Loud And Quiet 1 – Metronomy

LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 01 / 100 PERCENT TABLOID

& N EW VE D RO I M P AI N) (AG

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LITTLE BOOTS DIE! DIE! DIE! EL GUINCHO HEARTSREVOLUTION FILTHY DUKES NO AGE WEAREBIRDWOLF GANG GANG DANCE CHAIRLIFT GENTLE FRIENDLY FRYARS DEERHOOF TV ON THE RADIO

Metronomy KARL LAGERFELD’S A FAN...

OLIVER STONE ISN’T

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01 – Issue 01, February 2005 02 – Issue 09, February 2005 03 – Issue 27, October 2007 04 – Issue 01 (Volume 2), May 2008 05 – Issue 01 (Volume 3), December 2008

Where the devil have we been?

For those of you who slept and missed it (nothing is ever missed in the blink of an eye), the previous two issues of Loud And Quiet (June’s Battles edition and its preceding Santogold partner), were a beautiful couple. A4 in size, they symbolised the beginning of Loud And Quiet MK 2 – lush, an inch thicker with every page and certainly worth the zero pounds we’ve always charged. And that was the problem – the zero pounds thing.

Factory Records founder, Joy Division discoverer and Happy Mondays hostage, Anthony H Wilson defended his destructive business decision to release New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ in a sleeve so lavish that it lost money on every sale it made by stating that excellence never comes cheap. We never thought that he was necessarily wrong, even if Wilson’s stubbornness to compromise is what ultimately brought on Factory’s premature death. It seemed noble and passionate to us, which is why, after our most resent issue proved quite the financial blow to the L&Q fund, our knee jerk reaction was to do the whole dead-young-prettycorpse routine.

Over the past couple of months we’ve expanded www.loudandquiet.com, brought about four of our new Dirty Bingo Vs Loud And Quiet club nights and filmed the first instalment of DBvsLQ TV, coming soon to our web page. But we missed the physical mag as soon as we shelved it and have been seeking out how to bring it back ever since.

So here it is. No, it’s not printed on paper you could make a coffee table from, but it is here; still zero pounds and still featuring new, exciting music usually assigned to a pitiful section of

most retail titles. The format’s bigger, there’s more pages and in the New Year we’ll be back to our monthly frequency.

We hope Tony would have understood. www.loudandquiet.com

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Contents 12| 08 Photographer: TIM COCHRANE

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PLUS LITTLE BOOTS DIE! DIE! DIE! EL GUINCHO HEARTSREVOLUTION FILTHY DUKES NO AGE WEAREBIRDWOLF GANG GANG DANCE CHAIRLIFT GENTLE FRIENDLY FRYARS DEERHOOF TV ON THE RADIO

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OLIVER STONE ISNT

07 – Hippy / Flash / Mob 08 – Beat / Ricky / Wilson 10 – Laptop / Sexy-Time 12 – Neon / Hearts / Day 14 – Elton / John / Bleakness 16 – Print / Is / Dead 18 – Obama / Ball / Slap 20 – Blackpool / Is / Horrible 25 – Stupidly / I / Pissed 28 – Die! / Die! / Die! 35 – Enjoy / Weird / Girls 37 – Ha / Ha / Rank 38 – Yawn / Yawn / Yawn 42 – Beat / Old / Men

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CONTACT

info@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet 2 Loveridge Mews Kilburn London NW6 2DP Stuart Stubbs Alex Wilshire LIVE EDITOR Kate Hutchinson ART DIRECTOR Lee Belcher FILM EDITOR Dean Driscoll EDITOR

SUB EDITOR

ADVERTISING

advertise@loudandquiet.com CONTRIBUTORS

Anna Dobbie, Ben Parkes, Benson Burt, Chris Watkeys, Danny Canter, Danielle Goldstien, Dean Driscoll, Eleanor Dunk, Elizabeth Dodd Greg Cochrane, Kate Hutchinson, Mandy Drake, Owen Richards, Rebecca Innes, Reef Younis, Sam Little, Sam Walton, Simon Leak,Tim Cochrane THIS MONTH L&Q LOVES

Beth Drake, Briana Dougherty, Jane Third, Nita Keeler Pam Ribbeck, Richard Onslow Stephen Bass The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2008 © Loud And Quiet.

The Beginning 12| 08

ARE YOU A CREDIT CRUNCHY NUT? Kate Hutchinson wolfs down another bowl of recession and what it means for clubland Photography: DAVE SWINDELLS

Sick of hearing about the recession? Yeah, us too. But while the press predicts doom and gloom in every headline, we rave chasers are waving our optimistic glowsticks and predict exciting times ahead.

Leaf through any decent volume on clubbing and it emerges that, while the economic climate may be pretty shitty, recessions are a catalyst to significant trailblazing changes in nightlife, music and fashion.

Bill Brewster, co-author of ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’, explains: “People want to forget their troubles. It’s the lipstick factor. [Clubbing is] not particularly expensive and it cheers people up, if only for a night.”

Modern history is peppered with examples. The Great Depression saw a worldwide financial downturn through the late 1920s to the early ’40s, but this period birthed cuttingedge nightlife to rival today’s.

In America the tough times coincided with the Prohibition era, where evenings were spent dodging the authorities between illegal speakeasies. Arguably Germany’s money woes were greater, bankrupted by the pecuniary burn of World War One and the Treaty of Versailles, but it was in Weimar-era Berlin

where clubs were the most expressive. It was the epicentre of after dark performance, with a sexually ambiguous hub of writers, artists, transvestites and sadomasochists who revelled in the loose post-Kaiser censorship. Cabaret was cutting its teeth – and it wasn’t unheard of to see a sensuous vamp puffing a cigar out of her nether regions on stage.

Ben Osborne, author of ‘The A-Z of Club Culture’, argues that club life can at times even predict economic downturns. He says: “That club life prefigured the 1929 crash in Berlin and London is amply demonstrated in footage of Londoners clubbing in the 1928 film ‘Piccadilly’, which features normal types dancing on the tables in an East End hostelry. Of course, people went on to famously party through the recessions, before eventually being stopped by a nasty little wanker with a moustache.”

The golden era of disco in ’70s America was also a fine backlash against monetary discontent. In their book, Brewster and Frank Broughton describe how “Disco presided over an era of dramatic social change. As war raged in Vietnam, it provided a soundtrack of escapism.” They talk of revolutionary disco music that

stripped clubbing of its celebrity status and handed it back to the innovating underclasses, of beats that were “secret, underground, dangerous” and represented the period’s black and gay liberation. It was the furthest from the Bee Gees and ABBA as you could get.

Fast-forward a decade and the biggest boom was acid house in 1988. The Guardian called it “the biggest revolution in youth culture since the Sixties’ summer of love”. It was, in part, the result of four London mates’ – Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker, Danny Rampling and Nicky Holloway –Ibiza trip in 1987, where they discovered the euphoric combination of ecstasy and music and exported it back to Britain.

But rave culture also caught on because, like disco, it offered escapism, a bubble light years away from dreary Thatcherled reality. In the late ’80s a recession was in full swing: On October 19th 1987 (‘Black Monday’) the world stock markets crashed, the housing market was diminishing in value, and unemployment levels were abysmally high. The country’s youth were disaffected. Many were out of work and alienated from Thatcher’s emphasis on individual self-reliance.

Says Brewster, “Acid house was a definite big fuck off to wider society [and] a halfconscious attempt at creating an alternative [one]. For a time it felt like you were living in two polar opposite worlds, one that existed at night and at weekends and another regular world that existed the rest of the time.”

Early on in London, Rampling and Oakenfold’s Shoom and Future exploded, while northerners crammed into Manchester’s legendary Haçienda. The fashion was simplistic and rebelled against designer clothes and the boxy power suit era, with parachute trousers, oversized tees and bandanas being the chosen raving garb. The scene’s popularity mushroomed, and soon the circular M25 strip that ‘orbits’ the capital and up north, Blackburn, were the scenes of large-scale warehouse and field parties for up to 10,000 clubbers. And even though it eventually failed misserably, acid house remains a social boundary-trashing act of defiance and defined a new sound and style that still informs music and clubbing to this day.

So then, neo hippy communes in Dalston? Flash mob raves on the Olympic site? Kitchen drawer couture? ‘The Crunch’ could spells radical times to come.

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The Beginning

Dead Celebrities (I wish they were)

Philippa Burt thinks…

TAPES AND TAPES AND TAPES...

Yep, they’re making a return. And properly this time.

Writer: HOLLY EMBLEM

The MP3 has undeniably changed the face of music. In just a short period of time, it’s made Metallica look foolish, made Bradford Cox of Deerhunter throw a hissy fit and made maverick bloggers take up arms and leak White Stripes records everywhere, which was, well, messy to say the least. But the emergence of digital music has also made small record labels look for alternative recording formats. Record labels and artists who, quite rightly, don’t wish to pummel their compositions into handy 128-bit iTunes-style formats have taken a move against the bloggers, webzines and, well, everyone obsessed with bit rates, and have turned to DIY recording formats.

So, what is the underground music scene offering now? Well, to put it bluntly, cassette tapes. Yes, that seemingly decrepit format has weaselled its way into musical consciousness once more, rearing its apparently ugly head and turning what were crystal clear compositions into fizzy, static puddles of musical mess.

However, the tape is now much more than a second-rate recording device, as a new strain of ethereal and dreamy musicians (no, not My Bloody Valentine) have been working the format for all its worth, toying with its recording constraints.

For some, cassettes were, and still are, simply a vehicle for chart top 40 mixtapes, 80’s albums that hadn’t been digitalised and the only musical

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device that would work in your parents’ car. It is understandable then, that when you read that a new drone-comenoise record is only available on a tape, some feelings of cynicism towards the format emerge. Fortunately, it’s misplaced, as record labels such as Not Not Fun and Gizeh have taken on all the qualms of the tape and turned these problems on their proverbial head, effectively making the recording format compliment the music.

American Label Not Not Fun (NNF) remain optimistic about cassettes as a recording format, noting that “certain strains of music lend themselves to the warmer, blurrier sound of cassette tape”, which essentially describes what the label is all about. The decision to record onto tape is apparently “70% aesthetic” and “30% economic” as – unlike an expensive vinyl press – tapes are perfect for “rawer, less accessible recordings.” With an ever-increasing back catalogue, which includes the likes of Robedoor, Pocahaunted and even Thurston Moore, NNF’s harmonising of both the economic and aesthetic makes tapes more than just a ‘kitsch’ fad, but a genuine recording alternative.

It also marks a turn against torrenting. Cassette recordings are less likely to appear online, unless you move in certain circles, as the bit rate is lower than the expected norm of elitist torrent sites. This, along with the low record prices labels such as NNF offer, allows

listeners to seek out their own gems, search through a labels back catalogue, grabbing goodies that may have been missed by those who crudely demand releases in free lossless audio code (FLAC, for short).

On our own side of the pond, British labels such as Gizeh are also doing their bit for the tape effort. 2008 releases have included ‘The Heritage’ by nowon-hiatus Her Name is Calla and ‘With our arms Wide Open we March Towards the Burning Sea’ from Glissando, who, as luck would have it, aren’t on hiatus.

Both of these records were released on a limited run of beautifully packaged cassette tapes and for those who missed out on the action the first time around, Gizeh kindly released the albums on CD too. Like NNF, Her Name is Calla remain wholly positive about tapes, suggesting that ‘The Heritage’ was an “organic record” and that the noisy quirks of the “pokey basement” they were recording in – the electricity and water meters – added to the recording and finalised their decision to release it on tape.

It would of course be ridiculous to suggest that tapes will completely take back the place of MP3’s, but next time you spot an artist releasing something a little extra special on tape make sure you grab a copy. It will probably be the most enchanting 90 minutes of your life, with a 30 second break for when you have to change sides of course.

In October Estelle almost won the Mercury Music Prize. Or, rather, one song often mistaken for a Kanye West number, featuring some girl, was almost good enough to upstage Burial, Neon Neon and eventual winners Elbow. Across town, Kaiser Chiefs roped in producing slag Mark Ronson in a bid to “retake the dance floors” and, subsequently, can now be seen telling just about anyone that Jay-Z likes their stuff. And yet, with ‘Off With Their Heads’ (the new Kaiser’s album) comes too the height of Chief-bashing.

