Kruger Issue 14

Issue 14

Magazine

Contents KRUGERVILLE

Facts for the Visitor

Religion, Folklore & Philosophy 10. Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man. 12. Bat For Lashes 16. Death Vessel

Facts for the visitor 4. History 6. Facts 8. Late of the Pier

Places to Stay

Culture 28. The Ting Tings 30. Pop Levi

42. Architecture In Helsinki Places to Go

Law & Order 20. Tokyo Police Club 24. Bonde Do Role

Citizens

50.Good Shoes

36. Super Furry Animals

52.Holy Hail 54.The Mules

Eating & Drinking 46.Cate Le Bon

KRUGERVILLE

Facts for the Visitor

Krugervillians

Kruger Magazine Issue 13

Krugervillians responsible for this issue in order of appearance :

Editors: Mike Williams, Joe Howden, Mike Day Reviews Editor: Helia Phoenix Research: Helen Weatherhead

Words Jen Long, James Anthony, Greg Cochrane, Simon Roberts, Neil Condron, Dan Tyte, Natalie Davies, Kat Brown, Lisa Matthews. Betti Hunter, Helia Phoenix, David George, Susie Wild, Adam Corner, Janne Oinonen, Ellie Harwood, Gethin Jones, Kate Parkin, Barney Sprague, Rhodri Wyn Lewis, Daniel Owens, Stephanie Price.

Images Tim Cochrane, Si Peplow, Skinny Gaviar, Jess Long, Jon Mlynarski, Anouck Bertin, Mei Lewis, Kamil Janowski, Maciej Dakowicz, Brendan Barry, Lee Goldup.

Contact, Comment, Contribute

mail@krugermagazine.com myspace.com/krugermagazine

For Laura & Jon

Thanks to: Anna Mears @ Dogday, Will Lawrence @ Inhouse, Beth Drake, Ruth Drake and Ruth Clarke @ Toast, Jodie Banaszkiewicz @ Domino Records, James Heather @ Ninja Tune, Owain Rogers @ Ankst, Michal, Alex, Kevin & Cat, Al Power, Nathan Warren @ MWL, Eleanor Stevenson, Huw Stephens for all the support and especially Helen, Jen, Helia, Natty, Dan, Susie, Emily and Heather. Believe!

Printed by: MWL Print Group Ltd. Units 10 -13 Pontyfelin Industrial Estate, New Inn, Pontypool NP4 ODQ contact nathanw@mwl .co.uk Produced by Kruger in The Daley Thompson Suite, Cardiff and in Mike’s Flat, London. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the kind permission of Kruger. The opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily the opinions of Kruger.

All work by Mike Day, Mike Williams & Joe Howden unless otherwise credited. All words, photography and illustrations are original and specific to Kruger. Kruger is a quarterly magazine and is distributed throughout the UK. Advertising enquiries: mike@krugermagazine.com

KRUGERVILLE History of Krugerville

Welcome to Krugerville, city on the grow...

Times are changing for the citizens of Krugerville, as a fresh new wave of optimism sweeps across the area, and boy, do these fellows know a thing or two about graft; even the Scandinavians have got that can-do Krugerville spirit! With the brand new Megabroke shuttling people across the city, and half the country wearing Krugerville galoshes, there’s never been a better time to call yourself a Krugervillian.

It’s a far cry from the old-town days, when three tenderfoot prospectors happened across a piece of land and decided to call it home. Two buildings were all that stood at that time; the old outhouse where they laid their heads and the old Medical Research Centre, both still standing to this day.

The rumour goes that curiosity got the better of these three young bucks, and one morning they set out up the hill to that ominous looking laboratory. They were welcomed inside by a group of Lusitanian doctors who practised phase-one pharmacokinetics on them, inducing shared psychotic visions of metal towers that scraped the sky and bunting-lined streets in a grid formation. They left the next morning with pockets full of cash, a severely depleted libido and a desire to achieve and compensate for their newfound sexual inadequacy. But these are just rumours, you understand. All we know is a city got built and it keeps on growing and growing, so come with us as we tour through our homestead and show you all what makes Krugerville such a great place to live...

Facts for the Visitor

Facts for the Visitor

Architecture A stroll through the streets of Krugerville will uncover many of the city’s architectural treasures, like legendary nightspot Clwb Ifor Bach and its overused iconic photo-shoot-ready fire escape, or The Fanstasy Lounge, where stories of Jesse F Keeler’s insatiable thirst are told and re-told to weary travellers. Be sure to stop off at Crime Generator to pick up hot bargains, and Tourist Information, were you can hear loads more of this ridiculous theme-based rubbish. Explore, enjoy!

Transport You’ve got to get around somehow, and Krugerville offers a wealth of options to get from A to B. Travel on the Megabroke is free, all you have to do is give up a little part of your soul for the pleasure. If you fancy keeping the old spirit-inside intact, you can always plump for a hot air balloon. Powered in the north by a stream of blatherings from an army of press agents and in the south by the counter-prolix of the Kruger scribes, these are also free for those who can endure the endless musical diatribes that accompany each journey.

KRUGERVILLE

KRUGERVILLE

Facts for the Visitor

Economy

Dos and Don’ts

For a city so rich in culture, Krugerville is a poor relation to its more economicallysound neighbours. If Krugerville were a person it would be a tramp. A skiddy, piss-smelling, begging in a doorway tramp. ‘Please sir, got any change? Help an old soldier on a cold night like tonight?’

Fortunately, within the city limits, there is no need for the filthy lucre because everything is free! That’s right, pop into a shop to pick up a beautifully designed magazine... free! Want the latest hot new release by the latest hot new artist? Free again! OMG!

Any successful social infrastructure requires its citizens to adhere to some kind if voluntary code of conduct, and Krugervillians have always been vigilant to this. Don’t listen to shit bands, always help old ladies across the streets, never listen to shit bands and always put the toilet seat down are just a few of the examples set by our citizens daily. Visitors should note that it is frowned upon to sit on the floor cross-legged at indie gigs, as no-one likes a cunt, and that it is very polite to say good morning to strangers.

Enjoy!

So there you have it, a sneak peek at our lovely city. We hope you like what you’ve seen so far and that you’ll choose to explore further and learn more about what makes Krugerville the great place it is. Whether you want to learn about the climate and Late of the Pier, culture with Pop Levi or our citizens and Super Furry Animals, it’s there to be found all around you. Please enjoy your stay...

Late of the Pier Photgraphed by Kruger at Dot to Dot Festival, Nottingham.

Facts for the Visitor

KRUGERVILLE

KRUGERVILLE The climate in Krugerville is one of constant change with turbulent conditions arising unpredictably throughout the seasons.

Who can forget the Rumble Strips storm of 2005, finally resulting in a heated feast of energy in the town’s park this summer? Or the infantile eruption of Mount Foals which continues to bubble in the near distance, threatening to erupt at any moment?

Residents have become accustomed to these relentless extremes, always welcoming a new wave with open ears. Currently, the region is being seized upon by a fresh bolt of energy, shooting up through the ages, and termed by meteorologists as Late of the Pier.

“We’re an electrical storm, that makes everything go wrong and break” shoots Metro Smidgens, bassist with the torrential troupe, “But it isn’t like all the lights going off; they just start strobe-ing and everyone has epileptic fits, but everyone thinks they’re dancing.” Then from across the room; “It’s like putting a light bulb in a microwave as well as your dinner” fires electronic sampler Jack Paradise. “It looks good, but it’s pretty bad.”

Facts for the Visitor

Late of the Pier originated near Nottingham, spreading across the land by means of a four-pronged attack. However, as I entered the eye of the storm two crucial elements, Rogue Dog and Earl Samuel, had taken leave to peruse what charts as more personal destruction. “We’re always up for staying out and partying, enjoying ourselves.” drops Metro, “I don’t mean going out, getting absolutely hammered and taking as many

there were more people in that room on pills than I’ve seen at Fabric.” settles Jack, Metro reflecting: “In the toilets; you walk in and there’s sick and vodka on the floor…

It’s what Skins wishes it was.”

Studying reports from the area, it would seem the region has suffered suitably; “The all-age thing just grew and grew, got too big and then got kicked out of everywhere

It’s not about waking up on the park bench, but underneath it, coz you get more shelter. drugs as you can and going mad….” Then in blasts Jack, questioning, “Are we park bench people? Yeh; I’ve spent many a night in Hoxton Square just sat there ‘till 8 in the morning, drinking. It’s not about waking up on the park bench, but underneath it, coz you get more shelter.”

Sheltering from exposure to Late of the Pier has become increasingly difficult as the storm sweeps north to south, the underage scene in particular being battered by this burgeoning tour de force. Many believe chemical saturation in this area to be unattainable, but said case study has determined otherwise. “I remember playing one show, an all-ages show, and

because it was just too chaotic.” levels Metro. “They did a few more but kept getting banned from venues.” However, a number of texts theorise that this was due to strong winds carrying in a pollutant known as hype.

“Hype’s something ridiculous, it’s stupid. It destroys bands, it’s more detrimental than anything.” thunders Metro. Jack continues, shedding light on the subject; “You take in the hype and it makes you excited about what you’re doing and it gives you the self-confidence. There’s so many people blowing smoke up your arse these days, bands get complacent and they don’t actually remember that they’re making music and

that they have to keep progressing. We practice because we want to blow people away just by standing still, but we don’t stand still just because you can. You get a lot of bands who are actually really good musically, who just sell themselves through their hedonism. It seems like a selling point.

It’s just strange; like they forget they make music.”

So as the citizens of Krugerville look to the sky, we can only wonder how long Late of the Pier will hang over the area and what will spark a break in pressure. A five day forecast may not be foresight enough; however particles of hype are ominously present in their composition. What the consequences of this compound are to the young squall is anyone’s guess.

“Is hype like an air freshener that smells like the smell of rain?” breezes Jack. “No.” flashes Metro; “I imagine hype being the rain of the storm that makes everyone notice us more.” “Or Is hype a bird” adds Jack, “locked in a room, watching a stormy sky on a television… or like white doves in a glass elevator with a storm happening outside… or is it just a bag of lips?”

Words by Jen Long

Religion, Folklore & Philosophy

Ox.

KRUGERVILLE

“T

he way major labels are going, and it’s such a boring obvious issue, but I think in a couple of years there’s going to be nothing left anyway, and I don’t want to be one of those bands who are like ‘we’re freedom fighters, we’re going to give our music away on the internet’, because we’re not going to give any music away on the internet, people will have to buy our music, and if they download it on Limewire then I believe that’s theft, but at the same time, we’re not going to go around thinking we’re the big men, high-fiving ourselves, patting each other on the back, and coming on stage and doing like a hundred encores, getting like a blowjob off some 8 year old Hispanic whilst on our tour of New Orleans and bathing in money at the end of the night and spending all our advance on a fat car with a swimming pool built into it, only to realise that at the end of the year we haven’t got the money to even pay the tax on our advance, and the next year we’ll come back to the label and say ‘oh, we want to record our second album’ and they’ll be like ‘who are you?’ and we’ll be like ‘remember us? We’re the Bravery’ and they’ll say ‘who? Oh yeah, the guys who look like the people on that advert for hair gel’, and the door will be slammed in our face and we’ll be out on our ear and even our parents won’t let us sleep on their floor, and that’s such a state of affairs for so many bands who think they’re something, and perhaps you have to be savvy to the fact that perhaps you’re not the greatest songwriter in the world, and perhaps not everyone is going to want to dance to your song at their wedding, and I think just because Jonny Borrell can come and be an arrogant wanker and it can work for him doing everything I just said and still making profit and going out with Hollywood a-listers and probably having the best time ever, I think he’s the exception to the rule that that attitude doesn’t work, and there’s one exception that proves every rule, but you’ve got to be humble and you can’t go in all guns blazing because you’ll run out of ammunition. That’s the end of the monologue.”

This is the gospel according to Fred Mcpherson, the winsome philosopher at the front of prog-indie upstarts Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man, a band as unique, interesting and idiosyncratic as their name.

Eagle.

KRUGERVILLE Forming late in 2006, the band quickly recorded a couple of demos, pricking-up the ears of the industry and setting out a doctrine to make pop music without making ‘pop music’. They are yet to release a single, have not signed to label and have only played a handful of gigs. Faith is the foundation on which we build.

of fun for chin-stroking sessions in eastern Europe, only that in this new incarnation music and expression comes first, and everything from their non-handbook drum beats to the array of guitar techniques employed to the quasi-religious name they’ve chosen to be known by has been meticulously thought out. As Fred says,

You may recognise Fred and guitarist Shaun from their previous band Les Incompetents, a tumbledown bevy of knees-up party poppers whose single How it all Went Wrong was as popular as it was prophetic, the band splitting as it threatened to take them to the top of the indie tree. Kruger mourned, but for Fred things couldn’t have worked out better. Happier and more focused, he’s keen to distance the new band from the old.

“I think a lot of people were expecting us to be a basic evolution of what two of us once were, but I’d say it’s much more of a complete revolution rather than evolution.

