third of the excellent turntablist outfit The Scratch Perverts) and Beni G. You might know them best for their remix of Project Bassline’s ‘Drop The Pressure’, which Angelos drops on Shooting Stars. Expect big bass, loads of wobble and some mad skills. JT

Jameson presents Attack The Block is on at the QFT, Belfast May 6 at 7pm

... And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead play the Limelight, Belfast on May 24 and Whelan’s, Dublin on May 25.

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Jack Beats play the Stiff Kitten, Belfast on Saturday May 14. Tickets are £8.

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Following the recent flurry of Irish music being released on cassette tape, AU wonders: what is behind the resurgence of a once-dead format?

Words by Dean Van Nguyen

Last January, independent Dublin record label Quarter Inch Collective released their Quompilation, a 13 track collection of local bands that included Hipster Youth, Cloud Castle Lake and Spies performing a variety of selfrecorded cover tracks. From Flok’s acoustic take on Angkorwat’s electro dream ‘Gatecrasher’, to an energetic punk reimagining of Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’ courtesy of Ginola, the compilation rarely misfired.

“The idea came from a digital release of various bands covering songs from the Nineties,” says Quarter Inch Collective head Ian Maleney. “I decided to go with that, but change it up a small bit. I just asked all the bands to play. I didn’t expect anything like what’s happened. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone.”

Unlike most albums of its kind though, Quompilation was only made available physically as a cassette tape. “I went with cassettes because no one else was really doing it,” explains Ian. “They don’t really serve much use and no one can really play them, but people still kind of want them which I found kind of strange and weird.”

Strange and weird, certainly. Since their Eighties heyday, cassettes had seemingly been blown out of the water by higher fidelity options and digital music. But Quarter Inch Collective are not alone in embracing the format. Others are doing it too.

Belfast indie label CF Records has released music by international acts Cloud Nothings, Mt. Eerie and High Places, as well as those closer to home, like Patrick Kelleher, Girls Names and Sea Pinks.

According to CF’s Neil Brogan, putting out their

music on tapes has a number of advantages. “It’s partly aesthetic and partly to do with money,” he explains. “Basically, tapes look cool and are very cheap and easy to produce compared to vinyl. For a small label like CF there’s not much point in doing CDs either as the whole point is to make it limited and special and there’s nothing really special about CDs. So tapes are easy and, yeah, people seem to like them.”

Both labels’ enthusiasm for the format is symptomatic of a larger scale renaissance for the humble cassette tape. Many US-based labels have been proactive in encouraging the revival, including Woodsist (Ducktails/Sun Araw/Moon Duo), Mexican Summer (Ariel Pink/Best Coast/Washed Out) and Scotch Tapes (who bill themselves as “the world’s worst hi-tech music label”). These labels, and dozens others like them, sell cassettes at low prices via their websites. In the case of Woodsist, ordering one of their vinyl LPs costs $15, while a cassette of the same album sets them back only $8. Among the highest profile American artists to put out their music on tape include Dirty Projectors, Deerhunter and Beck.

This all represents a sharp contradiction to the complete digitalisation of media that has overwhelmed the music industry in the past decade.

As much as iPods and Kindles continue to move a massive amount of units, old fashioned enthusiasts are pushing in the opposite direction. With cassette tapes, music is tangible. There’s a product to hold, and a ritual involved in playing it. For many, this is an important part of forming a relationship with the music itself.

A renewed interest in cassette tapes also represents the continuation of an obsession with Eighties pop culture. From the early Eighties to early Nineties cassettes outsold CDs and vinyl and for many kids of that generation, they represented their first

experience owning music. As the last generation of kids to remember life without the internet have come of age, formed bands and started labels, the nostalgia factor involved when choosing cassettes can’t be overlooked. As Neil Brogan makes clear, longing for the ‘good ol’ days’ can make an outdated product seem glorious. “When I was a kid I used to raid my parents’ tapes and listen to the same ones over and over on my Walkman or on a shitty ghetto blaster thing I had. I also used to tape the charts every week like everyone else. Just the songs I liked, all squashed onto the same C90, and taped over every week until it got super hissy. There was a weird kind of purity to it. I sometimes miss the limitations of that medium and general lack of choice I had then.”

While tapes do have limitations (something noise rock bands sometimes use to their advantage), they can provide a more enriching experience than MP3s, vinyl or CDs. Most obviously, you cannot skip to any particular track quickly. As the listener is ‘forced’ to sit through every song, albums are more likely to be listened to in their entirety, as the artist intended. When you stop a tape, you pause the experience indefinitely, meaning it’s less likely the back end tracks will go unnoticed as so often happens when a CD player is powered down.

But while the number of cassette supporters continues to grow, no one is expecting the format to be the white knight that saves floundering record sales. Instead it’s providing a chunky alternative to the stainless steel smoothness of iPods, as well as giving independent labels a product to sell that’s cheap to produce, helping ensure their survival. “I think you have to find your niche and try and stake that out,” says Neil. Cassettes are making a return in a limited, boutique kind of way which is nice but it’s not about to become a mainstream, standard format again. That would be pretty funny!”

PRESS PLAY THREE KEY CASSETTE RELEASES ON IRISH LABELS

Estel – No Fi, Lo Fi, Hi Fi

School Tour & Patrick Kelleher – Split Cassette Double EP

Somadrone – Depth Of Field

[Quarter Inch Collective]

[CF Records]

[Skinny Wolves]

Quarter Inch Collective follow up Quompilation with a 14-track collection of rare and previously unheard songs from Dublinbased prog-rockers Estel, hoarded from the 12 years since the band’s inception.

Children Under Hoof members Gerard Duffy and Patrick Kelleher take a side each for this split solo effort. Its cohesion demonstrates why both men have proved such kindred spirits in the past.

Redneck Manifesto member Neil O’Connor’s third release under his alter-ego Somadrone, Depth Of Field is chilling and atmospheric but loaded with accessible pop hooks.

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SCENE SPIRIT: LIMERICK In the third of our regular reports from around Ireland, Shane Harrington fills us in on the musical delights, and beyond, to be found in the south-west.

THE RUBBERBANDITS LIVE AT DOLAN’S

WINDINGS

Underneath the mainstream veneer of The Cranberries and the comedy rap of The Rubberbandits lies an underground scene steeped in DIY ethics. Today’s roster spans the genres of indie, metal, punk, dubstep and everything in between.

Scene Stalwarts: Steve Ryan, formerly of the powerhouse rock duo Giveamanakick, features in the mesmerising windings, who are causing quite a stir in the industry at the moment. Fox Jaw Bounty Hunters keep the blues rock flag held high with nationwide tours and continuous radio play. Fresh from supporting Bob Dylan at Thomond Park, Last Days Of Death Country deliver powerhouse rock at its finest.

Similarly, bands like Super Model Twins, Seneca and Walter Mitty and the Realists have all toured internationally, with some even making quite the buzz in the States; We Should Be Dead received heavy airplay on KROQ, hosted by Rodney Bingenheimer who was responsible for breaking the Ramones among others. Limerick can also boast a blossoming metal scene, including the Metal After Mass events which often host over 40 bands at one gig.

Newcomers: You could fill a phone book with the names of the Limerick bands that have come and gone over the years, but a core contingent of dedicated noisemakers have kept the ball rolling throughout.

Emerging last year, math-punk trio We Come In Pieces [DOI – the author’s band] have gone from strength to strength touring the UK and supporting acts like Frank Turner and And So I Watch You From Afar. Pop-rockers Very Angry Girls (V.A.G.) played at the Milk festival alongside Right Said Fred and Alexandra Burke last year, while Theme Tune Boy, aka Niall Quinn of the infamous Hitchers, has been dishing out his own brand of hometown rock.

Newcomers Dead Read Light have been rocking the indie circuit nationwide for the past couple of years. On the dance end of things, Sixs has been pleasing house party goers and clubbers alike with his blend of dubstep and dreamy electro tunes.

Venues and clubs: A feature of the Limerick music scene is its evernomadic rock bar. What once was The Savoy became The High Stool, which then morphed into Riddler’s before taking a quick stop off at The Globe and finally landing in Baker’s which has recently closed. As a result the gig facilitation situation is somewhat in limbo. Down through the

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FABER STUDIOS years, everyone from Fugazi and Bruce Springsteen to Tubelord and Adebisi Shank have played at one of these venues at one point or another. Further downtown, Dolan’s Warehouse has hosted bigger acts such as Josh Ritter and Mumford and Sons.

However, with bands and promoters having to regroup it remains to be seen who will take the reins from Baker’s as the go-to gig venue.

Places to go: Limerick’s cultural strengths lie in its ever expanding DIY art scene. Operating in a similar way to the Berlin blueprint, the last two years have seen the emergence of a large amount of artistrun galleries and studios, some of which have begun to start hosting sound art and more obscure noise acts. New record shop/cafe Beats Working complements Limerick’s blossoming dubstep scene beautifully, while the new alternative cafes, Epic and Kaos provide the city with cool chill-out spots.

But if it’s a messy night you’re looking for, look no further than Costello’s Tavern, where the tunes are loud and the beer is probably one you nicked off someone who wasn’t looking.

Andrew Johnston vents his considerable spleen for your pleasure

You’ve got to laugh. Unless, of course, you’re an easily upset member of the Northern Ireland public. Yes, once again an audience member – a frontrow audience member, no less – has taken offence at remarks by a stand-up comedian. This time it’s moon-faced pun merchant Jimmy Carr, who has outraged a disabled Ulster woman who claims he called her a “cripple” at a Belfast Waterfront gig last month and joked that a disabled person had “never walked out of one of [his] shows”.

Needless to say, robbed of their context and intent, Carr’s comments could seem cruel. But as someone who was at the show in question, allow me to fill you in. Carr had asked for a volunteer from the crowd to pick a subject for him to make a joke about. A lad stuck his hand up and said: “Cripples”. Even Carr seemed taken aback, but turned the situation around by indicating towards the disabled section and asking, “Like them?”. He then enquired if disabled people were “still using that word”.

Never mind that anyone going to a Jimmy Carr show must surely know that his material can be as close to the bone as it comes, or that the aggrieved party had bought a front-row ticket (and yes, there are other disabled sections in the hall). The whole bit of schtick was clearly intended to humiliate the volunteer for his use of the word “cripples”. Furthermore,

had Carr brushed the incident aside and chosen not to include disabled people in his material, it would have been properly discriminatory.

In a recent, similar row involving Scotland’s ‘Mr Offensive’ Frankie Boyle, an audience member whose son has Down’s syndrome complained that Boyle’s jokes about the condition had made her feel humiliated. Yet the woman also admitted that she had laughed at his gags about cancer and AIDS, meaning she only cared when he made fun of something that directly affected her. I wonder if the lady at Carr’s show was wetting herself at his many rape and paedophilia jokes.

In comedy, either everything is fair game, or nothing is. Depending on context, content and intent, we should be able to laugh about anything – thin people, fat people, tall people, short people, old people, children, midgets, amputees, addicts, cancer sufferers, AIDS victims, gay people, straight people, single mums, mothers-in-law, black people, white people, Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Germans, Jordan and, yes, disabled people.

But let’s give the last word to Belfastbased comedian and wheelchair user Johnny McCarthy, who, when he heard about the Carr hoo-ha, simply shrugged and quipped: “Laughing about disability? I’m not standing for this.”

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THE FURIOUS FOUR Mojo Fury on their long-awaited debut album – and playing for Dale Winton

Photo by Gavin Sloan

It’s been seven years in the making for one of the torchbearers in the Northern Irish music scene, but finally Mojo Fury have a debut album to their name, as well as a serious amount of media buzz outside of NI, with positive reviews and magazine features across the Irish Sea becoming the norm. How do the band feel about their newfound exposure?

“It’s bullshit, really,” says bassist James Lyttle, “but we’re buzzed. It’s really nice to get the support.”

It’s about time too; in truth, Visiting Hours Of A Travelling Circus has been ready and mastered since 2009. “We’ve been waiting for Gerry [Morgan, drums] for seven years,” says former drummer and current frontman Mike Mormecha. Indeed, after Mike turned his attentions to the front of the stage, the band failed to secure a permanent drummer with Peter McAuley – now of Rams’ Pocket Radio – filling in for a brief tenure before new sticksman Morgan signed up.

With a gestation period of such geological proportions, you would imagine that boredom would set in, playing the same songs year after year. Not so, says James. “The music is constantly evolving,” he insists. “Even when we play them now, they’re different.”

leading to comparisons to Biffy Clyro, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine and At The Drive-In. But this is pure circumstance, as Mike admits. “I don’t actually even like At The DriveIn so it’s quite funny when we’re compared to something we aren’t necessarily fans of.”

“If we’re listening to jazz, we’ll play it jazzy, and if we’re listening to techno…” Mike tails off.

“Whatever Gerry can handle,” chimes in guitarist Ciaran McGreevy.

As for the future, Ciaran reveals: “We have plans in the pipeline for outside of the UK. Nothing’s set in stone yet but… ideas. And we’re touring the UK with And So I Watch You From Afar a week before our album launch.” And can we expect the second album to take another seven years? Not a chance, says James. “We’d like to have it done within the year, around this time next year.” Stevie Lennox

The band have toured with post-rock acts Oceansize and Maybeshewill, begging the question of how they went down with that genre’s notoriously cynical fans.

“The crowd reacted well and sat back to listen and appreciate us,” says Mike, “I think we went down well.” But of course you can’t expect everyone to be a fan… “Dale Winton actually showed up to one of our gigs because he’s a friend of Mike’s dad” laughs Ciaran, “but he really didn’t get it.”

Visiting Hours… is a diverse beast – angular, jagged guitar lines juxtaposed with dense, heavy riffs, with a dose of industrial and early 2000s post-hardcore,

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Mojo Fury play the Spring & Airbrake, Belfast on May 14, Crane Lane Theatre, Cork on May 15, Twisted Pepper, Dublin on May 16 and Pigstock Festival, Co. Down on May 26. www.myspace.com/mojofuryband

SEASON’S EATINGS What better May meal can there be than roast lamb? Read on for an immensely tasty – and a little bit devious – way to enjoy some of our finest native produce.

This is a bit of a sneaky recipe, in that it smuggles something that a lot of people find unpleasant (anchovies, shhh don’t tell them) into a dish that most people enjoy (roast lamb). I’ll get around to the anchovy smuggling later, but first a few words in praise of Ireland’s finest meat product – our native lamb. Irish lamb is worldbeating. The exact same stuff that gets hauled out for Sunday roast in our nation’s kitchens ends up trembling in fussy little cubes in three-starred French restaurants.

It’s generally farmed to very high standards and, unlike chicken or pork, most fresh Irish lamb will be consistently top-notch, especially at this time of year. There is no better

time than late spring/early summer for a bit of lamb.

Lamb is, admittedly, expensive. But a lamb roast need not break the bank if you opt for the tougher shoulder joint instead of the neck or the rack. And here’s the great thing – when cooked slowly and with the right attention the shoulder delivers far more flavour.

In fact, I’ll stick my neck out and say it is my favourite piece of meat from any part of any animal to roast. There is just such a staggeringly flavoursome quality to it. Ah, the way it looks sitting on a big dish of sliced browned spuds, studded with garlic and rosemary spears. Roast perfection, thy name is lamb.

Roast Shoulder of Lamb with Anchovies The first rule of roast shoulder of lamb with anchovies is that we never, ever, tell the guests about the anchovies. Well, okay, maybe afterwards for a laugh. But never before, because, guess what, they will never know, and you can chortle smugly to yourself as anchovy-phobes pound you on the back and wonder out loud about what gave your dish that certain je ne sais quoi.

Serves 4-5 as a main course

WORDS BY DARRAGH MCCAUSLAND PHOTO BY HOLLIE LEDDY-FLOOD

34- 36 Bank Street, Belfast, BT1 1HL

T: +44 (0)28 9024 8544 W: www.mourneseafood.com

40g of butter

1 medium shoulder of lamb (bone in - 2kg should do)

A few sprigs of rosemary

1.5kg rooster potatoes peeled and cut into thin slices (about 1cm thick)

5 anchovy fillets

4 medium shallots cut into slices to mix through the potatoes

THERE’S THIS LITTLE PLACE...

Mourne Seafood

For the lamb:

Belfast fans of the fruits of the sea should check out Mourne Seafood, a cosy little place nestled away in the city centre. First though, you’ll have to run the gauntlet of the alley between Tesco and Primark which is often home to a few sozzled ‘characters’. Afterwards you’ll be rewarded by a fine little seafood restaurant with a fishmonger’s up front. The menu places a strong emphasis on their specials which change with the tide. After a recent visit, a certain AU writer pronounced the fried hake with a lentil, chorizo and mussel soup as “godly”, no less.

Surprisingly affordable oysters also feature prominently on the menu.

The slippery little guys are done a number of ways, so it might be just the place for an amorous encounter.

For the anchovy paste: 1 tablespoon of olive oil The juice of half a lemon

5 cloves of garlic cut into little spikes (about three per clove)

1 clove of garlic

Grease a large roasting tin and assemble the potatoes and sliced shallots over the surface, while studding them with butter, all the while adding a little seasoning. Then take the shoulder joint and stab deep incisions into the surface at well-spaced points (as if the poor creature hasn’t suffered enough...). Make enough of these to fit a shard of garlic and a small sprig of rosemary into each.

rub the paste all over the skin of the lamb making sure to coat the full surface thinly.

Now it is time to put the anchovy paste together, and don’t forget the first rule of lamb with anchovies at this crucial point; you may have to remove nosey dinner guests from your kitchen. The paste is easily done by lashing all the ingredients into mortar and pestle which is old school and satisfying – or, less satisfyingly, by blitzing them in a food processor. Once this is done, tenderly

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A good sprinkling of salt and pepper

Pop the whole lot into an oven and cook for about 25 minutes at 210 degrees Celsius to brown the lamb, then lower the temperature to 150 degrees and cook for a further two hours.

After this time has passed the anchovy paste will have melted into a faint dreamy savour with nary a hint of the ocean about it, and the lamb will be tender the whole way through.

Rest the meat for ten minutes, carve, and enjoy with a nice glass of Rioja.

Some people serve this dish with added vegetables but the Italians would just let it speak for itself. I’d agree, as I normally do, with the Italians.

PLAYING FOR LAUGHS Have NI comics got the Beeb factor?

The BBC New Comedy Award is back, and Belfast is getting in on the act. Billed as “arguably the most prestigious new talent competition in the UK” – well, it’s certainly a step up from any of Simon Cowell’s shenanigans – the revived contest hopes to uncover some of the next generation of funnymen and women.

If this all sounds rather daunting, well, you don’t get into stand-up if you’re afraid of a few knocks. One such glutton for punishment is Strabane man Ruairi Woods, who at the time of going to press was waiting to hear if he had made it through to the heats. Such is the closeness of cards to chests in the comedy scene – or perhaps because a lot of performers turn their noses up at X Factor-style antics – Ruairi is the only would-be competitor AU could uncover. “As far as I know it’s just me, mate,” he laughs.

Past winners include Rhod Gilbert, Alan Carr, Josie Long and Marcus Brigstocke, and in this game it also pays to come second, third or even last. Runners-up number Sarah Millican, Russell Howard, Justin Lee Collins, Peter Kay, Chris Addison and Lee Mack.

The 21-year-old jokester is trying not to let nerves get the better of him – and his nonchalance is convincing. “It’s just another gig,” he shrugs. “The heat isn’t really a true reflection of your abilities as a comedian. Sometimes, onstage, the comedian will solely think of winning or progressing, instead of making people laugh and having a good time, which is fundamentally what comedy is all about.”

Successful schtick-meisters will be invited to punt their puns at heats in eight cities across the UK, including Belfast on May 17. Twelve acts will then make it through to the semi-finals – 10 chosen by the judges, two by audience vote – and the top three will get to strut their stuff at the live final, hosted

by Patrick Kielty and broadcast on Radio 2. The final will also feature a set by one of the esteemed previous winners.

With many of the more established Northern Ireland stand-ups having graduated from talent contests – Micky Bartlett, Sean Hegarty and Terry Keyes all made their names on BBC One Northern Ireland’s Find Me The Funny – you might expect fierce competitiveness. Not so, according to Woods:

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“I’ve noticed that many of the more experienced comedians are always at the ready for advice and contacts. Everyone wants to do well, but not at the expense of others.”