So, is the upheld façade beginning to slip? Are the public beginning to wise up? If bands are acknowledging that success is heavily dependent on the producers behind them, and the column inches they gain next to Lily Allen, could it be that (and whisper this) the notion of the musician as a genius is dead?

The gut reaction is to say of course not. And to some extent this is true.

Pioneers of each music movement, be it The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, Oasis, or Klaxons, appear as if from nowhere breaking new ground without star aid, bringing critics, fans and haters kicking and screaming with them.

But last month Kate Moss was immortalised in a 50kg solid gold statue as its creator, Marc Quinn, remarked that both Moss and gold are objects “we have agreed represent something special in society”. Similarly, musical success is reliant upon an agreement between the right number of the right people. This includes the ‘right’ producers working on it, the ‘right’ kind of public to buy it - record sales are one thing by who wants to be a housewives favourite? - and the ‘right’ magazine writing about it.

While this may be good news for flagging artists able to who call on a credible producers to perform a resuscitation, its bad news for anybody who has the foresight to see that Estelle, Ricky Wilson (with goons) and the like are dirge no matter who is adding their musical clout. And so here’s where you’ll find me with guitar in hand, plugged in drum machine and knocking on Erol Alkan’s door. We can’t beat them… unfortunately.

The Beginning

WIRES IN THE BLOOD A technology savvy Ian Roebuck on what it is to be a club promoter in 2008 Illustration: ELEANOR DUNK

I’m taking no requests, making no new Myspace friends and attending fuck all Facebook events. The phone’s flicked to silent, my hotmail box is barren and I haven’t checked Pitchfork for weeks. None of this is strictly true. The indisputable truth is that a promoter’s job consists of bone dancing with every piece of electronic equipment available to mankind. Whether it is dry humping my laptop on a commutercrazed tube train or parallel parking the mobile phone in a busy restaurant; technology and my good self have become inseparable.

Imagine a David Cronenborg wet dream penetrating the doldrums of

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my existence and you are half way there. Some may say this evaluation is considerably over the top, and they’d be right. I draw the line at porking mechanical objects but you can see what I’m getting at – being a promoter is becoming increasingly reliant on communicating in the language of avoidance. Bands are stumbled upon through tired eyes in reassuringly familiar places, contacts and friends are made in identifiable environments where security is a click away. Got the kettle on? The proliferation of Myspace has provided an explosion of talent for promoters to tap into beyond their LCD screens and increasingly bands are clinching

deals having played only a handful of gigs. Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong played out their whole career in a space of months and if it wasn’t for some clever management bands such as S.C.U.M and The XX would soon be overexposed. It is innovative acts like these that are breaking the mould – a single launch in a church or being selective in press and gig choices are now necessary means of creating the right buzz.

This culture of instant gratification of course has its benefits, and not just for people with a penchant for laptop loving. Promoters are granted immediate access to a bands inner

sanctum where a simple point and press gives you all the management details needed. In fact, if you didn’t have to wait practically a fortnight each time you contacted a booking agent, it would all be plain sailing.

Bills can now be booked with not one chord watched within a live arena, but like viewing Glastonbury on the idiot-box or getting the district line to work I wouldn’t recommend it. There is no substitute to watching a band first hand. The Internet has bestowed the industry with both a blessing and a curse and it is up to us to do what we will with it.

Now dim the lights and turn that monitor on, it’s sexy-time.

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oud And Quiet is fucking us in the ass!” spits a neon war-painted Lo in our general direction. “How come we’ve played your club but not been in the paper yet?”

Patience, clearly, is worthless in the world of Heartsrevolution. It’s been five minutes since Lo and her band alighted the Dirty Bingo Vs Loud And Quiet stage and already we’re being pinned against the wall by the tiny singer. “Do you like my rings?” she then asks excitedly, fanning out her fingers decorated with oversized jewels; the type usually found in arcade machines. “Where’s my one from you? You owe me one… no, two.”

It wasn’t always like this y’know. Six hours earlier Lo arrived at Camden’s Monarch in an altogether shyer mood. Along with Ben (Lo’s modest boyfriend, synth-controller and Hearts cofounder), her large opal eyes peeped around the door of the north London boozer for the politest of hellos. The duo – and only fulltime revolutionaries – came flanked by stand in drummer Franki (usual live sticks-man Prince Terrance otherwise engaged on tour with Santogold) and sometime visuals provider Kate Moross. The four waited patiently for their sound check, quietly taxing the venue’s Wi-Fi on their laptops.

But with a fluoro pink strip of makeup across her eyes comes too Lo’s explosive and mischievous onstage persona.

Like a Roman candle in a biscuit tin, she fiercely ricochets around come showtime, yelling into a distorted microphone to the thrashy, glitch techno zapping from Ben’s keys and buttons. Moross provides backing yelps and the overhead-projected display. Franki drums to the sounds wired into his headphones so hard he busts open his fingers. And all of this started in The Standard Hotel, West Hollywood.

Leyla Safai and Ben Pollock met checking in and waiting on guests, neither intending to pursue a career in the accommodation industry.

Unsurprisingly – especially considering Ben’s willingness to remain somewhat in the background of Heartsrevolution – it was the singer who made the first move. “I saw him in a dark dungeon and I walked past him like this,” reminisces Lo, reenacting a swift trot past her

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man. “And then I walked back again like this and said something to him, and he thought I was stupid. And I thought ‘That guy’s hot’. And then I went on a date with him and I knew I was going to be with him forever and ever.”

“But how did you guys start making music together?” prompts Franki who also owns New York label ihearcomix, unleashers of Heartsrevolutions’ ‘Switchblade’ EP. “That’s what he asked you.”

But a loved up Lo is now too busy squishing the cheeks of her beloved to care. Luckily we already know that, musically, the couple first worked together when Lo asked Ben to make a jingle for an ice cream truck she’d laid her hands on. Ben obliged, Lo provided vocals of sorts and the first vehicle in what has now become the Heartschallenger fleet was ready to run, distributing confectionary so colourful that Willy Wonka himself was gearing up to sign on.

Lo says: “We didn’t have real jobs so we did the one truck in LA and kids liked it so we took all the money we made and bought another truck, and then we’d do some big event and buy another truck. We’ve still not got any money but we’ve got a lot of trucks. And so all of our friends started to work for us and run the different trucks in different cities, so they didn’t have to get jobs.”

Typical stock for these mobile gift shops includes ice creams, toys, candy and Hearts t-shirts, button packs and stickers. A simple rule that all stock must be interestingly packaged, bright and colourful applies to every item sold.

You’ve no doubt heard whispers of these Heartschallengers – after all, how many new bands own not one but their own fleet of ice cream trucks? – but some confusion has been voiced about what a Heartschallenger actually is, if not the name of the vehicles themselves.

“It’s not the trucks that are called Heartschallenger,” explains Lo. “They all have their own names and own energy because they’re all old and beaten up in some way but have a nice shiny coat of pink glitter and pink paint. But if you look at them closely they’re a mess that’s been covered up, kinda like me. It’s a metaphor for my life,” she giggles.

“Everyone has that thing

that’s the hardest challenge in their life that they have to overcome, and the greatest challenges come from the heart so… I like to push the line, and if you can do that and knock down walls and barriers…”

Lo trails off and gestures towards Ben and Franki. “Look how interested my friends are,” she grins. “Now do you see why I don’t want to talk?… but look how cute he is…”

And with that Ben’s face gets another good ol’ squeeze.

Absent from our post-show interview is Brit graphic designer and founder of her own new Isomorph label, Kate Moross.

The Hearts part-timer isn’t so due to missing our chat (she’s not been feeling too well all day and so has headed home for an early night) but rather because of the 3470 miles separating her London base from the rest of the band’s in New York. Between her various illustrative projects, she provides Heartsrevolution with live visuals whenever she can.

“We met her in New York via a mutual friend, and really hit it off as friends…” says Ben before Lo jumps in.

“I had sent her a record a year prior and she never replied!” rants the singer. “And then my friend was like ‘you know that girl Kate? She’s here from London’. And I was like, ‘Fuck that bitch, she never fucking replied to me! I don’t like that girl!’ And then we hung out and hit it off. So I said, why don’t you join the band, because then we don’t have to be around anyone else but our friends.”

“It’s all about building a family,” smiles Franki, prompting a wincing, laughing “You’re such a fucking homo,” from Lo. But when the banter isn’t flying and the ice cream trucks are stationary, when Ben’s cheeks are just that and not Lo’s Playdo for pummelling, Heartsrevolution produce a trash metal that proves, at the centre of it all, the music matters. On record – beautifully packaged, limited vinyl treats no less – tracks like ‘Switchblade’ lash like Justice, while Lo’s fuzzy, hyper-angelic vocals are being compared to Alice Glass’ of Crystal Castles. For now, with Heartsrevolutions’ 8-gigs-in-7days UK tour over, and the group’s core having returned to NYC, we can defend that

recurring comparison, safe in the knowledge that an extra fistful of Liberachy rings won’t be demanded of us as way of punishment. Because Lo, of course, doesn’t see any similarities in the slightest.

“Everybody here comes up and asks us how we feel about the Crystal Castles comparison,” she says “and it’s a lazy comparison, other than the fact that I have a vagina and [Ben] has a penis, and we did a split together two years ago, or whatever.”

But that’s day one at Modern Rock Star School, isn’t it?

Never take a comparison, however true it might be, laying down… or bending over.

Heartsrevolutions (complete with their ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ mantra) clearly have a far more overt zest for life than Crystal Castles. Having interviewed both bands, they’re far less guarded, sceptical, contrived even. In fact, Lo and Ben couldn’t be further from such personalities. And yet, to deny their similarities to the Toronto duo would be foolish. On stage, Ben manipulates glitch synths, samples and pulsing dance beats. Lo dives around the stage, yelling incessantly, often falling to her knees in order to start and continue the party. It’s as exciting and original as you’d hope it to be from a band being hailed as ‘the new CCs’. And if you’re a oneband kinda gal/guy, currently on a fence separating the gardens of Crystal Castles and Heartsrevolution, just remember that only one of the playgrounds serves ice cream while barraging you with the finest 8-bit glitch techno punk rave thrash trash metal… or whatever the fuck it’s called.

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Heartsrevolution “The greatest challenges come from the heart,” say NYC’s finest glitch-metal duo Writer: STUART STUBBS

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EL GUINCHO Watch out Sir Elton, El Guincho has come to destroy you Writer: DANNY CANTER

When Pixar finally make The Lion King: Beach Party In The Sahara, Sir Elton John will no doubt throw a hissy. The credit crunch is effecting us all John boy, and not only does the modest figure of El Guincho come cheaper than your bloated ass, but he also comes propelled by a completed, booty-shaking, tropical soundtrack, destined for the Disney family brand. The patronising warthog will get sloshed on coconut rum, his irritating, ratty friend will cop off with a mongoose and Simba won’t think twice about his dead pa. Fuck ‘Hakuna Matata’. Good times are now called ‘Alegranza’.

Pablo Diaz-Reixa named himself El Guincho after a bird from the Canary Islands that always flies alone. Creatively a loner himself – every African rhythm, reggaeton beat and primary-splattered sample is the work of this one man – DiazReixa too was raised in the Canaries, before basing himself in Barcelona, where “it’s really hard to have music as a job so that’s a good thing in terms of writing exciting music”.

“You don’t have the pressure to fit anywhere,” he tells us in a shamefully rainy London “or to convince any specific audience.

And it is totally less press

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influenced. I feel more comfortable in Barcelona in terms of writing music and finding my sound. It’s very related to the city.”

So they don’t get the London Lite in the Catalonian capital.

No wonder everyone isn’t in “my favourite new band”, as gushed by any number of gossip column hags. But even the most clotheared of listener needn’t be told that Barcelona’s les affaire style is key to the sounds found on El Guincho’s debut album; ‘Alegranza’’s mirroring vibrancy as unmissable as an illustrated toucan funnelling chilled Kia-Ora down your arched gullet. More than a slice of sun, it’s an album of tropicana for us weather beaten Brits to holiday to, and with; an escapism that El Guincho was exactly aiming for, albeit for reasons altogether different to those of our climate related woes.