I think the leap from Home Alone to the Bible pretty much says it all”.

“We’re now doing what we want to do that we couldn’t do because there were four other people all with ideas of their own, and basically if you try and mix six herbs in a sausage, it’s not necessarily going to taste great, whereas if you pick two of those choice herbs that complement each other, then you’ll find a great sausage. Sometimes it’s not the more the merrier, and quality does beat quantity.”

Where Les Incompetents were all party party party, Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man take themselves a little more seriously. That’s not to say that they’ve forgone all sense

The other two beasts in the band are drummer Edward and bassist Tommy. It’s a grungy, proggy, techie kind of outfit. Four members, four animals. They must have played who’s who?

“I’m Eagle!” says Shaun. “That’s only because you said it first,” says Fred. “I don’t mind Ox, because I think there’s something about the face of an Ox – and I mean this from the deepest hole in my heart – I think if you look into the eyes of any land mammal; horses, cows, even donkeys, there’s a real air of age and torment. “ “And you just don’t get that with an Eagle!” butts in Edward, and I’ve lost them to an in-joke.

But this time around, an in-joke is what they’re not. Take them seriously, and they shall deliver.

Man.

Photography by Tim Cochrane - www.timothycochrane.com

Lion.

Religion, Folklore & Philosophy

Religion, Folklore & Philosophy

KRUGERVILLE

Photography by Tim Cochrane - www.timothycochrane.com

KRUGERVILLE Natasha Kahn is leading Kruger down the garden path. Except, dear Krugervillian, there’s no deception here - despite the tangible spell being cast.

Under a tree, we sit discussing Krugerville’s power station. As chief engineer, she’s briefing us on its design, form and function.

“It’s part nursery school,” she begins. “It educates children about important things and music. We also have an Andy Warholstyle factory...”

She’s referring to the Silver Factory, where Warhol did assemble his menagerie of free-thinkers. A glam-rock igloo of tinfoil, broken mirrors, and silver paint, Warhol turned his factory into a font of creativity.

Natasha Kahn, as the creative powerhouse behind elemental chamber-pop outfit Bat For Lashes, is that building made flesh.

“The power station is a consistent artsculpture of kinetic energy, driven by completely organic moving things,” she says.

I ask her to imagine a contraption designed

by Rube Goldberg or W Heath Robinson: an incredibly complex, convoluted and indirect apparatus, performing simple tasks. Her eyes glow. “Exactly,” she beams.

Religion, Folklore & Philosophy

Kahn’s encyclopaedic knowledge is striking. Incredibly well-read, she’s currently working through a dictionary of symbolism. It takes a certain type of person to read a dictionary cover-to-cover. When quizzed about the power of symbols, she becomes infused with energy.

“When I write about phenomena storms and hurricanes and animals - I do it in terms of folklore and symbolism,” she says. “These scenes and symbols are really important.”

So Krugerville’s power environmentally friendly?

station

is

“These things belong to the natural world.

I don’t want to see them disappear.

Already I’m singing about these things as sacred, compared to the world we live in. They’re already imbued with rarity and power. If all of that was to go...” She tails off, and all at once looks very sad. The tree swishes above us.

“The power of nature is hugely important,” she continues, regrouping. “To see something that’s forceful - so much stronger than you - really grounds you. It’s important to have a relative relationship with these huge ongoing things.”

For the sake of preservation of the species?

“Humanity is just this little parasite that’s living off the Earth, and she’s going to scratch us and shake us off one day,” she says, brightening. “We’re not going to destroy the planet. We’re going to be extinguished. A new ecosystem will evolve. Everything works in cycles.”

”What bothers me about cities is not being able to see horizons... If you’re constantly looking at obstacles, it’s really hard to get any sense of where you are” But obviously, Krugerville has urban areas - sprawling metropolises pulsing with life...

“I love the city for culture. You feed off it -

going to see strange shows or talking with creative people - it’s really exciting,” she says. ”What bothers me about cities is not being able to see horizons. I remember reading that the human eye needs a horizon or a space in order to clear its mind. If you’re constantly looking at obstacles, it’s really hard to get any sense of where you are and any relationship to the natural movement of the Earth.”

Everyone requires solace. Where does she go to find respite from the pressures of modern life?

“The house I’m in now is a little vicarage,” she explains. “It has a shadow of a cross on the wall, Exorcist-style - it feels a bit like, ‘the power of Christ compels you’, when you walk in. It’s beautiful, I’ve got a garden that’s two minutes walk from the sea – if you step out of the door and turn to the right, you can see it.”

We ponder the nature of houses for a moment. Le Corbusier, a Swiss architect, had this idea that architecture should meet the demands of the machine age.

Architecture should be as an assembly line, a kind of factory aesthetic. He once said that ‘a house is a machine for living in’.

KRUGERVILLE

Religion, Folklore & Philosophy

Kahn thinks about this, then, very deliberately responds. “Well,” she says, wrinkling her nose, “Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher, said that ‘a house was a shelter for dreaming’, and I prefer that.”

music’. This time, she answers immediately.

And so he did, dear Krugervillians. ‘If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house,’ Bachelard wrote in The Poetics Of Space, ‘I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ Of course, Kahn has read it.

So there is a definite mathematical pattern to everything - even Bat For Lashes?

“It’s an amazing book,” she enthuses. “He said the storm makes sense of shelter. His idea is that a house, for a child, is a place where you make sense of things. It’s your first universe. The universe itself is just like the house but projected onto a bigger arena.”

“I think music is mathematical - linked to physics and things like that. I think when he says that, he’s hoping to add a bit more poetry to the idea of building things.”

“I like working with extremes,” she says. “Putting two extremes together, two styles, or things from the past and future next to each other is very satisfying. There are definitely elements of mathematics present. But then, I think you need to add an element of emotion and humanity - in the form of expression.

“Whenever I do a show, if I’m expressing myself through a particular emotional standpoint one night, I might have a certain thing going - if it’s singing, it might be raucous, but other nights it might be small and meandering. It’s a combination of chance and maths, I think.”

When it comes to nature, Kahn knows whereof she speaks, yet never comes across as a flower-child. She’s able to apply an enviable breadth of science and philosophy to the natural.

Time for a quote of her own - for the wisdom of Bat For Lashes, chief engineer of Krugerville power station, shall stand and be recorded in the libraries of Krugerville, alongside that of Goethe, and of Le Corbusier, and of Gaston Bachelard. She once said that the music chose the instruments for her.

“Bachelard talks about beautiful things, like worlds within worlds within worlds within worlds,” she says. “Nature and architecture and all those things are based on the tiny patterns that you see if you look at a flower, or a cell under a microscope we have an archetypal sense of structure embedded in us.”

I counter this with another quote, this time from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who once described architecture as ‘frozen

“Whatever wants to be born through you, you shouldn’t try to limit to a palette of sound,” she says. “With certain emotions come certain instruments. For the next record, I want horns and more percussive drumming. That’s where the songs feel like they fit.

Each album is like a family of songs that fit together. They have to be bound together into sonic landscapes. Later, I might play with a brass band, a beatboxer and a tapdancer. If it’s right, the music will take me there.”

Words by James Anthony

* * * * * * * * * * * * Religion, Philosophy & Folklore Religion, Folklore & Philosophy

KRUGERVILLE

* * * * * * * * * * * * Religion, Philosophy & Fo

KRUGERVILLE Stop, settle, move. Stop, settle, move. A storyteller’s schedule is never stationary. They look the same; always ruddy-faced, wind-tanned silhouettes holding court, re-charging on warmth around a glowing, carroty camp fire. A voyager speaking in low tones with a weathered tongue, peeping through weary eyes sipping on mystery liquor from a buffalo-skin hip-flask. When tails run dry they sling their trusty five-string over their hunched shoulder and hobble (always during twilight) to the next town.

To the next captive audience.

See, stop, settle, move.

Not Death Vessel though, for the moment at least he’s resting, peaceful and contemplative.

He’s a fresh-faced storyteller – indeed, his glorious, clunky, bountiful bluegrass debut Stay Close (released on the impeccable ATP Records) weaves country yarns between each other like ribbons round a straw hat – but he’s also a protective, guarded newfolk hobo wary of opening up. No bad thing with all the blabbermouths in this town – in fact, today at least, he’s giving away sweet Jackenory.

Death Vessel, by the way, is Joel Thibodeau (alongside choice pals), and his stories are secrets. He lets you into his world of fanciful folklore, but only when he wants, hording

Religion, Folklore & Philosophy

tales like kindling for winter fires. When there are tough times ahead you’re going to need them, y’know. For this traveller, home is where his harp (banjo, fiddle, archtop geetarr, organ) is. Through autumn leaves and spring sunshine Joel’s just kept trekking

“There’s a dark and a troubled side of life.

There’s a bright and a sunny side too” on this planet’s great treadmill and his pastoral americana reminds us of just how vast, unknown and unexplored our own space is.

At times, it’s been a trudge down a lonely trail for DV. Born in Berlin, he’s uprooted through wind and rain to relocate to Maine,

Providence, Boston and now Brooklyn along the way. “On average, I’ve moved to a new place every year for the past fourteen years” he sighs. But in every case surely discovering every new accent, the local watering hole, a fresh set of townsfolk to marvel at your wonders has it’s appeal?

“Well, in every case I’ve been met with pleasant and unpleasant emotions that eventually peter out” he explains with an endearing, quivering tiredness in his voice.

“There’s a dark and a troubled side of life.

There’s a bright and a sunny side too” he cryptically quips. Tangents are his speciality.

Defensive he may be in person but he’ll still wilfully display his insecurities on record. “ Big deal, big trouble, an unnerving kind/ By ball and by powder/high tail attack” he quakes on Tidy Nervous Breakdown between the innocent coos of Meg and Laura Baird of whisper-folkstrels Espers. “After seeing The Baird Sisters perform I asked them to contribute their talents to a record I was making. Fortunately they accepted the invitation and met me at a studio (adorned with platinum cassettes of Kriss Kross) outside of Philadelphia.” The results are exotic and unfathomable.

As startling as what he tells is how he tells it – Joel’s voice is an extraordinary one, perhaps the most fascinating component of Stay Close. Thibodeau’s sweet, shrill, androgynous wail sounds like a blunderfooted meatbrain stamping a steel-toed

DM through Joanna Newsom’s pixie wing.

Painful, fragile yet perplexingly beautiful.

Like all foremen of folklore DV has an dizzying knack of melting fact, fantasy and fiction. Most of Stay Close recalls the grind, heartache and reward of setting up somewhere new (whether places like Swan Point and Picnic Rock exist we don’t know).

But they’re still disturbing annotations on someone else’s home, their coastline, their courthouse. “ Bandit came out of jury hall a tiny, peculiar beast/ siphoned the ore from his surname, balled it up, then tossed it” (Later In Life Lift).

Not all those discoveries and adventures have been pleasant hikes though; “U.S. String Builder tour, 1999 - trudging our way around the streets of the states on Greyhound bus May through June” he recalls as the most challenging. But then what’s an adventure if not a test?

Sparse he maybe with his words but Death Vessel isn’t your average chronicler, gathering round at story hour isn’t his style.

“You get down from there!/Grab a corner or a chair and listen to me” (White Mole).

In Krugerville, perhaps instead of words, faces narrate folklore, tears tell tales. You can be tight lipped and still tell a story.

Words by Greg Cochrane Illustration by Si Peplow - www.simonpeplow.blogspot.com

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Law & Order

Illustration by Skinny Gaviar - www.skinnygaviar.com

KRUGERVILLE

KRUGERVILLE

Law & Order

When you hear a phrase like Tokyo Police Club, you tend to assume metallic manbots with drills for fingers and phallic limb-like machinery, skull-fucking crime in some Baudrillardian mega-distopia, and whilst the 80s revivalists may still be hiding behind Bladerunning and simulacra, crudely identifying themselves through romanticised notions of postroboticism, upon deconstruction, this roboticism is merely a metaphoric adaptation of humanity’s plight with the eternal present, i.e. we have no idea of what the future holds and even less of a clue where we actually began. Philosophical allegory considered, it seems we are all still trapped in this eternal present chronologically, re-hashing shit decades.

What have we learned? Nothing. We are a culture of Gin, Boots and Bathtubs, repeatedly kicking ourselves in the twat, rectifying the poverty of the decisions that seemed genius at the time.

KRUGERVILLE

Law & Order Law & Orderr So what am I talking about? Michael Foucault’s Police State and Tetsuon Body Hammers. Iron Men, Robococks and Vic Makiesque Strike Teams who can Bluetooth justice straight through a torso at a 50 metre range without the standard 20 seconds to comply? No, I’m speaking of the Tokyo Police Club. A band without function. A Canadian band made of skin and bones, who Journalists have deemed cyborg due to one solitary reference to robotics in their debut 8 track EP/Mini Album A Lesson in Crime. Already they are plagued by the idiocy of writers desperately attempting to catergorise and in turn castrate the band into something tangible 13 year olds can translate from lollipops, because that’s what 13 year olds are primarily into. But lollipops don’t pay for cocaine parties and private schooling, Robotics can finance world wars.