Danny McCrossan, a Derry-based stand-up and comedy promoter, takes a more reserved view of proceedings. “I did one of these shows a few years ago, and they edited my footage to make me look like a total asshole,” he grimaces. “I guess if you want to retain any sense of dignity or integrity, you must stay away from these types of show. My advice to all aspiring comics would be to stick to the comedy clubs, hone your act in front of a live audience, and love the craft, not crave celebrity. If you want to gain recognition for dishing out bland, uninspiring fare, MasterChef hold auditions every year.” Andrew Johnston THE BELFAST HEAT OF THE BBC NEW COMEDY AWARD TAKES PLACE AT THE EMPIRE MUSIC HALL ON MAY 17.

WWW.BBC.CO.UK/RADIO2/COMEDY/ NEW-COMEDY-AWARD-2011

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ESCAPE ACTS

Will The Wii 2 Rock You?

Brighton beware: the Irish are coming!

Nintendo’s new console is almost here, but does it have the right games?

VILLAGERS

Mid-May sees the annual The Great Escape festival hit Brighton on the south coast of England. Attracting new and established names from all over the world, it’s best to think of it as a sort of ‘South By Southwest-on-Sea’ – journos, label representatives, liggers and of course fans can spend a happy three days ducking in and out of the resort’s venues, soaking up the sun if the weather plays ball and perhaps unearthing the Next Big Thing.

For the sixth year running, the festival is running what they term a ‘Lead Partner Country’ scheme – PR speak for an official hook-up with a country whose musical exports would benefit from the kind of platform the festival provides. This year, it’s Ireland’s turn, and a whole host of the island’s brightest and best will be making the trip to sunny Sussex – Villagers (pictured), Fight Like Apes, Funeral Suits, And So I Watch You From Afar, James Vincent McMorrow, Heathers, Fionn Regan, Rhob Cunningham, Halves and Cap Pas Cap. Kat Morris, the festival’s Operations Manager, explains further. “We showcase the best new artists from all over the world,” is how she puts it. “Every year we profile the music from one country over the rest, with a view to giving more artists from that country the chance to perform in front of industry and fans at The Great Escape.”

We are in good company – in previous years the spotlight has fallen on Canada, France, Norway, New Zealand and, in 2010, Australia.

According to Kat, the benefits for the chosen country are legion. “The businesses that participate are able to access new audiences and generate new opportunities off the back of performing or attending,” she says, while the artists that go and play can benefit too. “They get an increased profile in the UK and internationally,” says Kat. “They will be marketed to potential buyers, mainly fans and the music industry.”

A quick look at the line-up tells you how big a deal it is for the Irish artists, especially the less established ones.

Headliners DJ Shadow, Sufjan Stevens and Friendly Fires are joined by over 300 artists across more genres than you can stick a rolled-up copy of AU at, including the likes of Gang Gang Dance, DELS, Yuck, SBTRKT, The Naked And Famous, Okkervil River, and even John Cooper Clarke. Drool.

The future’s bright… The future’s in Brighton. Chris Jones www.escapegreat.com

Five years ago the Wii was released in a blaze of publicity and grandiose claims that its motion-controlled technology would revolutionise the home console market. To be fair, Nintendo’s white box fell far short of that, and merely whetted gamers’ appetites rather than satisfying them.

The main problem, as is often the case with a Nintendo product, was a poor line-up at launch.

One could argue that you are entitled to rest on your laurels if you’ve invented the Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Kirby and Donkey Kong franchises but there is no denying that this current generation suffers from a dearth of interesting titles. This should explain why Wii sales continue to plummet whilst its rival consoles remain in rude health.

However, Nintendo did achieve the unthinkable with the Wii: they made videogaming, previously viewed as a solitary, socially backwards pastime, appealing to the entire family. The slew of ‘party game’ titles brought parents and children together in a way consoles had never done before.

This helped to diminish the persistent notion that games are a particularly insidious and dangerous social evil.

Further, the Wii, along with the cash cow that is the DS handheld, is incredibly popular amongst teenage girls and middle-aged women, challenging the stereotype that such things are not to be cradled by a lady’s dainty fingers. It is a bold step

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forward for a company who once advertised The Ocarina Of Time with the slogan, “Wilst thou get the girl?

Or play like one?”. That aside, purists still baulk at the notion that videogames should encourage you to get off your backside and jump about like a cretin, and the relative failure of Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move would support that claim.

Nonetheless, it is expected that Nintendo will be unveiling the Wii 2 at this year’s E3 conference in Los Angeles. The web is currently bristling with tittle-tattle about 1080p resolutions, HD visuals to rival, say, the stunning Uncharted 3, touchscreen controllers along the lines of iPads and other tablets, backwards compatibility and so on. As we have seen before, such grandstanding is a tried and tested way of pre-selling technology which may or may not exist, but the hard truth is that Nintendo must learn from previous mistakes. Superpowered hardware is all very well and good but it is virtually worthless if you don’t have the titles to run on it. It’s called a ‘games console’ for a reason, you know. Ross Thompson

THE ARCADE ARCHIVE The classic games we’d like to see remade…

Words by Mike McGrath-Bryan

16-bit gaming classic Streets of Rage was recently remade from scratch by a community of dedicated fans, encompassing every aspect of the original fighting trilogy and producing a phenomenal piece of work. But what else could be done with the forgotten franchises of yore...?

ELITE (BBC Acorn, C64, Spectrum, NES & many, many others) World of Warcraft? Pah. Without Bell and Braben’s space-faring epic Elite, quests and strategy in gaming wouldn’t exist. Placed in space with nothing to lose, Commander Jameson ascends the ranks however he pleases: piracy, mercenary work, trade or even mining. With the ability to upgrade your ship no end, interstellar travel and ferocious dogfights, this truly set the bar for gaming grandeur. Eight galaxies, 256 planets each, with a compelling plot and a structure that defined ‘open-ended’, all in 2 kilobytes of memory? One can only imagine how it would be realised today...

ROAD RASH (Megadrive, PS1) Another obsession for (less enlightened) corners of the videogame industry is violence. And back when EA cared about delivering the goods, they delivered with not only brute force, but a cheeky smile with Road Rash, a biking game that revelled in bloodlust, with vehicular combat a staple of gameplay. Kicks, punches and weapons like crowbars and nunchucks could be used with cartoonish joy on the way to being king of the road. The PS1 version in particular bore a toothless grin, with gleefully grotesque artwork and a filthy soundtrack from the likes of Therapy?, Soundgarden and Hammerbox. In an industry deprived of that certain black humour, a Road Rash reprisal would certainly be cause for celebration.

RIVAL SCHOOLS: UNITED BY FATE (Arcade, PS1) The inspiration for the naming of both the New York band and their first album, Capcom’s 3D effort was masterful. Pitting high-school gangs against each other in urban Tokyo, each attempting to unravel

the disappearance of the town’s big boss, the game’s storyline often diverts into school-age fantasy in the best Seventies manga tradition, with a joyously fluid fighting engine that would still give today’s pugilists a thorough workout. Possessing colour and style all its own, with ridiculous combinations and team moves that make most anime look tethered and humble by comparison, there’s no denying that in today’s Street Fighter-friendly mainstream, this would go down a treat.

TOMBI! (PS1) A game often asked about, venerated and discussed in hushed tones but rarely ever actually found, Whoopee Camp’s mongrel 2D platformer/ RPG is a demented slice of genius. Jungle boy Tombi finds his land overtaken by evil pigs and sets out on a quest to flush out their influence, on the way learning to relate to others, making friends with missions of charity and good deeds. With pig-tackling platforming as enjoyable as any Mario or Sonic, it’s the sneaky riffs on RPG tropes that seal the deal. Though the game has long been the subject of admiration, it appears Sony weren’t arsed at all, rendering it hairpullingly difficult to find. Here’s hoping they pull their finger out and at least give us a reissue.

BAND BAND MATHS MATHS NO.9: NO.1: Odd U2 Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All 34% - Wu-Tang Clan 27% - Middle class hipster fans 16% - Twitterrhoea 14% - Misogyny 9% - A “therapeutic centre” in American Samoa

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Cut O’ Ye! AU singles out the stylish for pictures and probing

Name: Gavin White Age: 27 Occupation: Chef From: Belfast Biggest fashion disaster: White sunglasses First record bought: Michael Jackson – Dangerous

Name: Lucy Liddell Age: 21 Occupation: Student From: Belfast Biggest fashion disaster: ‘Vintage gems’ from Mum’s wardrobe First record bought: S Club 7

Name: Amy Kernaghan Age: 16 Occupation: GCSE student From: Newtownards Biggest fashion disaster: All things transparent First record bought: Avril Lavigne

Name: Victoria Lambert Age: 20 Occupation: Primary School Assistant From: Wolverhampton Biggest Fashion disaster: Big, black, baggy clothes First record bought: Backstreet Boys

Name: Ashley Elliott Age: 25 Occupation: Doctor From: Belfast Biggest fashion disaster: A green Mickey Mouse jumper First record bought: Oasis – ‘Wonderwall’

Name: Michelle McNicholl Age: 25 Occupation: Human resources From: Portadown Biggest fashion disaster: Fluorescent pink combat trousers First record bought: Spice Girls

Photos by Will Neill. Words by Catherine Maguire and Sarah Millar.

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SEA SESSIO

NS

SURF MUS IC FESTI VAL

UNKNOWN PLEASURES Niall Byrne digs deep to uncover the freshest new music

EP – Clams Casino While rappers get their swag on in public, the original producer of the tune often gets forgotten about. New Jersey producer Michael Volpe has been trying to rectify that by leaving comments on YouTube videos of the tracks he produced for Lil B and Soulja Boy. The 23 year-old’s blownout, stoned-sounding ambient rap instrumentals are thankfully getting the plaudits they deserve. A free download of his instrumentals raised his profile and an EP released through the rising New York label Tri Angle in June should seal his rep.

- twitter.com/clammyclams

Blog Buzz – I Am The Cosmos Ross Turner is often seen behind the drums for Irish artists like Lisa Hannigan, Jape and his own band One Day International but the last couple of years have seen him dabble in wistful electronic compositions.

Now a duo alongside Cian Murphy, ‘Dislocate’ is the latest tune from the project, and the first to feature vocals.

It’s got a DFA Records disco-funk strut and a classic sound.

- soundcloud.com/iamthecosmos/dislocate

Compilation Headed For The Ditch: A Tribute To Neil Young Even if you check out that link below to look at the artwork featuring a fresh faced reminder that the now craggy-faced Neil Young was once a wee lad with short hair, that would be enough. Beyond that though, there is lovingly compiled tribute to the man put together by blogger Universal Electricity featuring covers of Young’s songs from Teen Daze, Ghost Animal, Quilt, Emily Reo, Foxes In Fiction and a load of other decent alternative U.S bands you’ve never heard of.

- bit.ly/ditchyoung 7” - Love Inks Two minutes is all Austin’s Love Inks need to get you on their side with their slinky direct dreamy pop single ‘Blackeye’. The 7” single was released through Hell Yes! In late March and suggests that their debut album coming this month via City Slang/Hell Yes! will be one to get familiar with.

- bit.ly/loveinks Blog Buzz – The Weeknd R&B is having a renaissance y’all! A genre normally known for its syrupy love declarations, bump and grind slow jams and R Kelly’s batshit crazy sex metaphors has been infected by modern electronica. The result can be heard on Toronto duo The Weeknd’s free mixtape: sleazy dub-bass lines, twisted vocals, Beach House samples, spaced-out synth chords and some of the most inventive production to come out of R&B in yonks.

- the-weeknd.com

ZIGGY MARLEY BELL X1 . VILLAGERS

THE GO! TEAM . SKATALITES GRANDMASTER FLASH . NORMAN JAY CHARLES BRADLEY . GEMMA HAYES THE JAPANESE POPSTARS ROY SEVEN . BRIAN DEADY FRED . O EMPEROR . DELAYS BOXTY . HAM SANDWICH BITCHES WITH WOLVES . CODES THE DANGER IS . CASHIER NO. 9 WINDINGS

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MINUTES

RIPTIDE MOVEMENT . FUNERAL SUITS ROOFTOP ANTHEM . HAT N CARA BONA

FIDE

FEDERATION

THE KANYU TREE . SURF CHIXXX 24-26

JUNE

2011

BUNDORAN

TICKETS 79.95 EURO . WWW.SEASESSIONS.COM

WWW.NIALLER9.COM

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HMV STORES NATIONWIDE

HERO FOR HIRE Why the comics industry needs superhero movies more than ever

THOR

As we hurtle towards the summer months, there are two words that are set to divide comics fans around the world: superhero movie. Now, depending on your viewpoint, these big budget blockbusters are either as essential eating, sleeping and Googling for photos of Emma Stone dressed as Gwen Stacy, or they’re the equivalent of having to snuggle up beside James Corden in a single bed. In other words, they are to be avoided at all costs. I side with the former opinion, and here’s why.

Simply put, anything that helps shed light on the medium can only be a good thing. You see, comic books are by far one of the most misunderstood cultural phenomena in the history of modern civilisation (yes, even more so than Girls Aloud). For some bizarre reason, a lot of people who haven’t been lucky enough to experience graphic literature firsthand tend to instantly write off a form of story-telling that is nearly as old as the world itself. Even worse, they snobbishly turn their noses up at a centuries-old industry built on innovation, constant creativity and subversion.

Here’s a brief, first-hand example of the kind of misguided, moronic bollocks comics fans still have to regularly put up with. About six months ago, I spent a week in New York City with a bunch of other journalists from around the UK and Ireland.

Our hosts were the good people of DC Comics and they were giving us a sneak peak of the Batman Live arena show. Now, to cut a long story short, one unnamed scribe from a notoriously conservative daily newspaper in England couldn’t get their head around why people read titles like Wonder Woman or The Flash in the first place. Rather depressingly, this closed-minded character even assumed that the medium was solely about spandex and super heroics and flat-out refused to listen to your humble

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correspondent when I tried to recommend some of the more adult-oriented comics such as Y The Last Man, Alias, Preacher, Eightball and a multitude more. “Adult comics?” they shrieked, “You mean porn?”

This is the kind of losing battle comics fans face on an almost daily basis, but with the advent of characters like Blade, Iron Man and Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead fast becoming household names, public opinion is slowly starting to change. Yeah, the first X-Men film sucked ass and the people behind the Fantastic Four franchise dropped the ball faster than a Spurs goalkeeper, but they have helped our much maligned sub-culture infiltrate the mainstream and that can only be a good thing in a climate of dwindling sales and cancellations.

For me, saying that you don’t like comics because you find Superman a bit silly is like claiming you don’t enjoy music because U2 are boring. It’s a ridiculous statement. There is a whole other world of literature out there that millions of people aren’t aware of, but hopefully the new Thor, Captain America and Green Lantern films prompt people to dive in sooner rather than later and find out for themselves that comics aren’t something to be afraid of. Fingers crossed, eh? Edwin McFee

LABEL PROFILE: BELLA UNION

CASHIER NO.9

BEACH HOUSE

MIDLAKE Founded: 1997 Based: London Run by: Simon Raymonde Key Acts: Fleet Foxes, Midlake, Explosions In The Sky,

Cashier No.9.

When Belfast’s Cashier No. 9 release their debut album, To The Death Of Fun, next month on Bella Union, they will join the ranks of such esteemed artists as Fleet Foxes, Laura Veirs, Midlake and Beach House on a record label birthed by two Cocteau Twins. AU talks to label boss Simon Raymonde about Bella Union’s commitment to “utter awesomeness”.

“I am looking for the ‘fuck me!’ factor.”

Words by John Freeman

Why did you set up Bella Union?

The label was set up as a vehicle for my thenband Cocteau Twins to release its own records.

We didn’t like record labels much so thought we should have our own, and then we wouldn’t have anyone to argue with, other than ourselves, of course. Within a few months of setting the label up, designing a logo and buying a desk, the band broke up, so we had a label and no bands. Having nothing else on that week, we had a few friends like The Dirty Three and Françoiz Breut who were looking for labels, and foolishly they thought we were a good bet.

What do you look for in an artist before signing them?

Only their utter awesomeness. I’ve released classical records, hip-hop records, space rock records, pop records, electronic records, soundtracks, but the most successful ones have been from artists who people may pigeonhole into a ‘folky’ bracket. I am looking for the ‘fuck me!’ factor. If a band blows me away, and affects me in more ways than just being impressed by their playing ability, then my interest is piqued. After this, I am looking for good people – people I would be proud to work my bollocks off for.

What’s been the most important Bella Union release?

Probably the Lift To Experience album [The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads] in 2001, as the record’s very arrival was borne out of adversity.

Having signed the band in Texas after an apocalyptic show in Austin amid a thunderstorm, I returned to the UK to mix the album myself at our studio, only to find myself greeted by the receivers who as each day went by were coming around with vans and loading all the studio equipment up to be taken away. Somehow, by working 20

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hour days, I mixed the album and got it out there.

The record was astonishing and was received ecstatically by the press.

How did the success of Fleet Foxes impact your aspirations for the label?

Fleet Foxes’ success signalled our ability to not just sign wonderful artists but also sell half a million records in the UK alone. Also, it’s a privilege to work with such adorable human beings.

Are there any artists you had a chance to sign, but didn’t, and have lived to regret missing out on?

No regrets, but I turned down Martha Wainwright and Antony and the Johnsons. I wanted to sign Washed Out but someone else won that race. I don’t really like to be in competition with any other labels for a band; there are enough bands out there to go round.

Cashier No.9 have recently signed to Bella Union. What was it about them that interested you?

They are not like any other Bella Union band.

For a start, they’re not American. David Holmes called me up about them. He produced the album and has put his heart and soul into it. The songs are fabulous, the boys are lovely too and feedback here so far is excellent. Hopefully they are another band who will be around for a long, long time.

What other new Bella Union artists are you excited about?

Lanterns On The Lake, despite their youth, have already played two shows that I’d rate in my top 10 shows of all time, which is probably all you need to know. They make me weep uncontrollably, in a good way. www.bellaunion.com

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU(TUBE) Instru-mental

Words by Neill Dougan

The basics of the rock n’roll band are thus: one or more guitars, a bass, and some drums. That’s essentially all you need to begin creating your very own unholy racket. But for some adventurous musical types, this rudimentary set-up is far from ideal. These far-sighted visionaries (or ‘weirdos with too much free time’, if you will) prefer instead to either radically alter the set up of existing instruments or even to invent their own musical devices…

BASS-IC INSTINCT

STICK WITH IT

HARPING ON

A bass guitar has four strings. That is a fact. Ok, if you want to be a fancy show-off you might go one better and nab yourself a five-string affair. Six strings is really pushing it. So what, then, are we to make of this monstrosity? An 11-string bass guitar, as played by Jean Baudin of avant-garde California types Nuclear Rabbit. Why he has chosen to display his prowess by playing the theme from Super Mario Brothers is anyone’s guess, but one thing’s for sure: Guigsy from Oasis would never have got up to shenanigans like these. We miss Guigsy.

Starting a band is a tricky business. Finding decent guitar, bass and keyboard players, who you don’t actively hate, can be a torturously time-consuming process. But with the strange and wonderful Chapman Stick, these problems can be a thing of the past, as the unusual ten (or twelve) stringed instrument can produce bass, guitar and keyboardtype sounds all at once – as beautifully demonstrated here by noted Stick-man Rob Martino. No need for those pesky bandmates at all! Although admittedly it does look like it might be a bugger to learn.

Have you ever seen a harp? Bit large and unwieldy, isn’t it? How elfin songstress Joanna Newsom transports hers is a mystery (although our best guess is ‘With the aid of a troupe of put-upon, hapless underlings’). A much more compact solution is to simply graft a harp onto your acoustic guitar.

Of course! Sure, it might look like the result of a botched gene-splicing experiment by a musicallyminded crazed scientist, but – as demonstrated here by virtuoso guitar-picker Andy McKee – it sure sounds real purdy like.