“I was totally trying to escape from feeling trapped in my other band,” nods the singer.

“El Guincho was kinda like my way to chill from the typical band things, like rehearsals, fights and all that. I wanted to try different sounds and different production so I just took the songs that I had written for my band to my own

thing, and recorded them in 2 days, trying to keep them as fresh as I possibly could.”

So, free from inter-band interfering, The Lion King: Beach Party In The Sahara is free to rage on until the glimmer of dawn in whatever fashion El Guincho cares for.

Hooves can two-step to the speed salsa of ‘Palmitos Park’, palm trees can come down to the plinking plonk of ‘Pol Ca Mazurca’, stuffy characters can comically double drop to ‘Antillas’. And then there needs to be a death. Preferably of the warthog. Which apparently there is on ‘Alegranza’, confirmed by Guincho when admitting that, like most records, the album’s continual themes are “love and how to fit the idea of dying in there”.

This bleakness is news to us.

If it is there in El Guincho’s music it’s buried deep. Or perhaps that’s what us who can only speak limited Spanish (need to order a cheese sandwich, I’m your man… and then I’m spent) like to think.

“I guess in Spain people understand about the lyrics so they can actually see the ‘other side’ of the album,” states an ominous El Guincho, alluding further to a darker undercurrent in his safari rhythms. Great, so

the warthog does get it. But let’s talk more about the colour of ‘Alegranza’. It could only be one item of clothing – a Hawaiian shirt. No, a pair of Hawaiian Bermuda shorts, garish and fun, trying their hardest to trick the human eye into thinking it’s just seen a brand new shade. The likes of MIA aside, is music in need of some more colour?

El Guincho says: “I don’t think so. I think people are opening their ears more and more. I love music that would be seen as ‘monochrome’ compared to my record. I like minimalism, especially in pop music, although I know ‘Alegranza’ is kinda like the opposite in terms of sound. But it actually is really simple in terms of songwriting. Writing fun music is also a very clever thing.

Like the Pet Shop Boys. But yeah, we’re just recording some tunes. That’s it, how could we take ourselves seriously? We all really NEED music but we’re not saving lives. I’m just thankful to be making a living from it.”

Elton John would have lapped up that question, spitting his worth, arrogantly. But what would Reg Dwight know? He just lost his job to young man who’s making original soundscapes in glorious Technicolor.

FILTHY DUKES From promoting electro bands to being one, here’s the Kings Of Noize

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Writer: DEAN DRISCOLL Photographer: SIMON LEAK

You’d be forgiven for any apprehension. Having made their name as London’s premier indie DJ duo with their residency at the Barfly, their foray into making music wasn’t one of popular music’s high points. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, the single possibly ranks somewhere below ‘Barbie Girl’ by Aqua as one of the greatest crimes against music ever committed. Thankfully, the Queens of Noize never got the chance to inflict any more lasting damage, and the “song”, ‘Indie Boys Don’t Deserve It’, will remain a little-heard abomination to remind everyone what can happen when indie music eats itself and gets the trots as a result.

Yes, given the past form of Barfly DJ duos, there’s a possibility you might be somewhat apprehensive about the Filthy Dukes move into making their own tunes. But thankfully, as anyone who caught the Filthy Dukes’ triumphant debut live shows at this summer’s festivals will tell you, any such reservations are wholly unfounded.

The Filthy Dukes’ Camden night, ‘Kill ‘Em All, Let God Sort It Out’, was itself a reaction to the Queens of Noize brand of indie DJing. At that

point, Tabitha and Mairead were still London’s foremost indie DJs and with Dukes Olly and Tim wanting to provide an alternative night for the more electronic-influenced indie music coming through, they initially found some resistance. “Apart from Trash, there were no nights like that,” explains Olly. “We started booking that type of band and having a mixed music policy. It was really hard to begin with – everyone was kinda getting angry with us, just wanting the Kaiser Chiefs!”

It’s now fair to say Kill ‘Em All has become one of the most influential nights in London, paving the way for the acts that now dominate the UK indie scene, and broadening the musical horizons of the kids who once demanded they play Kaisers records. Having brought electronic music to the Barfly, Olly and Tim completed the dance/indie cross-pollination by setting up a Kill ‘Em All residency at Fabric nightclub.

The live project was born back in 2005, when the Filthy Dukes were asked if they could remix the Rakes’ single 22 Grand Job. Having never produced before, they turned to their friend Mark - a producer who has worked with Soul Mekanik and Justin Robertson - to help adapt

to the studio environment, eventually recruiting him as the third Duke. It was a mix for The Maccabees that led to the band’s label, Fiction, signing them.

“They liked the remix so much that they brought us in and said “have you ever thought about making your own music”, says Tim. “We had, but we’d never really had any spare time to sit down and make our own music,” continues Olly.

Fiction have been a good fit for Filthy Dukes, lending them their expertise on what makes for good singles, giving them final say in artwork and remixes, and the freedom to collaborate with the artists they want to – the forthcoming album features guest vocals from Late Of The Pier, frYars and Plastic Little (whose vocals are lent to new single ‘Tupacrobotclubrock’) amongst others. Avoiding big name guests, they chose to stay true to the ethos that established Kill ‘Em All. “Also, we found that with the less established artists they were more prepared to put 100% into it”, says Mark. “More established artists might have held themselves back”.

Having spent the past year working on their album, the Filthy Dukes made their live debut this summer, appearing at

Glastonbury, Field Day and Bestival, and were blown away by the reception they received.

There are positives and negatives to be drawn from the move from DJing to live performance: “There’s a lot more stuff to carry!” says Tim. “With DJing you can just turn up, play for a couple of hours and go back to the hotel.” But as Olly explains, there are plus points: “You get more female attention.

DJs just get geeky guys coming up saying ‘hey, I really like that remix...’”.

With the album due out in early 2009, and having recently completed their first UK tour, you may have thought the Filthy Dukes might have less time to put into Kill ‘Em All. But as the band contends, booking new exciting artists keeps them sharp – there will be a new Kill ‘Em All night planned for next year, and there are plans afoot for their own label too. Are the Filthy Dukes expanding the empire? “I don’t know if it’s an empire,” says Olly. “It’s... musical fun. It’s certainly not a very lucrative empire!”

Whether it’s lucrative or not, the musical fun being had by Filthy Dukes and the indie heads they’re inspiring isn’t going to end any time soon.

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Clubs

PRINT IS DEAD!

Magazine promoter calls time on club only to start another one Writer: SAM LITTLE Photographer: CHARLEY STANIFOTH

Fittingly, club promoter Wolf is sat directly beneath a snarling stuffed head of… well… a wolf.

As a pair, they look as rough as each other. One’s been hanging on the wall of Soho pub The Endurance for God knows how long, the other’s been hanging in the eye of a post-West End sore face since he woke up today. Having taken a rare night off from throwing parties, Wolf’s been… partying. Not that a pulsing head, whirring nausea or a dose of the shakes is enough to prevent the now veteran promoter from enthusing about his new club night, or any number of his current projects for that matter.

To start then, wearebirdwolf – successor to Wolf’s recently self-slain indie night, Magazine.

“It’s completely different,” he buzzes. “It’s returning to what I’m really into, not indiebased in any form. It’s going to be more electronic. There will be live music and live elements, but more along the lines of bands like Holy Fuck.”

Quickly, it’s apparent that Wolf knows ‘electronic’ music (a word that, when shortened to electro, he hates due to its vagueness) far better than most.

Because wearebirdwolf isn’t Klaxons here and Late Of The Pier there, it’s far filthier than that - “The DJs will be anything from Detroit Techno to Heavy Bass,” he continues.

“There will be dance, there will be techno. It’s going to be quite rough and quite dirty, but not intimidating in any way.”

The catalyst for Wolf’s giant stride away from Magazine came when his indie night (which was usually found wedging fans into Camden’s Proud Galleries) merged with its doppelganger, Year Zero. Having realised that “things needed a bit of a tidy

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up”, Wolf called time on the night, feeling that it had reached its peak. Today he still co-promotes Year Zero, simply without the ‘Magazine Presents…’ prefix. There you’ll get 8-quid secret guests that range from Ash to Sunshine Underground to The Kooks, even if public school boys with navel-skimming V-necks and guitars are not what Wolf got involved in promoting for.

“With the indie stuff we do… sometimes it’s not necessarily what I’m into,” he honestly confesses. “It’s difficult because as you move on you’ve got bands like The Kooks, which you may be into but maybe not, but when you’re running [a club] as a business sometimes you’ve got to put your feelings behind the door. I used to see it as a compromise when I was younger, I don’t really see it like that anymore. I see it as sense.”

Wolf’s a businessman, y’see?

Because viral flyering on Myspace isn’t something he does when, really, he should be quoting people happy in a tragic insurance job that would be all doom and gloom if it wasn’t for ‘dress down Fridays’ (ties optional). This is his life, which began when he traded Manchester for London a decade ago and made for the capital as a jobbing DJ. A few parties thrown, he realised that a career could be made from promoting.

“When I first came down to London there were only a handful of promoters,” he remembers as we discuss the current saturation of clubland [guilty].

“You knew who was who and the nights that were going down were amazing, crowds would go to those nights no matter what.

Now, there is no loyalty whatsoever. No one knows what’s good anymore. There’s no trust anymore because there’s too much

going on. People aren’t going to believe that your night’s any good, they’re going to think it’s shit like the rest.”

And if you’re reading this thinking, “I’ve got records and good taste in music, I want a club a night”, Wolf’s advice…

“Don’t do it! Seriously!

There are times when I think, ‘what the fuck am I doing?’ But it depends what level you go into it at. I really don’t think that people go into it as a career option these days. You used to, I did, but people don’t now. You can lose lots of money, and you can make lots of money, and it can be soul-destroying.

But when a party goes off, it’s the most amazing thing in the world.”

Wolf would take his own advice if he could, but his knowing of the rush a successful night can provide acts like a stubborn rose-tinted lens that he can’t exchange for bogstandard face-furnisher. The graft he faces, convincing punters that wearebirdwolf isn’t “shit like the rest”, will all be worth it. In the meantime, his fix comes in the shape of four palm trees and a mushroom cloud… or London school of electronic music, Apocalypso.

Either the hangover’s lifting or Wolf, irrelevant of his online promoting and press commitments to the Dekkerfounded club night, is an Apocalypso junky, perking up at just the talk of another veinprick.

With enthused awe, Wolf says: “That is going stronger than ever, it’s an animal. I’m very proud to be part of it. It’s on fire. It’s always rammed. The room up there only holds 120 people in theory, but it’s usually double that, so it’s always rammed, and the vibe is always amazing. And the music

policy’s amazing because Dekker is so on it. If you do like electronic music and you wanna be educated in it, it is the place to be.”

Year Zero is no doubt an impressive business product, but Apocalypso (which has seen Dekker joined at the decks by James Lavelle, Shir Khan, Jesse Rose and Phones, to name a few) is clearly Wolf’s true vocation, so close to his heart that his ventricle probably has its own mirror ball. And now he needs to find room in there for wearebirdwolf also.

“It’s going to be as and when we choose,” he explains of the night’s whereabouts and frequency “and when’s right with us. It’s going to be when I’ve found the optimum venue, the optimum date for the crowd and for myself. There’s no rush for it.”

Perhaps Wolf is starting to listen to his own advice. Agreed by new partner James Catoe (putting the WE in wearebirdwolf, Cator is also one half of Wolf’s new DJ/production team, ready to remix any day now) the new club has a strict quality over quantity policy.

Churning out nights like clockwork is, like clockwork, wholly unexciting. And wearebirdwolf hatched (at least that’s how we think a birdwolf enters this world) before a throbbing Vibe Bar a couple of months back. The pristine techno, heavy bass and electronic sounds of Detroit and Chicago threatened to send even those without child (or wombs) into early labour. Yuk! A disgusting thought, but wearebirdwolf promises to be even filthier.

Check the wearebirdwolf Facebook group of the same name for future events www.myspace.com/apocalypsoclub

NO AGE No surrender as the Californian duo take on CBS Television... and the world

Writer: TOM PINNOCK Photographer: BEN PARKS

Dean Allen Spunt: “I feel like we make art instead of ‘rock’.