“It pisses us off...” says Dave, “... writers having nothing constructive to say.” And that’s not to say there isn’t anything constructive to write. In the last year they’ve traveled the world on the back of these 8 tracks, notching up a number of UK festival appearances.

“We’re really suprised how many miles we’ve done... we released the record gradually around the rest of the world so Canada is slightly ahead with the radio play. It may seem quite fast but when you’re producing the work it seems like an age but we didn’t think we’d make it as far as Glastonbury.”

Automatons don’t cope with mud well, it fucks with their circuitry, sends them wrong, like Kilroy in that shopping precinct. Luckily they aren’t Robots and they certainly don’t sound like 80s revivalists; neither are earthly creatures. They sound like The Strokes without daddy’s money, without the autonomy and narcissistic egotism of a collection of self proclaimed mutual masturbators… actually they sound nothing like The Strokes because they’re aren’t total cunts.

They are Canadians after all, and if Jamie Gunn is to be believed, Canadians are just Americans that aren’t total cunts.

And that’s a crying shame. With a name like Tokyo Police Club you’d expect the tenebrous savagery of their American counterparts, I thought maybe they’d coerced some labels with hideous japanese noise-terror until they pleaded to sign them, cellotaped some ear drums to Bong Ra’s bass bins or injected the Locust into an artery, but when I asked him when the last time he laughed when he shouldn’t have, “it was in a rom-com, called Knocked Up.” And when I asked when the last time he took credit for something he didn’t deserve, he couldn’t answer because he isn’t at that end of the social spectrum. “That’s terribly introspective’ he said when I asked if he’d sacrificed something he knew would benefit him in the long run, “I’m a pretty good guy.”

This certainly doesn’t sound like the actions of base fascismo and the name, like most names, is projected without characteristic referential. It was stolen from their song Cheer It On from pure necessity. “We were all 18 and on a school field trip and we really needed a name and we sing it on the first track of A Lesson in Crime and thought we should probably just take that.”

And they did. They took it, stole it from themselves, and stealing from yourself is as evil as helping the aged open cans of luncheon meat. So if you’re looking for ideological enforcement with big metal dicks exploding in liquid mercury drowning pools

or a malevolence that the diamond trade could be proud of, the Tokyo Police Club are not what you’re looking for. You’re searching for the animal chin, another Canadian resident who claims human drum skins from Italian canals. This man fullfils all of Jello Biafra’s police state prophecy. The beast man that Dr Zeus warned us of. He kills for sport for greed, for lust. He fucked the devil, broke his face with a 303 and now has Canadians hiding in walls like Anne Frank, turning them into soap and buttons for the slightest utterance of the French language.

The Tokyo Police Club are more like the good time guys of Z-Cars or Dixon of Dock Green, there’s certainly no masturbating into car windows like Harvey Keital, or smashing up black youths with a big six-foot chain like a certain Michael Chiklis, but at least the 13 year-olds won’t lose too many lollipops on A Lesson in Crime, its about the cost of 10 fags or a flagon and a disposable geronimo. So save your lungs from cancer and get yourself on the housing list because by the time their album is out, your balls will have dropped and the sweets you’ll be craving will be full of smack and ketamine and not the mdma you spent your pocket money on.

Words by Simon Roberts

Law & Order

KRUGERVILLE

Scene of Crime photography by Jessica Long - www.jessicalongphotography.com

KRUGERVILLE The law in Krugerville is difficult to enforce and is often broken; the unregulated loaning of band members, the fraudulent use of the pre-fix nu... bagpipes.

However, there is one sinister trio who while remaining free from allegation, have been hooking their salaciously deviant rhymes under the skin of the town’s top dogs, only to evade capture at the last breath. Rumours suggest those who have caught sight of the outlaws to have been left exhilarated and destroyed under a heavily intoxicating influence of samples, screeches and sweat. So, it’s with nerves of steel and a wet wipe that I move in to finally steal a moment with those most wanted fugitives, Bonde do Role.

This is my fourth attempt at cornering the rogue outfit, a series of trails leading me to their temporary digs in north London. It’s here that suspiciously good-looking Pedro, half of the their two-pronged vocal attack, highlights the tribulations they faced, leading to the cancellation of our last secret meeting at the Latitude Festival; “We hired a van” he begins, regret already creeping into his voice, “They said the van wasn’t ready in time, and then they got stuck in traffic, and when we finally got to see the van it looked like we were going to play Woodstock. It was a fucking piece of crap from the 60s.”

DJ Gorky, the ordinarily mute beat-master of the troupe moves from the shadow of his alias, explaining further; “First the US Tour, then the Camden Crawl. It’s like we see on My Name is Earl; it’s all about the karma I think! We should all start making a list with all the bad things we’ve done as a band.”

I question further the nature of these ‘bad things’, awaiting a misspoken word or incriminating anecdote to slip through their

Law & Order

thoughts. However, Pedro leaps at the opportunity to describe his youthful hellraising; “You know those huge trash bins on wheels?” he asks, reversing the spotlight.

“Me and a friend, we were drunk, and we stole one of those, and we saw there was this bridge. We checked to see if there was

“The thing that fucks me up is the fucking Brazilian passport. It takes all the fun out of everything because I can’t do shit here in Europe... I can’t even fight with people in the street or I get deported.” no one in the street but there was just one car and we were like ‘Yeh, whatever, we don’t care’ and then we tossed it. It happened that this one car were undercover cops so they just came out with guns

aimed at our heads. It was really late and people in the other buildings were screaming like ‘Yeh, finish those motherfuckers!”

“I was a really nice kid” asserts Gorky in defence. “I think the best stunt I pulled was when I was around 10 and I’d broken my right arm, and told the teachers I couldn’t write anything down for three months because of the cast. Note: I’m left handed.

How they figured out? I was playing tic tac toe with my friends in the back using my left hand.”

But since joining forces with Pedro and Marina, the menacing final member of this elusive crew, Gorky has developed a taste for the criminally minded, forwarding me video clips from a highly disturbing underground network named YouT ube.

“It’s a guy so drunk that he got a donkey and completely damaged a bunch of cars” he exclaims with all the Schadenfreude of a jealous sibling playing dodge ball with his brother. “There’s this one as well; it’s about an old man who had denied to pay $20 for a hooker. He was only willing to pay $5, because she was bad at it!”

With such stories in mind, you would think that chaos and disorder could be found in any town or city that gives hiding to the Baile Funksters. However, Pedro quickly

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objects to this ideology, anger rising in his voice: “The thing that fucks me up is the fucking Brazilian passport. It takes all the fun out of everything because I can’t do shit here in Europe, I can’t do shit in America coz they just send me to Brazil, and if I get deported from any country nobody will let me in ever again. If this was Brazil and I had a European passport I would be doing so much more shit. Pete Doherty; he gets arrested like, every once in the week and he’s still here. If it’s me and I get arrested one time, I’m never here anymore and they won’t let me in. I can’t even fight with people in the street or I get deported. It’s really depressing.”

While the illicit pack have ventured in front of a few lucky eyes this summer, I ask whether their lyrics have been uncovered by any offended ears? “They’re too offensive to be serious” defends Pedro, offering an example of their innocence: “It’s like you were on your way to the Subway, and then someone just getting there doesn’t let you get in. And this person turns to you, and normally they would say: ‘Yeh, Fuck You’ or something like that, but instead they say ‘Oh, I’ll cut your mum’s bowel and put it up through your ass until it goes throughout your ear” and you would start laughing. It’s so stupid that you can’t take that seriously.”

If this notion is applied to law and order, then the stupider and more obscene the crime, the less punishment one would suffer. I ask what Bonde do Role would do if their passports became an irrelevance and their actions were consequence free. “I would misplace all the furniture in everyone’s home to his neighbour, not the furniture but like things outside their homes; vases, cars, trash bins” smiles Pedro, stopping to think; “Actually, we did that in Brazil, it was really funny, we put stuff from one door in the next door and then the people wake up and think that guy in the next door stole it.”

Suddenly there’s a knock at the door and everyone freezes. Pedro moves toward the divide, peering around with stealthy caution. He leans back into the room and utters a single word; “Kids.” His voice loosens, “I thought they were hitting the door and running but no, they were raising money. That was one of my favourites too; hitting doorbells and running.” I assure him it’s not the kids of Krugerville he should worry about. In our minds, Bonde Do Roles are innocent.

Words by Jen Long

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Culture

Illustration by Jon Mlynarski - www.myspace.com/safariart

KRUGERVILLE

KRUGERVILLE How unwelcoming, from the outside, this weathered 1820s building appears.

Hidden away from the through-flow of buses and cars along Chapel Street, conjoining the Siamese cities of Salford and Manchester, this foreboding Grade II-listed block stands stubborn among the shops, council flats and municipal buildings that have sprung up at its feet. And yet, inside, so many local artists, musicians and late-night revellers, have spent their hours at work or at play. To them, Islington Mill is practically a home.

Two such people are Katie White and Jules De Martino, whose recording session Kruger interrupts to find out about their band, The Ting Tings, and their ageing HQ. The pair not only write, rehearse and record at Islington Mill, but they live there too. It was at the Mill that their rough-edged, wide-eyed pop first began to prick ears, as the gigs they threw for friends evolved into an industry swarm in a matter of weeks.

A single, That’s Not My Name, followed on local label Switchflicker, selling out as the band found themselves thrust onto Radio 1 indie playlists and the BBC’s Glastonbury footage. Those yet to hear

Culture

them in all their White Stripes-meets-Le Tigre glory can do so on a forthcoming tour with New Young Pony Club. Or – perhaps – with a visit to the Mill?

“Well, we still have a few mates around, but we’ve cut right down on the parties,” disappoints Jules, the band’s drummer.

“There are 50-60 artists working here, and word gets around if it’s a good night.

It causes a bit of a problem, ‘cos everyone gets wrecked! People were saying, ‘Are you playing again tonight? Shit, I’ve got work in the morning, I can’t do it!’

“But, that night, they’d be there.”

The Ting Tings would not be the first band to have such a place to call home. Franz Ferdinand, The Dandy Warhols and – most notably – The Velvet Underground are groups that have spent either their formative or latter years holed up in galleries or warehouses. It takes a certain kind of temperament to lay oneself open to the influence of the others, but this is precisely what is happening at Islington Mill. The brainchild of interior designer Bill Campbell, the complex houses his home and workspace, along with 15 units that are rented by artists and designers. It is also home to club nights such as Club Brenda and Blowout.

“Bill is brilliant – he’s running the place” exclaims Jules. “He tries to get people together all the time. He’s got a really good knack for introducing people who wouldn’t normally work in each other’s medium.

Suddenly, they’ll be doing something together.”

Artists working at the Mill who have particularly inspired Katie and Jules are Rachel Goodyear, one of a group of artists who runs the floating ip gallery in Ancoats and who is publishing a “beautiful book” of her work in September, and Maurice Carling, an interactive artist running workshops at the hub. Carling has been a particular help with the latest project the band are planning.

Katie explains: “For the new single (Fruit Machine, out on vinyl in October), we’re just going to press 400 copies. We’ll do a launch here, and there is a sister mill in Berlin which have asked us to play, and a place in New York. So we’re going to play Salford, London, Berlin and New York and sell 100 copies at each. We’ll be getting the people in Salford to do the artwork for the covers and sell them in Berlin.”

“The New York designs will come back here, so people can pick up the single they’ve pre-ordered,” Jules continues.

“We might even do a film of all the artwork being done and show it here. There are no complications at the moment, we just need to set a date.”

Grand plans for a band on their second single – but Kruger can’t help but be impressed by the imagination put into turning the mechanics of a record release into something quite magical. It’s an interaction between fans, band, and fans again, and it can surely be argued that the company the band keeps at Islington Mill is partly to thank.

“This place is such a cool place for bands to be,” nods Katie. “Over the past year I’ve seen so many bands I wouldn’t normally have seen, crazy Japanese bands, really odd stuff.”

“For a while, we were struggling, as we didn’t want to leave,” agrees Jules.

Unfortunately, as the tour offers fly in, and the celebrity fan club – which already includes Noel Gallagher and Rick Rubin – swells with membership requests, that is exactly what The Ting Tings may have to do. But something tells us that the spirit of the Mill will go with them all the way.

Words by Neil Condron

Culture

KRUGERVILLE

years ago, civilisation was at a revolutionary stage. Elvis rocked up and shook his hips, girls swooned, boys got boners, parents raged.

Rock and roll was new, exciting and dangerous. People chewed gum and smiled. Culture was changing, there was magic in the air. But this simple and accepting happiness didn’t last forever. Seasons changed, decades rolled by, progress was made. Science and technology took over. People no longer spoke, they poked on Facebook. Bands didn’t flyer for gigs, they sent MySpace bulletins.