- TINYURL.COM/11STRINGBASS

- TINYURL.COM/CHAPMANSTICK

- TINYURL.COM/GUITARHARP

WEIRD WIDE WEB

Words by Karl McDonald

Being to mothers of disappearing internet cult hit rappers what Woodward and Bernstein were to Richard Nixon, Complex Magazine’s Ernest Baker found Odd Future’s absent 17-year-old talisman Earl. Rapping in the dirtiest, most surreal language possible about sexual assault at high school wasn’t popular with Earl’s ma, so she sent him to military school. In Samoa. Marvel at the web of lyrical hints, Twitter crypticism and innocuous Facebooking that Baker unfurls to reach the truth.

Everybody loves Lego and, given that this magazine’s extended title has the word ‘Alternative’ in it, we’re going to operate on the assumption that everyone loves Brooklyn too. Expressing a fondness for BK’s streets that seems to extend beyond simple aesthetics to a strange, plasticky version of its soul, Jonathan Lopes has spent the past several years building a huge Lego landscape taking in bridges, subways, crumbling warehouses, brownstones and plenty more.

Excitingly for those with preposterous amounts of disposable income, American holiday property rental site airbnb.com has teamed up with Xnet, leaders in the hitherto presumed-to-be-a-joke Rent A Village sector, to provide a rather enticing new option. For $70,000 a night, you can rent the nation of Liechtenstein. It’s unclear at this point exactly what that entitles you to, but apparently there are 500+ bedrooms, and it could be handy for scuppering an international football giantkilling.

- bit.ly/theyfoundearl

- bit.ly/legobrooklyn

- bit.ly/rentliechtenstein

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"aaagh! my eyes!"

STORY OF THE VIDEO Kid Karate

Words by Chris Jones

The column that longs for the sweet release of oblivion Words by Neill Dougan

Long accustomed to breezing effortlessly through airports customs checks, Dion was taken entirely by surprise by the impromptu body cavity search.

When University of Limerick film student Alan McAuley needed to make a short film for his university thesis, he turned to an old friend – Steven Gannon of Dublin art-punk duo Kid Karate. The result? A visually striking, thematically shocking and altogether compelling hybrid between a short film and a music video, starring a very pissed-off dwarf on a bike…

Where was the video shot, and how long did it take?

The video was shot around the Firhouse area of Tallaght, Dublin in segments over the course of three weekends. The bedroom scene and all the shots ‘inside’ the tunnel were done in a rehearsal space/shed in a friend’s back garden. His mother was a bit concerned when she popped her head in the door to find a bed, a camera crew and a Rob [main character] half-dressed!

Why did you decide on this format, where it goes beyond a straight music video and into short film territory?

The extended video format was just something that evolved quite organically. I had an idea for a short film script that I had been ruminating over for a while. When I decided to make the video for Kid Karate, the script had elements that I knew I were perfect for a music video. I found myself listening to ‘You Need Violence’ and building my short around

it. As the idea progressed it turned from being a short film with a Kid Karate soundtrack into the extended music video it is now.

- TINYURL.COM/CELINESEARCH

We are encouraged from the opening scene to root for Rob, and yet by the end that is thrown back at the audience. What is the thinking behind that?

I suppose that’s the ‘twist’ to it. I wanted the audience to have a level of empathy towards Rob. When the shopkeeper is introduced this empathy is switched to him and I think people forget about ‘poor’ Rob. Then that all gets turned on its head!

The song definitely needed some form of violence and aggression, too. The song is a sharp, sweaty, testosterone-filled ball of aggression!

Even by her outlandish standards, most people felt Gaga’s latest outfit was going too far.

- TINYURL.COM/GAGANO

What is intended to be the message of the video?

Does it even have a message?

I’m sure there’s probably a different meaning in it depending on who watches it. That’s the way it should be in my opinion, too. I always take people I pass in the streets at cover value, and I think this video adds a little bit of depth to that concept. You build up one opinion of a character before being shown a completely different dimension to them. It’s kind of a nice sentiment, except for all the violence and racism!

Watch the video online at bit.ly/kidkarate - kidkarate.bandcamp.com

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Sadly for Rooney, his desperate attempt to avoid another ban cut no ice with the FA. - TINYURL.COM/ROONEYCAKE

THE EMERGING ACTS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT

Chrissy Murderbot

Real Name: Based: For Fans Of:

Check Out:

Website:

Christopher Shively Chicago, Illinois.

Planet Mu, Diamond Dagger, juke and footwork.

New album Women’s Studies, out May 23 on Planet Mu. www.murderbot.com

If you’re going to get into Chrissy Murderbot, you had better like dancing. Fast and hard. Welcome to the world of juke and footwork. Now, what the hell does his name mean? “Well as long as I can remember everybody has called me Chrissy,” he says. “Murderbot was kind of meant as a joke-you’ve got all these DJs with these tough, badman names, especially in jungle, dubstep and grime and I was kind of poking a little fun at that. Also it’s really easy to Google me.”

And if the idea of ‘juke’ and ‘footwork’ seems odd and inexplicable, Chrissy is on hand to sort that out too. “Oh man, where to begin?” he laughs. “Juke is more for the dancefloor – can be anywhere from 145bpm to 160bpm, has the more four-on-thefloor beat. That’s really more what I’m into. Then footwork is the subgenre of juke for the footwork battles... it’s almost always 160bpm, the rhythms are a little more sideways.”

Chrissy’s reputation is that of a joyous party monster. Is he really that happy? “I am the happiest guy on earth,” he tells AU. “People fly me to exotic places and pay me money to play party records on big sound systems. Anybody who does what I do and manages to be glum about it is a douchebag.”

Adam Lacey

Smith Westerns

EMA

Real Name: Based: For Fans Of: Check Out:

Website:

Erika M. Anderson Los Angeles, California.

Loop, Gowns, PJ Harvey.

The album Past Life Martyred Saints out now on Souterrain Transmissions. www.cameouttanowhere.com

Erika M. Anderson may just have made one of the most astonishing debut albums of 2011. Past Life Martyred Saints is a distorted, fucked-up world of lo-fi folk, suicide ballads and proto-grunge.

Formerly of Gowns and Amps For Christ, Erika views her solo career as one last shot. “My bands imploded, but I felt like I still had some songs I wanted to get out into the world.”

And thank fuck she did. Lead single and Viking funeral hymn ‘Grey Ship’, backed by a brainfrying 16-minute version of Robert Johnson’s ‘Kind Heart’, was merely an apocalyptic aperitif – Past Life Martyred Saints delivers feral rock, visceral blues and naked candour. “At first I was frightened by the honesty,” Erika admits.” I didn’t realise I had those feelings until they came out of me and onto tape. Some of the things I talk about on the record are things I would never share in conversation. I’ve had some near emotional breakdowns playing in previous bands. I’m hoping that this one will be a little more light-hearted.”

Indeed, any concerns about Erika’s ‘happiness quotient’ appear unfounded. “I think my music often makes people assume that I am going to be super-dark or socially withdrawn when they meet me,” she admits. “I’m actually very outgoing and like to make strangers feel comfortable.” That’s very reassuring to know. John Freeman

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Members:

Formation: For Fans Of: Check Out:

Website:

Cullen Omori (vocals, guitar), Cameron Omori (bass), Max Kakacek (guitar) Chicago, Illinois.

Girls, David Bowie, The Soft Pack.

Second album Dye It Blonde, released outside the US on May 2. www.myspace.com/smithwesterns

Marrying the aesthetic of Californian beach slacker pop to the confident expression of Mott The Hoople guitar riffs, Chicago’s Smith Westerns present a novel take on lo-fi’s recent nostalgic function. The college dropouts (they picked music over education, man) filter and transform the music of the Sixties and early Seventies – stuff like Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley as well as the more obvious T-Rex and David Bowie – into something a little more flawed and contemporary, taking out the crotch-thrusting but leaving in the lushness. Cullen Omori’s logic on the subject is refreshing to hear: “It’s why the big bands are popular – because their songs are great.”

Smith Westerns are unlikely to sell out the Odyssey or O2 any time soon, but this idea of making songs that are meant to be heard in huge arenas is much of what differentiates them from other nostalgia merchants like San Francisco’s Girls, with whom they toured America. On Dye It Blonde, they very consciously tone down the lo-fi stylings that characterised their debut in an attempt to stop reviewers calling them ‘ramshackle’. That works for some and not for others, but it’s left Smith Westerns’ already alluring Nuggets compilation rock songs more listenable and allowed them space to breathe. Single ‘Weekend’ is probably the best example, catchy as hell in its California glam flair and sounding like it would sit unashamed on a Best of 1972. Karl McDonald

Tokimonsta Real Name: Jennifer Lee Based: Los Angeles, California.

For Fans Of: Brainfeeder, Flying Lotus, Daedelus, Shlomo.

Check Out: New EP Creature Dreams, out May 17 on Brainfeeder.

Website: www.tokimonsta.com Jennifer Lee, aka Tokimonsta, is yet another alumnus of the Flying Lotus-helmed Brainfeeder collective, banging out a variety of skittery beat music over the last few years on tiny US imprints. When AU caught up with the LA-based Lee, she had just completed festival duty in the US, where the sun had played a big part. “We just played Coachella and now myself and Daedelus are going to northern California to play,” she says. “Coachella was amazing but it was really, really hot. We played on Friday and on Sunday. It was ridiculous. Both days we were playing daytime. It was sweltering. I got really bad sunburn.”

New EP Creature Dreams drops May 17 but listening to it, one wouldn’t think that Lee is a trained pianist.

She explains, “Yeah, I was classically trained – I started when I was six. It was never my choice to play piano as a kid; it was my mother who wanted me to take piano lessons. I can still read music but the running joke in my family was that I couldn’t play a full piece from beginning to end.”

And her classical training certainly didn’t prevent her from blossoming in the LA beat scene, where after starting to make beats in the early 2000s she began to make a name for herself, mixing with producers and becoming a regular at the Low End Theory club. “I was just asked a while back if I wanted to do anything with Brainfeeder so I did,” she explains. “I see the whole Brainfeeder thing as more of a collective than a label really.”

And what got Lee into this kind of music? Hip-hop legends, that’s what. “I guess I was a big fan of Wu Tang,” she says. “Choosing not-so-common kind of samples was something I thought was really interesting.

I was listening to DJ Krush, DJ Shadow – I also listened to a lot of rock because the place where I grew up, there weren’t many hip-hop fans. Maybe Sixties/Seventies punk rock and psyche rock too. I guess I draw influences from everywhere but maybe older stuff more often. But, of course, being in LA I also love West Coast hip-hop.

Like, gangsta rap is totally a part of everything I do.”

She tends to record at night and the appeal is simpler than one might imagine. “It’s a very solemn kind of moment.

Everyone you know has gone to sleep,” she says. “I guess because I’m less focused on external aspects, I’m able to focus on the music. I don’t have my chat on and my phone’s not near me. I can’t have a good conversation at two in the morning but I tend to make better music.”

And how does Lee approach recording as Tokimonsta?

“With this new EP, a lot of it is recorded instruments like me on my piano or me recording guitar or drums and then programming them onto the computer. Sometimes I have a handheld recorder and I might record ambient sounds from the street and incorporate it in strange ways.” Strange, yes, but also beautiful. Adam Lacey

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A to Z

FESTIVALS The days are getting longer, the sun is shining (er, sort of) and summer is nearly upon us. You know what that means: festival season is almost here. Wahey! Music festivals are gruelling, draining, costly experiences – and, done correctly, they’re also the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Music, mates, campfires, sing-songs, and perhaps even the odd sneaky drink – what’s not to like? Well, the portaloos, obviously. That goes without saying.

Words by Neill Dougan Illustration by Mark Reihill

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A is for

Alcohol

Like it or not, booze is the traditional fuel for the vast majority of British and Irish festivalgoers. And, in fairness, when you’re standing in a field, covered in mud and soaked through, listening to Pete frigging Doherty murder another tuneless dirge – well, who wouldn’t want to get shit-faced?

curries, top-notch vegetarian fare, gourmet pies and practically anything else. In fact many people now actually eat better at a festival than they do in their day-to-day lives. There’s something not right about that.

B is for

Boutique

Kids

Child-friendly festivals, where you’re as likely to encounter a nappy-clad toddler as you are a grizzled rocker, are now the norm. AU has mixed feelings about this. Partly we think, “Fair play to those parents, giving their kids a fantastic experience like this at such a young age, that’s very forward-thinking.” Another part of us wants to run over to those poor children and shield their eyes from the sights that will haunt their nightmares for years to come.

C is for

Camping

D is for

Disorientation

It’s highly likely that you’re going to get lost at some point, but there’s no need to panic.

There’ll be many people just like you, so look at it as an opportunity to meet new friends.

Chances are you’ll bump into your mates soon enough. And if you don’t, you can invent some entertainingly outlandish tale about where you’ve been all weekend. Everyone’s happy.

E is for

Expense

Benjamin Franklin once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. To this he might have added, “Electric Picnic costing about €350 every single year, irrespective of whether anyone in Ireland has a job or any money.”

F is for

Food

Festival grub has come a long way since AU first attended Witnness (ask your parents, kids).

Back then your options were a plate of greasy noodles or some half-cooked chips. Nowadays you can choose from organic burgers, delicious

Joy

There will be many moments during a festival weekend that will put a big stupid grin on your face.

It could be when you finally find your friends after wandering around lost for three hours. Or when you witness a band totally rising to the occasion and blowing everyone away. Or, indeed, the moment you get home and realise you’re actually still alive.

K is for

Are you eating a portion of organic hummus and falafel, which cost €12? Are people lounging around reading the Arts section of the Guardian instead of going to see bands? Is there a ‘Poetry Corner’ instead of a dance tent? Have you paid €300 to be here? Sounds like you’re at a ‘Boutique’ festival, chum. It basically means ‘really posh’.

Camping is like life in Soviet Russia: a grinding, unpleasant chore in which you sleep on a hard, uncomfortable surface, wake up freezing in the middle of the night, and are generally miserable – but at least everyone’s in the same boat.

Except those bastards in the camper van site.

J is for

L is for G is for

Gatecrashing

Loos

The horror! The horror!

Glastonbury used to be a freeloader’s dream, and many were the intrepid punters who would scale the fences to gain illicit entry. Those days have gone now. Glastonbury is like Fort Knox these days, and rumours that ticket-holders will have to undergo a full-body scan upon entry – while entirely made up (by us, just now) – are surely not too far off the mark.

H is for

Hats

There’s something about a festival that makes people want to don ludicrous headgear, for example an oversized jester’s hat, or a fluffy Viking’s helmet. Rather than waste time wondering about this, it’s best to just accept it as a fact of life, like the tides or the changing of the seasons. Only more stupid.

I is for

Investigation

A festival can sometimes yield unexpected delights, be it a secret stage hidden away in a secluded copse, or a new band playing a stormer in a deserted tent at midday. These are the rewards you can reap from simply going for a bit of a wander. Of course this can go wrong too.

Should you stumble upon Damien Rice giving an intimate solo performance by a campfire, for example, it’s probably best to just turn and run quite fast in the opposite direction.

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M is for

Music

Remember, the reason you’re actually at a festival in the first place is to hear some bands. An acquaintance of AU’s attended Electric Picnic in 2005 and managed to catch a whole two acts, spending the rest of the time either unconscious, wandering around the campsite muttering to himself, or falling asleep in portaloos. He still said it was the best weekend ever.

that’s seared indelibly into the memory of those who witness it. It could even be the craic round the campfire that stays with you. It’s great moments like these that make all the other shit on this list worthwhile.

N is for

Narcotics

It’s a fact that people tend to take drugs at music festivals. AU takes an entirely neutral stance on this, but we ask you to at least remember that by sticking to harmless, legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine, you’re contributing to our struggling economy, and not lining the pockets of some spotty oik selling dog-worming tablets for €10 a pop. But you won’t listen, will you? Tsk. Kids these days.

V is for

Victims

We’ve all seen the videos on YouTube. Y’know, the ones with titles like ‘Paddy off his tits at Oxegen, LOL!!!’, featuring a pale youth in a Kildare GAA top and a Reni hat, eyes rolling in his head, mouth working furiously as he busts a move to some banging techno. At half nine on a Sunday morning. The important thing to remember, if you find yourself in this unfortunate position, is to not under any circumstances let yourself be filmed. Deniability is key.

O is for

Oxegen

Ireland’s biggest music festival, loved by school-leavers and known to everyone else as ‘Hell on Earth’. Invariably coinciding with a three-day biblical deluge of rain, by the end of the weekend it usually resembles the Somme. So will we go again this year, yeah?

W is for R is for

Romance

Given that a festival is basically an extended party, it’s inevitable that romance tends to blossom between eager young music fans. All well and good, but unless you want to bring something a bit nastier than a hangover home with you, AU can only echo the advice of Alan Partridge and suggest you ‘rubber up’.

S is for

Supplies

P is for

Pacing Yourself

It’s easy to overdo it on the first night. This is illadvised and may mar the rest of your weekend.

There are few things quite as unpleasant as waking up in a badly-erected tent with a raging hangover and no recollection of the previous evening, before realising you’re expected to immediately start all over again, beginning with a warm tin of Carling for breakfast. This is the voice of experience talking.

Q is for

Quantity Vs Quality

You have two options when it comes to seeing bands at a festival. One is to pick a handful of acts you want to see each day and stick to that. The other is to frantically rush about trying to see as many people play as possible.

Or, you could just stay in the dance tent the entire weekend with your top off, gurning like a chimpanzee.

Going to a festival is much like any other camping trip, and you will need to pack accordingly.

Essentials include a tent (sounds obvious, but AU knows one person who turned up at Oxegen a few years back with no means of shelter), a sleeping bag, food and beer. And toilet roll. Lots of toilet roll. For the love of God, don’t forget the toilet roll.

T is for

Timetables

Those schedules you wear around your neck that festival organisers like to sell to you for around €15 (bargain!) should be taken with a pinch of salt. In fact they’re actually just aspirational, and should really say something like: “Flaming Lips hope to be on stage at around 8.15. All things being equal. Give or take 45 minutes.” Not helpful, but at least honest.

U is for

Unforgettable

From the nascent Oasis blowing R.E.M. off the stage at Slane Castle in 1995 to Arcade Fire’s legendary set at Electric Picnic a decade later, most festivals will feature at least one moment

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Weather

The best way to prepare for an Irish festival is to assume you will encounter extremes of all types of weather. So bring wellington boots, warm, waterproof clothes, and possibly flippers and a snorkel. Also bring shorts, sunglasses, suncream and perhaps a fetching summer dress.

Snowshoes are probably unnecessary, but you never know.

X is for

X-Rated

At a music festival you will see people behaving in a manner they would never normally contemplate. Your correspondent could tell you manys a hair-raising tale about the things he has seen and heard at these events. Mostly involving bodily functions. Probably best to leave it at that, to be honest.

Y is for

Young People

Annoying at the best of times, festivals are where young folk really come into their own as an irritant. Often away from home without parents for the first time, they tend to be loud, excitable, incredibly drunk, and conspicuously enjoying themselves to an almost offensive degree. Ugh.

Z is for

ZZZZ...

Before heading to a festival, it’s best to just accept that you won’t be getting much sleep for a few days. Anyway, staying awake for 72 consecutive hours never did anyone any harm, right?

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AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR The Gang Mentality The last two years have been turbulent for ASIWYFA. Through the highs of worldwide recognition and distant touring to the lows of a discarded session and outright exhaustion, the band have emerged stronger and better than ever, with a second album that confirms their status as one of the world’s best instrumental rock bands. But before we get onto all that, we meet them up a mountain overlooking Belfast…

Words by Chris Jones Photography by Carrie Davenport

“We’re like penguins in the Antarctic,” says Johnny Adger, the bass player’s ginger mop clamped firmly underneath his cap as he wipes yet more tears from his eyes. “The wind is making me cry.” A little later, drummer Chris Wee disappears down a steep slope in pursuit of his own cap, ripped from his head by an icy blast. It may be a gorgeous spring day in the centre of Belfast, but on the summit of Divis Mountain, the most imposing of the hills that partially surround the city, it feels like anything but.