I’m definitely not a musician, I don’t know what a fucking C# is!”

Randy Randall: “Being an artist isn’t reserved for some upper echelon of well-trained dudes with berets and moustaches. If you have to make a creative decision you’re an artist.”

Welcome to the world of No Age, self-defined artists and simultaneous experimental punks, but also one of the most politically aware bands in America right now.

What’s more, they’re a band with morals and sizeable ambition to follow their own rules, splitting their mildly successful three-piece Wives after the release of their 2004 debut ‘Erect The Youth Problem’ because they didn’t actually like their own music.

“We had to sit back and be like ‘do we like this music we’re playing in Wives?’ and we were both like ‘not really’,” explains Spunt as we catch up with the band backstage before their show at London’s Electric Ballroom. “I listen to it now and it just sounds bad. No Age is definitely more conceptual. We have to like everything we write; it has to be our favourite. I think originally we wanted to play with other people

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but we were so comfortable playing with each other that it was hard to play with other people, ‘cause we’re not musicians.”

So No Age were born, with Spunt switching from bass to drums and lead vocals, and Randall handling the melody and noise with his guitar and racks of loop pedals and samplers.

Getting it together at Los Angeles community hotspot The Smell (which also boasts HEALTH and The Mae Shi among its regulars), No Age released five EPs on the same day in 2007, shortly collected as their debut album ‘Weirdo Rippers’, which saw shards of punk thrashings peek out from a scree slope of hiss and ambient noise. This year’s ‘Nouns’ featured a more hi-fi approach and even some, admittedly twisted, alt-rock anthems in the shape of ‘Eraser’ and ‘Teen Creeps’, especially.

There might not be many intelligible political lyrics in any of their releases – or, to be honest, intelligible lyrics full stop – but even in Wives (who sounded “like shit”, according to Spunt) politics was a driving force in the band.

“Our life is political,” explains the singer, eager to expand. “It’s who we are, who we’ve become. We’ve grown up together essentially since we were about 19. What we do as

people reflects the band and vice versa. In Wives it was similar, I mean, we practiced what we preached - DIY. That’s just how we work, we’ve never really done anything in a way we don’t want to.”

“You do what you believe in,” adds the flannel-shirted, baseball-capped Randall.

Not only their personal politics were put in the spotlight recently however, when No Age came up against one of the US’ most powerful traditions – censorship. Rehearsing for a performance on CBS’ The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson in October, Randall was told he had to remove his ‘Obama’ t-shirt because of the ‘equal-time rule’, a little-observed law which basically says all political candidates must be given the same amount of exposure on US TV and radio stations - surely Libertarian candidate Bob Barr or the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney can’t be too pleased with how well it’s working. Whatever the band’s arguments, including Spunt suggesting to the production team that he would wear a McCain t-shirt to even things out, the programme wouldn’t budge on the issue, so Randy decided to make the best of the situation and turn the tshirt inside out and write ‘Free Health Care’ on it.

Scheduled to be shown on ‘The Late Late Show...’ a few days before the presidential election, the clip was surprisingly brought forward and a two-minute monologue from presenter Craig Ferguson effectively supporting the band in their choice of clothing was tacked on.

“I think they put it out early just to quiet the blogs and the internet chat,” Randall says. “But [Craig Ferguson] talks about it, it’s pretty amazing. I mean, it was never a personal attack against him, we never met the guy.”

“My mom called me and was like ‘it’s on right now!’” laughs Spunt, revealing that the band didn’t even know the performance was due to be screened early.

“I thought it was cool that [Ferguson] at least addressed it,” Randall explains. “He could have just said nothing.”

“Now Obama’s ahead even more, so maybe we did something, hey?

We gave Obama a ball-slap, have that as the pull quote!” says Spunt. “Although if McCain wins, there’s gonna be a lot better bands - there’ll be something to rally against, like Ronald Reagan in the 80s.”

Although the duo are firmly committed to the Democrats’ campaign and eager to speak about it (despite Randall

04

stating firmly that Obama “isn’t as far to the left” as he’d like), the guitarist doesn’t think politics is something all bands should have to talk about.

“I don’t think a band necessarily has a responsibility to say anything, I think it’s a very personal thing. I can’t expect everybody who can play guitar to have a thought about how the world’s run, you know. I don’t think they necessarily go hand in hand, but I think if you do think about politics and the way the world runs it doesn’t matter if you’re a band or a teacher or you work in a pizza store, you’re aware of what you can do to make the world a better place.

“So if I’m in a band I have a stage and I can say things from the stage or at a TV appearance or a blog and people can listen to what I’m saying - I would feel that I wasn’t doing my part to make the world a better place [if I didn’t speak out]. You can’t ask someone to do something but if you show them how easy it is and what kind of reward you get personally in

your life from it, you can maybe lead by example.”

Of course, in exploring No Age’s political and social convictions we’re forgetting the amazing music they’re continuing to make. While ‘Weirdo Rippers’ was a lo-fi treasure, ‘Nouns’ seems to get better with every listen, seamlessly mixing up the band’s hardcore and ambient sides. ‘Here Should Be My Home’ might be one of the catchiest things the band have ever done, but its speed and chiselling guitar lines ensure it stays away from pure pop music.

The duo’s gig at the London leg of the pleasantly monikered Shred Yr Face tour with Times New Viking and Los Campesinos! at the Electric Ballroom is as much of an onslaught as you’d expect from them. While Dean thrashes away on his kit with manic energy, shouting into the microphone like a particularly angry Stephen Malkmus, Randy’s guitar throbs with feedback and bass, creating loops of ebbing noise and jagged stabs that often sounds more like there are five people onstage rather than

two. They might only have made two albums but, to paraphrase John Peel’s comments on his favourite band The Fall, No Age seem “always different, always the same”. Not that all their songs sound the same – although they’ve yet to release anything straying close to sensitive or ballad-shaped – more like who else would have the gall to mix up Brian Eno, Crass and Royal Trux in so many different combinations?

“I think we’re having fun writing songs, we’re getting better at it,” says Randall on the future.

“We’ve only written one, two new songs,” adds Spunt. “One’s pretty poppy, it sounds like The Kinks. [But] I can see us writing some stuff that’s harsher in noise as a counterreaction [to ‘Nouns’]. We started the band to write music we wanted to listen to – and we listen to a lot of pop music, a lot of noise music and punk music. I think with our early stuff it’s so simple and straightforward. Like a song like [‘Weirdo Rippers’’] ‘Dead

Plane’ with all those ambient parts then at the end it’s literally like [sings, a bit] duh duh duh duh duh duh duh, you know, one note? It’s like The Bee Gees, you know? It’s just recorded really lo-fi.”

There are a lot of things most bands, especially British ones, could learn from No Age; how to be a brilliant punknoise-ambient-pop band for one, but also how to go about changing the world and making a stand. Let The Pigeon Detectives studiously ignore all social issues and let Jon ‘The Reverend’ McClure preach like a devout Baptist, ‘cause No Age have found a better way. Never letting polemic get in the way of their art, the band are using interviews like this to spread their social messages and their personal politics to others.

There really doesn’t appear to be any careerist ambition, no desperate desire to be popular.

They just want to make music they (and, luckily for us, other people) love - and who would deny an artist’s right to do that?

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Little Boots

Want our list of ‘Ones To Watch for ‘09’? Here you go, it needn’t be any longer Writer: STUART STUBBS

A quick word from the Blackpool tourist board: “Don’t go there, it’s horrible. I’ve only ever been to Blackpool, Morecambe and Brighton, and Morecambe is even worse than Blackpool, maybe. If you got Brighton and put it in a nightmare, that’d be Blackpool.

It’s all the same stuff – the pier and all the guest houses – but put in a nightmare with drunks, fights, hen parties and dirt… but it is good.” Dear, fetch me the AMEX, I’m booking us a getaway.

For legality’s sake, we should state now that of course the Blackpool authorities would never be this bold and/or honest. But that doesn’t mean that Victoria Hesketh – aka electro sensation Little Boots – needn’t be loose-tongued when talking of her hometown. Now she lives a stones-throw from the Shoreditch bar we meet in, over 200 miles from the seaside mecca she holds a begrudging respect for, much like most coastal deserters – “I suppose it has influenced me a lot,” says the petite musician “and you don’t forget where you come from, or how different it is from down here.”

“I like London a lot,” she says, optimistically. “There’s a lot of twats but there’s a lot of twats anywhere you go.”

Having met Little Boots twice before, her mini frame should no longer alarm me. But something in the promo shots of her previous gal pop trio, Dead Disco, had me and others thinking that Miss Hesketh towered above her 5ft 2”; her jet black, slack curls giving off a touch of the leggy Kate Jacksons about them, at a time when we were clinging to The Long Blondes as the resurrectors of Brit Pop. But Dead Disco – running out of Leeds – were never much about revisiting Pulp’s urban, decadent indie.

Giddy and stratospheric (see

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what we’ve done there?) their lusty compositions were, but tracks like ‘You’re Out’ came on all together more vampish and stalking than the Blondes.

In hindsight, perhaps it was ‘City Place’ that alluded to the end of Dead Disco and start of Little Boots for Hesketh the most. More Girls Aloud than ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, it was Dead Disco doing straight up pop, and rather brilliantly.

“When you’re in a band it takes on it’s own personality,” says Hesketh now “it’s a bit of all of you but it’s none of you totally.”

Talking about her split from her former group is, understandably, not Little Boots’ favourite thing in the world.

“At the time, [leaving] was the hardest things I’d ever done,” she says. “I’d been thinking about it for quite a long time but would always say ‘no, I want to stay, I love my band’. It was the most important thing to me so I was really upset about leaving. I didn’t want to at the time but now I know it’s the best thing I could’ve done, for me. We were so in it together so it was really hard. There’s a lot of reasons behind it all, which I don’t really want to go into, but I think a big thing was that we wanted to go different ways musically. I wanted to go more pop and electronics and they wanted to be more guitar-y and band-y. We’d done a lot of gigging and towards the end I’d stopped enjoying the gigs, which is what I really lived for.”

In December of last year, a pre-Little Boots Victoria Hesketh made our Humans Of The Year list for “making Debbie Harry, circa 1977, look as sexy as a bag of shit”. This rather boyish accolade, we’re sure, has little to do with Little Boots’ current barnet, but nevertheless

out are the dark tousles and in is a short platinum do, platted, in places, tightly to the singers scalp.

She has free reign on everything she does these days, justifying her split from Dead Disco alone.

“I do pretty much everything,” she grins “and it’s really liberating. There’s a lot more pressure, but it’s really exciting, because I’m totally myself now. I can do whatever I want to creatively.”

Being a classically trained pianist no doubt helps where such responsibilities lie, and having a keen interest in music’s technological advances.

But, all in all, what Little Boots wants to create is simply pop music.

“I’d like people to think of it as imaginative pop,” she ponders “like quirky, English electronic pop music. I’m not really interested in doing a cool thing or an indie thing. If people want to call it that then fine, but I’m not trying for that. Making pop music is really challenging for me, which is why I do it. And I’ve not got any excuses for it. Pop’s coming back now and it’s a bit cool with people all saying ‘oh, I write pop songs’ but it’s always still a bit indie and a bit crazy. And I don’t have any excuses to make for pop music, personally. I love it and don’t think you should have to say it’s wonky pop or indie pop, or something cooler.”

And as a fan of “big choruses, otherwise I lose interest”, Little Boots intends to develop her fledgling live shows into a scaled down Smash Hits Poll Winners Party. Think Kylie’s Showgirl Tour, only in Notting Hill Arts Club, for now at least.

“I want to do the opposite to your average guitars, drums, indie set up really, cos I’m

just bored of that. And I’ve seen a lot of solo acts who’ll just hire a session band that look a bit indie to make them look cool. It’s just really soulless. I’m really interested in technology. Electro music is still a bit of a mystery to a lot of people I think. They think that it just involves computers and synths and lots of buttons, and no one knows what happens, but then you see a band like Hot Chip live, and they don’t have a drummer or anything but there’s so much energy and they produce a lot of it live.

We’re going to have visuals too that are quite spacey and discoy. I just want it to be a real ambitious pop show.”