Any toothless child who ever caught their mum putting a shiny silver coin under their pillow knows what it’s like to lose a little faith in the wonder of the world. By 2007, the magician had revealed his secret. And while the revelation brought knowledge and knowledge brought power, the magic had gone. Once the innocence of a people is lost, it’s nigh on impossible to regain.

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Culture

But then one morning the world awoke to a mysterious stranger who whirlwinded into town in a white jumpsuit, pointy shoes and fuck-yeah beard. This stranger was Pop Levi and he had tales of myth, mystery and mysticism to tell. Gather round …..

“I use a technique called Scrying to write my songs. Essentially it’s a creative tool that gets in touch with an interpretative side of your brain and gets it to write stuff for you. It was popularized in Victorian England by Dr. John Dee who used it to invent the Enochian language, which he called the ‘Language of the Angels’. He would stare for huge times at suggestive things like scribbles or sand or smoke or mirrors or glass or crystal balls until the negative space would just suggest stuff.

The idea is you get your brain to invent negative space, you don’t shy away from it, you just write down everything until your brain gets into it. I’ve invented something called audio-scrying, where I listen to sonic landscapes for long periods of times until I hear harmonies and melodies come through and I write all those down and write songs that way. I like that because it means that they’re not really my songs. I’m not trying to say it’s massively revolutionary because people have been doing this type of thing but just describing it in different ways for ever, but I do think now more than ever, it’s a potentially more interesting way of creating art than just saying I’m going to write a song

“I’m not interested in anything other than music and fucking. If I said I was I’d be lying”

about what happened on the bus the other day. Saying that though, that doesn’t mean to say you need to write songs about clever stuff. I write all my songs about girlfriends.

What else is there I’m interested in? I’m not interested in anything other than music and fucking. If I said I was I’d be lying. Oh and Maths actually.”

With scrying, sex and subtraction in the space between the space in his mind, exLadyton bassist Poppy set about recording his first album on his laptop while traveling around the world, in places varying in scope from aeroplane toilets to cathedrals. The end result, The Return to Form Black Magick Party, is the most infectious thing you’ll ever fucking hear. A cultural highpoint for uncultured times. If one of the Vestal Virgins asked you what sex was like, you could play her this album and she’d either be a slut or scared of cock for the rest of her life. Pop explains “It’s a completely uncommercial artrock album really. Which The Sun tried to say sounds like a Bolan album. It sounds nothing like Marc fucking Bolan. It sounds as much like Marc Bolan as it does Jimi Hendrix as it does Marvin Gaye as it does Brian Wilson.” It sounds like all of these and none of these and some of these musical milestones all at once.

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Culture

Pop picks up: “It’s a real white Western view to think that because somebody else has done something that you can’t do it.

That’s wrong isn’t it? Imagine a thousand years ago, if you were in some Kenyan tribe at the monthly party with people all around playing music, I bet you nobody had an argument about originality then. It’s quite the opposite, you’re playing the same rhythm.

Music should be about the moment. It’s real square and that’s where people start to mess up academia with art. You should just be like Little Richard and make records. And make shitloads of fucking money and laugh at all the other precious white people who think that they’re cool when they just didn’t have the balls to make something.”

Well the self-effacing Poppy has made something, and it’s a psychedelic blanket of pop songs, dirty rockers and tearjerking slowies.

Pop has grand ambitions for the album, he’s after cultural recognition, “I want to win the Mercury in England. Death knell? Only for dickheads who can’t follow it up. I know what you’re saying but it’s kinda bullshit isn’t it? It’s like saying that anything good that happens to support what you’re doing can only result in other people thinking you’ve got too much hype and aren’t interested.

Who cares man? Look at Barry Manilow, he doesn’t think about hype. He’s gone onto a level beyond entertaining, if you do that shit

“It’s a completely uncomercial artrock album.

It sounds nothing like Marc fucking Bolan”

then it wins. I mean if you make a record that you really really love as your second record and it’s a commercial failure, who gives a fuck? You just make another one. I’ve written the next record already. It’s called Never Never Love, and it’s going to sound like, I hope, if I can really fucking pull it off, the first R ‘n’ B record to be made by a four piece Caucasian rock band from Liverpool.”

It should be no surprise to you if the wildeyed wanderer Pop passes through the midst of your town. Born in London, grown in Liverpool, living in Los Angeles, Pop’s a nomadic soul “When I say I’m from Liverpool, it’s not true is it? But I did spend more of my time there than anywhere else in my life so far, so I could have a tenuous right to say that. It’s not somewhere that’s close to my heart either. It’s just somewhere that I spent a decade. Don’t get me wrong dude, it shits on every other city in England, but in terms of the world, I’d rather go and live in Cairo...I’ve never even fucking been there, but I know I’d prefer to live there. There’s a book in there somewhere isn’t there? A story, an adventure…I just like moving to new places, I like vibing around....zzzooom zzzzzzoom… zzzzzzoom…”. And like that, he’s gone.

Words by Dan Tyte

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Culture

Pop Levi at Bowery Ballroom, NYC by Anouck Bertin - http://newyorkcitygirl.kaywa.com

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Citizens

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Super Furry Animals

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KRUGERVILLE There are three things that are held sacred by the deeply sussed residents of Krugerville; music, mates and high jinks. The high priests of this exclusive cult could be only one band. Let’s play Guess Who? Does your band have a purple Techno Tank? Yes. Did your band turn profanity and Steely Dan into a cult single, for which they still do not receive royalties but play anyway because everyone likes saying ‘fuck’ when they’re hepped up on goofballs? Uh yes, they did. Ok, has your band made eight awesome albums? Well more than eight if you count their compilations and remixes… but hell yes! Ok, is it the Super Furry Animals, the favourite sons of Krugerville and psychedelic trailblazers for independent, alternative music? Yes, Einstein, it is; stick a yellow pin in your board.

It all started back in the heady days of 1996, when Kruger was just a twinkle in six dilated pupils. Five men gathered under a bridge in Cardiff to have their portrait taken for their debut album Fuzzy Logic. Emblazoned across a Victorian railway bridge above their heads was the statement ‘It’s Brains You Want!’, a cultural landmark for bitterdrinking Kairdiffiians and a wake-up call to

Citizens

the manufactured balladeers, mockneys and anyone responsible for Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You staying at number one for a cagillion years. Fresh faced and still sporting all of their own hair, Bunf, brothers Cian and Daf, Gruff and Guto had just signed a six album deal with Alan McGee’s Creation Records, the Kubla Khan of indie labels. But no-one knew just exactly how much the Super Furry Animals had yet to deliver or the surprises that were to come.

With Fuzzy Logic they had created a record with all the punk ethics of The Ramones and the imaginative storytelling powers of Nilsson. A song about Bunf’s hamster, Fuzzy Birds; Brit-pop standard Something for the Weekend; the irreverent Buzzcock’s antihymn God Show Me Magic and the beautiful folk trip Gathering Moss were all present on their debut, hinting at the diverse catalogue to come. Next came Radiator, the indie-pop classic that first featured artwork by friend and long-time collaborator Pete Fowler; then the futuristic techno-pop extravaganza Guerrilla; the defiantly acoustic Mwng; Rings Around the World, simultaneously released with the first 5.1 surround sound DVD; the effortlessly melodic Phantom Power; ‘sludge rock’ album Love Kraft; and now their latest offering, Hey Venus!. That’s eight studio albums plus the amazing Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochocynygofod (In Space) EP, Moog Droog, Ice Hockey Hair EP, the b-side rarities album Outspaced, the singles album Songbook, the remix album Phantom Phorce and the single The Man Don’t Give a Fuck- twice!

Phew, they must be knackered.

Eleven years on and the band are a few hundred metres from that bridge, larking about in Sophia Gardens before the third performance in a four-night run of shows at Clwb Ifor Bach, more than 12 years after their first gig at the original den of indie iniquity. The shows sold out to the handful of Furry fans sober enough to get on the blower within 45 minutes of them going on sale. Was ditching stadium tours in favour of a small indie club in Cardiff a way of thanking their fans?

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Gruff Rhys

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w“No it was purely selfish,” laughs Gruff, front man, gentle bard and easily the frontrunner for the title of coolest man in the universe. As Welshmen go, he is the alpha male; dudes want be him and girls want to be on him. He looks like a lumberjack, sings like an angel and is the power-ranger face of the greatest Welsh band of all time.

“Last time we went on a tour of Scotland and the North to get the songs in shape before playing festivals. We get really excited to be back on the road when we haven’t been on tour for a while and we get completely wrecked every night, so it can be pretty gruelling.

We basically decided instead of killing ourselves before we started the tour we’d stay at home.”

It also gave them a chance to test out the new material on a juiced up audience in their hometown. With influences ranging from techno to prog rock, tropicalia, folk, punk, 60s harmony groups and psychedelia, their sound has been created from a lifetime of listening to great records and as their tastes have changed so has their own music. Hey Venus! heralds a return to form and the pop song sensibilities of Radiator and Phantom Power but with a new retro twist.

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Daf Ieuan

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“We started choosing songs with the idea of a young woman called Venus from a rural area in a small town moving to a metropolis and becoming completely corrupted by it, but coming out fighting at the end.” With songs ranging from Runaway, a nod to 60s girl-groups like The Shangri Las, Neo-Consumer, a twitchy taurine-fuelled punkpop song and glam-rock gunner Baby Ate my Eight Ball it’s a tricky concept to nail down. With a wry smile Gruff concedes, “Well yes, that became the concept but not all the songs fitted in with it. In the end we chose things on musical merit instead of going all out to create a conceptual record.”

“We were listening to a lot of doo-wop and early 60s beat music.

For the past three or four years we’ve had record players in the dressing room and we’ve been listening to a lot of old pop records we pick up completely randomly in second hand shops in different

countries and they become ingrained in our heads,” says Gruff, in their makeshift dressing room on the middle floor of Clwb Ifor Bach.

In typically prodigious fashion, the band recorded over 25 songs at a chateau in France before deciding on the direction of the album. The 60s influence on the album blazes in the boogie-woogie piano played

by Cian, the pinball wizard and leading light of the techno splinter group, Acid Casuals. As we wait for the photographers outside Clwb in the rain, he explains how the distinctive sound on Hey Venus! came about accidentally.

“On the picture on the website there’s a grand piano there but by the time we got to the studio they had sold it. The only piano that was there was this old 1910 upright piano that was about a tone out of tune and we couldn’t tune it up without the strings breaking and it wouldn’t stay in tune either so that was pretty Honky-Tonk.”

In addition to the wonky piano, Hey Venus! departs from their other albums by virtue of its cover, designed by Japanese silk screen artist Keiichi Tanaami.

“He’s about 70 years old and an original psychedelic. He took acid in America and went back to Japan, which coincided with the first pizza parlour opening in Tokyo so he would go there and get all the different

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Citizens

pizza toppings and get inspired by the different colours.” says Gruff.

“There are no raging Tories in the band and no royalists or Motley Crue fans and no Christians,”

Going on gut instinct as much as impeccable taste, the Furries manage to surprise with every project they take on, collaborating with artists like Boom Bip, Mogwai and The High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan. Aside from their collaborations, each member has sideprojects: drummer Daf, is about to release a record with his side project The Peth, a bunch of right wronguns, including the original SFA frontman and smoking buddy, Rhys Ifans.

In both their solo projects and collaborations the band are notoriously picky about taking on bedfellows and openly adopt a policy of ‘blatant nepotism’, a legitimate approach when you’re mates with Pete Fowler and Howard Marks.

“What was amazing with Pete was that everything he did was spot on; he listens to the same music as us, the same artwork and the same humour. I like his cultural references. He puts mobile phones in his pictures and they make you smile which is a powerful thing,” explains Guto, the bassist and fellow card-carrying Acid Casual.

Essentially, the Furry philosophy is that no idea is too outlandish for consideration and there are no rules.

“The Super Furry Animals do not have a manifesto. It’s like politics with the two party system because it’s hard to believe that everybody in the country will believe in one or the other, it doesn’t work that way. It comes down to five individual decisions so a lot of the time it’s a totally compromised beast that comes out at the end,” explains Guto.

But the five members have been friends since their teens, and like all good gangs they have unspoken understandings. “We’re not radically different. There are no raging Tories in the band and no royalists or Motley Crue fans and no Christians,” adds Bunf.

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Guto Pryce

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Citizens

Everyone loves a renegade and Huw ‘Bunf’ Bunford is the Walker Texas Ranger of psychedelic rock. Legendary tales are told about the ‘Teacher’. Once, at a post-gig gathering, he took offence to a man who wouldn’t stop playing drippy songs on his beloved acoustic guitar, announcing ‘I’ll show you how to play the fucking guitar’ before smashing it into tiny pieces. Fair point, Bunf. One cunt down, another billion to go, especially those arse-knuckles in the industry who’ll try and tell you how to make a record. “We’ll take things on board but the final decision is ours. We keep an open mind. Never say never - we’re not like ‘we’re fucking right all the time’, even if most of the time we are and when we’re wrong nobody notices anyway.”