In truth, we’re lucky to be getting our shots at all. As we made our way up the mountain – AU relatively nippy in photographer Carrie’s Peugeot 206, followed by the band’s lumbering beast of a tour van – the weather had started to turn. Wind got up, rain started to fall and we took shelter in the back of a van that has taken this band all over Europe in the last couple of years. We make small talk and survey the scene – a skateboard on the floor, an Xbox and DVD player, a large bottle of 10-year-old malt whisky – reward for selling out King Tut’s in Glasgow.

It was most recently supped – gulped, apparently – by John Stanier from Battles at a festival in Luxembourg.

When we venture out again into the wind, the view – though not at its crisp winter best – is extraordinary. On one side of the mountain, the whole of Belfast is laid out in front of us. The Harland and Wolff cranes look like Lego toys; Stormont a white blob far on the other side of town. Look left and you gaze down on Cave Hill.

Further to the north, you can pick out the volcanic rock that is Slemish, up near Ballymena. And to the east and south, Strangford Lough, the Ards peninsula and the Mourne Mountains, majestic in the distance. Dermot, the affable warden who shadows us in his pick-up, tells us that you can see Wales from here on a really clear day.

And here stand four lads from Portrush and Portstewart, for all the world looking like kings of all they survey.

With the weather closing in, we decide to cut short the shoot and head back into town, eventually parking up outside the Spring & Airbrake venue. It was here, in October 2007, that ASIWYFA truly arrived as THE force in Northern Irish music. Having packed out Auntie Annie’s to launch their ‘Mount Kailash’ single, and in a pattern that would continue for some time, the band decided to move up a venue for their next EP launch – Tonight The City Burns. There, they debuted tracks from their eventual first album, packing out the venue and lighting a fire that has raged to this day, with endless, exhausting and yet frequently exhilarating tours

throughout Ireland, the UK, Europe, and most recently the USA and Russia.

The band’s new album, Gangs, is both a reflection of and an homage to those experiences; experiences that have stretched the band to their limits but ultimately strengthened their bonds. You can taste it in song titles like ‘Lifeproof’, ‘Gang (Starting Never Stopping)’ and ‘Homes: Ghost Parlour, KA -6 to Samara to Belfast’, the two part epic dedicated to the people they met in Kansas and Russia, as well as here in Belfast. And you can hear it in its epic scope, feral energy and celebratory power.

“We tried to think of what our lives had entailed since the last record, and it was two things,” says guitarist and main spokesman Rory Friers, cradling a much-needed coffee. “It was travelling and it was people. We really felt a need to try and put across how much the people who come to the shows – and people in general – mean to us.

So we wanted to dedicate the record to that notion, and the overriding feel of this adventure since the first record.

We were thinking of a way to sum this all up and it was this idea of gangs. It sounded cool and we’ve always felt that kind of gang mentality being in the band.”

The title speaks to the band’s defiantly DIY, groundup way of going about things, never having to rely on label advances or corporate moolah. As figureheads of the Belfast scene they made their own gigs into genuine ‘were you there?’ events, giving all sorts of other bands a leg-up along the way. Their famed A Little Solidarity festival in November 2008 even featured Two Door Cinema Club further down the bill. And as they have travelled, they have always repped for Belfast and Northern Ireland, spreading positive messages about their home scene even as they have drifted from its centre.

“It’s almost the only way we know how to do things,” says Rory. “That’s the way we’ve grown up. Everything had to be grass roots and DIY – when we first started playing music there wasn’t really a music infrastructure in the whole of Ireland, never mind the north coast.

It was always talk to people, meet people, get them into what you’re doing. Get into what they’re doing.

Form groups, collectives. We always lived by that Joe Strummer rule – without people you’re nothing. And without people this band would just be four guys in a rehearsal room somewhere.”

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AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR The Gang Mentality

WHAT’S IN A (SONG) NAME? And So I Watch You From Afar are well known for their less-than-subtle, often silly song titles. This time, though, they are going to need some explaining…

BEAUTIFULUNIVERSEMASTERCHAMPION Rory: “We attempted to compile the most amazing sentence we could, because it sums up that song and what it feels like to play it live.”

Gang (Starting Never Stopping) Tony: It’s us being a little bit naughty and having a song for ourselves – we’re the gang.

R: It’s a dedication to that line in the sand and that re-realisation of what this band is.

Search:Party:Animal R: We came back to Belfast at Christmas 2009 and there was an interesting scene involving a lot more drugs than there had been before. We wanted to write a song about the madness of that time and the change in people’s animalistic-ness in the search for the party.

7 Billion People Al Alive At Once R: Joe Strummer said there was no point getting down about stuff because we’re all alive at the same time and that’s amazing.

Think:Breath:Destroy R: It kind of came from our skate background – Skate And Destroy. Destroy is cool!

T: Thinking’s cool. Breathing’s cool!

Homes: Ghost Parlour, KA -6 T: We met these guys in Manhattan, Kansas and did a show in a front room. It was hectic as fuck – there were 30 people in there and the floor was bouncing.

T: Ghost Parlour was the name of that house, it’s been a tradition for years. …Samara to Belfast T: Samara was the furthest east we’ve been as a band, where the guys got tattoos. It was a real punk rock show and they guys made us feel completely at home. Being so far west in Kansas and so far west in Samara, and Belfast is slap-bang in the middle.

Lifeproof T: It sounds cool and it’s kind of like the end credits of the album.

R: It’s nice to finish on that notion of being immune to whatever is thrown at you – it’s been a strange couple of years since that first record and now we feel stronger than ever.

“We always lived by that Joe Strummer rule – without people you’re nothing” Of course, ASIWYFA have long gone far beyond ‘local figurehead’ status. After becoming widely recognised as Northern Ireland’s, then Ireland’s most powerful live band, the last two years have seen them truly come of age. From their triumphant Ulster Hall show in Belfast at Christmas 2009 and multiple UK and European tours, the band’s tentacles have spread far and wide. Last year they took a trip across America in the company of Envy, Trash Talk and Touché Amoré, and in the dead of winter they embarked on a hugely successful headline tour of Russia and Ukraine.

Aside from one mishap when Johnny injured his knee and the band had to cancel a gig (an extremely rare occurrence), the tour went swimmingly, taking them as far east as Samara (seriously, check Google Maps – it’s just north of Kazakhstan). It was characterised by sold-out shows, insanely cluedin fans and even some slightly dodgy homemade tattoos – a Russian bear for Rory and a balalaika for Johnny. “We were being brought gifts every night and being asked to sign big photographs of the band,” says Rory, incredulous at where the images came from. “The people there, there’s such a youthful energy and optimism. It’s just these little pockets of, like, 100 kids who share music amongst them and talk about bands. They are so savvy.”

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“They knew all about the Richter Collective [the band’s long-term friends and new label],” adds Tony Wright, Rory’s fellow guitarist, “and there was a kid in Kazan with a homemade Fighting With Wire t-shirt…”

These are the kinds of experiences that inspire the band. They help to shape the intense and yet uplifting music that they make – and Gangs is a step-up in that regard, mark our words – as well as giving the band yet more fuel for the perpetually burning fire in their bellies. But despite ASIWYFA’s relentlessly positive public image and ongoing narrative of DIY success, the couple of years haven’t all been sunshine and light. In January, Tony revealed publicly that he is bipolar, and the previous year was difficult for the band. “It was two years’ solid touring, basically,” says Johnny. “It takes its toll mentally, physically and emotionally.” “Yeah…” Rory nods sombrely.

“We were all on the verge of losing our minds,” says Tony, “and I think I did to a certain extent – ups and downs. I know this is all we do, the whole band thing, but at this intensity and this level we are still learning every day about how to deal with it and how to make sure that we’re making this band as good as it deserves to be. So exorcising that stuff was vital.”

In order to effect that exorcism, the band took an extremely courageous, and potentially foolhardy, decision – they ditched more than 20 tracks that they had demoed in preparation for recording the second album, and started again almost from scratch.

What you hear on Gangs is the sound of a band with something to prove to itself more than anything, and a short time in which to do it.

“We were doing sessions at Smalltown America’s studio in Derry, but it didn’t feel like the record to put out,” Johnny explains. “So we freaked everybody out by saying five or six weeks before we were due to start recording that we weren’t going to record any of those demo tracks. We were just going to start from scratch.

And it came out being the best stuff we’ve ever composed together.”

“When we started over again, it kind of felt like a first album,” says Tony.

“We started again on a new label and all these things with it, and it completely reenergised us. We were physically and mentally exhausted from all the touring. Everyone was having problems and it was all escalating. And as soon as we were brave enough to go, ‘These songs aren’t good enough, let’s start again’,

Tony: “One of the realisations that we had when we made the decision to start again was that we spend 75% of our lives on the road, and we’re going to be playing these songs for the next year flat-out, so we wanted an album that was fun to play and hear live. That was the most basic blueprint.”

As our time together draws to a close, conversation turns to Belfast – the band may not have grown up there but it has become home, even if they are able to spend less and less time there these days. Our interview comes in the middle of a relatively extended period of time spent in Northern Ireland, rehearsing for tour and writing songs for the third album.

It has been a luxury for a band that,

by Rory’s reckoning, had just six days off from band duties in the whole of last year.

At this, everyone laughs, but while Tony’s tongue is firmly in his cheek, you really do sense that a weight was lifted when the band decided to rip it up and start again. It’s visible in the change in their body language and facial expressions as they discuss times before and after.

And you can hear it on the record, too – it’s fun, bright and alive.

‘BEAUTIFULUNIVERSEMASTERCHAMPION’ (jokingly known as ‘Bum Champ’) kicks off proceedings with fist-pumping power chords, gang vocals and an infectious riff, before spiralling ever upwards, to places you never imagine it could, or would, go. ‘7 Billion People All Alive At Once’ is as joyful as it gets, with a chorus of ecstatic singing, and the first single ‘Search:Party:Animal’ has been described on air by Zane Lowe, through gales of disbelieving laughter, as “one of the best pieces of music I’ve ever heard”.

WILLY MASON

Wed 4th May Speakeasy, Belfast

PETER DOHERTY

Sun 29th May (Bank Holiday Weekend) Mandela Hall, Belfast

3OH!3

Fri 3rd June Mandela Hall, Belfast, +14s show

FRAMING HANLEY

Sat 18th June Speakeasy, Belfast +14s show

plus special guests

“It’s really important for us to be able to come home,” he says. “We’ve had such a lovely time the past few weeks just being at home, rehearsing and hanging out with friends, watching bands and stuff. It’s one of the most depressing things about being away all the time that we never get to see new bands here. That was such a big part of our lives for three years.”

“We were all on the verge of losing our minds” we literally went from having our shoulders slumped and people hmming and hah-ing in rehearsals and things to being right back in it again and ready to fucking plough through and start once more. It became like, ‘Sophomore LP? Difficult second album? Pffft, piece of piss!’.”

RED ROOF

plus special guests

It’s a huge change from the days of A Little Solidarity, but although the band aren’t so often seen in the Mandela Hall, Auntie Annie’s, the Limelight these days, there are still many bands that draw inspiration from ASIWYFA’s sound and M.O. – here and across the world – even if Tony humbly suggests that it would be nice if “some day” they were cited as an inspiration.

It’s a fact that they are, and that is a notion that Rory takes extremely seriously. “We feel incredibly humbled to think that,” he says. “But if anybody has latched onto it, we’d like to think it’s because we are honestly sincere in what we try and do. Romanticism aside, whenever you meet other people trying to do the same thing, it’s fucking life or death stuff. It’s not like we’re kids any more. This is it – this is all we’ve got.”

“We’ve been inspired by so many other pockets of people,” adds Tony.

“So many gangs.”

Gangs is out now on Richter Collective.

- asiwyfa.bandcamp

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plus special guests

plus special guests

Tickets for all shows available from Ticketmaster outlets, www.ticketmaster.ie and from Queens Student Union.

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART

When The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart made their one-and-only visit to Ireland in 2008, it was as an unknown support band for The Wedding Present.

Two albums later, they are finally gearing up for their first ever Irish headline gig at the Button Factory in Dublin. AU spoke to frontman Kip Berman about super-producers, emotional fragility, and his love of Downpatrick’s finest…

Words by Chris Jones

Two years ago, The Pains Of Being... released a classic indie-pop debut album that flirted with shoegaze but focused on the songs. Lo-fi and bighearted, the record was a classic slow-burner, and as cutesy peers like the Vivian Girls, the Dum Dum Girls, Girls (and other bands without ‘girls’ in their name) gradually found that wider success was not restricted to the indie-pop ghetto, so too did The Pains… As momentum built, widespread recognition followed.

But this is not a band content to keep preaching to the converted. Their recently released second album Belong showcases a bold new approach – big, beautiful and immaculately produced, it is proud to wear the legacy of the band’s teenage years as suburban kids obsessed with the big American alternative rock bands of the Nineties.

Not to mention another band slightly closer to home…

“You’re in Belfast?” Kip asks. “One of the bands I loved at that time was Ash. They weren’t that popular in America, but oh my god – that first album 1977 was incredible! It had this really playful but heavy feeling. ‘Girl From Mars’ to this day might just be my favourite song ever. I love that heavy immediacy and visceral sensation you get from listening to that album – ‘Kung Fu’, ‘Angel Interceptor’ and stuff like that is so in-your-face. I know we get compared to a lot of the shoegaze stuff

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– which is fine, people need to compare us to stuff and make sense of it – but Ash is probably closer to something that I would identify with.”

The Downpatrick trio may not be the first – or the coolest – band you would expect Berman to namecheck, but listening to Belong, with its huge walls of guitar, lovelorn lyrics and – it must be said – rather weedy vocals, the comparison stands up. As we talk more, the frontman goes on to enthuse about Ash’s American equivalent, Weezer (“everyone was wearing flannel and screaming about their dad, but Weezer was kind of dorky and cool”), and aside from the musical similarities, there is something else that these bands’ early albums share with The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – emotional vulnerability.

“Pop songs are best when they’re not trying to be anything but what they are – blasts of three-anda-half or four minutes of raw emotion,” says Kip. “Fragility is totally okay, and I like that sense of powerful music but really vulnerable lyrics. I thought that was the cool thing about Smashing Pumpkins – they were pretty heavy and a big rock band, but the way Billy Corgan sang was often in a falsetto and in very romantic, emotional and relatable language. It didn’t always make sense in a narrative way, but you understood what he was trying to express. And Ash were also great – really romantic, direct songwriting. I’m not a great writer, and trying to write a book in the form of a pop

song isn’t me – we’re just trying to be honest with our feelings and experiences and say them in plain language that hopefully people can understand.”

Belong begins in a manner not dissimilar to the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream – one of Berman’s formative albums. Just as the elemental force of Billy Corgan massed guitars leads the assault from the very beginning of ‘Cherub Rock’, so the same can be said of Belong’s title track. And apart from The Pains being big Pumpkins fans, there is one other major connection between the

honoured that they wanted to work with us.

Musically, the stuff that Alan Moulder has worked on over his career has been really influential – the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Smashing Pumpkins… These really heavy, beautiful, melodic rock records that we grew up listening to or discovered over time. Even stuff like The Sundays, and Curve, and Swervedriver! Every cool record or band that we like, he has something to do with.

“And Flood, he is well known for music that isn’t always in keeping with what we sound like. I don’t

that circumstances allowed the band to conceive of Belong as an entity in itself, rather than a collection of the best songs they had to hand. “I don’t want to say the first record was rushed or anything but it drew on some early 7”s we did, a couple of tracks we recorded for an EP and a few new songs, so it was kind of a hodgepodge.

“With this record, we got to think of making a record that was cohesive. We were conscious of the fact that there needed to be times when it was quiet or heavy and times when it was fast or slow, and

“Girl From Mars might just be my favourite song ever” two records: legendary engineer Alan Moulder.

His involvement – and that of producer Flood – marks a major shift from the endearingly lo-fi sonics of the band’s debut album. Between them, the two men have done as much as anyone else to define the sound of alternative rock, having worked on records

by Nine Inch Nails, My Bloody Valentine, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Foo Fighters and even U2. But talking to Kip, there is not the slightest sense of concern that working with such production titans means sacrificing any of the band’s indie cred.

“I don’t mind if people notice that!” he insists.

“We’re not trying to keep it a secret – we’re really

think anyone is going to associate us with Nine Inch Nails or U2 or whatever. But his skill, when you look at his discography, is not that you think of ‘the Flood sound’. It’s that when you think about a band, the album that comes to mind is usually the one he worked on. He brings out the best in whoever he works with – the quality in the artist that is truly themselves, and that people will remember them by.”

Given Berman’s infatuation with Nineties alternative rock, it is fair to say that Flood has been successful in capturing the true essence of the band – emotionally open and vulnerable, but keen to make as much noise as they can. Kip is delighted, too,

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all those things. In a weird way, it’s the first record we have recorded as a record. It was pretty cool to think about what that format really meant.

“We’re music fans, we’ve listened to a lot of records growing up, and I really respect the idea of a record you can listen to from beginning to end and where you don’t have to skip tracks. I hope people don’t have to skip too many of our songs.”

Belong is out now on Slumberland/PIAS. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart play the Button Factory, Dublin on June 1. www.thepainsofbeingpureatheart.com

New Kid on the Tower Block Joe Cornish is edging dangerously close to becoming a workaholic. While presenting a new series of the Adam And Joe radio show on BBC 6 Music, he is also deep into promoting his first film as both a writer and director. Perhaps the only movie ever to be inspired by a mugging, Attack The Block received rave reviews at the recent SXSW festival, and attempts to answer the age-old quandary – who would win in a battle between aliens and hoodies? AU went in search of an answer…

Words by John Freeman

“It wasn’t a particularly dramatic or exciting mugging,” Joe admits, when recalling the 2001 incident. “I gave them what they asked for and they left.” Cornish looks tired. Alongside his comedy partner Adam Buxton, he has just started a new run of Adam And Joe, the Saturday morning 6 Music radio show, and juggling that and the promotional juggernaut for his movie director debut on Attack The Block is a test of endurance. But, he is endlessly charming, self-deprecating and wickedly articulate.

He is also impressively tall and, like AU, dressed in ‘forty-something student’ gear.

It also takes a unique personality to display empathy for one’s attackers. “They seemed frightened and young and they didn’t really hurt me,” he says, explaining his unusually reflective attitude to becoming a victim of crime. “I knew the kids weren’t demons or monsters; they were just kids who had decided to do something stupid. It interested me why they made that choice. I am not making light of being mugged. It was a really traumatic thing for me, so traumatic that making this film was a process of catharsis. I don’t want to make it seem like I don’t think that mugging someone isn’t very serious. But at the same time, it is probably equally deeply wrong to then characterise a person by that one action, when often there is a lot more going on.”

and Streets Of Fire, and Cornish went to great lengths to ensure that the London estate patois was authentic.

“I figured out what the story was and broadly what the characters were, and then I just stopped. That was as much as Joe Cornish could make without starting to bullshit.” He then spent a year researching the language of the estates and pressure-testing how kids might react to situations outlined in a story board of the plot. “We went round loads of youth clubs in South London and I recorded every single thing they said. Hopefully, I got myself to a place where I could approximate the language enough to start writing and use verbatim a lot of the stuff they said.”

Aficionados of The Adam And Joe Show will not be surprised that many aspects of ‘street’ language fascinated Cornish. “I really like the way that kids mangle the grammatical structure of sentences. [The character] Pest has a line where he says “Dennis, why you being such a prick for?” For me, somehow, that has got more punch than ‘what are you being such a

“Making this film was a process of catharsis” prick for?’ or ‘why are you being such a prick?’ it is both of them conjoined into one. I love it – I think there is a weird demented poetry about it.”

And so the seed for Attack The Block was sown. The film opens with a scene in which a young woman is attacked by a gang of kids on a London estate.

During the attack, an alien lands on Earth and is viciously killed by the gang. However, when many more aliens descend, the kids are thrust into the role of heroes. It’s a fascinating concept.

Gangs of hooded kids are often perceived as a faceless evil by society, and Cornish was keen to explore that sociological reaction. “The idea for the alien in our film was to take all the adjectives people use to describe kids like that – feral, bestial, territorial, immoral – and turn those things into a monster, and then pit the monster against them to bring out the humanity of the kids’ characters.”