If you didn’t know it was true you’d not believe that all of the attention currently gained by Little Boots has, to date, only manifested itself in one extremely limited release – the 300 vinyl pressings of the squelching, heart-fooling ‘Meddle’. But behind the scenes – in between features in Dazed and live reviews in NME – Little Boots is planning an attack on the charts for 2009. And judging by those arming her arsenal, I know what side I’d like to find myself on.

Those that have gotten involved so far include Diplo, Heartbreak, Simian Mobile Disco, Joseph Capriati of Hot Chip – who has continued to work with Little Boots via email since producing ‘Meddle’ – and Ladyhawke chief collaborator Pascal Gabriel. Chuck an Epworth at that and you could call “full house” on a game of super producer Texas Holdem.

Dead Disco? It’s only just coming to life.

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WORTH THE WAIT It’s been a long time coming, so it’s a good job that Metronomy’s second album is the best release of 2008 Writer: STUART STUBBS Photographer: TIM COCHRANE

“We’re three poofs and a piano, that’s the role we’re playing this evening.” So grins bassist Gabriel from behind Perspex bins. It’s not the usual orbs of light on the chests of Metronomy tonight then, but rather the face of this week’s celebrity chef. Only Ramsey couldn’t make it and Metronomy are a little too fond of those orbs. It’s probably for the best anyway; their ominous electronics hardly lend themselves to prime time on the Beeb. Metronomy are going to be on television tonight though. And none of this pre-recorded piffle either. Ce soir ou Jamais (This Evening Or Never), we’re told, is France’s equivalent to The Culture Show, which goes some way to explaining why Oliver Stone – creator of new George Bush biopic, ‘W’ – is tonight’s star guest. But short of Tarantino-bashing, all Stone’s likely to

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bring to the hip monochrome show is a string of well-rehearsed press junket blurts.

Give a microphone to Gabriel, guitarist Joe and sampler Oscar and you’ve got tales of cola-supping at Karl Lagerfeld’s.This is what’s pulled us to the City of Lust for the day… and the only album that’s ever been awarded the coveted (surely!?) L&Q 10/10, ‘Nights Out’.

On the banks of la Seine, France Télévisions is one of those places that annoyingly belittle our British equivalents. As sleek and fashionable as you’d hope it to be, even the techies strut as if on runways here.

Think you’re louche T4? Pop a Xanax, hop into a coma and you’re getting close to the sexy set of Ce soir ou Jamais. And while Parisian glamour is as alien to us as an Alex Zane funny, it’s fast becoming the norm for

Metronomy.

Last time we met, the trio were nearing the end of a week that saw Joe’s birthday clash with the band’s eventual signing to French label – home of Justice and Daft Punk – Because Records. Since then, nearly a full year has lapsed and Metronomy’s excuses to celebrate have only escalated.

They’ve met the festival boom head on, playing every event from the sun-kissed Benicassim to the diarrhoea-splattered Blah Fest in your average have-a-go promoter’s back garden, released a follow up to Joe’s then-solo-debut album, ‘Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe Me)’, and have been embraced by the continent. “[In Europe] it’s interesting what people focus on,” explains Joe on a cigarette break between sound checks and a makeup

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powdering. “We had or first experience of Germany last week and there they seemed to be concerned if we were financially okay.

And another question they kept asking was, ‘why do you use a saxophone? It’s the most uncool instrument’.We were like, ‘we think it’s quite sexy…’

“And I play it in the most un-sexy way,” adds Oscar “which is quite cool.”

Joe: “But then in France they’re more interested in the whole package and concept.”

Gabriel [adopting a French accent]: “You are wearing lights, what is the meaning of this?”

Joe: “We’re like… ‘yeeaaaahh’. But I think people are far more open to us here. I think they’re fed up of regional sounding bands from England, because I think to a different country they sound more similar to each other than they do to us. Pigeon Detectives, throw them on the pile.We’re lucky because we’ve got something that’s not just about where we’re from.”

Where they’re from is Devon, despite Joe’s time spent making music in Brighton and now London muddying the origins of the band. And Metronomy are a band – Joe may continue to be the sole writer/producer of all output but his cousin Oscar (the bands’ more bashful member and best onstage semaphore dancer) and best friend Gabriel (the quick-witted, well-groomed one) have become irreplaceable members since originally lending a hand onstage, then under the backing band name The Food Groups.

“I think it’s perhaps a harder situation for other people to get their heads around,” say Joe, now that his once solo moniker is shared three ways. “But we’ve all known each other for a very long time, and so quite often they’d heard my music before it was released.

They know how I’ve always made music, so it wouldn’t really cross their minds to think, ‘I’m pissed off, I’m not getting enough writing!’ So in terms of the studio it’s a nice way to work still, just doing what you like doing. But then on the flip side, in terms of touring I think it’s so much nicer to be with friends.You look at someone like Calvin Harris and wonder how well he gets on with the guys in his band, because they don’t look that similar and do they really have any history together?”

You also look at someone like Calvin ‘the Myspace discovery’ Harris and wonder just how much he grafted for his success.The truth is, having never delved into that perhaps thrilling history, we can’t confirm that he didn’t spend an untold number of years shaking off an untold quantity of set backs in order to finally grace us with ‘Acceptable In The 80s’. Joe Mount did… just without the grating pop hit as a way of

“

You look at someone like Calvin Harris and wonder how well he gets on with the guys in his band

”

thanks.

Post 2006’s ‘Pip Paine (Pay The £5000 You Owe Me)’ a certain amount of legal wranglings prevented the signing of a new record deal for Joe. And his penchant for creating sinister, skewed instrumentals seemed to simply create another problem.

“There were times [when I thought it wasn’t going to happen for me],” he explains, mid-makeup for tonight’s broadcast “when there was a bit more interest from some of the bigger labels and then they’d stop short from actually offering anything.They were always worried about how many vocal tracks there were.The worse case scenario would have been to sign to my manager’s record label [ed: Moshi Moshi] but the only real downer on the whole thing was when you’d talk to a bigger label and they’d be really interested and excited, and then it’d go to one person higher and they’d be like, ‘we need more songs like ‘Heartbreaker’’, and well, you don’t really get it then, do you.”

So tracks like ‘Radio Ladio’ and ‘My Heart Rate Rapid’ – both of which are clear pop progressions from earlier Metronomy tracks – wouldn’t have been written without such industry criticism?

“Yeah they would have, because what we were going around with was, ‘Heartbreaker’, another song called ‘Let’s Have A Party’, which ended up being a B-side, ‘On Dancefloors’ and then two or three instrumentals, one of which didn’t get on the album, so I’d done them anyway and they’d have been on the record no matter what.The only thing that happened before finishing up the album, the label were like, ‘Oh, we’d like another single if you could write one’, which I thought was for the greater good. So then I did ‘A Thing For Me’, but decided I didn’t like it. Stupidly, I’d played it to them already and given them a copy, which they really liked. Meanwhile, I was writing what I thought would be a better single, which was ‘Holiday’. So ‘Holiday’ is the most intentional single on the record, which is

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“

The world of high fashion doesn’t disappoint. Karl Largerfeld’s is like going into a James Bond villain’s lair

”

actually one of the weirdest tracks on there.”

Both tracks stand strong on ‘Nights Out’, neither of them seeming forced or desperately compromising. ‘A Thing For Me’ – a first hand account of lust found on the dancefloor minutes before it’s cruelly interrupted by that bastard fate – has wound up being Joe’s favourite track on the album, and Metronomy’s next single. Its video is being shot the day after, in a château outside of Paris, styled by Karl Largerfeld’s people.

But more on the band’s most brow-arching fan later; we insist on talking about that intentional single, ‘Holiday’.

If you remember our last interview with Metronomy, a year previous to this one, you’ll remember Joe announcing how ‘Nights Out’ was to be “a going out concept album, an experience, so people want to listen to everything.” And if you’ve bought ‘Nights Out’ (and if not, why not?), you’ll realise just how conceptual it is. From its parping ‘Nights Out Intro’, mirroring the anticipation of girls slapping on Maybelline, to the drunken boy sensitivity of ‘On Dancefoors’, it’s a record to relate to. Even ‘Side 2’, completely instrumental and bumbling with a fuzzy head, is abstractly emotive. And yet ‘Holiday’ loses us. Psychotic and menacing it seems to be about saving for a holiday, albeit one you’d probably not want to go on, and then, as Joe uncharacteristically drones a chorus of “So you want me to yourself / well, you must know that won’t happen”, we seem to have turned two pages at once and landed in the middle of a break up warning.Which it turns out we have, even if Joe didn’t originally see it when tacking two different songs together.

“I did it as one song and then went to a pub quiz one night. I came back from the quiz quite drunk and put down this vocal, played it to other people, and I thought it was this happy disco song, and they were like, ‘what are the lyrics?’. So I told them, and they were like, ‘that’s a really horrible, dark, sinister break up song’.”

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On

the set of Ce soir ou Jamais, Metronomy are about to give ‘My Heart Rate Rapid’ another go, this time in their full stage get up, or their matching black tees with Velcro’d on pound-shop lights. Sitting in for Oliver Stone is L&Q photographer Tim Cochrane, staring blankly back at the show’s host who is thanking him for his company, in French.We make out the song’s title and an excitable “Metronomy”, and, to the left of a video wall that boasts a giant beating heart (subtle visuals, aye?), the band casually strike a direct blow to ‘Holiday’’s cynical core – “I’m gonna tell her with my heart rate rapid,” they optimistically chirp as studio cameras whiz around.The lusty ‘Radio Ladio’ would have had the same appeasing effect. Or ‘Heartbreaker’ – a song featuring the best bass intro since Cream’s ‘Badge’, about precious friendship. And yet some people feel that Metronomy’s electronic pop – and perhaps the word ‘electronic’ has something to do with it – is too cold to connect with.

“Maybe lyrically I’m not the most adept,” confesses Joe “because the first time I started to write lyrics was for this album. And I don’t want people to think I’m being metaphorical – I try to be pretty straight down the line – and obviously that can be seen as maybe cold, but in the music I’d like to imagine that there’s far more emotion than… I dunno, like, I hear all of these records now and in terms of the quality of the sound, that sounds cold. It’s probably not the best example because it’s not the same thing, but that Friendly Fires record, there’s nothing about it that puts you in a particular place, it’s just there. And fair enough, they’re not trying to do that, but the fact that I’ve written it and recorded it, and spent time with it, and not given it to anyone else to help me with, I think that’s probably coming from a far warmer place than other stuff. I think all of the stuff it talks about is emotional.”

Autobiographically emotional, we presume. And seeming about one particular girl. “‘Heartbreaker’ is less about a girl and more about friendship,” says Joe “and I suppose about a particular boy. So it’s personal in that respect. ‘Back On The Motorway’ is a bit… well, it was a bit funny because I played it to Jamie from Klaxons, because he was living where I was recording the album, and he was like, ‘Oh, I get it. It’s about a relationship’, and I was like, ‘no, it’s just about a car crash’.”

Hoodwinking a Klaxon in his own loggings, you don’t hear of that every day.

But, then, you don’t often hear of a musician writing and recording an album completely alone (or at least not one that shows no signs of being cripplingly introverted). Joe Mount did once tell us “it’s more enjoyable spending time on your own in a little room” though, which is exactly what he proceeded to do, even if the little room was the garden studio of Milo Cordell, founder of hippest of hip

indie labels Merok and now one half of hipper than hip duo The Big Pink.Which begs the question, are Metronomy, even if only by association, one for the scenesters?

Joe: “I think that especially in London, for a long time, we were seen as a scene band, so the gigs were well attended. And then there was quite a big period when people weren’t really sure if we were still cool. And I think that at Offset Festival this year it felt like people were finally realising that we were alright. Not necessarily cool, but I think all of the reviews of the album have made people realise that we’re a real band. I think hopefully we’ve gone a bit beyond that.We’re not a scene band, we’re just a band.”

The first ever Offset Festival wasn’t like a lot of the rooky gigs-in-fields spawn this year. A satellite soirée in Hainault Country Park, you could get there on the central line.