SFA have never been afraid of changing their approach. Sometimes the jump between albums is cavernous, like from the techno Guerrilla to the acoustic collection of Welsh folk songs on Mwng. The shift in styles coincided with a sharp change of circumstances: after the release of Guerrilla, the band’s record label, Creation, folded but left them with a parting gift of their completed album Mwng. Offers soon poured in from other labels, keen to release an SFA album without the cost of recording it, but the band were wary of what the marketing men would do with an album like Mwng.

“They wanted to put ‘Made In Wales’ on the cover, which is not what we’re about at all,” says Guto. In a typically independent move, they decided to release it on their own label, Placid Casual. “I think we understand how to put a Welsh record out better than most people probably.”

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Cian Ciaran

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The Furries have always flicked the bird at organisations who try to railroad them into inauthentic avenues. In 1996 they were asked to play the Eisteddfod on the proviso that they sing all their songs in Welsh. Despite having the most successful Welsh language album in history, SFA told them to get fucked and played their normal set but refused to sing during the English songs, handing out lyric sheets in English, Welsh and Japanese.

“If someone tells us what language to sing in then you’re really missing the point”

KRUGERVILLE “We’re basically just awkward fuckers and we just wanted to prove a point. The audience wouldn’t know that this had happened if we hadn’t made such a big deal out of it. That’s the thing that I find more annoying; that they do it clandestinely. We don’t like anyone giving us any constraints,” rants Bunf. “You can’t please everyone all the time. If someone tells us what language to sing in then you’re really missing the point.”

SFA have always been fiercely protective of their right to make music without intervention. Have they ever had to scrap to get what they want? Not really, according to Gruff. “People are always curious to know if Sony were really interfering because they’re a big record label but they actually completely left us alone to do what the fuck we wanted and the down side of that was when we delivered the last record there seemed to be an air of indifference rather than enthusiasm.” The new record deal with Rough Trade, however, has spawned more rewarding partnerships. “We haven’t had people from outside of the band really interfering in a positive way since Creation,” says Gruff.

“For example, with Show Your Hand - we’d left it off the record because we thought it was too predictable, but Jeff Travis (from Rough Trade) was like ‘please put it on’; but we didn’t have to listen to him though.”

Citizens

With great power comes great opportunities to fuck over the little guy for money. Modern folklore recounts that the Furries knocked back a million-dollar deal for Coca Cola to use Hello Sunshine in an ad campaign after Gruff visited one of the company’s bottling plants in Colombia.

“Turning down that amount of money was horrible. But when you weigh it up it was the only decision we could have made,” says Guto. “They stand for a lot of things that we actually sing about; huge multinational companies shafting people. When it’s in your face like that, it’s really hard to take money off the Man. We just don’t want to do it. I’m not going to say nobody else can do it but we don’t want to do it” The Furries are not slaves to a cause though, preferring to treat each enterprise on its own merits. “We are ethical in some ways, but then we reserve the right not to be. Ok, we didn’t do the Coca Cola advert, but say Red Stripe turned up and asked us to go do an advert in Jamaica, we’d go ‘Ooo, I like that,” muses Guto.

And, with that, they’re off for their sound check and a cheese and wine party before tonight’s gig; heading for the holy trinity of mates, goofballs and rock’n’roll. Bunf ambles off with a bag of fromage in one hand and a spliff in the other, blithely ignoring the smoking ban, a rebel to the last.

Words by Natalie Davies Photos by Mei Lewis - www.missionphotographic.com

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Huw Bunford

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Places to Stay

Architecture

In

Helsinki

Photography by Kamil Janowski - www.kjanowski.com

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Places to Stay

Turn the corner in any large UK city and you stand an 89% chance of falling over an Aussie backpacker. In my city, I at least had the good sense to fall over Melbourne caffeine addicts Architecture In Helsinki, six multi-instrumentalists whose new album Places Like This delivers on their seven-year promise with songs of Fun with a capital F. Heart It Races in particular will own your summer or you have the soul of a blackboard.

singer Kellie Sutherland. “Although we had a really amazing bed (each) when we were touring with someone once. It was just the best bed in the history of the world. We were all so tired and it was like a gift from the cosmos descending on us going ‘Yeah ok, you kinda deserve something’.” I’ve always had the sneaking dream that touring in a band is a non-stop whirl of video games, beers and adoring fans. Kellie laughs and looks slightly embarrassed. “I don’t mean to bitch, but man – it’s really tough.” Yeah right, whatever. You Aussies are clearly too jet-lagged to know any better, right? Wrong, apparently. Who knew?

Formed vaguely in the late 90s and with more conviction in 2000 by lead singer Cameron Bird, the band – pick your own idea behind the name, they make them up all the time – only released an album in 2003. Multi-instrumentalists on a scale currently monopolised almost entirely by Canadians, the band’s Brazilian-inspired sunny folky funk has reached new heights on Places Like This, but despite being Bruce Willis’s favourite new band (seriously) they’re still touring the rounds.

Straining blearily down at me through caffeine-deprived eyes, they give me tips on how to survive a tour with six people and not much money. Cameron: “Firstly.

Get enough sleep. It’s the only way to get through the tour. I always try to get a decent night’s sleep before I leave but then you catch up with friends and end up staying up all night and crawling home just in time to leave for the airport.” “Then make sure you’ve got your essentials,” says Kellie, pointing at the beer I’m holding, which isn’t actually mine and I’ve got them confused. “I make iPod playlists to get through the plane journeys. Oh and I pack Kava Kava. It’s a herbal anxiety remedy like a natural Valium – ” “ – It’s actually illegal in Australia mind you

“We’ve never had upgrades,” the deadpan Bird says, remembering with a shudder his trans-global plane ride the day before.

“It doesn’t really suit us anyway,” says co-

“We had an amazing bed when we were touring once. It was like a gift from the cosmos...”

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Places to Stay

– “ advises Cameron gleefully. What about lovely things like teddy bears and photos of loved ones to remind the band of home?

They rightfully look at me like I’m insane. “All the years we’ve been touring, James (Cecil, drummer) packs his yoga mat,” says Kellie.

“I think I’ve seen it out twice.”

Cameron wakes up slightly. “I always pack nice toiletries because they make you feel more normal when you’re changing places all the time. And about thirty t-shirts because you never know when you’ll find a washing machine.” “When you’re there, finding a place before a gig is a good idea,” muses Kellie. “We’re incredibly anal about making sure all our gear is ok,” says Cameron. “We finish playing and sometimes drive around for three hours trying to find a motel room, at which point half the people are drunk and half have a migraine. Then you find you’re on the eighth floor and you don’t have an elevator and end up lugging your entire backline up the stairs. Someone’s got to sleep on the floor on top of the guitar place with a city of gear around you then the alarm goes and you’ve got to drive for 13 hours so you’ve got to lug all the grear down the stairs.”

“I did a count on one American tour and I think I consumed about 60 bags of potato chips. In America, every town on the freeway is basically a mini-mall so you live

“I got a first class meal on a plane once... It kind of made my brain short circuit”

off bread, chips and bottled water,” says Cameron, who in the flesh looks far too thin to eat anything other than cucumber.

“Eating well on tour is the most important thing for us, we’re all complete food heads and that’s another reason we hate touring in England because if you tour for any longer than seven days you’re probably going to have a coronary.” I point out the existence of Borough market, about twenty minutes away by cab. “Even if you’re in the main fresh produce areas it’s really hard because you don’t have the time,” placates Kellie, “but it’s something we always do, find somewhere to have coffee and something to eat.” “We’ll always get online and research the town we’re going to and find out where the good restaurants are,” says Cameron, an A to Z London guide suspiciously absent. “Whoever wants to go and eat will get a cab to the place, and if it’s a 15 minute drive, so be it.

The importance of eating good food on tour is paramount.”

This doesn’t extend to seeing the city itself, and in common with nearly every other band I’ve interviewed, the most the band get to see of a place is the route from their hotel to the venue and back again. “Sightseeing on a budget when we’re in the band consists of Jamie driving while holding his digital camera and photographing famous landmarks out the window,” says Cameron dryly. “We’ve been to Paris three times and never been to the

Eiffel Tower,” says Kellie, doubly sad when I clock her cheery Eiffel Tower earrings.

Nor do they have the time to develop blagging skills and, in fact, I draw a complete blank when mentioning the word. “I got a first class meal on a plane once,” says Cameron, helpfully. “I got to eat off a porcelain plate. It kind of made my brain short circuit because no legroom and porcelain don’t really go together.” “The only place we’re any good is at the airport with excess luggage,” says Kellie apologetically. “Next to moving and probably giving birth, excess luggage is the most stressful experience for anyone in our band because we have so much gear and such a little budget and everytime we get nailed. Even if we pay in advance.” Here Cameron dives in with a touring tip that cheers me up considerably after hearing how hard the damn thing is. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to perfect your Airport Smile. “Even if you haven’t slept for four days you put this smile on your face where your lips are touching either ear and it’s amazing how much it works,” says Cameron as Kellie swears to its effectiveness. Just keep smiling.

“As soon as you look pissed off they’ll just add another two thousand dollars.”

Two thousand dollars? Christ: my heart, it races.

Words by Kat Brown

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Places to Stay

Eating & Drinking

Cate Le Bon

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ÂŁ'DUN

5XP

/LPH DQG 6RGD¤

This is a line to be oft repeated â&#x20AC;&#x201C; nay slurred â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in a series of downtown but upbeat alehouses one evening as I get to know Cate le Bon. Entering the pub Cate stands out from the cigarette-beige interior of The Butcherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Arms almost as much as the fruit machine. No need for red carnations in the lapel here. We manage to resist the darts on in the bar and, ladies and that, take to the lounge for a lager top, a natter and possibly some dry roasted. But I neglect my hostess duties, let me make introductionsâ&#x20AC;Ś What many would call a new-folk chanteuse, Cate has an undeniable gift for penning beautifully catchy songs and delivering

Eating & Drinking

them with her arrestingly lilting voice. Now settled in its capital, Cate was raised in rural west Wales - â&#x20AC;&#x153;that does influence my song contentâ&#x20AC;? she nods - and the delicate, sweet harmonies often belie the subject matter of her songs. Her forthcoming album, Pet Deaths documents that childhood grief, hitherto never-experienced, when Fluffy goes to heaven.

Settling into a steady pace for the night, Cate reflects on a bellyful of a year, starting with supporting Gruff Rhys on his UK tour and its finishing cresendo in Liverpool Philharmonic. â&#x20AC;&#x153;You thought, this is ace, this is what music is about. Everyone joining in, really having a good time. I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop smiling, I just though this is amazing, It was such a lovely tour as it was such a small group of people and you know everybody, the crew. It was just ace. I miss itâ&#x20AC;?.

You can hear the affection in her voice and there is no doubt that ties were closely knitted on the road. DJ on the tour was Andy Votel, Welsh folk obsessive and founder of B-Music and its offshoots. As well as featuring Cate on one of his forthcoming compilations, Votel also asked her to play at Jarvis Cockerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Meltdown Festival on a night dedicated to lost ladies of folk. Cate leans in.

I sense gossip. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I loved Jarvis Cocker since I first saw him live and then, eleven years, later I meet him. Andy just introduced me and then Jarvis spilt all his dinner all over himself. He must have been nervous ever

since he saw me in the crowd at V96.â&#x20AC;? Cate is a good craic and dry humour goes best with wet beer. Drinks are finished.

Taking the mantle of Location Manager, I suggest a change of sceneryâ&#x20AC;Ś The Glamorgan Staff Club. Cateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes widen with intrigue, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Wow, can you go in there?â&#x20AC;?

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s my round, course we can. Three drinks, ÂŁ3.83. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Happy daysâ&#x20AC;? as one of locals toasts.

As the ales start going down easier it transpires that Cate is only just getting used to being made a fuss of in her own right. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Especially when itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something creative, you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to put yourself out there, you want someone else to. But you kind of have to in the end, you have to say, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I wantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.â&#x20AC;?

Thankfully, much like the bandit in here, nudges are not in short supply. â&#x20AC;&#x153;It was about year ago when Catryn, (Gruffâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s girlfriend and now Cateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s manager) said, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Look, do you want to do this or not?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Yes! Before then I had done odd gigs but never taken it seriously and recorded.â&#x20AC;?

In an act of loveliness that reflects her music, her first single, No one Can Drag Me Down, was made available as a free download from her website. Cate also had to form a band. Having played in (former Gorkyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s) Richard Jamesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; band, he now returns the favour. Friends that play together, play out together too as many of her band make

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Eating & Drinking

up the gang that join us now for beers. It’s clear that on tour or off Cate has a close knit family around her, “There’s a lovely community of people, the whole music, whole art thing - there’s always people about, spurring ideas of everyone” her eyes glow with enthusiasm, “everyone from different corners and creative styles, coming together.”

has been released. “ It sounds really, really loose, as my drumming not up to much.

But that gives it a nice shonky feel.” This is set for release on Peski, run by another musician from the fold. “They guys that run the label are ace, so lovely. I just wanted to do a Welsh language release because I love the language and the scene andI’d like to contribute something towards that.”

get to the stage which was miles away… I bumped into a friend that I hadn’t seen for ages though.”