Even though the film is set on a mythical South London tower block estate, Attack The Block looks great. Cornish was adamant that the film would not dwell on the “morally unsettling” visions of urban decay that are often used in films depicting inner city Britain. “It struck me as someone who has grown up in quite posh streets next to those places all my life, that that architecture was once aspirational and futuristic. The tower blocks look like massive, clapped-out spaceships – they remind me of the Nostromo in Alien. The corridors remind me of Battlestar Galactica. A Clockwork Orange was shot with similar architecture.”

Shot exclusively at night, Attack The Block, doffs a stylistic cap to Walter Hill films such as The Warriors

We ask Joe about the score for the film, which meshes the work of composer Steven Price and Basement

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Jaxx. “The score was a really exciting. Our pitch was that we wanted it to sound as if John Williams and John Carpenter had gone round to Roots Manuva’s house and got really high and composed the soundtrack.

Steven did orchestral, fantasy escapist music and Basement Jaxx took care of the percussive side; it’s almost as if Steven did the sound of the monsters and Basement Jaxx did the sound of the kids.”

Fans of the Adam And Joe TV and radio series have been delighted by the return of the Cornish and Adam Buxton to 6 Music. As ever, the duo sound spontaneous and free-formed, as if the listener is eavesdropping on two friends riffing gags in a pub.

Joe concedes that preparation can be a bit scanty.

“We will each come in that morning with 20 pages of listeners’ letters and ideas and a CD each of rubbish we’ve found in the week that we want to play to the other person. We don’t see each other during the week because Adam lives in Norwich like a lunatic – no disrespect to Norwich. The radio show has become our equivalent of meeting in the hairdressers to get our hair done.”

The duo first appeared on TV screens in 1996, before transferring their comedy to radio on XFM in 2003 after standing in for Ricky Gervais. Over the last decade-and-a-half, Joe concedes that their humour has changed. “I think we are nicer. We were ruder on XFM – we used to swear on our podcasts and we were quite filthy, which had its charm. So, we are a little more family orientated on 6 Music, but the same filth is still swilling around on our brains. We just have to find euphemisms these days.”

As we wrap up our chat, Joe ponders on the one major lesson that Attack The Block has taught him – “The bottom line is whether you are me or a kid from a tower block, when aliens invade you have the same needs.” Every day is a school day.

Attack The Block is released on May 11 via Big Talk Pictures. It is screened on May 7 at QFT Belfast in association with Jameson. www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamandjoe

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MARCHING AGAINST THE TIDE While violence marred the London march against the UK coalition spending cuts, the message from half a million civic demonstrators was clear: we must stand up against the government.

Words by Kiran Acharya Photography by Phil Sharp

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“It’s not a question of an issue, but a question of the people I know who are close to me, who are health-care workers, or living with illnesses, or the neighbours, housed and homeless...”

- Marilyn Hacker Those who gathered were surprisingly quiet but I supposed they were just waking up. Alarm Clock Britain, I thought. Naturally many were late. I made a breakfastless bolt to the Embankment after waking to a text from our photographer, Phil Sharp: Alarm Clock Apocalypse. By 10 o’clock we were tailing a group of teachers towards the waterside. They walked under a NASUWT banner, greeting one another with loose hugs and air kisses... “Heya sexy!”

Joggers veered off the kerb to pass men handing out socialist tabloids calling for revolutions and unity and a 24-hour public sector strike. We fell in with Angie Dobson who rolled along in a batterypowered wheelchair, with no banner or group or outfit other than a pair of Jimmy Choo specs and a fabulous feathered red coat. She asked if she could march with us. “I’ll probably not remember your names,” she said. “But I’m terrified of losing you.”

And by eleven Angie and I had lost Phil. We moved towards Big Ben alongside a stylish Chinese delegation. The men wore green blazers pinned with medals. A leader in a wide-brimmed fabric hat threw his arms up to lead the cheers.

The response came with arms aloft: “Hi-yo!”

They could have been shouting about Gong Gong the water god for all we knew. But they had the joy and we both joined in: “Hi-yo!”

Angie was starving. By now her tray was piled with flyers, everything from Free Palestine to Fight The Fees. Someone had planted a big stick in her left hand, a big stick with a round No Cuts stop sign at the top. “I could murder a bacon roll,” she said. My own hunger had digested itself. Turning the corner by the Houses of Parliament I chanced to see something printed on a t-shirt: ‘Let the asskicking commence’. A din of plastic clappers and whistles and vuvuzelas struck up. The chant nearest to us, the loudest, was ‘No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!’

From waist-level Angie could take her bearings from only the tallest landmarks. She asked where we were. “Approaching Downing Street,” I said.

Looking back was to see that the people were taller than the Parliament buildings, as when you hold your finger up against a distant tree. A man stopped with his hands behind his back, his head lowered as if to admire a flowerbed, and spat a long thread onto the pavement.

The sun came out but didn’t hang around. I was there but I wasn’t. My head hopscotched back to the student protests in November, when an 18-yearold A-level student named Edward Woollard got caught up in the invasion of Millbank and dropped a fire extinguisher from the top of the building. It

“We’ve got to make our voices heard. We’ve got to stand up to this government.” Angie Dobson injured nobody but landed close to the police. In January he was sentenced to 32 months in prison.

His mother wept as she left the court. Woollard had, apparently, wanted to become a policeman.

During the student protests there was a lot of newspaper-talk about Paris in 1968, but the student action and the subsequent left-wing mobilisation, right up to this half-million march, appeared to have more in common with Berkeley, California, in 1965. Hunter S Thompson wrote a good article on how student dissent over free speech attracted non-students, became internationalised by the Vietnam War, and developed into nationwide opposition across a range of issues. “Injustice is the demon,” he wrote. “And the idea is to bust it.”

The UK was seeing a similar thing: studentled single-issue opposition in November, internationalised by the wave of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, unfolding to mobilise not just left-wing activists but grassroots organisations prepared to fight the government on as many fronts as necessary: the arts, the NHS, banker’s bonuses.

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Back in January I had gone to the Dance Against the Deficit, a lunchtime rave outside the Bank of England. This is the heart of Roman London, where men of power organised into guilds and companies. The symbolism was irresistible. A primitive siege outside the walls of the wealthy. I expected archers to pop up and shoot arrows at the revellers.

They blasted Rage Against the Machine and ‘Stake a Claim’ by Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip. A dance-off between two men in full-head masks: vulture versus pig. Even then, websites like False Economy were documenting job losses: 184 council workers at Magherafelt District Council invited to apply for redundancy. Belfast Health and Social Care Trust cutting its workforce by 1,855.

A stout Sikh with a silky beard returned from lunch, pausing on the steps of the banks to capture a bit of video. “It’ll be good for a laugh on YouTube.” I asked him for a light. He handed me a black clipper with golden casing. “You keep it,” he said. “I have two.”

Scroobius Pip

Photo by Vince Philbert The Essex rapper is pleased to see people staking a claim ANGIE DOBSON

”The mood at the moment is interesting. It’s something I talk about on tracks like ‘Great Britain’ and ‘Stake a Claim’. At times these things can feel like protest for the sake of protest but either way it’s positive as people are realising that it’s their country and they can make a change.

“A lot of people think they can’t make big national changes. But people can stand up or start to make changes locally. It’s easier to get things moving in your own area. That’s just as important. It’s defeatist to say ‘this government is in, this coalition, and nobody voted for them’.

Take ownership.”

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip play at the Forbidden Fruit Festival, Dublin, on June 5 and at the Indiependence Festival, Mitchelstown, July 30.

I told Angie about dancing against the deficit and felt suddenly rude as if it drew attention to her own infirmities. She found it hard to navigate the march. In slow moments flags carried by people in front would wilt over her head. She rolled slowly while I felt as guilty and nimble as Spiderman. By three o’clock we were only at Trafalgar Square, a good two miles from the rally at Hyde Park. The speeches – Ed Miliband, Len McLusky, Vicky Yeardley – had been and gone. “Angie,” I said.

“I’m going to have to shoot off.”

But she was quite dependent on strangers for support. Many streets were closed to traffic. We asked a steward at the side about buses. “Yeah what about them? They’re big long red things that carry people around.” A bewildering response. “You’ll be lucky, mate.” Another limp flag. People tended not to notice Angie and when they did they were keen to move on. However one lady had leaned down to compliment her fabulous red coat. “That’s a brilliant coat,” she said. “I do love your coat.”

“Marks and Spencer,” said Angie.

“Marks and Spencer. I don’t believe it.”

But that lady wandered on. And now I was telling

Angie the same thing the government’s cuts to education and healthcare seemed to say: you’re on your own.

If I’m manic I don’t want to know / how much money GlaxoSmithKline will make if I’m diagnosed... Tim Holland (Sole), ‘Crisis’, Live from Rome If the Lib Dems fumbled with fees, the equivalent issue for the Conservatives is the NHS. Angie and I moved point-by-point to Trafalgar Square, avoiding kerbs, loose stones, and inclines. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how did you come to be in a wheelchair?”

“Cerebral palsy,” she said, as if describing a stubbed toe. She was born three months premature, and could be held in the palm of a hand. Angie’s twin brother Peter had died soon after birth. Now, aged 63, Angie had become primary carer for her 92-year-old mum. “My mother didn’t know she was expecting twins,” she said. “There was no technology, compared to what they have now.”

She regularly used the large University College Hospital on the Euston Road, opened in 2005,

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a rough equivalent to Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital. “When I go there I can’t even get into the toilets. I went for an x-ray four years ago and couldn’t get into the changing room to take my clothes off. You have to wait for somebody to open the doors. And there’s no tactile information for somebody that’s blind. It’s terrible.”

Shaftesbury Avenue was quiet, though on the approach there were blue and yellow footprints on the pavement. The HSBC had been attacked; the windows and ATMs splattered with paintbombs, glass broken.

To keep things moving I chattered about Michael Minchella, a guy I had met the week before. He’s no longer a banker but for sixteen months worked for Barclay’s. As an economics graduate in 2007 it was the only job he applied for, winning the position over more than 400 candidates, many from Harvard and Cambridge. He quit to begin a civil engineering course at the University of East London where, the week before the march, he led a sit-in against the closure of the humanities and social sciences department. “I didn’t like the culture of the bank,” he explained, his voice soft

but confident. “The people I worked with were miserable. I had to get out.”

As an Operational Risk Analyst he was responsible for figuring out how much the bank stood to lose from internal malpractice. “Basically, looking out for guys like Nick Leeson: rogue traders.” But it was during a commodities training session, with bankers flown in from New York and Singapore, that he realised the gulf between his work and his worldview. He learned how the same organisations will generate scarcity, supply and demand. At its most basic: control the supply to make a commodity valuable, then bring demand to the boil before charging the highest price on the market. “It didn’t make sense that there should be such a surplus of say, wheat, in one country, while people in the countries producing the wheat worked for less than a living wage or starved.”

As we toured around the sit-in we took a look at a report from the London Evening Standard, a piece from before the march with a headline that makes less sense the more I look at it: ‘Police put firms on riot alert for TUC anticuts march by 250,000’. Anticipated violence made for compelling news. The article, written by crime editor Justin Davenport, contains the following paragraph: “Up to 250,000 people are expected to join the march, which would make it the biggest since the protest against the Iraq War in 2003 when 750,000 took to the streets.”

Minchella was bothered by story’s claim that only 750,000 had marched against the invasion of Iraq.

“No way,” he said. “That was at least a million man march.” Three days later I was bothered when reading the same paragraph repeated verbatim in a story written by a different journalist, Benedict Moore-Bridger.

All that stuff, the wrecking, the stuff you saw on TV, it all happened, but it was as separate from the main event as a support act playing on the new bands stage. I later saw a lot of it, but Angie and I passed only a little, at the HSBC, and continued hunting for a bus. She had rolled through paint and as we moved through Soho she left light blue trackmarks. “It was a big march, wasn’t it?”

“Massive,” I said. “Apparently Hyde Park is absolutely jammed. That’s where everybody was going.” Five buses, none in service, sat at the top of the Tottenham Court Road. Groups of people waited at the next stop along.

“Thanks so much for your company,” said Angie. “You’ve made it very easy for me.” It was remarkable that anybody should choose to come to such a big event on their own.

“Well,” she said, “it affects us all.” The driver extended the ramp, which stopped flush with the pavement. “We’ve got to make our voices heard. We’ve got to stand up to this government.”

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While the pace of NHS reform seems to be slowing as more and more medical professionals oppose Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, even the lowest-ranked universities are now charging £9,000. The shutters have come down on a lot of young people’s prospects of further and formal education. Seeing this happen, it seemed that the greatest loss, for young people, would be hope or self-esteem. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote that “the worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves.”

I figured a vast reservoir of potential would curdle instead of flourishing.

But I was guessing, and trying to force the story into dimensions it did not possess. Half a million men, women and children means one million feet, and folk like Angie counted for double. I walked to the Embankment, to where the River Thames flows past the Houses of Parliament towards the Isle of Dogs. Those who gathered marched against the tide.

In December 2003, it seemed that Suede had bowed out of the game for good. They departed with little fanfare and few tears were shed for their going. Then came the miracle of their Royal Albert Hall performance. From a whimper to a bang, Suede were back. This time, they’re determined to keep it special.

Words by Francis Jones

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The O2 Arena, London, December 7. With temperatures overnight regularly falling to between -10C and -20C, the UK is in the white-clawed grip of the coldest winter in living memory. The domed, white-capped O2 looks like an enormous igloo. By contrast with the freezing conditions outside, the interior is a sweaty, humid throng. Suede are performing their largest indoor gig to date, the final stop on their much-heralded reunion tour.

Onstage the band run through a veritable 23-song greatest hits set.

Like shadows they prowl, dressed in black, shaking their bits to the hits, their meat to the beat. No one is as animated as Brett Anderson, the liquorice-stick man. He’s ever on the move, throwing his body into improbable shapes and pressing the flesh with the heaving front rows. The band are loud and raucous, the songs powerful.

The O2 performance, like the handful of reunion dates before it, proved that the passing of time had not tamed Suede. Meanwhile, the audience response, the unceasing clamour of the insatiable ones, helped resolve their mind – the show would go on. And so, in early 2011, the Londoners announced that they would be extending their reunion. Additional dates would include three nights in the Olympia, Dublin at the end of May. So, what can those attending expect to see? Will they witness the effete, floppyfringed Suede of popular imagination?

things,” Brett briskly remarks. “For us, it’s simply another way of presenting ourselves live. When you tour, you essentially play the same set, night after night. Even for a band like Suede, with a large back catalogue, you know that we’re always gonna play ‘Trash’, ‘Animal Nitrate’, whatever. Doing this, it’s a way of challenging ourselves. It’s a bit of an unknown, I don’t know how the crowd is going to respond.”

But Brett, how do you stop the nostalgia trip becoming a nostalgia trap? “Essentially, I think, by not doing the wrong things. For example, the next stage after the festivals will be to make a new Suede record. We know we can’t go around in circles, playing songs from the Nineties. That would get a bit sad. However, if we make a new record it has to be absolutely extraordinary and spectacular.

Otherwise, forget it, nobody is going to hear it. When you first form a band, it’s a romantic proposition and very principled. So you’ve just got to remember why you did things in the first place. It’s only after a while that the drudging machinery of a career kicks in and you begin doing things because it’s expected of you.”

Work on making that spectacular new album, an album that will increase Suede’s shelf-life, is underway, albeit still in the infancy stages.

“I’ve started writing a bit with Neil,” reveals Brett, “but we haven’t had that much time. We’re just back from Jakarta, so we haven’t really got into proper writing mode, but we’ve been exchanging ideas. However, it’s too early to say anything more than that.”

Whatever the ending to this latest chapter in the Suede story, there’s no doubting it’s been a remarkable one. It’s a tale pockmarked by numerous milestones, their performance at the 1993 BRIT Awards amongst the most celebrated. “It really felt like we were gate-crashing the party,” states Brett. “You have to

“Suede are one of the most dynamic rock bands you’re likely to see” “People who have those perceptions obviously haven’t seen us live,” spits Anderson, when we speak to him ahead of the Dublin dates.

“Suede are one of the most dynamic rock bands you’re likely to see.

I’m very conscious of the current live sound and have beefed it up.

Neil [Codling] plays a lot of electric guitar now, whereas before he’d have been playing keyboards on those songs. I want the band to sound like a powerful rock band. That’s very important.”

The band have fond memories of playing in Ireland. Reminiscing about Suede’s very earliest days, Brett recalls a show at the Limelight, Belfast. “It’s an amazing venue. I remember a show we did there on what must have been one of our first tours outside England. We were playing ‘The Drowners’ and Bernard’s [Butler] guitar amp cut out and the crowd at the Limelight took over and sang along, almost this a cappella version. It was one of the first occasions we realised that people were really loving what we were doing. It meant quite a lot to us.”

Their forthcoming Dublin shows will find the group performing the first three Suede albums, in their entirety, over consecutive evenings – Brett confides that Dog Man Star is his personal favourite. “Well, y’know, it is a very fine album. If I had to be remembered for just one, I’d pick that one. It’s a powerful, beautiful collection of songs and works as an album, I love that.”

The band will also be releasing re-mastered, expanded versions of all their original albums, replete with extra tracks, rarities and DVDs. I bring Anderson’s attention to a comment by his contemporary Nicky Wire on such legacy exercises. When asked if the Manic Street Preachers would ever do a classic album evening, Wire stated, “You’re just a living museum at that point...

I will never be defined by my past.”

“Well, that’s their opinion and how they want to deal with

look at it in the context of the times. That BRIT Awards featured the likes of Peter Gabriel and Cher, really mainstream stuff. Then we appeared, this gang of snotty, emaciated lunatics dressed in Oxfam clothes and we just tore it up and left everyone with their jaws on the floor. And that’s the role of new bands, to shake up the status quo, challenge people and just fuck it up a bit, y’know?”

Looking back over Suede’s career, Brett is rightly proud of the span of the group’s achievements. From those very early days when they were, he says, “the most relevant, most exciting new band in the world,” right through to the reunion shows, “a lot of the motivation for us reforming last year was about setting the record straight. We wanted to put the right end on Suede. It was an ignoble end for Suede in 2003.”

What is most gratifying about his time in Suede, however, is the influence the group have had on the lives of others, be it bands inspired by their example – both Jamie Reynolds of Klaxons and Bloc Party’s Kele have informed Anderson they were moved to start bands because of Suede – or the connection with the fans, Suede’s “rabid little universe”, is how Brett describes them.

“It’s an honour that people have taken us into their lives so much,” he says. “People have come up to me and told me they had their first kiss to one of our songs, or they got married to one of our songs. The ways in which you touch real people’s lives, it’s a pleasure and it shows the beauty and the reach of pop music. It’s a positive thing to have done with your life.”

Suede will perform Suede at the Olympia, Dublin on May 24, Dog Man Star on May 25 and Coming Up on May 26 The entire Suede studio back catalogue is released in re-mastered, expanded versions on May 30. www.suede.co.uk

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The world championship of one on one B-Boying

D N A L E IR YPHER C

date:

th 8 all y H a r M e t : Uls ast e u n e v Belf time:

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• pg 47 Record Reviews | pg 53 Young Blood | PG 54 Live Reviews | pg 55 MOVIE & GAME REVIEWS •

Illustration by Mark Reihill

Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues BELLA UNION

When Fleet Foxes arrived, almost fully-formed, into our collective world in 2008 they were a curious proposition. Trying to describe their genius often resulted in them being clumsily damned with the faintest of praise. ‘Five bearded geeks from Seattle playing gentle folk and singing close harmonies’ never seemed to do explain their magic – their self-titled debut album was a set of songs which just had to be heard. Tracks like ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’ and ‘White Winter Hymnal’ were like listening to an epiphany – beautiful, full of a childlike naivety and blessed with the twinkling innocence of Robin Pecknold’s gorgeous vocal. It would take a cold, cold heart to remain unmoved by ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’. Fleet Foxes bore a unique strand of DNA in American folk music – euphoric yet hymn-like, it was a record to make the listener smile.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the follow-up Helplessness Blues is solid but unspectacular, a good, but not great, album. While over pontificating as to whether they should twist or stick, Fleet Foxes have chosen the latter – tending and nurturing

their astral folk and allowing (and perhaps relying on) Pecknold’s voice to take centre stage. Without the shock of their initial heady intoxication, and lacking its predecessor’s natural highs, Helplessness Blues leaves a slight ache of disappointment. A number of songs fail to ignite – ‘Bedouin Dress’ has a lovely violin break but lacks a killer hook, while ‘Someone You’d Admire’ is sweet and forgettable.