The Verve were given the week off from headlining and Wire and Gang Of Four were shipped in to close each day. Metronomy played the Last.Fm tent after a rare and brilliant live performance from the godfather of Italo disco Black Devil, and, bucking the trend of the day’s new grave guitar bands (black net curtains for shirts compulsory, not optional), they and the Frenchman pulled two of the event’s largest crowds.The doubting 60s bobs and Ray Ban disciples (don’t seek out that look now, it got guffed away with the return of Oasis and their legion of terrace terrors) were indeed muted, perhaps so much so that Metronomy are cool again. Karl Largerfeld certainly seems to think so.

Recounting the first time that Metronomy ‘went Chanel’, Gabriel’s Myspace blog began, In the UK, some people say Metronomy are dweebs…but in Paris, we’re major dudes!. He then pasted in a snapshot of the band with the silver-headed fashion mogul and signed off…

This is us with Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion designer.We went to his secret fashion bunker and were fed fancy canapés.Then he took photos of us for a French magazine. He told Joseph he was very photogenic and had the hands of someone from a 17th Century Dutch painting. He even gave Joseph one of his PERSONAL shirts to wear in the shoot, and to keep afterwards!

So there it is LiLo, Largerfeld has a new muse. Freckled redheads are out, axed for hands from 17th Century Dutch paintings.

Joe’s people would like to apologise on his behalf as Mr Mount is currently unavailable to comment.

“Yeah, y’know, we met at a party, as you do… no, not at all,” laughs the singer at the rather silly notion. “We did a photo shoot for this French fashion magazine. None of us particularly expected him to be who he was… The night before in the restaurant was when we first knew who it was going to be, and we were like ‘fucking hell!’, and then we had this amazing day.”

“The world of high fashion doesn’t disappoint,” confirms Oscar. “Like, he does have a butler with flat diet Coke coming

around to him because he only drinks it flat.”

“It’s like going into a James Bond villain’s lair,” furthers Gabriel. “He just lives in this really crazy world, but he’s a really nice guy; really chatty; really intelligent. And I think he’s become a bit of a fan. He’s styling our video tomorrow... well, he’s not but his people are. And I’m certainly wearing Karl Lagerfeld jeans now.”

And so too are Joe and Oscar, making our photo shoot styled by Largerfeld… sort of. But don’t go practicing your air-kisses for the next time you see Metronomy in Dalston just yet. Joe admits “I don’t think anyone of us feel that we’ve got anything in common with high fashion, we just find it hilarious,” and Gabriel later tips us off about the charity shop on Hackney Road that he bought his deck shoes in.

“Oliver

Stone walked out while we were playing,” says Joe down a crackling line from inside his band’s tour van. “He just got up and walked off.” Just as we expected, well-rehearsed press junket blurts and little else.We’re back in London, having left Paris before the live broadcast of Ce soir ou Jamais, Metronomy are stuck in traffic, somewhere between Bristol and Manchester.The night before there was “crowd-surfing and all sorts” to this trio’s dance music… if that’s what it is?

“I don’t see it as dance,” offers Joe. “I can see why people would put it in with dance music but ask Oakenfold what he reckons, I doubt he’d think it’s dance music. If we sent out white labels of the intro track to DJs the response forms wouldn’t be too good. But I know it’s difficult and is going to be called dance music in the same way that you’d call LCD SoundSystem dance music.”

Still, whatever it is, Metronomy’s continually crawling splitter van is an exhaust-fume-sullied symbol of the bands live commitment to their new record.When we met in France three days previously we felt rather guilty having Eurostar’d to Paris in under three hours, while the band had taken from 5am ‘til 1pm to match the same journey by road.We felt like cheats, but the distance is soon to be small fry to Metronomy as the new year sees them embark on their first world tour.

“We’ve just got some album sales figures in and England’s the highest but then second it’s Mexico of all places, so I think we’re going to try to go there in January when we’re on our world tour,” enthuses Joes, happy at the prospect of getting to see Japan, America, New Zealand and Australia also.

‘We’re gonna need a bigger van’ springs to mind. And bigger venues. And bigger sponsorship deals to match Largerfeld’s. And, just maybe, a bigger little room for Joe Mount to sit alone in. He’s already started album number 3; another concept record, but more so, with 5 or 6 strong ideas ready to go. Already, we can’t wait for it, but then ‘Nights Out’ is our 2008 Album Of The Year, so we would say that, wouldn’t we.

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DIE! DIE! DIE!

No-one wanted to release the Kiwi liability’s latest stellar LP – with stories of exploding vans, broken faces and hate for the industry, it’s not hard to see why…

Writer: GREG COCHRANE Photographer: TIM COCHRANE

Today, Andrew Wilson arrives on foot. But last time we met him, he and the band he pilots, Die! Die! Die!, rumbled into London town driving an uninsured, untaxed (essentially unroadworthy) knackered postalvan. They bitched about Pete Doherty, spent their final pocket shrapnel on pancakes from a street vendor then proceeded to shatter every inch of north London’s Buffalo Bar – from the lampshades to the beer fridge – with an incredible twenty fiveminute burst of angular noise, which burnt new eye lashes for the hundred or so people in attendance. Now, six months later they’re sat in a south London boozer thinking of places they can hide said broken automobile – procured, incidentally, from antipodean mad-punks The Scare – until they return to the UK early next year. Oh, and firing their sixth (sixth?!) UK manager of the year. Is it any wonder that, despite their sophomore release being one of the best records of 2008, it took nearly a year for the band to find someone UK based to issue it?

For the uninitiated, the threesome’s plotted history goes a little like the following: “Me and Mikey have been in a band since we were 13, so like almost ten years,” says ginger-haired Andrew in his NZ southern island snarl “so we don’t really argue that much now. Sometimes we call each other cunts, but that’s standard.”

Die! Die! Die!, as they exist now, took shape as bassist Lachlan Anderson was recruited in 2003. Since then, it’s been a struggle. They’ve been ploughing away for five hard years, putting on and playing DIY shows in their remote hometown of Dunedin, NZ, before heading oversees. With their fierce live reputation expanded they attracted the attention of legendary producer Steve Albini – who then laid his trademark fingerwork on the band’s self-

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titled 2005 debut album.

Constantly turning heads and trashing stages, attention heightened. The band’s latest, and second, full length LP (the LA-recorded ‘Promises Promises’) may have been garnering explosive reviews and heaps of punk rock kudos but the band are not quite living in luxury yet.

“It’s been peaks and troughs,” says Andrew, sat next to drummer Mikey Prain and settling into a pint for reflecting on Die! Die! Die!’s meandering journey so far. “For example, the last date we played we each got a 5 star hotel room each, and the next four nights we were sleeping in the van, not eating anything. Ups and downs.”

Mikey laughs, “unfortunately, those up and downs coincide together far too quickly - not in the space of months and years, more like hours and days.”

Our

first Our first ever encounter with the band was at Bristol’s Thekla boat nightclub a couple of years back – the only time we’ve feared for the safety of the venue rather than the crowd or band. Andrew spent their mid-afternoon set Catherine-wheeling around on the soggy top deck and throwing himself towards a nearby window, while Lachlan star-jumped from a nearby table. Not entirely untypical behaviour. “[The live shows] have gone too far,” admits Andrew “in bars in New Zealand or Australia, definitely!

Just to get a reaction. I’ve broken my shoulder, my hand.

I’ve broken my nose before.”

Mikey: “The background we came from in New Zealand was house shows - we got used to the displays and people going nuts.”

Andrew: “At our last Auckland show this little shit poured a pint of beer down my neck. Mikey was going mental, jumping off the P.A. and stuff.”

Good job then that the records – and the tour stories –

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29

are just as chaotic as their live appearances – “So there was one day when we were driving… and the van caught on fire,” reminisces Andrew of their recent past.

Cue laughter. Mikey: “Andrew freaked out!”

Andrew: “Yeah, course! It was full-on filled with smoke. It was in such shit shape and we’d bandaged it up. Someone removed the heating pads. We had a nightmare tour when we first came here in April. The crowds were really good, but we’d been locked up in New Zealand for six months before that.”

Mikey: “We were so retarded, we had to ring up our booking agent and she drove us to loads of our gigs.”

Semi-permanently relocated to London throughout festival season (living with an unnamed fourty something male in Hoxton, putting them up because “he just loves punk”) they embarked on a series of European adventures.

“We went out on tour with Brian Jonestown Massacre in Europe,” explains Andrew. “We’re the only band who’ve ever stolen their rider and got away with it. That’s what we heard from the band themselves. Anton [Newcombe] would be like ‘these are my boots, they kick skulls’ and we’d be like, ‘yeeeeeah’.”

Mikey: “Dig hasn’t stopped – the movie is still going on in his own mind” And D!D!D!’s tour antics don’t stop there either.

“We were recently in Finland and they have this drink called Yowl, it’s brandy and vodka mixed together,” recalls Mikey.

“Pretty bad to think about those two combinations of drink in one. Anyway we were having a pretty good time. I’m saying bye to all these people I’d met and this guy just started punching me in the face. I hadn’t seen him all night and I was like ‘owww that really hurt’ and then he punched me in the nose.”

Andrew: “By this point Mikey was looking a bit like the elephant man…then I beat this guy up. Then like six dudes were pinning him down on the floor.

Then his neck swelled up because

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I had him in this really bad headlock. Mikey just attracts trouble everywhere he goes but he’s a nice guy really.”

It’s fair to say they’re a magnet for mess. Sat in the pub now they’re perfectly genteel, but introduce the spirits and… well…

“The others in the band refer to vodka as Werdna juice, which is Andrew backwards,” explains Andrew. “So when I’m sober I’m Andrew and when I’m pissed it’s Werdna. Werdna’s the vodka man.

How would you describe the Werdna?”

Mikey: “The Werdna’s just like a monster. [Adopts voice booming voice] ‘I’ll tell you about something!’”

Andrew rocks back on his chair and contemplates why carnage seems to follow them: “It depends on how much we

to pay attention to anything good.”

Apart from Die! Die! Die!?

“I’d really like to say that we’re flying the flag for amazing underground music in New Zealand…well, actually we are,” he smiles. “We’re the only band that’s actually come from there and done it for ourselves.”

So the bluster surrounding Cut Off Your Hands et al, you’re not part of that?

“Yeah, they are not a good band. I put on their first show.

Really nice guys, all Christian dudes. Nothing wrong with being Christian - I’m not insulting them. They’re coming at it from a completely wrong angle,” Andrew says looking repulsed.

“It’s this quick door to success. You get this cool manager with the moustache. It’s just a bit of weird situation

“There are actually good people that come to our shows too - not just freaks and weirdos” drink, it depends on the severity of the situation.

Especially us rock dudes,” he laughs. “When we’ve been drinking things go fucking wild.”

You’re

probably already exhausted heaYou’re probably already exhausted hearing that the future of music is Kiwi – a barrage of talent including Cut Off Your Hands, So So Modern, Ladyhawke and The Ruby Suns. It is, if you believe the hype, the centre of brilliant new music right now…

“No, fuck no. Definitely not,” says Andrew. “I reckon it’s really, predominantly shit. I really would hate for it to become known as a good place for music. It’s really awful. It’s a society of wankers. There’s some amazing talent but no-one wants

with bands flying people to New Zealand to get promotion.

They’re doing it for a quick buck. It’s a career for those sorts of bands. But they do say they’re punk rock and they say they’ve played underground shows, which is never true.”

One band – if you can call them that - they are fully behind though is NZ comedy exports Flight Of The Conchords.

In fact, they’ve starred in the show.

“Yeah me and Mikey were in the pilot and episode three,” says Andrew “not much happened to be honest. We’re just drinking coffee and buying bagels in the background. Brett used to go out with our old bass player’s sister. They’re really nice guys, we’d met them before.

I’d much rather they did well than anyone else.”

Mikey: “I thought I was gonna

get a talking part and my acting career was gonna be launched.”

Indeed, D!D!D! might not be the flashiest deal coming out of the southern hemisphere at this moment but they have an avid, dedicated following. While they’re still very much a cult concern in the UK, back home they’re heroes - fully stalked heroes.

“We’ve got these two guys called Shane and Karl, and they follow you to every gig around New Zealand. I think they’re like my age, in their early 20’s – they’re pretty retarded though.”