Cate has an instantly likeable integrity too - she doesn’t even wrinkle her nose when a gent, who has seemingly laced himself in Eau de Man Piss, parks himself next to her.

Next bar please.

“There’s a lovely community of people... everyone from different corners coming together” As she suggests sambucas its clear that this one likes a challenge and those around her are only too happy to oblige with suggestions. She was recently asked to play drums by a fellow musician and given a month to get up to scratch. “I’ve been given lots of homework, people giving me 7”s to listen to … I listen and think I can’t play that.

It’s so much fun though!”

Cate also plays drums, and most other instruments, on the Welsh language EP she’s began work on even before her debut

I’m now starting to understand how this friendly collective really work for each other.

Cate is ambitious but completely affable. For someone who this year went to Glastonbury for the first time as performer not punter, she could all too easily be conceited. Instead she retells her experience with matter-offact wit. “Oh fucking hell! I got my guitar, put my wellies on - I had white wellies for some reason - took a couple of steps and within five-minutes I was head to toe in shit, nearly in tears because I only had half an hour to

We scramble to the adjoining boozer – one room indie disco, one room with less of a cue at the bar. The latter wins out. So how would Cate see herself then, if we’re going to label? Folk? Indie? A shandy of the two?

“The whole folky thing is a weird one.” If you go on any MySpace now everyone is ‘new/folk/electronica’. Folk all the fucking time. I think the gigs that I do on my own - solo it’s easy just to say, ‘woman singing and playing a guitar - that must be folk!!’

Well it isn’t necessarily folk and the stuff I do with the band, I guess there’s elements of

folk in it but I would say that it’s out and out FOLK.” I’m inclined to agree and increasing reclining as the night draws on and the differing personalities of the party come to the fore.

I look at Cate’s ensemble. She’s in good company and they clearly think the earth of her. “You can never say what influences you as things can influence you without you knowing. Everyday you’re being influenced it just comes out in whatever form it come out in. It just is what it is and you can think about these things too much.”

I realise that I can’t actually think anymore and make my sojourn into the night. I leave Cate playing on the quiz machine until the wee small hours. Help is not short. She’s definitely winning.

Words by Lisa Matthews

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Photography by Maciej Dakowicz - www.maciejdakowicz.com

Eating & Drinking

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Places to Go

Good Shoes Morden. This is not the sort of place you want to take your kids to.

Photography by Lee Goldup - www.leegoldup.com

KRUGERVILLE Good Shoes are in Cardiff, coming to the end of their headline UK tour along with The Moths and Envelopes, and lead singer Rhys has a problem. Or, more specifically, his mouth does. “I’m sorry, I’m really losing my voice,” he splutters, as he coughs his way through the interview, “and my wisdom teeth are coming through.” Isn’t that rather painful combination going to make singing a bit nasty, I wonder? “No, no, I’ll be fine, I’ve got a case full of drugs – Ibuprofen, of course! – that I’ll take before I go onstage” he assures me, “besides, the pain has only just come back, and I’m getting my wisdom teeth out in a few days anyway.”

We’re sat in a dark corner of the claustrophobia-inducing Clwb Ifor Bach, which has a dubious looking pile of sawdust on the floor and a pungent aroma of hard liquor and years-old BO that Rhys has forewarned me about. Scabbiness aside, Rhys reveals that Ifor Bach is actually his favourite venue in Cardiff, well, compared to Barfly, that is. “On this tour, we were going to be playing Barfly originally, but we all hate that place. So we decided to come here instead. It’s a bit scummy, but the upstairs is nice! I’ve never been to the club downstairs though, because I’m told that you’re only allowed in there if you speak Welsh.” I assure him that this is pure urban myth, as this writer has partied on Ifor Bach’s ground

Places to Go

floor many a time despite only knowing four words of welsh; Dwi’m yn siarad Cymraeg (“I don’t speak welsh”).

In the spirit of this issue’s Krugerville theme, I start off by asking Rhys about Good Shoes’ hometown Morden, an outer suburb of London that according to their song of the same name ‘is not a place to bring your kids to’. So not such fond feelings of home, then?

“No, no, I don’t hate it. I just wrote a song about the negative aspects of where I live.

It’s a song about where I grew up, so it’s kind of a song about everywhere. I mean, if you go to any town you get the same problems – I just wrote about Morden because it’s the only place I know.” London at the moment seems to have a very definitive sound – just look to the Maccabees, Jamie T and Kate Nash to see my point. So I ask Rhys if he reckons the band would sound much different if they were from, say, Kent. “Yeah, I guess we’d be a lot posher! I think we’d probably be pretty different, because where you’re from kind of plays a part in defining who you are – so it’s probably had a bigger influence on our band than we realise.”

So say, hypothetically, that Rhys has somehow succeeded Ken Livingstone as London’s mayor and revamped the capital as Good Shoesville. What major changes would he make? His reply is disappointingly

mundane. “I’d probably introduce free public transport, and raise congestion charges – the traffic in London is really bad. Maybe I’d just ban cars in the centre altogether.” What?! No 24 hour parties?

No utterly ridiculous laws designed only to benefit yourself? “Well…in countries like Spain and France, bars are allowed to open until whenever they want to…I think part of what is wrong with our culture is that people have to stop drinking at 11, so they end up binge drinking, so maybe I’d just let bars open until whenever they want.” Fair dos, it’s a sensible enough idea, albeit one that has already been installed, what with the changing of licensing laws. There’s one more I can’t resist. I just have to go there.

Would people get chucked out for wearing for bad shoes? “No no, not at all!” he laughs, “I don’t care about shoes!”

with sheer abandon. It then begins to shake ominously as the band launch into Photos on My Wall, during which Rhys takes a break halfway through to say “It wasn’t as busy as this last time we were here.” No shit, Sherlock. Tonight the venue is actually full to bursting, the bar is deserted and people are straining to get as close to the stage as possible as Rhys and co storm through their incendiary set. Strobe lights are flickering on kids dancing the robot, innumerable lunatics jump from stage to crowd during a riotous version of Ice Age, and a petite girl hops up to the microphone and in a squeaky voice begs the mob to halt their dancing for a second so she can locate her lost yellow jelly shoe.

Later on in the evening, a crowd made up mainly of skinny H&M-clad hipsters fresh from sitting their GCSEs duly applaud The Moths and Envelopes’ stellar sets, but the air of anticipation is tangible – this young audience can barely wait for their headlining heroes to appear. As the background music fades and Good Shoes stroll onto the miniscule platform masquerading as a stage, the creaky floor of Ifor Bach’s third storey threatens to buckle under a hundred or so kids jumping up and down and shrieking

Words by Betti Hunter

Ladies and gentlemen, Good Shoes have arrived.

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Places to Go

I landed in New York a day or two before my interview with Brooklyn four-piece Holy Hail, and set about making my acquaintance with the Empire City, visiting landmarks and ticking boxes.

And drinking and hanging around. Everything was perfect and I made up my mind right there that I’d move at the first opportunity.

So I arrived at the band’s rehearsal space in Williamsburg with a head full of dreams about my future dwelling, finding a foursome with a look right out of a comic book, more New York than the city itself, but with a flip to the script.

With a sound pitched somewhere between French electro-poppers Klanguage, genreforerunners Add N to (X) and the obviously comparable New Young Pony Club, Holy

Hail make bleepy, bassy hop-scotch-pop, the snappy gab from lead singer Cat like a re-animated Betty Boo; a sound so far removed from New York By Numbers that as they fire up their instruments in their tiny practice room I forget I’m half a world away from home and tune my ears into a sound plucked straight from the speakers of indie clubs up and down the UK. “It’s funny, because we didn’t find out about that scene until last year when Klaxons came over to play” says keyboardist Kevin from behind Casio. “When we started the band it was like an alternative to the one-note New York indie rock scene, not to fit in with what was going on in the UK”.

Perhaps the intention wasn’t there initially then, but fit in with the UK they have. Four tours down, the most recent of which a full UK tour in support of the above mentioned NYPC, and a pullulating fan base budding out and all over, Holy Hail become more synonymous with the British indie-dance scene with every visit. I ask them why

they fit in better back in Britain than here at home.

“I think in England people in general are just more excited about different types of music” says bassist Michal, considering the question. “You’ve got more things which are acceptable, so it’s easier for the press and the fans to give you a tag and put you in a box, which is essentially all people want to do” adds drummer Alex. “I feel like we’re really lucky because of that” says Cat, “because over in the UK they can sort of put us in a genre with bands like CSS and Klaxons, whereas over here they can’t put us in a genre. It’s like ‘are you rock, are you rap, are you electro?’, and it’s like, we’re nowhere, we straddle a lot of lines”.

I devise a quick plan. Holy Hail moves to the UK and Kruger moves to NYC in some kind of Nadia Sawalha-presented daytime TV heaven. We can call it Transatlantic Transplant ©, or something equally insipid. I put it to the band...

“Financially it’d make a lot more sense to move over there, but we’re a New York band, and a lot of our inspiration comes from here. And if we lived there we couldn’t visit” is Kevin’s sober response, and my bubble is burst. But I understand I think. Where you call home will always be fraught with traps, pricks and problems in a way Gatsby’s green light never could. So accepting that an NYC residence will probably always be just a dream, I ask Cat about hers for the band.

“At the start I thought, ‘oh, it’d be so rad if we could play with The Gossip, and we played with them in like our second show, and Michal was like, ‘oh, it’d be great to play with The Rapture’, and we toured with them, so I feel like we set these goals, and we’ve met them, so from here...” “It’s all downhill!” interjects Kevin, and they all start to laugh. With an EP due out in October in the UK and rumoured CSS tour support to follow, ascent would seem more likely.

Now where did I put Nadia’s number?

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Places to Go

Places to Go

Photography Brendan Barry - www.myspace.com/brendanbarryphoto

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KRUGERVILLE I first met The Mules in a barn on a hot summer night, deep in the heart of the country.

They played crazed wonky electrobilly blues that sounded like balkan gypsy through angry whisky shots. We’d been out swimming in the lakes all day and were exhausted, the drinks kept comin’, the band kept playing and we kept on dancing. Son of Dave was there too.

He went on later, but his performance was punctuated by his threats (repeated threats) to kill the sound engineer if the monitors weren’t turned up. Eventually Son of Dave was banned from the venue for life. The rest of us left at 2am and had fried chicken on the way home.

(Replace ‘Clwb Ifor Bach’ in Cardiff for the barn. And it was more like March - still bloody hotter than now). But the basics remain. The Mules are from London, by way of Oxford (where they all met), by way of Welshpool (Ed - singing&drums), Jersey (Jim - bass), and London (Tim - piano / moog, Duncan - guitar and Jenny - fiddle). Ed and Tim first met in Oxford in 2002, where the band (then

Places to Go

an eight-piece) started by bashing out songs by the likes of the Flying Burrito Brothers. Early recordings sound like “a really angry Salvation Army Band”.

By 2005 The Mules trimmed down to five members and moved to London.

“Oxford is great,” says Ed. “It has a rich scene for somewhere so small. We were sad to leave, but it never felt like we were deserting it, as we were never fixttures on the scene; we never wanted to ingratiate ourselves. We wanted to be asked to play instead of forcing it. We actually started playing a lot more in Oxford after we left.

We still play there a lot now. We were only really starting to get serious with the band as we were leaving Oxford, and London is where lots of things are. But we don’t really take big band decisions about ‘what everybody has to do with their life’. You don’t have to be in London, but it does make things a lot easier,” he muses. While they might live there, The Mules are at odds with much of its associations. Their sound (stomping, hard drinkin’, country thrash) sets them apart. They reinterpret hugely disparate influences (beside the obvious Ed likes NWA and Tim’s dayjob is as trainee conductor at the Royal Opera

House). Their self-effacing nature and their goshdarn saltiness also sets them apart. Ed is forthcoming about his dislike of festivals, informed by a nervousness of large crowds, and a bad experience in Glastonbury this year (where - during 18 hungover hours onsite - he and Jenny “missed our gig, it was pissing down, and a colossal waste of our time”).

Although they’ve played a few small festivals around London, their summer has been largely off the circuit. Which is no bad thing. It’s given them time to plan their residency: a weekly Monday night event in Kings Cross called ‘Pick Your Own’.

“I’ve enjoyed the residency ­a lot,” says Ed. “It’s more work, but more thought goes into it than just turning up somewhere and playing. We ask bands to play that are good musicians, not because they’re our mates.

We’re not scene whores, but I guess the residency is the closest we get to that!”

So far Pick Your Own has featured School of Language (David from Field Music), Johnny Flynn and Noah and the Whale, as well as The Mules playing every night too. What else is there (legal) to do on a Monday night, for free, in Kings Cross?

As well as the residency, the band are working on material for a new album, following up their well-recieved debut Save Your Face. Though they’ve enjoyed all their undertakings this year, Ed’s favourite part was supporting the Young Knives at Koko. “I always thought we’d have trouble playing to more than 500 people,” the singing drummer ponders.