The nigh-on six-minute ‘The Plains/Bitter Dancer’ takes an age to build into not much. You will want these songs to be better.

Helplessness Blues has not been helped by a troublesome creation. Having toured Fleet Foxes deep into 2009, the band only started on the daunting prospect of a second album in the October of that year at the same Seattle building in which Nirvana birthed Bleach. However, when Pecknold was asked to play a number of shows with Joanna Newsom, and drummer Josh Tillman released a solo album, the band then scrapped their initial idea of recording a set of new songs quickly.

A huge part of 2010 was then spent recording, and then the band broke the news that the album was going to be reworked and re-recorded, citing – according to Pecknold’s personally-written press release – “illness, scheduling, creative doubt and reassessment.” Consequently, much of Helplessness Blues feels fussy and fretted over.

But the Seattle six-piece (they’ve now acquired Past Lives bassist Morgan Henderson) are too blessed with talent for Helplessness Blues not to

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contain moments of magisterial beauty. Pecknold claims that the album was heavily influenced by Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. The lilting lullaby ‘Blue-Spotted Tail’ and the hymnal love song ‘Lorelei’ (“You were my glue”) both nod to the great curmudgeon’s masterpiece. The eight-minute ‘The Shrine/An Argument’ is even better, with Pecknold allowing his voice to crack on the line “Sunlight over me no matter what I do” before the songs ends on a cacophony of detuned string and brass.

Indeed Pecknold appears racked in self-doubt and twenty-something passitivity. The pop-folk of ‘Montezuma’ opens with him in reflective mood, “So now I am older / Than my mother and father,” while the lovely title track finds him admitting that “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique” before concluding that he’d now rather be a “functioning cog.” It is a curious phrase – but one that is perhaps insightful into the internal struggles underpinning Helplessness Blues. Struggling to second-guess their next step, Fleet Foxes have played it safe and made an enjoyable record and, in doing so, have shifted the weight of creative expectation onto album number three. John Freeman

KEY TRACKS: ‘HELPLESSNESS BLUES’, ‘LORELEI’, ‘THE SHRINE/AN ARGUMENT’.

FOR FANS OF: THE HEAD AND THE HEART, VAN MORRISON, BLITZEN TRAPPER.

Gang Gang Dance Eye Contact 4AD

After the critically adored Saint Dymphna, the arty New York dance outfit return to the fray with an album that announces its grand intentions from the get-go. “I can hear everything. It’s everything time,” announces a slightly frazzled male voice, before Eye Contact’s monster opening track ‘Glass Jar’ descends from the sky like an angelic techno symphony – the sort of noise that might have featured in Primal Scream’s dreams during their Screamadelica era.

It’s a bold yet appropriate starting shot across the bow of an album that revels in its myriad extravagances. As with Saint Dymphna, you get the feeling that Gang Gang Dance are operating in a position of intoxicating musical power, a place from where they are able to draw on the many strange and wonderful detours of their lengthy career and focus the results, laser-like, into the hard shells of almost-pop songs that burn intensely.

There are no moments of mediocrity on Eye Contact, no moments where the vision falters. It is a solidly beautiful effort from start to finish, a self-contained world of odd monuments to dance music in all its variety. Darragh McCausland

KEY TRACKS: ‘GLASS JAR’ ‘ADULT GOTH’.

FOR FANS OF: THE KNIFE, ANIMAL COLLECTIVE.

Boxcutter The Dissolve

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi Rome

Blitz The Ambassador Native Sun

PLANET MU

CAPITOL

JAKARTA

Boxcutter’s fourth album marks the point at which he leaves dubstep behind, perhaps never to return. Continuing the trend that saw 2009’s Arecibo Message incorporate funk, hip-hop and psychedelic flavours, The Dissolve sees Barry Lynn’s core vision refracted through a manyfaceted musical prism. Almost every track offers something different, whether it be the the dubinfused dancehall of ‘Cold War’, the evocative, guitar-led instrumental ‘Passerby’ or the out-andout highlight, ‘Allele’, where the skittering toms of juke collide with a monstrous, rave-inspired breakbeat. A bit more of that track’s energy wouldn’t go amiss, as there are a couple too many woozy soul jams here (though Jamie Lidell fans will love Brian Greene’s guest vocals), but repeated listening is more than rewarded. There is no multiple personality disorder at play – every track is bathed in psychedelia and it’s Lynn’s ear for detail that proves to be the common thread, despite the stylistic diversity. Chris Jones

KEY TRACKS: ‘ALLELE’, ‘TV TROUBLES’, ‘ZABRISKIE DISCO’.

FOR FANS OF: JAMIE LIDELL, FALTY DL, SQUAREPUSHER.

When it comes to collaborations, Danger Mouse – aka Brian Burton – likes to keep things varied, talents as diverse as dirty south/soul crooner Cee Lo Green and twee-indie popsters The Shins having benefited from his magic touch. Here he has teamed up with Italian composer Daniele Luppi for a record that is five years in the making and is inspired by their shared passion for classic Italian film music. Recorded in vintage style with no overdubs or studio trickery, Rome is characterised by lush, dramatic stings and is as cinematic and evocative as you’d expect. Norah Jones and Jack White provide vocals on three tracks each, and do so very effectively. White lends an eerie, burnt-out vibe to ‘The Rose With The Broken Neck’, while Jones voice seems tailor-made for this material.

Overall this is impressive stuff, even if it’s just a little too stylised at times to really fall for. Daniel Harrison

Native Sun sees classic African highlife and golden age hip-hop awkwardly bumping pelvises, with Ghanaian-born, New York-based musician Blitz The Ambassador unsuccessfully attempting to join the dots between his two home countries.

But the genres don’t make good bedfellows and the experience is badly hampered by Blitz’s flow, which lacks rhythm, timing and eloquence.

It’s a shame, because the production (courtesy of Blitz himself) is gloriously faithful to the Afrobeat sound that emerged from West Africa in the 1970s. Its stand-out moment, ‘Accra City Blues’, sees Blitz dropping the manic rhymes, and switching between a more effective crooning vocal and thoughtful spoken word delivery. A wannabe jack-of-all-trades, but a talent nonetheless, a strong second-in-command on his next album could coax the best out of Blitz. As is, this is an infuriating listen. Dean Van Nguyen

KEY TRACKS: ‘THE ROSE WITH THE BROKEN NECK’, ‘BLACK’, ‘THE GAMBLING PRIEST’.

FOR FANS OF: ENNIO MORRICONE, BRUNO NICOLAI, ISOBEL CAMPBELL & MARK LANEGAN.

KEY TRACKS: ‘ACCRA CITY BLUES’, ‘THE ORACLE (CHUCK D PSA)’, ‘NATIVE SUN’.

FOR FANS OF: FELA KUTI, PUBLIC ENEMY, SIR VICTOR UWAIFO.

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Meat Puppets Lollipop MEGAFORCE

The Meat Puppets are perennial underachievers, slackers before such a thing existed. Despite releasing at least two stone-cold classics in the shape of Meat Puppets II and Up On The Sun, the Pups have managed to fritter their legacy away somewhat, with even the support of Kurt Cobain only delivering a momentary spell in the limelight.

2009’s Sewn Together was a confident return for the band, crystallising exactly what was good about the band in one bite-sized package. Lollipop, conversely, is a lovely distillation of everything they manage to do wrong – a collection of throwntogether songs, housed in a tacky sleeve that looks like it’s fallen through a time-warp from the earliest days of Photoshop.

Sounding like they’re working on autopilot, everything about this album sounds cheap, from the cheesy synth noises throughout, to the dry-sounding guitars that distract on every track. The melodies are early Nineties alt. rock-by-note and the whole thing sounds like it was made by a band who went into the studio with no songs and no idea how to make a record. Coming after Sewn Together, it’s a huge disappointment from a band that is struggling to pay tribute to its own legacy. If even the Meat Puppets can’t remember how good the Meat Puppets used to be, then why the hell should we? Steven Rainey

KEY TRACKS: ‘HOUR OF THE IDIOT’ (WHICH COULD BE A SUBTITLE FOR THE ALBUM…).

FOR FANS OF: PEOPLE WHO HATED THE MEAT PUPPETS – ALL YOUR CHRISTMASES HAVE COME AT ONCE.

A Plastic Rose The Promise Notes DI DI MAU

There’s a gung-ho quality to A Plastic Rose that even their critics must grudgingly respect. Every time they take the stage, every song they record to disc, they do with unfettered enthusiasm.

This is not to damn them with faint praise, for the Belfast-based quartet possess flair enough to match the fire in their bellies. Almost-album The Promise Notes is brimming over with emotion and, yes, potential. The lyrics are a little blunt – songs such as ‘Tiger Tail’ and ‘Two Steps’ drift

into the nondescript – but there is a greater finesse and subtlety to these seven tracks than they have displayed on any previous release. Opener ‘Oceans’ dips us into a broiling cauldron of feeling, strings adding a sophisticated veneer and delicacy to the alt-rock template, whilst ‘The Metal Man’ boasts a brilliantly dirty, Sabbath-echoing riff. Rough around the edges, perhaps, but there’s enough here to suggest that A Plastic Rose might soon make good on their promise. Francis Jones

KEY TRACKS: ‘OCEANS’, ‘THE METAL MAN’, ‘LOUDER THAN ME’.

FOR FANS OF: BIFFY CLYRO, SIX STAR HOTEL, PEARL JAM.

Tokimonsta Creature Dreams EP

Thurston Moore Demolished Thoughts

Fred Leaving My Empire

BRAINFEEDER

MATADOR

R.C.M.

L.A.-based Brainfeeder alumnus Tokimonsta crafts the kind of murky waterbed instrumental semi-hip-hop that the label has made its own over the last few years. The inherent liquidity of this review’s opening, admittedly tortuous, metaphor is vital: Creature Dreams bumps and sways downriver, half-submerged cracking voices ooze and wooze up and under slowed down drum patterns. ‘Stigmatizing Sex’, awful title aside, is as good as anything on the fantastic Teebs LP from last year, all lurching folky curlicues and Ryuichi Sakamoto-esque subliminal melody. Tokimonsta makes bedroom jams for somnambulists, music suited for those nights when your mental fug won’t clear. And I swear she manages to turn ‘The Weight Of My Words’ by Kings of Convenience into a post-ambient banger. Josh Baines

KEY TRACKS: ‘DAY JOB’, ‘FALLEN ARCHES’, ‘BRIGHT SHADOWS’.

FOR FANS OF: ADA, FLYING LOTUS, BRIAN ENO.

Demolished Thoughts, the Beck-produced fourth solo LP from one half of the most prolific noisenik guitar duo in alternative rock, is a whimsical, wintery, yet warm trip and is Moore’s most mellow offering yet. The signature alternate tunings and unconventional structures characteristic of Moore’s sound are present in the almost completely acoustic recording, while his vocals feel decidedly more bare and honest than his outings with Sonic Youth. The occasional lush orchestration serves to highlight the sparseness and intricacy of the sonic landscape, and heighten the peaks of the songs where appropriate (not unlike Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois), most notably on the mostly-instrumental ‘Mina Loy’. Indeed, Demolished Thoughts is probably Moore’s most cohesive and assured solo effort to date, and often makes you wonder why he bothers to make such noise elsewhere. Stevie Lennox

KEY TRACKS: ‘ILLUMININE’, ‘MINA LOY’, ‘BENEDICTION’.

FOR FANS OF: BECK, SUFJAN STEVENS, SEBADOH.

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Given that they’ve found it easier to achieve success in Canada than they have closer to home, it’s perhaps no surprise that Cork quintet Fred decamped to Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studio to record the follow-up to 2008’s Go God Go. And with Howard Bilerman behind the mixing desk, Leaving My Empire sees them continue their trend of crafting intelligent, hooky indie-pop tunes, only now there’s more depth. Bilerman’s guidance is apparent, with soaring harmonies and beefy arrangements prodding at emotions in much the same way that Arcade Fire’s best songs do. ‘Fears And Remedies’ and ‘Everyhing’ are highlights, but in all honesty there are no real weak points on what is an impressively strong body of work. With a bit of luck, Leaving My Empire will finally give Fred the recognition they deserve. Patrick Conboy

KEY TRACKS: ‘IF NOT NOW WHEN’, ‘FEAR AND REMEDIES’, ‘EVERYTHING’.

FOR FANS OF: ARCADE FIRE, BELL X1, DELORENTOS.

Vivian Girls Share The Joy POLYVINYL

The Brooklyn all-girl trio are back with their third LP, offering more of the same lo-fi noisepop, but all the while sounding more refined, aided by improvements in both musicianship and the songwriting. The wall of sound is present, served with frontwoman Cassie Ramone’s vocals, which drift seamlessly between a syrupy tone reminiscent of Kim Deal and a Kim Gordon-esque snarl; indeed her voice feels more assured and versatile than on previous releases.

A nice diversity in the mood gives good flow to the album, broken up with tongue-in-cheek moments like Fifties throwback ‘Take It As It Comes’. Share The Joy displays a more developed and fully realised Vivian Girls, with zero loss in energy. Stevie Lennox

KEY TRACKS: ‘LIGHT IN YOUR EYES’, ‘SIXTEEN WAYS’, ‘TAKE IT AS IT COMES’.

FOR FANS OF: THE ROSEHIPS, DUM DUM GIRLS, GIRLS NAMES.

Agnes Obel Philharmonics PIAS

With a notable forthcoming release by Oh Land, Denmark’s assembly line of idiosyncratic female singer-songwriters is starting to rival even their production of pastries, bacon and fairy tales at this stage. Nanna Øland Fabricius will have to beat down the door of Agnes Obel first, though; the 30-year-old Copenhagen native’s debut album is a thing of serene beauty and disquieting atmosphere. Obel is as likely to draw from her background in classical piano as she is from 1960s British folk, while many of these songs shaded in dark and light also nod to a more contemporary palette of muses, like Joanna Newsom and Natalie Merchant. At just under 40 minutes, it’s the perfect length to put on repeat, too, every crystalline cycle acting like an aural cleanser.

Lauren Murphy

KEY TRACKS: ‘RIVERSIDE’, ‘PHILHARMONICS’.

FOR FANS OF: NATALIE MERCHANT, SANDY DENNY, JOANNA NEWSOM.

onward with Spearhead, Franti has championed the poor and dispossessed in a way that would make Bono green with envy – you don’t see U2 playing gigs outside their concerts for those that can’t afford the ticket price, do you? The Sound Of Sunshine is a surprising release stylistically, in the form of a Jack Johnson, feel-good, ‘lay my surfboard beside the bonfire at the beach’ kinda groove; the anger and fury of a songwriter that moves in the same domain as Jello Biafra and Chuck D practically nowhere to be seen.

The absence doesn’t matter a damn. These are wonderful examples of spiritual, saccharine-free festival tunes. The only curious track selection is the riffy Eighties rock of ‘I’ll Be Waiting’, which sits awkwardly between some great reggae.

Medicate yourself by buying immediately.

Jeremy Shields

KEY TRACKS: ‘THE SOUND OF SUNSHINE’, ‘SHAKE IT’, ‘HEY HEY HEY’, ‘ONLY THING MISSING WAS YOU’.

FOR FANS OF: JACK JOHNSON, JOE STRUMMER, BEN HARPER, G. LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE.

The Computers This Is The Computers ONE LITTLE INDIAN

On this, their second LP, rock ‘n’ roll punks The Computers blend tight-yet-raw, garagey guitars with mangled vocals without a care for compromise or larynx, exorcising every demon within. There is an almost tangible energy throughout which makes the LP feel like a live album (making it unsurprising to learn that the album took four days to record) pulled straight from the peak of the Eighties hardcore scene, which is no mean feat for a bunch of rockabilly fans from Exeter. With 11 tracks clocking in at less than 25 minutes, This Is The Computers feels like a hit straight to a main artery, a quick burst of chaos which leaves as hastily as it enters without ever outstaying its welcome. Stevie Lennox

KEY TRACKS: ‘MUSIC IS DEAD’, ‘BLOOD IS THICKER’, ‘GROUP IDENTITY’.

FOR FANS OF: FUTURE OF THE LEFT, MINOR THREAT, CIRCLE JERKS.

Tennis Cape Dory CARMEN SAN DIEGO

Michael Franti & Spearhead The Sound Of Sunshine EMI

For over 20 years, Michael Franti has been at the forefront of that particular wing of American pop music that has challenged whatever issues the ‘New Right’ have been blustering about. From The Beatnigs to The Disposable Heroes and

With possibly the best back story possible – they are a husband and wife duo who quit their day jobs to go live on a boat – the Atlantic Ocean’s Tennis make swooning, romantic music that well becomes their unique selling point. Their songs, with sha-la-la choruses and Beach House-type picked, reverby guitars, have a refreshingly naïve tendency to literally be about looking at the sea.

At times the album comes off like it’s just plugging in tropes of sweetness and twee as ordained by the dummy’s guide to sounding lovely, and there’s

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nothing that approaches the less constructed, catchier sentimentality of someone like Camera Obscura, but nevertheless, songs like the title track are made for imagining beach twilights, and there’s no way you could claim they’re not pleasant. It feels lightweight and throwaway like the girl group music it sometimes mines, but that’s not necessarily a flaw. Karl McDonald

KEY TRACKS: ‘LONG BOAT PASS’, ‘CAPE DORY’, ‘SOUTH CAROLINA’.

FOR FANS OF: GRIZZLY BEAR, CAMERA OBSCURA, BEACH HOUSE.

Explosions In The Sky Take Care Take Care Take Care BELLA UNION

Enjoyable as the last Explosions record was, it added precious little to the formula established on its genre-defining predecessor, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. Their trademark dynamic, evocative guitar cascades are again prominent here, but there the similarities end. Kicking off with dense, Eluvium-style ambience, Take Care Take Care Take Care incorporates handclaps, acoustic guitar, subtle programmed beats and cavernous guitar howls, while wordless, sampled vocal snatches mesh woozily in the background or stab percussively through the magnificently deep sound. Both a thrillingly propulsive rock album and immersive headphone music, it’s their most adventurous release to date. Lee Gorman

KEY TRACKS: ‘LAST KNOWN SURROUNDINGS’, ‘TREMBLING HANDS’, ‘LET ME BACK IN’.

FOR FANS OF: BATTLES, VESSELS, MONO.

Norabelle Wren NORABELLE

Wren, the debut album from Dundalk’s Norabelle, is a thing of beauty. Wisps of piano, slivers of acoustic guitar, tip-toeing percussion and tender vocal – it’s a combination that gives the record a spun sugar delicacy. Opener ‘Gregarious Bird’ signals the trio’s understated style. Every instrument has space aplenty to inhabit, each song unhurried, coming to bloom in its own damn time.

There is a fine narrative thread to the songs too, a writerly eye particularly apparent on the title track. Those who like their musical thrills fastpaced may find it all a little placid. However, those who appreciate country-tinged, contemplative sounds should prepare to have Wren take wing with their affections. Francis Jones

KEY TRACKS: ‘CHECKOUT LINE’, ‘WREN’, ‘ROAD MAPS’.

FOR FANS OF: BON IVER, DAMIEN RICE, BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY.