Andrew: “There’s another guy that always gets really cross with the bouncers. He sits down, has a couple of beers and he just unleashes war on the entire dancefloor whilst wearing this amazing suit. Even after playing he’ll be like - ‘nobody’s spilt any blood tonight, I’m going to hit a couple of bouncers’. There are actually good people who come to our shows too - not just freaks and weirdoes.”

Two days

after our chat, Die! Die! Die! fly to New York’s CMJ conference before heading back home to record album number three; a process they hope will be a little smoother, less eventful than previously.

“When we go back to New Zealand we’re going to set up in the recording studios and record some demos then go home and practise some stuff,” says Mikey. “All the other stuff has been done in such a short period of time. Now it seems really right to just take some time. We wrote most of the last one in just a two-week block.”

The master plan being to build on what’s already a career gathering pace, for D!D!D! there’s been no quick route.

“Maybe I really should start cutting myself like the guy from Fucked Up to get a reaction,” questions Andrew. “Put a screwdriver through my foot or something.”

But Die! Die! Die! don’t need gimmicks or a sharpened knife.

Hard work has got them this far.

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RE DEC VI 08 EWS AL BUMS

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Chairlift Crystal Antlers Deerhoof Deerhunter Evil Nine Globo Grampall Jookabox Justice Je Suis Animal Kreeps Little Joy Lovvers Mirror Mirror Ribbons School Of Seven Bells The Bronx The Old Killer Romanic Band Trost Youthmovies

LIVE

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David Cronenberg’s Wife Diesel xXx Party Evil Nine Frightened Rabbit frYars Gang Gang Dance Gentle Friendly Glam Chops Grammatics Ladyhawke Liquid Liquid Maps & Atlases Release The Bats The Walkmen The Vulgarians TV On The Radio Vel eugait praese magnit

-} www.loudandquiet.com

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AL BUMS

Chairlift Does You Inspire You (Kanine Records)

By Sam Walton. In stores now

08/10

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Chairlift are probably the most hummed band in the UK right now, thanks to the new iPod TV ad that features thirty seconds of their song ‘Bruises’ to accompany the pretty Apple colours.

But to anaesthetised viewers they’re also nothing more than the “handstands for you” group – and their debut LP suggests they harbour ambitions far higher than that.

For while ‘Bruises’ is a lovely choice for an advert – catchy, bright and familiar (maybe a little too familiar for admirers of The Cure’s ‘Close To You’) – ‘Does You Inspire You’ is in no way an album of ditties. In fact, with the exception of ‘Bruises’ and the quirkily charming ‘Evident Utensil’, the record is a relatively slow, atmospheric affair.

It begins with the coldly seductive ‘Garbage’, the best song you’ll hear about landfill all year, with singer Caroline Polachek issuing stark warnings with Blondie-like detachment about “your condoms and your VCRs” being left to decay.This, and then ‘Planet Health’, offers sharp contrast to the bouncy, sing-a-long singles: the attention to production detail suggests that there’s more here than pretty washes of treated guitar and bedroom electro beats.

‘Earwig Town’ and ‘Territory’ make similarly bold impacts; their melodies, ethereal vocals and stately, polished production simultaneously evoking ‘Take My Breath Away’-style 80s power balladry and film noir soundtracks.Then just when it’s becoming predictable, Chairlift swap synths for twanging guitars for ‘Don’t Give A Damn’, the kind of melancholy country duet that Johnny Cash did so well on his final LPs. Performed with the battered poise you’d expect from musicians three times their age, it’s a well-

placed breather from the glossy production.

A more experienced band may have wrapped things up here – ‘Don’t Give A Damn’ is as apt a closer as Radiohead’s ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ or Bjork’s ‘All Is Full Of Love’, and would’ve capped the album impressively.

However, youthful zeal wins over, and the two final tracks slightly spoil the sense of nonchalance generated by the first nine. An aimless instrumental melds into a waffly number with far less substance than it aspires to have, and the result is a frustrating conclusion: the pair may as well be called ‘Love Me, Pts 1 and 2’, such is their eagerness to impress.

However, the rather unsatisfying end is the first serious clunk on an otherwise remarkably assured debut, and if Chairlift can produce a follow-up that walks the line between 80s kitsch and sombre electropop as magically as this does, then their status as just another iPod advert band may be as temporary as they hope.

03/10

03/10

05/10

08/10

07/10

Crystal Antlers

Evil Nine

Globo

Grampall Jookabox

Deerhunter

EP

They Live!

This Nation’s Saving Grace

Ropechain

‘Microcastle’

(Touch & Go Records)

By Sam Walton. In stores now

(Marine Parade)

By Dean Driscoll. In stores now

(Comuse Recordings)

By Sam Walton. In stores now

(Asthmatic Kitty)

By Laura Hughes. In stores 17.11.08

(4ad)

By Holly Emblem. In stores now

Oddly, for such a blokeishly alphamale record, the cover art for Crystal Antlers’ debut EP features what appears to be a pair of labia. A more honest image would have been a huge cock and balls, given the amount of preposterous willywaving that takes place across this record. But then again restraint or clear judgement is not this band’s strong point: at more points on ‘EP’ than is remotely necessarily, six or seven high-pitched, masturbatory guitar lines compete for dominance, while an omnipresent and rather trying feedback fuzz drones on in the background.The closing ‘Parting Song For The Torn Sky’ has the self-control and woozy Black Sabbath swagger that the rest of the EP is lacking, choosing to freak out only in the last of its seven minutes, but the rest of ‘EP’ is boorish guitar-shop bombast.

This is Brighton duo Evil Nine’s second studio album, following on from 2004’s ‘You Can Be Special Too’. As stalwarts within the breaks scene, Evil Nine’s DJ sets have won approval for their eclecticism. It’s all the more puzzling then that their own musical output is so one-dimensional. Pretty much every track on ‘They Live!’ follows the same formula: live-sounding drum breaks, a rumbling bassline, the occasional big beat-style halfrapped, half-sung vocal over the top, and some sparkly chimes and drum-fills as dressing.What’s most galling is that the tracks rarely ever seem to go anywhere - they’re just production plateaus that sometimes get a bit louder in the middle. For an act that’s made their name in imaginative DJ sets, it’s strange that their album would be so bereft of fresh ideas.

When the Dirty Projectors covered Black Flag’s ‘Damaged’ last year, they drew only from their childhood memories of the album, recorded a great deal of it live and changed the title and running order.The result was stunning. By contrast, Globo’s vaguely electronica-hued interpretation of ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’, the album frequently cited as The Fall’s high watermark, is devoid of any new perspective – it is largely the same notes, in the same order, faithfully performed on different instruments.The result is a good record – and so it should be, given the classic source material. But with so little of Globo’s own personality stamped on this socalled “reinterpretation”, one is left wondering quite what the point of this release is. Beyond satisfying a fanboy wet dream.

Grampall Jookabox is the pseudonym of Indianapolis native David ‘Moose’ Adamson, a nonsensical, childlike refusal to adopt a proper name echoing Adamson’s reluctance to adhere to any kind of traditional musicianship or song structure.

‘Ropechain’ (album number two) was never going to be normal.

‘Black Girls’ uses skewed, M.I.Astyle samples of children singing alongside its nonchalant lament.

‘Ghost’ is an eerie, sweeping refrain. ‘The Girl Ain’t Preggers’ is the closest we get to visualising a live performance, with twanging basslines. Like a dirtier, more distorted LCD Soundsystem or a frantic, shrieking Soulwax, ‘Ropechain’ draws on old-school hip hop, pitched-up country samples and heavy electro-beats to be an innovative, fusion-filled treat.

Poor old Deerhunter. Earlier this year, Bradford Cox’s heart and soul leaked onto the internet, in the form of unreleased songs from both his side project Atlas Sound and his day job band. His frustration at an such incident is important to bear in mind when listening to ‘Microcastle’.

Meandering along nicely, opening track ‘Cover Me [Slowly]’ sets the pace for the rest of everything found here. Complete with swooning guitars, effervescent feedback and Cox’s matured vocals, it’s soon clear that ‘Microcastle’ is Deerhunter’s most accessible album yet. However, if you prefer the clattering and uncontrolled nature of earlier records, ‘Weird Era Continued’, ‘Microcastle’’s bonus disc, is for you. It encapsulates of all the…well…‘weird’ and brilliant aspects of Deerhunter and Cox.

Deerhoof Offend Maggie (ATP Recordings)

by Sam Walton. In stores now

08/10

Try to comprehend ‘Offend Maggie’ and you’re missing the point. Like a good David Lynch movie, the idea is not to understand what’s going on, but just to let Deerhoof mesh together the way they do and enjoy the bursts of expression that come out along the way.

Special mention among the madness though must go to ‘Chandelier Searchlight’, the catchiest thing on the album and one of the most curiously bewitching pop songs of recent years.With half a dozen sections and key changes in four minutes, this should have no right to be anything more than an academic exercise, but instead it’s perfectly paced, beautifully sung and effortlessly composed.The album is sung half in Japanese, half in English and peppered with Pavementesque guitars and Sonic Youth time signatures, offering a very pleasing sense of bewilderment. www.loudandquiet.com

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AL BUMS 04/10

07/10

07/10

08/10

04/10

Kreeps

Mirror Mirror

Ribbons

School of Seven Bells

‘Belly Full Of Razorblades’

The Society Of The...

‘Royals’

Apinisms

(Exi-Tone)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores now

(Half Machine Records)

By Dean Driscoll. In stores now

(Osaka)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores 01.12.08

(Ghostly International)

By Laura Hughes. In stores now

The Old Romantic Killer Band

Finally, Kreeps follow their last Stooges-bludgeoning single, which coughed black tar in the face of Faris Rotter.That was the doomed garage rock of the brilliant, growling ‘Everyone I Went To School With Is Dead’. It’s here, along with the equally brutal ‘I Wanna Kill, Kill, Kill (Alright!)’.

And if ‘Belly Full Of Razorblades’ were to continue hurtling towards its grim, self-destructive death in such fashion it’d be a debut to lay in state next to Horrors’ ‘Strange House’. But, despite featuring a track called ‘Cyanide’, Kreeps refrain from doing themselves in, and suffer for it.Tracks like ‘Be My Frankenstein’ are slick productions from The Mighty Boosh; ‘Pennsylvania Boarded Up House Blues’ only slightly glummer Elbow. It was just meant to be far more unhinged than this.

Coming on like the Super Furry Animals at their most psychedelic, blended with Mercury Rev’s default ‘otherworldly’ setting, ‘The Society Of The Advancement Of Inflammatory Consciousness’ provokes exactly the kind of experience that the title suggests, swerving between the sweetness of dreams and the unnerving recesses of nightmares. It’s basically the musical embodiment of a particularly strong mushroom trip.

Whether or not it’s advisable to listen to this when on certain substances and watching freaky films (say, the original Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory) is difficult to say, but it’d certainly be an interesting experience.The highlight of the album’s lighter side is the single ‘New Horizons’; give Mirror Mirror a try and expand your own.

Jherek Bischoff has been listening to a lot of Radiohead. And not the fly-by-night-fan’s favourite stuff either; the weird shit. Bischoff – a multi-instrumentalist now recording under the moniker of Ribbons – in fact sounds so much like Thom Yorke in his vocals that you’ll probably find yourself clapping the opening lyrics of the troubled ‘All Of Us’, as if in the Stars In Their Eyes studio. And he’s got the weightless-but-heavy music of ‘In Rainbows’ down too – processed beats that tick and dub away, along with sparse guitar strums and passing instruments, the names of which escape you. All of this will probably not do ‘Royals’ any favours, and yet it should as Bond-theme-on-downers ‘The Last And The Least Likely’ suggests, Ribbons’ stretching musical talents are not the work of a cheat.

The work of former Secret Machines guitarist Benjamin Curtis and twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza of On! Air! Library!, School of Seven Bells are a less-clunky Bat for Lashes, with each song a cocktail of ambient, synth-heavy noise, delicate and ethereal in their layered vocals.

Named after a clandestine South American pickpocketing academy that may or may not have existed, SOSB are equally as mysterious in sound. ‘Half Asleep’ is trippy, spaced-out magic, while ‘White Elephant Coat’ is shoegaze for the modern age, complete with minimalist beats and monotone vocals. ‘Sempiternal/Amaranth’ is then an electro-monster of keyboard beeps and distorted, psych vocals. Epic pop songs for those lamenting the disappearance of the Cocteau Twins.