“I’m behind my drum kit and I can’t move. The singer of a band is supposed to stand up and move around. But it was really exciting. The crowd loved it, and everyone performed so well.”

He smiles before continuing: “It was just like being in a proper band.” Maybe those big crowds ain’t so bad after all.

Words: Helia Phoenix

Firstly, kitsch can’t come into it at all. As much as it might be a promising marketing ploy to have rockabilly trumped up in the press release as ‘Uma Thurman and John Travolta dancing in Pulp Fiction, Back to the Future’s jiving past, and the soundtrack to every 50s American prom,’ these are entirely the wrong reference points to be making if one wants to be of service to the genre. Feel the clacking, clattering rhythms, feel the insanity, and rejoice in the still vital sound of post-war America learning to tear shit up. But – dear Lord! – spare us the Tarantino-ization of a music that doesn’t need any vindication from the 21st century.

And, to be fair, Keb Darge and Cut Chemist, the crate-digging double team behind this splendid two-disc compilation, seem to have pre-emptively taken this point on board. It’s the reason why their record goes beyond fanboy muddle and actually sounds like the work of two sensitive, impassioned but unfussy curators doing their job to serve the sounds and not their egos. Rockabilly and Jump Blues could come from the stable of many of the best reissue labels around at the moment – think Rhino, Soul Jazz or, more appropriately for the material contained, Ace. At times, they stray towards the Northern Soul Trap: that is, a tendency to mix up the concepts ‘forgotten gem’ and ‘justifiably obscure’ in a DJ’s rush to stay ahead of the game and prove what a busy boy they’ve been in the bargain bins. But this pitfall is largely avoided. Keb and Cut certainly have a compiler’s ear for providing the listener with range and value for money, and they steer clear of the temptation to wave their dicks in our faces.

Good. But why should one care about vintage rockabilly in 2007? More to the point, what the hell is rockabilly? The truth is that I only dismissed the Pulp Fiction image for strategic reasons, to shoo off the spectre of ironic post-modernism. As a quick summary of the terrain goes, it’s pretty bang on. Think reverb and twang; rock and roll being played rustically, with cut and swerve, by hillbillies; the slightly unsavoury odour of cheap hair oil. There is plenty of excellent stuff here that plays into this stereotype, most notably the eponymous Rock Billy Boogie by Johnny Burnette, a genuine force of nature and pillar of the genre. It’s insouciant, on edge, but too cool to be totally feral.

However, showing real wisdom, our two compères don’t confine themselves to merely the groovy and generic. Elsewhere on their respective halves of the

Reviews

Lost And Found: Rockabilly and Jump Blues BBE

compilation, Keb and Cut expand the remit slightly. Interestingly, both CDs commence with tracks which you’d hesitate to define as rockabilly: Keb has I Got a Secret (I Ain’t Gonna Keep) by Buddy Griffin and his Orchestra 1597; Cut Chemist kicks off with The Walkin’ Blues (Walk Right In, Walk Right Out) by the Jesse Powell Orchestra. These perfectly urbane and witty slices of lovesick pop owe as much to doo-wop as they do rock and roll. The moniker ‘Orchestra’ goes to show that many of these groups had at least pretensions of something a bit more uptown. Rockabilly could be sharp-suited and lyrically dextrous. The verbal panache reaches its apex with Too Much Monkey Business by Chuck Berry, the track which provided an exact template for the meter of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Astonishingly, the wordplay is almost as good, despite being a full decade earlier in the game.

KRUGER

Keb Darge & Cut Chemist

Rockabilly and Jump Blues is an excellent first stop in a potentially foreboding world of minor record labels and mediocrities. It spans the rough and the slick, the dumb and the sophisticated, and it should serve anyone looking to hear the truth behind Uma and John’s moves. For much of its running time, you will be reminded of cool people throwing cool shapes (or amphetamine-addled dorks doing weird things with their knees, which I’m pretty sure is the same thing), but it goes deeper. The closer to Keb Darge’s selection, Oil Field is Burning by Mark Lee Allen & the Driver Brothers, sounds older than Abraham and is profound in that natural, salt-of-theearth way which only the greatest folk music is. In an era of oil dependency and frenetic doomsday prophesying, it is the perfect, stoical antidote. The impressive thing is that it fits naturally into the defiant, fun, angry and mysterious patchwork that has been woven together for this excellent compilation.

David George

59

Reviews

Gravenhurst

The Go! Team

Mr Ronz

Make Shape Records

The Western Lands Warp

Proof of Youth Memphis Industries

A War of Nerves Skipping Beats

I could write this review in one word. It’s the first word on the album and it sums the whole, beautiful package up. “Woo!” yelps singer Mark on the opening of opening track How To Build A Boat. “Woo!” think I, especially as I’ve been waiting ONE WHOLE YEAR to hear the results of last summer’s recording sessions by these three brothers. Make comes in a sunshine yellow box covered in parrots and penguins and spacerelated paraphernalia, swirls and the South Pole. Inside are 11 tracks that attack the world with a series of wide-eyed, toddlerinquisitive whys arresting your earlobes with choruses from toyshop wonderlands. “So where we’re heading to find treasure?” Mark asks, and we’re launched into a kaleidoscopic landscape of arcade games, space travel, artic exploration and the ills of the modern world from mass consumerism (More) to the onslaught of wrongisms the daily TV news throws in our face (News Is Not Neutral). Those who had their appetites whetted by the Owl EP will not be disappointed, the same raw, shambolic charm is present here, and More hops over to appear on the album too, yet the sound has also grown and filled out with the delightful addition of youngest brother JT’s melodic backing vocals against Mark’s growling shoutiness and some more Lee-experimentalism. While Garibaldi, a crowd-favourite from the band’s energetic live set is another welcome addition. What you have here is a lovely thing, much like a banana in that it comes in yellow packaging and makes you smile after consuming. It has all their usual quirky lyrics and pop preambling and makes me feel much the same as when finding something utterly brilliant in a disorganised mountain at a jumble sale.

Like the girl in DNA I find myself dancing on the table, waving my find about and shouting “Look!” because this is a party and I am meant to. Join in. SW

What a bewitching, beguiling proposition Gravenhurst are. Fronted by songwriter, arranger and lyricist Nick Talbot, his incredible compositions are situated somewhere between Jeff Buckley (minus the vocal histrionics), The Smiths (without the tedious shoe gazing) and the blissful calm of a Mogwai ballad (sans white noise crescendos).

A melancholy, but defiantly resilient album musically and lyrically, this is a contemporary folk classic, and trust Warp to have zoned in on such an irrepressible talent. It has the aching glow of an album that has absorbed a lifetime of emotion, only to reflect it back at the world dressed in the colours of a silent army of broken toy soldiers. Beautiful and brooding, subtle, soft and seductive, the tonal weaponry employed by Gravenhurst slays you with a hypnotic charm that’s impossible to resist. AC

Streams of heavy sunshine pour down from a cloudless sky, warming my bare skin before a light and cooling breeze pours over me, and I’m left to lie in the thick park grass with friends seconds before we head to the chiming ice cream van for Twisters and a Mr. Whippy. This is how Proof of Youth hits me. In actual fact it’s pissing down a storm outside and I’m sat in a dark, grey office, but The Go! Team make me feel like summer inside all the time. JL

Given Mr. Ronz’ background (part of UK hip-hop act Arkane), I was expecting a mini-album of crate-dug, broken funk beats and inoffensive scratching. Not so. War of Nerves is a beautiful exploration of the deep reach of instrumental music at its melancholy, foreboding and unsettling best. My personal highlight: Only As Multiple, where gentle piano melodies drift against a luscious sunset that goes on, quite possibly forever.

In a parallel universe where DJ Shadow’s ego isn’t still eclipsing the sun this is the sort of music he is making: intelligent, sometimes freaky, always breathtaking. HP

Album

Attack + Defend

Twisted Charm Real Fictional Because Nathan Doom, like his album, is a bit of a paradox. Here he steps, fronting sax-wielding glam punks Twisted Charm – arguably the capital’s coolest band – while savaging the London Scene and its Phoney People.

In Nathan Barley terms, he’s both the singer in The Bikes and idiot-baiting Dan Ashcroft.

The same applies with Real Fictional, an album pitched between the mundane and the transcendental. “Turn off your TV, you moron,” he spits on Television Nation, yet begs for a similar, albeit heightened, escape in Cinema. No Klaxons, but thankfully no Hadouken!, Doom & Co are an intriguing dilemma. NC

Wooden Wand James and the Quiet Ecstatic Peace “When will you ever find comfort when you forfeit who you are”, James Toth (psych-folk practitioner behind the alias) croons. An apt question. Initially, Toth’s attempt to go straight for his third solo outing after outbreaks of lysergic freakouts in the ranks of underground Americana heroes Vanishing Voice sounds like a constraining fit. But listen closer and James and The Quiet soon proves as inescapably catchy as the bucket of tar the honeybees are drawn to in the chorus of In The Bucket. More conventional, sure, but still warped and wonderful. JO

o’death Head Home City Slang Like the sound of a southern belle being murdered with chains by a toothless hobo hopped up on moonshine, o’death stomp in, eyes rolling back in their heads and The Pixies and Neil Young in their hearts to sodomise Americana. Couldn’t happen to a nicer genre. The New York five-piece take the best of Gorgol Bordello with the thigh slamming spirituality of the Saggy Bottom Boys. Allie May Reynolds is a proper hoedown; raw, energetic and stomping. O Lee O is like the bastard son of Neil Young’s Old Man and the stand out track all the world counts in like Joey Ramone to a duelling banjo and bass drum. If you like a bit of fiddle with a saw and a bit of scrumpy then get on this. ND

Kid Acne

Interpol

Marcus Intalex

Videohippos

Worst Luck EP Lex Records

Our Love to Admire Parlephone

Fabric 35 Fabric

Unbeast the Leash Monitor Records

These days, a UK hiphop release that registers on the radar is a rare event; the scene’s talents seem to have dissolved into urban mush. It’s with a warm glow, then, that I can report that Sheffield mic-maniac Kid Acne’s EP sounds great – banging on about nothing much in particular, but in a smile-raising way, even managing to rope professional lunatic Infinite Lives into a few verses. It’s just a shame there’s so little of this kind of thing around these days. I blame Sway. And Robin Cook. AC

Three years after Antics Interpol finally release their third album, with a fair few changes. They wrote it on the road, recorded it in their hometown of New York and they got a new producer in (Rich Costey).

The result? The sound is still the dark and wandering breed of post-punk Joy Division despair, and yet there is no mistaking - lyrically and musically - this is a band growing up. The gothic, atmospheric opener Pioneer To The Falls sets the mood for their sleeker sound albeit with a brighter tone than usual.

Admire. SW

Euros Childs

Future of the Left

The Miracle Inn Wichita

Curses Too Pure

Drum’n’bass eh, it’s a funny thing. One day you’re up to your arsehole in combat trousers, hoodies, rollies and poppers, surrounded by dogs-on-strings in a squat in London Bridge, while random trustafarians swing from dreadlocks tied to the rafters, chanting “ketamine, ketamine, ketamine”.

Deptford eh, those were the days. But this exquisite mix from Marcus Intalex brought me straight out of the metaphoric k-hole and slammin into sophistication (and at the age of 26, it’s about time too). Showing how drums and bass have matured over the years, this lively mix features deep rollers from Alix Perez & Sabre, Commix and - seemingly - Calibre’s entire back catalogue (no bad thing in my opinion. This is proper modern jungle, Soul:r style. Simply marvellous. HP

They like to breed in Baltimore. And good job too, cos without all that humpin they’d never have spawned the sounds of Spank Rock, Diplo, Ecstatic Sunshine, Ponytail and of course these pesky VIDEOHIPPOS, and my music collection (for one) would be a lot less exciting. Unbeast the Leash is 30ish minutes of lo-fi, fuzzy, guitar-led hypernoize-pop: undignified in places, blissfully optimistic in others, eclectic throughout. It sounds extra good if you’re ragging around in your motor, aviators on, sun blazing (if you’re blighty based you’ll probably have to wait til next summer to enjoy this added high – or emigrate). Bonus points for Kool Shades (off beat and off key whistling: like someone recorded you tootling along in the shower), You Thought I Was Dead (with heavy droning guitar solo that sounds like demented jungle animals or an angry bee stuck inside a fender strat), Rider (fast-paced guitar thrash indie-dance with a wonderfully rousing synth melody that sounds like the sun rising through a megaphone – my personal favourite). Wages Of Fear is good too – and Sick Dolfin. Imagine the Go! Team, The Strokes and USAIsAMonster donning redcoats and booting the real performers off the stage at Butlins to entertain the kids with psychedelic techno cabaret. Or imagine if Arcade Fire designed a Super Mario level, and then played it on Scotchegg’s gameboy.