And So I Watch You From Afar Gangs RICHTER COLLECTIVE

Six weeks before recording this second full-length album, And So I Watch You From Afar scrapped more than 20 demos and – with the exception of the sole survivor ‘7 Billion People All Alive At Once’ – started entirely from scratch. It was a ballsy decision and, with the caveat that we haven’t heard the ditched material, it has paid off. Gangs is a more focused, concise and downright fun record than its predecessor, the four-piece band having invested in it every once of energy and enthusiasm in their possession. Which is a lot. It starts like a juggernaut (‘Gang (Starting Never Stopping)’ was described by Tony Wright last year as “an instrumental pop-punk song”, though it’s much more interesting than that sounds) and rarely lets up, constantly coming out of leftfield with fiendishly clever riffs, block-rocking drum patterns and, on ‘Search:Party:Animal’, some depth-charge bass drops. It’s perfectly paced, however, with the occasional catch-your-breath interlude and one epic, the two-part ‘Homes’, which provides the necessary respite before the redemptive, triumphant ‘Lifeproof’ closes proceedings with the kind of lifeaffirming slow-build that will doubtless score film montages from now until Kingdom come. And then a samba breakdown. Because with this lot, the good times are never far away. Chris Jones

KEY TRACKS: ‘GANG (STARTING NEVER STOPPING)’, ‘SEARCH:PARTY:ANIMAL’, ‘LIFEPROOF’.

FOR FANS OF: ADEBISI SHANK, MAYBESHEWILL, BATTLES.

Twin Atlantic Free RED BULL

Glasgow alt. rockers Twin Atlantic are a nice twist on the saturated pop-punk genre if only because they pointedly resist the prevalent Americanisation of the style, with the harsh Glasgow drawl of singer Sam McTrusty (no, really…) shining through on almost every track. Free isn’t going to convert many new fans to a traditionally teenage niche, but tracks like ‘Make A Beast Of Myself’ and ‘Yes, I Was Drunk’ offer a relatively lyrically-intelligent sing-a-long, while the relentless power chords – broken up only by the mellow, folky title track – offer plenty of stadium-ready bounce. Free could easily be mistaken for an early, pre-concept-album outing from My Chemical Romance, a band Twin Atlantic recently supported, if it weren’t for that glorious Scottish twang. The acoustic moments are a charming respite, arguably the strongest tracks on the record, but all in all it’s just a touch too predictable. Still, when there’s so much to sing along to, who are we to argue? The kids certainly won’t. James Hendicott

KEY TRACKS: ‘MAKE A BEAST OF MYSELF’; ‘CRASH LAND’.

FOR FANS OF: FRANK TURNER, MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE.

Cat’s Eyes Cat’s Eyes POLYDOR

Given that Cat’s Eyes’ first live performance took place in the Vatican last December, they are an astonishingly pagan-sounding pop group. Their self-titled debut suggests that the ‘death discs’ of the 1950s and 1960s are their communion wafers, The Shangri-Las, My Bloody Valentine and Ennio Morricone their idols. And, whilst the sounds are much different, the record has that sweet, blurring into sinister quality that made The Wicker Man soundtrack so memorable. The pair – The Horrors’ frontman Faris Badwan and Canadian multi-instrumentalist Rachel Zeffiri – initially assume celestial form, the haunting vocal of Zeffiri floating through the gleaming synthetic haze of ‘Best Person I Know’. Even better is the string-drenched ‘I’m Not Stupid’, a song which

has the mournful quality of Nico. ‘Face In The Crowd’, meanwhile, is the upbeat crowd-pleaser in the pack. The vocal sparring between the two here is propelled by booming, Phil Spector-style percussion. Darkness descends on ‘Bandit’, with Zeffiri warning of a highwayman of the heart, keyboards, guitar and strings rattling with all the unnerving intent of Jacob Marley’s ghost. ‘Sooner Or Later’ ratchets up the tension, instruments blurring into a killer-shrouding fog, strings stabbing like Psycho’s Norman Bates. And then we are back, blinking into the light, with the tender drift of ‘The Lull’ and pop stomp of ‘Over You’. Less than half an hour long, Cat’s Eyes is not short on magic. Francis Jones

KEY TRACKS: ‘I’M NOT STUPID’, ‘FACE IN THE CROWD’, ‘BANDIT’.

FOR FANS OF: THE LAST SHADOW PUPPETS, CANDY PAYNE, THE SHANGRI-LAS.

Young Legionnaire Crisis Works

Chrissy Murderbot Women’s Studies

WICHITA

PLANET MU

The brainchild of erstwhile Yourcodenameis:milo man Paul Mullen and Bloc Party bassist Gordon Moakes, Crisis Works sees the duo (ably assisted by drummer Dean Pearson) discover a level of inspiration palpably absent from the latter-day outpourings of their parent groups. Young Legionnaire’s sound is, perhaps unsurprisingly, closest to Mullen’s previous work, but sharper and more direct. Crucially, the forceful punk bluster is focused around pristine melodies, the sterling production job capturing both the music’s forceful crunch and resonant depths. It’s early days yet, but there aren’t likely to be many better British rock releases this year. Lee Gorman

KEY TRACKS: ‘NUMBERS’, ‘A HOLE IN THE WORLD’, ‘THESE ARMS’.

FOR FANS OF: YCNI:M, IN CASE OF FIRE, MILLION DEAD.

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As an artist whose self-professed mission is to get people dancing, the only thing this review needs to do is confirm that Women’s Studies will achieve that goal. Based in Chicago, this is Chris Shively’s first album for Planet Mu and he has no time for po-faced electronica heads with greasy hair, hoods up and white Nike plimsolls. This dude wants you to move. And his juke (145-160bpm) or footwork (160+bpm) is going to make that happen. Try and resist tracks such as the bouncing ‘New Juke Swing’ with MC Rubi Dan toasting the bejaysus out of it or ‘Under Dress’, taking it back to the old school with Warrior Queen bringing the patois. This is bass-heavy, dancing music and you are powerless to resist. Adam Lacey

KEY TRACKS: ‘NEW JUKE SWING’, ‘UNDER DRESS’.

FOR FANS OF: RUN DMC, DJ FUNK, DJ GANT.

Cloud Control Bliss Release INFECTIOUS

DELS GOB BIG DADA

There’s a line in ‘Moonshining’, one of this album’s highlights, that sums up English MC DELS (aka Kieren Dickins) perfectly: “If you wanna hear ‘knife-gun-knife-gun-crime’/ Feel free to change the channel ‘cos I’m not your guy.” As far removed from bitches ‘n’ bling rap as it’s possible to be, his lively rhymes instead take in childhood nostalgia (‘Shapeshift’), the hazards of drinking on a work night (‘Hydronenburg’) and spacedout psychedelia (‘Eating Clouds’). With obvious influence Roots Manuva guesting on excellent state-of-the-nation address ‘Capsize’, and with Micachu, Kwes and Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard

handling production, GOB promises much – and, in places, it totally delivers. Singles ‘Trumpalump’ and ‘Shapeshift’ are sublime, all squelching synths and Dickins’ lithe flow. ‘Moonshining’ is another great moment as DELS effortlessly rides a lolloping Kwes beat. So far, so good – but sadly GOB is flawed. ‘DLR’ and ‘Droogs’, especially, are badly misjudged – hand-wringing, heavy-handed examinations of homelessness and domestic abuse, respectively. Meanwhile ‘Melting Patterns’ and ‘Violina’ fail to attain the dizzy heights reached elsewhere. There’s little doubt that DELS has a brilliant album in him. But right now he’s only halfway there. Neill Dougan

KEY TRACKS: ‘SHAPESHIFT, ‘CAPSIZE, ‘MOONSHINING’.

FOR FANS OF: ROOTS MANUVA, HOT CHIP.

Bachelorette Bachelorette

Psychedelic Horseshit Laced

SOUTERRAIN TRANSMISSIONS

FATCAT

It comes as no surprise that New Zealand-born Annabel Alpers namechecks John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band output as an influence, while at the same time rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Drag City label, Animal Collective and Beach House. File this one under ‘cool’. It’s also some out-there stuff with Alpers’ breathy, Eighties voice underpinned by great swathes of synth along with whistling, guitars and bass rumblings galore.

Highlights are tracks such as ‘Blanket’, a pulsating delight as Annabel’s voice drifts around spookily, and ‘The Last Boat’s Leaving’, which has that doomed ‘end of the free love era’ vibe to it. It’s easy to imagine her sitting in her bedroom with Ariel Pink, skinning up and recording quirky track after quirky track. And it’s all fascinating. Adam Lacey

Having once allegedly driven drunk around Dublin looking for a party in a van filled with Times New Viking members and hangers-on, Matt Horseshit is something of a totem in the lo-fi scene, but his music has always been too deliberately obscure to make any but the most recalcitrant back him in his beefs with No Age and Wavves. What Laced is, on a basic level, is simple, ramshackle pop intentionally marred by some glitchy noises. When it works, like on the title track or ‘French Countryside’, it genuinely feels like it’s onto the next step in the post-Animal Collective total reconstruction of indie rock. When it doesn’t, it seems forced and gratuitous, too knowing to be enjoyable. It’s a genre Horseshit himself invented and dubbed ‘shitgaze’ though, so what would you expect? Karl McDonald

KEY TRACKS: ‘BLANKET’, ‘THE LAST BOAT’S LEAVING’.

FOR FANS OF: WEIRD EIGHTIES MUSIC, WES ANDERSON FILMS, BLADE RUNNER, ANIKA.

KEY TRACKS: ‘FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE’, ‘LACED’.

FOR FANS OF: TIMES NEW VIKING, SWELL MAPS, BOREDOMS.

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Bliss Release is the first LP from this Blue Mountains four-piece and it’s already received plenty of acclaim in their homeland, landing them the 2011 Australian Music Prize. This re-released version tweaks the tracklisting somewhat, but the essence remains the same: a bright, uplifting sound that nods to the warm, close harmonies of Fleet Foxes, the quasimystical vibes of Yeasayer and the exuberant hooks of Vampire Weekend. Opener ‘Meditation Song #2’ is a swelling campfire strum complete with handclaps, vintage-sounding organ and a catchy refrain. It’s typical of the band’s sunny, vaguely hippyish outlook, further in evidence on tracks like ‘The Rolling Stones’ and ‘This Is What I Said’. The stripped-back ‘Hollow Drums’ is a highlight, with Alister Wright and Heidi Lenffer’s voices combining in stunning fashion, but overall Bliss Release lacks a unique personality to distinguish it from the reference points it nods to. Daniel Harrison

KEY TRACKS: ‘HOLLOW DRUMS’, ‘GOLD CANARY’, ‘THIS IS WHAT I SAID’.

FOR FANS OF: FLEET FOXES, YEASAYER, VAMPIRE WEEKEND.

Mojo Fury Visiting Hours Of A Travelling Circus GRAPHITE

It would be something of an understatement to say that this album has been eagerly anticipated, given that it has been in the waiting room for the best part of two years, but thankfully Visiting Hours Of A Travelling Circus is the album everyone hoped it could have been; dense yet angular, equal parts post-hardcore, industrial and sludgy, grungy riffage, with intelligent, quirky lyrics.

Constant tempo changes inject an energy which is maintained throughout the LP, sometimes offering respite from the riffs, and at other times serving to propel the song forward to an anthemic hook. The importance of rhythm in Mojo Fury’s music cannot be understated, as the reliance on bass and the tight-sounding drums give the songs drive and a signature sound, contributing light and shade to the unconventional and often surprising structures. Admittedly, frontman and guitarist Mike Mormecha’s brooding vocals aren’t for everyone, but for anyone who likes their music to sound catchy, but still original and challenging, Visiting Hours... is definitely a rewarding listen.

Stevie Lennox

KEY TRACKS: ‘LEMON MARINE’, ‘WE SHOULD JUST RUN AWAY’, ‘THE MANN’.

FOR FANS OF: FUTURE OF THE LEFT, THE BLOOD BROTHERS, NINE INCH NAILS.

Young Blood Your indispensable guide to new releases from up-and-coming acts Words by Brian Coney and Chris Jones

Avalanche Ammo Animals EP Seriously, can someone show us the way to the great Irish instrumental rock band factory please?

Yet another new act proud to wear the influence of scene daddies The Redneck Manifesto as well as upstarts like Adebisi Shank, Enemies and ASIWYFA, Avalanche Ammo is one man with the ability to make your heart go boom.

With its electronic trickery, bold melodies and hyperactivity, the Shank is the closest touchstone, but think of Avalanche Ammo as their happy-golucky kid brother. There’s even a hint of The Go! Team’s playground energy as the hard riffing ‘Owl Speak’ draws to a close. Splendid. CJ - avalancheammo.bandcamp.com

Annapurna I Am A Leaf EP Swiftly becoming one of Belfast’s – nay, Ireland’s – pre-eminent instrumental rock acts, Annapurna have practically extracted the primordial weight and authority of ISIS, This Will Destroy You and Boris on this one track, 12-minute EP. Encompassing vaguely cerebral post-metal, passages of severest doom and some real ‘moments’ of deceptively intricate instrumentation à la early Don Caballero, it is a brilliant uncompromising effort from the five-piece. In fact, despite its brevity, all sufficiently figures on ‘I Am A Leaf’: crescendos on the warpath, unchecked sections of semi-discordant call and response and one truly earth-shattering conclusion. More please. BC - annapurna.bandcamp.com

Grand Forever Kappillan Think of all your favourite woozy electronica, cosmic Krautrock and itchy math-rock songs, and then imagine them all distilled into a six-minute droplet of a .zip file. These three tracks (yep) are infuriatingly brief, but my word they leave you begging for more. The London-based quartet feature former members of Panama Kings and Six Star Hotel but it’s best to leave preconceptions at the door, because Grand Forever have more in common with the likes of M83 and Solar Bears than any post-punk indebted indie bands. Now, if they would only extend the length of the spellbinding ‘It Made Me Stand A Little Quieter’ by around four times, they might really be onto something… CJ

Photo by Jennifer Atcheson

InProfile: ACT: Avalanche Ammo FROM: Kildare, Co. Kildare REAL NAME: Anthony Boland FOR FANS OF: Adebisi Shank, Enemies,

The Go! Team.

WEBSITE: avalancheammo.bandcamp.com Formerly a member of Kildare band Belljar, which also helped to spawn We Are Losers, talented mofo Anthony Boland is breaking out alone with his one man band, Avalanche Ammo. The Animal EP came out at the end of March and its deliriously joyful instrumental racket has immediately set tongues a-wagging. Here’s what he had to say for himself.

What is the story so far?

Avalanche Ammo came about because I wanted to challenge myself and experiment in a different writing dynamic than I was used to. I recorded the EP over about four weeks last December and January – snow is a great inspiration – released it at the end of March and here I am now, wearing a mask...

I believe you are just one guy in the studio. Do you play everything yourself?

Yeah, I do. I wanted to experience a level of control over the music that I hadn’t had before so keeping it a solo venture while writing and recording was very important for me.

- grandforever.bandcamp.com

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Why is Ireland producing so much great instrumental rock music at the minute?

I just think the current climate is right for bands without singers, thanks to the incredible offerings from the likes of Adebisi Shank, Enemies, ASIWYFA – they’ve each done wonders opening people up to instrumental music. I haven’t heard, ‘Yeah but they’d sound better with a singer’ at a gig in years – a sign of the changing perceptions and growing acceptance of instrumental rock music in Ireland I think.

Can you name any key influences?

At The Drive-in, Björk, The Oxes, Dredg, Refused, Minus the Bear, Colour, The Bronx, Buddy Holly, Glassjaw, The Redneck Manifesto – to name a few. I kind of stayed away from guitar driven music while recording the EP, I remember those days were filled with lots from the likes of Mr. Scruff, Cut Chemist, Nujabes, Baths, Fantastic Plastic Machine, Fat Jon, and Gold Panda.

What’s the story with the mask, and hiding your face in general?

The original idea behind being faceless was just to help keep it more about the music then the individual guy playing it; I want Avalanche Ammo to be a fun character I can let loose on stage as. There’s no real scheme to keep my identity secret or anything like that, I’ve just always loved the aesthetic look of Venetian masks, and being in a band gives me an excuse to wear one, but I suppose what it all boils down to is that every good superhero needs a mask!

LIVE REVIEWS

LaFaro Auntie Annie’s, Belfast The people of Belfast love LaFaro, that much is certain. Animal Disco really is becoming an increasingly popular night, pulling a good crowd with its unique ‘One band at midnight’ concept.

The room is packed, the audience are ready to erupt, and all LaFaro need to do is stand on the stage for this place to go completely crazy.

Which is more or less exactly what happens. The band have been touring for quite some time now, and it’s clear that they have been much missed, as they are hailed as returning heroes upon their appearance on the stage. It’s difficult to remember a local show that has prompted as much sweaty fist-pumping, shouting, and general rocking out as this one, with the tightly packed audience doing everything they can to go ‘buck mental’, as we say round these parts.

However, for the keen ear, something is amiss.

It’s loud and it’s powerful, but one of the reasons LaFaro work so well as a band is their grasp of subtleties, and this is almost entirely lost from the bludgeoning noise we are treated to tonight.

It’s all raw rush and aggression, but the incisive lyrics of Jonny Black are swallowed up in the maelstrom, as are the duelling guitars of Black and Dave Magee. It’s not so much that LaFaro aren’t delivering the goods, but rather that they’re giving an almost entirely one-dimensional version of themselves. For a band that have more depth than their initial impression would imply, this is a real misfire, and first-time spectators might be hard pressed to fathom why the band deserve the rapturous response they receive.

And let’s not mince words here: to say that the crowd are almost over enthusiastic in their love of the band is not an understatement. Some bands in Belfast are liked because they’re cool. Some, because they’re the flavour of the month. Some, like LaFaro, are loved because that’s simply that’s the only possible response. Old favourites are greeted as part of the canon, whilst new songs are treated as epistles that must be learned, their gospel spread to the unfaithful (whoever they might be).

The new material has a rawer edge, something harder coming through in the music, but as to what is actually being said in the songs, we’ll have to wait for the album to come out.

So LaFaro 2011 have the power to pull it off for a hometown show, but hopefully they haven’t lost the songwriting edge that makes them special. If they have, that’s going to hurt more than any absence caused by long-term touring ever will.

Steven Rainey

PHOTO BY DAMIEN MCGLYNN

Lykke Li Tripod, Dublin It’s like a Fever Ray show on a budget; the way Lykke Li, Sweden’s newest enigmatic songwriting force takes the stage, that is. Amidst a haze of dry ice and flashing strobes, the 25-year-old’s stage show certainly cuts a dash compared to the last time she played Dublin. That gig may have been to an equally packed Button Factory in late 2008, but there was no dress code (black is the colour), billowing curtains dangling from the ceiling, and atmospheric lighting rigs dotting the stage back then. But there’s a good reason for Lykke Li’s live production development. For starters, she’s not the incidental pop star that many might have mistaken her for after Youth Novels; now with a second (excellent) album under her belt, she’s shaping up to be a songwriter of real depth.

Yet as much as things change, some things stay the same; Li’s endearing dance moves remain consistent throughout the hour-long show, not even her sturdy Doc Martens and dress-thatcould-double-as-a-flasher’s-mac preventing her from weaving and bobbing around the stage as she purrs through ‘I Follow Rivers’ and drips

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despondency through ‘Sadness Is A Blessing’. It’s the upbeat tracks that the Saturday night crowd wants to dance and sing along to, though, and though ‘I’m Good, I’m Gone’, ‘Little Bit’ and ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’ elicit much arm-flinging, the well-oiled audience’s impatience materialises in the rampant chatter during the more sedate, lesser-known songs, including the rhythmic organ/ drum based bonus track ‘Made You Move’, and a cover of The Big Pink’s ‘Velvet’.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s another quality of the singer’s that hasn’t been shirked since she was first touring Youth Novels way back when, and that’s her failure – or even unwillingness – to really engage with her audience. There’s a niggling feeling that although she certainly has the songs to fill big venues, does she have the charisma?