You’re part way to imaging the glorious chaos of VIDEOHIPPOS. Get moist, hide the prophylactics and stick your dick in the mashed potato. HP

Given the energetic brevity of Euros’ two previous solo albums it’s surprising to find a song on here measuring a mighty sixteen minutes. But the Miracle Inn of the title track is obviously no ordinary pub, and the song itself plays out like a particularly crazed night on the tiles, covering joy, despair and bad karaoke in interrelated songlets. Perhaps a more cohesive whole than Chops or Bore Da, The Miracle Inn shows Euros’ love affair with jaunty keyboards still going strong, and he continues to whip up perfect pop songs in spades. But the twin themes of loss and longing that wind through so much of his songwriting are at the fore here, tracks like Outside My Window echoing the soft sorrow of Bonnie Prince Billy. A unique, funny and sometimes sad offering from the king of doing your own thing. EH

It’s difficult to review Curses without talking about its authors’ former bands, especially when, in singer Andy Falcous’ case, FOTL seems a logical progression from (and reaction to) Mclusky. FOTL are a more confrontational proposition than his ex-band, whose diatribes were never quite as overt as Fuck The Countryside Alliance, and former Jarcrew frontman Kelson’s basslines give songs like Fingers Become Thumbs a surprising sprightliness, but this does sound like Falco’s New Band. And who’d want it any other way - he’s a brilliant guitar contortionist (The Lord Hates a Coward sounds like a train derailing, in a good way) and one of rock’s sharpest wits, a master of the oneline rhetorical v-sign. Here’s the gushing: this is the best alternative rock record I’ve heard this year. Curses could well be the best thing any member of this band has ever put their name to. GJ

Art Brut It’s a Bit Complicated

Mute The first time I heard Art Brut they split the room; half thought they were ace, the other half thought they were a joke. Legend has it Rough Trade went and watched the band perform live; jumping on the latter half’s thinking and declining to sign them for an album. Four years later, It’s a Bit Complicated has all the charisma, wit and jagged pop songs of its predecessor. A little more mature, a little less raw, it’s clear the only joke about here is on the Rough Trade bosses. JL

Wild in the Country

Hopewell

The Brian Jonestown

Hammersmith Apollo 05.07.2007

Knebworth Park 30.06.07

Borderline, London 19.07.07

Clwb Ifor Bach. Cardiff 15.07.07

Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with, or so it goes, and the sight of 9 of New York City’s most nefarious mud-larks bouncing drunk, burly and bellicose onto the Hammersmith stage was enough to tell you they haven’t been fibbing. RZA steps forwards, Wu-Tang Shogun. 5000 people drop in worship. Method grabs the mic and they all hit the ceiling. Not only have they turned up, but they’re actually trying. A bit of liquid comes out of my willy and I don’t know if it’s wee or the white stuff.

This was a one-nighter I’d spent two months dribbling over. Justice, Hot Chip, Simian Mobile Disco – are you dribbling too? I certainly was by the time I lurched off site the next morning. However, you should never spend two months looking forward to anything. It will rain, and your drugs will dissolve in the banana you cleverly used to smuggle them in. At least the music justified the salivation. Justice ripped the roof off their tent, and Simian monkeyed around with their own and others’ Big Tunes, to predictably rapturous reaction. Hot Chip get top prize though – strangely composed, but with a blistering live sound that caused polite rioting in the neon-coated crowd.

Sadly, the organisation was dire, causing several annoyingly avoidable problems for a tired man in a big wet field. Great bananas mind. AC

Formed by ex-Mercury Rev man Jason Russo and now into their third album, I wonder how Hopewell feel about opening up in front of about six people. But it’s all positive as they deliver loud, powerful altpop that needs a much bigger space than this toilet venue. Whilst it’s a leftfield territory forever defined by Flaming Lips, there’s a nice balance of guitar-driven tunes and sweet otherworldliness that’s miles ahead of the bands they are supporting tonight.

Let’s just hope that future sets last longer than six songs. BS

“If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be speaking German.”

A decade of shambolic live appearances has to some extent tarnished the legacy of what many consider the definitive hip hop crew, and a couple of shit albums hasn’t helped, but tonight as they race through the best of 36 Chambers, Wu Tang Forever, Tical, Bobby Digital and Liquid Swords, they remind everyone of what they were always all about. Simple samples, raw-meat beats and a group of emcees head and shoulders above their peers.

Live

reviews

Wu-Tang Clan

Da Mystery of Chessboxin is a highlight, as is Bring the Pain and when the crowd takes over Old Dirty Bastard’s vocal on Protect ya Neck, every box is ticked. As the gig goes on, they get drunker and drunker, the joint celebration of RZA and Ghostface’s birthdays enough to get Method Man front-flipping into the audience and Raekwon menacingly stalking the stage, and as RZA tells everyone to give it up for his “main man Clive Owen”, things take a bizarre turn, but on a night like tonight, it can only end well as crowd pleaser Gravel Pit draws a line under what can only be described as a fairytale show by hip hop’s dark knights. MW

Cajun Dance Party The Plug, Sheffield 14.07.07 Riding in on a wave of publicity, Cajun Dance Party seem unfazed by all the attention and screams when singer Danny Blumberg appears on stage. Like Robert Smith fronting The Kooks, The Race is full of observations about life and Amylase continues the theme about time passing too fast. They end on The Next Untouchable and Danny tears at his shirt trying to escape his own skin. Instruments compete for space as tension crackles through the air; then, they are gone, and the Cajun Dance Party train rumbles off into the night. KP

Joan as Policewoman Shepherds Bush Empire 11.07.07 At her best, Joan Wasser’s reflective battle cries curdle the soul. At her worst, she’s just a kinkier version of the Ally McBeal lounge singer. While the Empire was full of the furious sssh-ers that have reverently stalked her since last year’s excellent Real Life, at times the lounge singer threatened to take over. Peppered in between the glorious Ride, Eternal Flame and Christabel were tracks that had all the emotional punch of a wet kipper. New or just underplayed, I’ve got no bloody clue, because my past enjoyment of her gigs has led me to believe that the As Police Woman part of the band are under orders to shoot her if anything less than perfect goes out on stage. Wasser had better rediscover that mojo soon, or Real Life is going to hang around her neck like a reproachful albatross. KB

“You’re a slave to the man, wearing that adidas t-shirt.”

“You’re all a bunch of niggers.”

A man of too many words, these days Anton Newcombe is about as witty as a mumbling drunkard, only twice as drunk and half as witty.

I’ve got to be honest, I was really looking forward to watching this band play live. I love the hedonistic lyrics, dirty guitars and the out and out rock’n’roll ethic. This was going to be special, a real rough-diamond of a show, a chance for the headliners to pull something fantastic out of the bag, but then the massacre started.

The band were late, drunk, and never really looked bothered about playing. Newcombe’s runt-like body was dotted in smack head style tattoos, he’s greying, old and out of shape. Like watching someone commit suicide; you either want to stop them or want it all to end.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre were a cross between a freak show and a car crash. What was meant to be a revered live show turned out to be pantomime.

Tired and predictable, sad and boring. It’s such a frustration, feeling such regret after seeing one of your favourite bands play on home-turf.

It wasn’t funny, just fucking embarrassing.

RWL

Beirut / Dirty Projec-

PJ Harvey

Latitude Festival

Koko, London 26.06.07

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester 07.07.07

Henam Park, Suffolk 12-15.07.07

I’m kneeled on a sofa peering over railings, eagerly awaiting the lowering of the lights.

Support (Dirty Projectors) just astonished us with frantic crashing of cymbals on skins, and now 21 yr old Zach Condon takes the stage. The sound is perfect. Zach gloriously conducts the seven musicians (half look old enough to be his father), inciting jealous bewilderment in myself and those around me. “He’s how old?!” The show is perfect; enough Eastern European influence to balance the Western megaphone gimmickry, enough quaintly folk instrumentation for the solid pop moments to shine, and just long enough to keep a crowd cheering at big hitters. Through my letterbox I can see an old couple waltz to The Gulag Orkestar and my faith in true love is restored. This is not perfect, it’s a fucking fairytale. JL

This one-woman performance was a showcase for PJ Harvey’s career highlights, along with some tantalising material from her upcoming album. Mainly alternating between electric guitar and piano, but with some material played on the auto-harp and keyboard, the highlight was a thunderously electronic version of Rid Of Me. The album should be quite special if the material here is anything to go by, with wonderfully dramatic piano pieces making up the most part. Let’s hope the beautiful simplicity in evidence isn’t lost under conventional overdubs when the album comes out. DO

Daniel Johnston The Point, Cardiff Kartel Legendry outsider and lyrical genius, Daniel Johnston performed his astonishing back catalogue of heartbreak and kooky rock’n’roll.

Leaving nary a dry eye in the house with acoustic lo-fi gems such as True Love will find you in the end, his childlike voice and vulnerable delivery were constant reminders of his frail health. Just as grown men were beginning to weep he kicked it out with unique versions of Rock’n’Roll (and so on) backed by an allstar line up of Cardiff’s muso royalty including Sweet Baboo, Los Campesinos and Spencer McGarry Season. Bittersweet and balls-out brilliant. ND

Mirah Bowery Ballroom, NYC 10.07.07 It was hot as balls at the Bowery on Tuesday night. It was also dark and Mirah, cast in blue light reminiscent of the moon wasn’t wearing any shoes. She also drank from a sturdy silver canteen and encouraged us to play guessing games which consisted of her singing snippets from her new insect-themed album and us guessing which little critter she was referring to. Ant. Dung beetle. Cricket.

It was all very endearing. And sweet. And honestly, a bit like summer camp. Our counselor Mirah gently calmed us down with favorites like Cold Cold Water, Don’t Die in Me, and Mt. St. Helens. For the finale she sang from Joyride: Remixes while her drummer beat-boxed behind her. Through everything we stood there listening to her sweet, melodic voice, completely mesmerized. And sweating. SP

The best festival Of last year was Latitude By a mile Its second outing Had too much to fit into Such a short review Haikus? Bring it on.

Book Club nailed the comedy But Vox ‘n’ Roll sucked.

The Poetry Tent Was still self-effacing tripe Although popular New Young Pony Club Attracted the Topshop kids (Fucking retards all) NYPC rockers Taught them nu-rave is NOT REAL But Topsheep are. Baaaa!

People dressed up too The human whoopee cushions Were strangely pretty And cabaret folks Wandered around, making it Like Glastonbury (Except it only Rained on Sunday. Ten minutes.

Which was pretty fair.)

The only pisser Was the people who came to Get slashed not listen.

Leery beered-up men Sweated and screamed “OI!” like twats.

They got sunburned. Ha.

So. Back to music.

CSS rocked as usual Children lapped it up.

Incidentally Where does Lovefoxx get her cat Suits? I need one. Now. Patrick Wolf glittered He referenced Rihanna His Stars outshone ours Irrepressibles (The) played three hours by the lake Each day. Sounded lush.

Ooh, and James Franco From Spiderman, came to talk On Radio 4 I was hungover But not as much as he was The man looked like shit.

Bat For Lashes are just…

Magic. And were again, on The Obelisk Stage.

(Here’s a vodka tip: Pour it into the centre Of raspberries. Eat.) Cold War Kids weren’t all There. Still, they sounded quite loud Despite being crap.

Howling Bells headlined Despite Arcade Fire next door They bloody NAILED it.

Then The Guillotines Went and dirtied up my head And now I love the sax.

KB

KRUGERVILLE

Competition

Quiet at the back, calculators out. Howden! Put your hands on the table where I can see them! Day! What have I told you about pulling that out in class?!

Williams! Excellent work. See me after the lesson...

Today you will be learning how to write naughty words on your calculators. There will be prizes for two of the lucky students. Anyone caught sniggering will be sent to the head and inappropriately diciplined. Okay, here are the sums. See if you can work out what naughty words they spell:

Question (a)

Question (b)

End Of The Road Festival takes place from the 14th- 16th of September at Larmer Tree Gardens on the North Dorset and Wiltshire border and features ace artists like Yo La Tengo, Euros Childs, Architecture in Helsinki, Super Furry Animals, Scout Niblett, Slow Club, Seasick Steve and I’m From Barcelona. If you would like to win a pair of tickets to this most lovely of festivals, tell us which naughty word this sum makes when you pop the numbers in your calculator and turn it upside down.

To celebrate the release of their album Hey Venus! and the single Show Your Hand, our model citizens Super Furry Animals have given us this amazing prize for our lucky winner, so if you’d like to win a copy of Hey Venus!, a limited edition picture disk of the single, a pair of tickets to see the band at ANY of the venues on their upcoming tour and best of all a clock constructed out of a picture disk by their very own hands, tell us which naughty word this sum makes:

2578410 + 2739598 = ?

64595 – 6587 = ?

Send your answer along with your contact details to boobies@ krugermagazine.com before noon on August 31st. All entrants must be over 16. See the full line up at www.endoftheroadfestival. com

Send your answer along with your contact details to boobs@ krugermagazine.com before noon on August 31st. All entrants must be over 16. Tour dates and venues can be viewed at www. myspace.com/superfurry