Between-song murmurings are minimal, and when they do occur, they’re mostly simple introductions of whatever tune is coming next. “Most of you will have experienced what this song is about, or will experience it at some point in your life,” she explains curtly, before ending the encore on a beautiful, harmony-strewn telling of ‘Unrequited Love’. It seems, given the circumstances, to be an apt closer. We like you a lot, Lykke – but don’t you like us, too? Lauren Murphy

Treme

DVD:

Writers: David Simons and Eric Overmyer Starring: John Goodman, Stev Zahn, Wendell Pierce Cert: 15 The Wire may have not made David Simon a name in all households but those who saw it revelled in its multilayered narrative and keen political commentary. Treme, Simon’s next pet project (not counting the excellent Generation Kill), runs along similar tracks, namely an exploration of how a community can be rocked by bungled American home policy. The eponymous neighbourhood try to move on in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Some might find it less involving than The Wire but the persistent will find much to savour in sterling performances from John Goodman, Steve Zahn and Wendell ‘Bunk’ Pierce. There’s both a tangible feeling of sadness as we see how New Orleans was ignored and dehumanised by the Bush administration, but what is most fascinating is their sense of defiance. Their spirit is epitomised by jazz music whose bombast not only brings these people together in coffee shops and workplaces but also symbolises the optimism which pushes them through the tragedy. Treme is a fascinating, profound drama about everything that is at once great and wrong about the Disunited States. It makes Simon the most important American dramatist working today. Ross Thompson

CONSOLE YOURSELF! May’s gaming releases rounded up After a quiet start to the videogame year this month sees the release of a raft of new titles. First off, petrolheads will be in their element with Shift 2: Unleashed (EA), a slick, high speed driving title from the Need For Speed stable. It has a distinctly arcade feel in comparison with the accurate yet dry approach taken by Gran Turismo yet is none the worse for it. The result is a much more accessible game – the online competitions in particular are a blast. Elsewhere in sport, Tiger Woods: The Masters (EA), with its variety of real world courses and tweakable stats, pushes the golfing simulator about as far as it will go, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your predilections.

The absence of the troubled golfer’s visage from the cover art is not a way of sidestepping the sportsman’s negative publicity. Rather, it not only places more focus on the titular tournament but also places a plethora of other playable golfers in the limelight.

Those who fancy something a little less sedate can let loose with Operation Flashpoint: Red River (Codemasters), a co-op or single player first person shooter which once again draws inspiration from real life military campaigns. It’s more strategic and certainly more punishing than your usual tales of

LEGO STAR WARS III: THE CLONE WARS marines blowing stuff up, and will more than happily fill that slot until Battlefield 3 storms consoles later this year. On a more sci-fi bent is Crysis 2 (EA), an enjoyably overblown caper involving souped-up super-soldiers squaring off in a future New York.

Graphically, it’s stunning, and while the storyline is certainly not the most innovative the enjoyment gained from strapping on a ‘Nanosuit’ and hunting bad guys never gets old.

One for kids and adults who should know better is LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (LucasArts), arguably the strongest to date of the brick-building

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tie-ins. Although it will be confusing for those who have not seen the cartoon, it’s buoyed along by a whimsical sense of humour and sprawling, replayable levels. Further, developers Traveller’s Tales have jazzed up the rather staid formula by adding in Real Time Strategy elements. Finally, the brutal Dead Space 2 (EA) continues to be just as grotesque and beguiling several months after release, its lifespan having been boosted by the episode Severed, now available for download. It offers a different perspective on the main story and is just as twisted and frightening as its older brother.

Ross Thompson

FLASHBACK The Death Of Childhood The release of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, May 19, 1999

12 YEARS AGO

It began on familiar terms. An intake of air, blue words on a black screen, and then the most heart-stoppingly glorious fanfare the world has ever known. 133 minutes later, all that could be heard was faint sobbing and a general air of astonishment. George Lucas’ The Phantom Menace had done the unthinkable – it had killed our childhood.

When The Phantom Menace was given a release date, there was a general feeling that this would be Lucas’ grand return to filmmaking. After all, other than his efforts as a producer, he hadn’t actually directed a film since the original Star Wars film back in 1977. If even the great man felt the need to give this one the stamp of approval, surely it was going to be a classic, right?

Wrong. Right from the very beginning, The Phantom Menace disappoints. A convoluted plot about trade federations and embargos is as dull as it is confusing. Coupled to this was a bizarre tone

that was clearly aimed at very young children, but consistently stuck to adult concepts, lurching around all over the place.

But then the true horror of it all emerges… Jar Jar Binks. Who could have thought that this one character would be enough to bring down the entire Star Wars saga? Sure, the plot was rubbish, and the effects were dazzling, but insubstantial, but these were problems we could deal with, something we could work past. Jar Jar Binks is nothing less than a cinematic atrocity. A clownish, oafish character, every second of screentime he has cheapens the entire film, reducing it to nothing less than a diabolical unsalvageable mockery of all we held dear.

The rest of the characters don’t fare any better, from Liam Neeson’s rigidly one-dimensional Northern Irish Jedi, a man whose mastery of the Force has seemingly come at the expense of his ability to sound interested in the clumsy dialogue he’s been given, to Ewan McGregor frittering away all the goodwill he’d earned in the preceding years by doing a really, really bad Alec Guinness impersonation. It’s badly acted, embarrassing nonsense, and you got the impression that everyone involved knew the truth.

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Everyone except Lucas, that is. Documentaries made at the time show him acting as some kind of bloated, grotesque overlord, surrounded by sycophantic cronies who agree with every terrible idea he has. It’s not surprising that the film turned out so badly considering that the entire production team seemed to regard Lucas as an infallible god, whilst he gorges himself on their admiration.

Every bad idea he had ended up on the screen, representing some kind of awful ‘value for money’.

The Star Wars franchise (‘saga’ no more, sadly) was creatively crippled, and even the previously untouchable original trilogy ended up looking a little sullied and dirty.

And, as if there was anything else than this, it ended up being the highest grossing of all the Star Wars movies at the box office, and is currently the 14th highest grossing film of all time.

If that’s what going over to the dark side of the force can do for you, perhaps it’s time for us all to defect?

Steven Rainey

CLASSIC GAME Sonic The Hedgehog (1991)

Illustration by Mark Reihill

The little blue speedster, Sonic the Hedgehog, hits 20 this year. As another ream of Sonic retro collections looks set to hit the shelves, AU investigates the creation and undoing of one of the greatest series in videogaming history.

By 1990, console outsiders Sega had reached the number two spot in videogaming, a slot there for the taking after the games crash of the 1980s allowed Nintendo and its shroom-hopping plumber Mario to take centre stage. But though Sega’s then-current machine, the MegaDrive, was a giant put next to Nintendo’s ageing NES, it had failed to seduce the masses and capitalise on the new phenomenon of the ‘casual gamer’ as hoped. They had all the tools.

Sega appealed to gamers put off by Nintendo’s family-friendly approach, and developers put out

by Nintendo’s incessant bullying. They just needed that something to compete. That something would be the most unlikely of all: a blue hedgehog inspired

by Bill Clinton’s sleeves-up attitude. Yep...

Sonic was born Mr. Needlemouse, designed by staffer Yuji Naka when Sega set about replacing previous mascot Alex Kidd. The highly-strung ‘hog would be given Michael Jackson-inspired sneakers, fangs, a girlfriend named Madonna and a cockrock band for company. Sega of America tore the idea to shreds, but the boots remained, becoming a

distinctive characteristic. And in 1991, Sonic took to MegaDrives around the world, pitted against his nemesis Dr. Robotnik, fighting for the freedom of South Island, a utopia for Sonic and his newlyenslaved animal mates.

The game itself blew minds and captured hearts, as the blue blur whizzed across screens at unprecedented speed, showcasing MegaDrive’s raw processing power and graphical capabilities, and upping the pace of platform games, creating both incredible challenges and a pulsating visual experience. Sonic’s pursuit of Robotnik brought him to varied places too, a million miles from Mario’s verdant hills and rolling sandscapes. Sonic would explore Greek ruins, glitzy casinos, and abandoned industry, each in eye-popping hues, as well as psychedelic special stages. The music, provided by Masato Nakamura of J-Pop veterans Dreams Come True, was a revelation, eschewing jaunty jingles for fuller, varied compositions that set the bar for gaming OSTs. But as astounding a technical achievement as it was, the main draw was Sonic himself, a badass who took the initiative and did the right thing to save his homeland, rather than eternally chase princesses around castles. Indeed, Sonic’s everyman cool saw him take to other media by the following year, with animated TV shows and two concurrent comic book series following his digital domination, as well

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as adorning the Williams F1 team car, a float in the Macy’s Day Parade and acres of merchandise.

His likeability only increased with the addition of friends, such as young protege Miles ‘Tails’ Prower, an orphaned fox cub with two tails, usable as propellers, taken in by Sonic and accompanying him as a sidekick and occasional fall-guy on his adventures.

Two sequels, the latter of which was to be soundtracked by Sonic superfan Michael Jackson (before certain events occurred) and spin-off title Sonic And Knuckles concreted Sega’s place atop gaming, but numerous gaffes with new hardware and expansions would wind up making Sega look greedy and stupid, coasting on the next Sonic game’s assured success. Meanwhile, Sonic’s low profile at the launch of Sega’s much-feted Saturn hampered the console’s chances of competing against Sony’s casual-friendly PlayStation.

Indeed, when Sonic finally went 3D in 1999 (on Dreamcast title Sonic Adventure), the results were underwhelming at best, ending a line of fine platformers that, for a vast majority of a generation, remain synonymous with Sega and gaming as a medium. Recent attempts to rekindle the magic have met mixed reviews, but as long as there are new machines every few years, there’s always an excuse to bundle the old games together for a quick buck... Mike McGrath-Bryan

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…and the end of the ‘group’ “Washington DC is not a state, it’s a district. There’s no representation in congress, so it’s always felt like a weird zone, like a Twilight Zone in a way.” With these words, Ian Svenonius has almost nailed the manifesto behind Nation of Ulysses, the pioneering DC based band he formed in the late Eighties. As he prepares to return to Ireland under his current guise as Chain and the Gang, AU engages into dialogue with one of punk’s premier ideologues. And in the end, who knows who the true victor will be?

Words by Steven Rainey

When the history books are written – and let’s face it, that day seems increasingly close – there’s a chance that people like Ian Svenonius might be overlooked. And after two decades of refusing to compromise, it’s difficult to ascertain whether that’s a fair judgement, or a crime against music itself. If there were rules to this game, no-one told Svenonius, and the music he has made in his various incarnations has rarely toed the line, playing with form and convention, and always seeking to push whatever boundaries he can find.

“We were drawing from a variety of influences different from a lot of ‘normal’ American groups. We were just lucky to be more sophisticated.” At this, Svenonius breaks into a laugh that is part mocking, part heartfelt, aware of the pomposity of his words, as well as their truth. “We were aware of street gang culture, but also the future, modernism. We didn’t want to be a rock and roll band in the traditional way, we wanted to be a political party.”

Nation of Ulysses exploded onto the DC hardcore scene back in the late 1980s, completely at odds with the rest of the country, as well as their peers in DC, largely centred round the hugely influential Dischord record label, run by Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson. Largely eschewing the hardcore punk rush or emotional dynamics with which the label had made a name for itself, NoU unleashed an almost impossible-to-categorise sound that was part MC5 ideology and hardcore thrash, and part free-jazz improvisation and fashionista cool. DC’s hardcore scene was made up of misfits, and even in this most outsider of genres, NoU stood out.

“My groups are really part of the Pitchfork narrative of what’s important. Maybe the groups are just too interesting? They have too much personality, and I don’t think people want personality.” The tone is measured, but one gets the impression that Svenonius has spent the last two decades waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with his vision.

Over the course of the two LPs the band released during their lifespan, NoU had to rail against the perceptions of their peers, as well as those looking in upon this microcosmic scene. To say that the band were misunderstood is something of an understatement, with NoU never quite finding the audience they deserved, their punk politik rhetoric frequently falling on deaf ears.

Looking back, it’s frequently difficult to see why.

The band’s first album, 13 Point Plan To Destroy America, is an unfocussed, but undeniably powerful

punk missive, a raw explosion of garage rock energy, with ideas spiralling out of control in all directions.

The follow-up, Plays Pretty For Baby, upped the jazz ante, but still struggled to win any converts to this nascent political party. Amid this lack of support, the band folded in 1992, with Svenonius and bandmates James Canty and Steve Gamboa going on to form the equally underrated Make Up. “At one point, people looked to rock and roll to make a statement, and now it plays a different role,” explains Svenonius, in full on ‘Rock and Roll Theorist’ mode. “The main thing that has changed is the format. The sonic quality of a 45rpm record was designed to be played on the radio, it’s all the compression and it demands your attention. You can’t really engage in conversation over the top of an old soul 45, you have to either dance or listen or respond, or engage in some heavy petting.”

The Make Up pioneered their own brand of what they described as ‘gospel yeh yeh’, something that was meant to be engaged with by a live audience.

The records were sporadically thrilling, but the live experience could be transcendent. Ask around… if you find someone who managed to catch The Make Up during their five year run, you’ll notice them get misty eyed at the very memory of this band.

But once again, Svenonius was left playing catchup with the rest of the world. American music in the mid-Nineties was still recovering from the death of Kurt Cobain, whilst in Britain, Britpop was beginning its slow climb to the top. The musical climate was not ready for more theoretical pontificating and concepts, all wrapped up in a stylish package, harking back to the French new wave. For all their merits, The Make Up were perceived as too arch, too arty, and too out of step with the times to mark out their territory on the musical map. In the face of indifference, they called it a day in 2000.

Since then, Svenonius has made music under various guises, such as Weird War and his current incarnation as Chain and the Gang, each one representing a continuation of his musical ethos and philosophies. But, as with any great philosopher, exactly what idea he’s putting forward can be difficult to pin down. But, if Svenonius is to be believed, there’s a-change a-coming.

“The group is on its way out, I’m just enjoying the last gasps of the form. Pretty soon I don’t think we’re going to have the luxury to make records. I

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mean, once upon a time, people used to go and see paintings, and beat each other with sticks because they were so aggravated by the content of what they were seeing! No painting can have that effect anymore. And similarly, the groups are still drawing people because it’s the one thing that can’t be done on the computer, besides alcohol, but I just don’t know how much longer it’s going to last. Being in a group is like being a poet, you can’t have any economic ambitions around it.”

As for any attempt to look back upon the music he has made, or any notion of contextualising it, Svenonius is equally adamant that something has to change. “It’s weird… really weird.” He rolls the words around in his mouth a few times. “They’re creating the canon. The Pitchfork canon of indie rock. ‘Oh, these are the important things!’. I find the whole thing distasteful. I guess whenever people see their life historicised in a distorted and cynical way, it’s always depressing, I guess. Or funny. The Pixies!

They’re the greatest group ever? That’s really sad, I think! If Nation of Ulysses reformed, how pathetic would that be?!”

Refusing to rest on the laurels of his past, and continuing to stick to his mission, Svenonius still has something to say, and is still finding a way to say it. Be it with Chain and the Gang, and their ability to reach out to an audience and really touch them, or his hugely entertaining YouTube chat show Soft Focus, Svenonius is still preaching. “Chain and the Gang is very primitive, inspired by ‘call and response’, and it’s entertaining. It’s everything that most groups aren’t. We don’t just sound like the Ramones with a bunch of reverb, or the Jesus and Mary Chain with even more reverb.”

And with this, Svenonius’ mask slips somewhat and he utters a deep and sincere laugh. “Just so you know, I don’t hate all the groups that sound like The Ramones with a bunch of reverb! Some of them are pretty good!”

For the man who refused to compromise, it’s perhaps encouraging to see him letting a little bit of the light back in. Perhaps his place in history isn’t that far off, after all.

Chain and the Gang play the Menagerie, Belfast on May 21 and Crane Lane Theatre, Cork on May 22. www.myspace.com/chainandthegang

Record Store Day Head, Belfast

Space Dimension Controller

Victoria, Aaron

It has been happening around the world every year since 2007, but this is arguably the first time that Belfast has fully embraced Record Store Day with both arms, and squeezed a great day out of it. Head Music was the focal point of activity, with live in-store performances from some of Northern Ireland’s finest bands taking place throughout the afternoon. The Answer stopped by for a special acoustic set, and Sea Pinks, Morning Claws, Tom McShane and Third Man Theme all put in great performances. A slew of great DJ’s also performed over the course of the day, working exclusively with vinyl. Kenny Murdock, Joe Lindsay, Lyndon Stephens and Space Dimension Controller all spun fantastic plastic. A great event that showed there is life in record stores yet.

Words by Jonny Tiernan Photos by Will Neill

Matt & Claire

Gareth, Viv & Amy

Amy & Scott

Jake & Ravinda

Skip & Cat

Tom & Matthew

Richard

Gareth & Daniel

Sea Pinks

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The Empire Laughs Back Comedy Club The Empire, Belfast

Natashia & Danielle

You could easily consider The Empire’s Tuesday night comedy club a Belfast institution. Along with the Queen’s Comedy Club, it has been responsible for the non-stop promotion of local comedians and new talent. We’re also pretty sure that it has been responsible for more than a few conceptions. Yes, that kind of conception. Just look at the amount of couples in these pictures, it must be one of the most popular date destinations, perhaps only pipped by the cinema. Except you can’t really get drunk at the flicks. And if it’s the wrong movie it can be a romance killer, whereas laughter can be a good aphrodisiac. Just think, in a few years time there could be people going to the comedy night who were actually conceived after one many years before. And if they’re on a date too it could start some kind of weird infinite loop. Just a thought.

Words by Jonny Tiernan Photos by Tony Irvine

Conor & Fiona

Charlie & Aine

James & Jill

Teri, Taylor, Ryan, Stephanie & Pete

Jamie, Lynn, Mark, Christine & Chris

Aaron & Robert

Keith Farnan

Shelley Marshall

David & Janice

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Anna, Fiona & Clare

THE LAST WORD with: Andrew Trimble of Ulster & Ireland been there, and I thought it would be really funny to try and grab his guitar. Except he didn’t think it was that funny and came down and smacked me.

What was the last good album that you bought?

I downloaded The Naked And Famous’s album recently. I’m not completely into yet, but it’s pretty accessible. I also love the last Arcade Fire one. You have to listen to it for ages before you start liking it, but it’s totally worth it.

When was the last time you were scared?

I get scared very easily watching films. I watched Black Swan with my wife recently and it scared the crap out of me.

What was the last bad job that you had?

I worked in the Comfort Hotel in Portrush. I only worked there for a few weeks over a summer, clearing tables and stuff whenever I was 17, but I got sacked in the end. They had a two strike policy, and my first strike was spilling bleach all over the floor which dyed my trousers. The second strike was when I couldn’t turn up to work because I was playing a gig with my band on the Friday, and they said, if you don’t turn up for work on the Friday, don’t bother turning up on the Saturday either, so that was me.

Photo by Gary McCall When was the last time you ever bought a t-shirt at a gig?

I haven’t bought one in a long time actually, probably not since a Two Door Cinema Club T-shirt I bought at one of their early gigs in the Limelight.

What was the last meal you had?

I had a ham and cheese plum chutney sandwich from [Belfast deli] Yellow Door. I’ve been eating that for about six months now though so I think I’m going to have to either change sandwich shop or change sandwich.

When was the last time you cried?

It might have been when I got married two years ago. It’s the one time that it’s okay.

When was the last time you got into a fight?

I haven’t really been in any fights outside of rugby since school. Apart from when I went to a Hives gig at the Limelight, and got punched in the face by their guitarist. It wasn’t really a fight because it was one punch and that was it. He jumped into the crowd, and I was only 16 so I shouldn’t have really

FAMOUS LAST WORDS “Vi faccio vedere come muore un Italiano!” – “I’ll show you how an Italian dies!”

Uttered by Fabrizio Quattrocchi (May 9, 1968 – April 14, 2004), an Italian security contractor, shortly before he was executed by Islamist militants in Iraq “I am just going outside. I may be some time.”

Captain Lawrence Oates (March 17, 1880 – March 16, 1912) on Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition. He was never seen again.

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Was there anyone notable in the band?

Niall [Kennedy, ex-Panama Kings] played, we were just kids and it was just for fun. Daniel Brown from the Lowly Knights played and he’s also really talented. I think those two were definitely the most talented and I think me and the other guy Tim were probably holding them back! www.ulsterrugby.com www.twitter.com/andrew_trimble

THIS ISSUE WAS POWERED BY Too much of a good thing, sun, Natalie Portman, Adam and Joe, Yammer, hand-written letters, poker wins, cramming, ulsterbus goldliner, seduction.

WWW.KELLYSPORTRUSH.COM / £7 ADMISSION

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The SMIRNOFF word and associated logos are trade marks. © The Smirnoff Co. 2011

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