Little Joy ‘Little Joy’ (Rough Trade)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores now

05/10

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Nonchalance can make the dreariest of people cool. For others it’s a less contrived way of being. And for The Strokes, it’s their bread and butter, the mutual trait that joins their five mutually striking mugs, and the reason we ourselves have slurred “bothered” on occasion, even when, really, we’re more bothered than you can possibly imagine.We love and hate them for it, but as Little Joy is the latest side project to prolong any new material from the unmotivated New York City fops, the latter feeling is eating up the former with chomping frustration.

Falling in love with Fab Moretti’s ‘Little Joy’, then, is not easily done. He’s ‘gone LA’ for starters; lured to the west coast where Uncle Sam’s American dream is realised, trading white

The Swan with Two Necks (Bad Sneakers)

By Laura Hughes. In stores 01.12.08 Simultaneously influenced by American delta blues and grinding metal,The Old Romantic Killer Band - aside from having a ridiculous name - do a passable job of pretending to be a thoughtful acoustic outfit that also rock out.

With chameleon vocals, the band churn out what appear to be BSides from both Led Zep and a Ryan Adams impersonator, but also, bizarrely, on ‘Pigs’, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. But many of the songs are so full of unintentional comedy rock posturing that the ‘Romantics resign themselves to sounding more like a duo of two angry tryhards parked in the middle of a duel carriageway with signposts marked ‘Blues’ and ‘Metal’ pointing in opposite directions. Style, but no substance.

beaches and well-filled bikinis for a frat rock contribution, or, worse, an acoustic indie one that, apparently, “totally rocks”. Annoyingly, Moretti’s opted out of the Sum 41 cock rock, which would have at least been a bit of fun.

Instead, the (handsome) curly Stroke – along with Rodrigo Amarante of Brazilian schmaltz group Los Hermanos and gentle coo-er Binki Shapiro – appears to be sound-tracking a longcancelled series of The OC. At points, drums don’t even come into it – skinless, ‘Unattainable’ is, admittedly, sung beautifully by Shapiro, even if ‘Play The Part’ is too sparse to be considered so. Swaying tracks from a 1950s bop, like ‘Brand New Start’, go some way to making this at least more than an Albert Hammond dud but rather predictably it’s the most Strokesy tracks that keep us from nodding off – ‘Shoulder To Shoulder’ features vocals that could easily have been purred by Julian Casablancas. So how about that fourth album then boys?

08/10

07/10

07/10

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Trost

Je Suis Animal

Justice

Lovvers

The Bronx

Trust Me

Self Taught Magic From A Book

A Cross The Universe

Think

The Bronx III

(Because)

By Danny Canter. In stores 24.11.08

(Wichita)

By Kate Hutchinson. In stores now

(Wichita)

By Mandy Drake. In stores 10.11.08

If there’s one thing more pointless than a live DVD it’s a live album; a cruel “Ha Ha” to the listener, whom, the chances are, couldn’t get tickets for a single date on the tour, let alone the actual night of the CD’s recording. And so much of an exhilarating experience is a Justice live show that this rule should definitely apply here... only it doesn’t. Maybe it’s because, visually, the Parisian duo provide little to look at whilst they reassemble their ballsy electro with accurate aggression. Sure, there’s the wall of speakers and illuminated crucifix, but it really is all about the tunes with these two, which is definitely (not maybe) why ‘A Cross The Universe’, with ‘Atlantis To Interzone’ adlibbed samples and a full ‘NY Excuse’, is a choice mixtape first and a massive gloat second.

Lovvers claim that, like, ‘no one gets them’, but after seven short shocks of discontentment, it’s evident that not everyone appreciates a short punk rock antimasterpiece (12.6 minutes!) these days.The London quartet are deliciously shambolic. Donny Tourette-styled Shaun Hencher channels The Germs’ Darby Crash with his mic-snogging grizzly blurts, while the crunchy GSCE guitar solos and garage Iggy rockin’ sloshes boozily between NOFX and Les Savy Fav’s NY camp. From it’s title, ‘Wasted Youth’ may sound like it’s 1977-by-numbers but rest assured that as Lovvers’ instruments fall over themselves, slipping on the phlegm they’ve gobbed up, it’s the real stuff alright. Encapsulating their live shows, you can even enjoy ‘Think’ without Hencher knocking over your pint.

Anything else you read about on these pages, be it a surprise earraping release from Motorhead with Lemmy rubbing his rank wart on you face - or a solo speed metal album by Slipnot’s Dicknose (who else?), it’s pansy pop compared to ‘The Bronx III’. And yet, while the LA six remain as ferocious as they’ve always been at their barking best, this latest record also sees them crank up the growl-along melodies in their hardcore assaults. It’s controlled, organised chaos, like The Distillers hinted at before foolishly disbanding.

Replace the retching Matt Caughthran with... well... anyone not shredding their vocals and ‘Past Lives’ could even be a one for Pink fans to hum while ironing; ‘Ships In High Transit’ less so, unless what you’re ironing is Pink’s fraudulent mug. Still ‘wanna start a fight’ love?

(Bronzerat)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores 17.11.08 When Annika Line Trost isn’t being one half of electro punk duo Cobra Killer, she’s axing her first two names and self-producing multi-lingual solo albums like ‘Trust Me’. Her confidence to not only sing in German but also French, as well as English, is telling.

But then a shy girl wouldn’t have been a drummer in several 60s garage bands at the age of 13. And more than a little of that period of Trost’s life has found its way onto ‘Trust Me’.There’s mini-skirted surf pop twisting to be had (‘Cowboy’), a sultry, ivory-swaying waltz (‘It Was Wrong’) and a ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’ in the attention grabbing ‘Black’.

Brilliant and sexy throughout, is there anyway we can take the credit back from Duffy and give it to someone who understands the full power of 60s pop?

(Angular)

By Sam Little. In stores 01.12.08 The story goes that the foursome of Je Suis Animal recorded this debut album on a diet of tea and gingerbread men. In seven days.

Without sleep. And it all makes perfect sense, providing the tea was taken with 10 sugars a time and a splash of LSD. Because ‘Self-Taught Magic From A Book’ is chirping Skandinavian pop for light heads with sweet teeth. ‘Secret Place’ starts like a carefree Belle And Sebastian, only with some Radio Dept. guitar fuzzes to keep your bonce from bobbing off over the nearest, snow-capped mountain.

‘The Mystery Of Marie Roget’ is then Sleeper plus pan-pipes, and while the choir-like lead vocals of Elin Grimstad grow dangerously sickening at times you can’t stay mad at this floating dream pop, it’ll only give you the puppy dog eyes.

Youthmovies ‘PolyP EP’ (First Blast Petite)

By Danny Canter. In stores 10.11.08

08/10

Oxford’s Youthmovies return, having not actually been anywhere.Their debut album ‘Good Nature’ was only released in March, and already here’s a 6 track EP of new material.

Wistfully, ‘Magic Diamond’, featuring guest backing-vox from Vicky Steer of Blanket, opens ‘PolyP EP’ with a beautiful Smiths-come-folk lullaby. It of course then stretches into a prog apocalypse, and then an intricate groove, before ‘Sad Trash’ makes things plain odd. It’s less a song and more a Yankee spoken word half dream, buzzing and brainwashing. Later, ‘Become An Island’ expands the idea into something more substantial, helped by the involvement of Joe Shrewsbury of 65daysofstatic. ‘Thazn’ meanwhile, beginning like the uneasy ‘Small

Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky’ by Manic Street Preachers, constantly promises to progress and frustratingly disappoints. But a Jonquil remix of ‘Good Nature’ album track ‘Magdalen Bridge/Golden Palace’ soon irons out that bump.Whilst downbeat and harbouring a muffled bass/snare march, it’s the most accessible offering here, and thus ‘PolyP’’s crowning glory, which may not be something the band will be too pleased about – it is, after all, the only track that we’ve all heard before, just done slightly better. Still, that probably says more about Jonquil’s (or, more accurately, Hugo Manuel of Jonquil’s) remixing skills, because Youthmovies’ new material is exactly what you’d expect from a band too busy experimenting with sounds and structures to play into the hands of even their most unassuming of fans. And most of the time they discover something unnervingly new soun ding.

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LIVE

Bat’s Entertainment

RELEASE THE BATS with... SHELLAC, LES SAVY FAV, LIGHTNING BOLT, OM, WOODEN SHJIPS, PISSED JEAN

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The Forum, Kentish Town 30.10.2008

By Kate Hutchinson Pics: Owen Richards www.owenrichards.co.uk

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RARGH. BLUDOOM DUM. MENOWW WOWOW.That would have been the sound of whiplash-inducing drum and bass duo Lightening Bolt, whose ear canal-throttling set Loud and Quiet irritatingly misses thanks to an early start time.There is a reason why queen of weird pop, Björk, picked drummer Mark Chippendale to guest on her latest single, ‘Nattura’, after all.

Still, we’re fairly thankful that we saved our hearing organs.Tonight’s early kick off is to shoehorn as many ATP-approved bands as possible: Pissed Jeans,Wooden Shjips, Les Savy Fav, Shellac and Om are still to unsettle our heads at this pre-festival mini-carnival. Stuffed full of Halloween décor and noise rock anoraks in half-arsed zombie costumes, the vast venue recalls the prom setting of teen horror flick Idlehands.

Sub Pop’s Pissed Jeans are the school band that used their prom performance to unleash all their teenage angst on their classmates – and are

swiftly ushered offstage by embarrassed teachers.

Like a juvenile and disorderly Jesus Lizard, with toilet humour songs like ‘Ashamed of my Cum’, their punk rock is shot through with sludgey distortion lifted from ’70s noise-punk band Flipper’s chord book.

Front man Matt Korvette’s flailing performance fills the space where spooky outfits would have been. He cuts an awkward, shuffling figure like Angus Andrew from Liars, lolloping about as if dancing to post punk wearing a temperamental pacemaker, but his volatile antics seem forced.The only moments of authentic zeal are his face’s shade of scarlet after he wretches over the microphone. At times doom metal creeps through, the bass guitar resonating painfully slowly as if strapped to a torture wheel, and groovy grunge hooks pep the sound up; if only Korvette would drop the teenage turbotheatrics then these might shine through.

But there’s San Francisco psychedelists Wooden Shjips, who revitalise the evening with

their swirling tie-dye cloaked soundscapes.Their acidic, organ-led rock’n’roll often trails off into long-winded Krautrock-like freak-outs that have listeners nodding into their pints, but they’re an adorably mismatched assortment all the same – guitarist Erik ‘Ripley’ Johnson’s cartoonish gold turban is a particular highlight.

Had this been forty years previous, they’d be first in line for a Roger Corman film soundtrack.

Les Savy Fav are well placed to pick up the beats. Decked out in voodoo make-up and black hoodies, they hurtle through ‘Patty Lee’ as the audience place bets on when bearded, bellied frontman Tim Harrington will get naked.Two songs in and he’s topless, make-up melting down his face, and ends the rousing alt.indie-punk belter ‘Yawn Yawn Yawn’ wearing a demon baby figure like a hat.What LSF lack in a thrilling sonic catalogue – ‘Tragic Monsters’ and ‘The Sweat Descends’ are the remaining sing-along treats – but Harrington, deprived of a mega dose

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GENTLE FRIENDLY The Luminaire, Kilburn 15.09.2008

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

of Ritalin, compensates for this with his dizzying stage workout.The remaining members of the New York quintet are suitably fired up, but he is another beast. He picks up everything in sight, throwing loo roll over the lighting rig and wrapping his face in whatever he can find. But an unrivalled stunt comes mid-way through their spirited string of jubilant post-hardcore: bored of stage antics, Harrington embarks on an expedition up to the Forum’s balcony, working his way around the front row with his microphone still entangled in his facial hair, much to the delight of the audience.

Crowd surfing into the throng at the set’s close, they carry a strong visual message. Les Savy Fav have finally arrived – and about time too.

Sadly for dronecore doom metal duo Om, who work the graveyard shift well but fail to stop people running for the last bus, Nirvana producer Steve Albini’s trio Shellac

are the main draw.They kill it.The lights go up and their hilarious costumes – guitarist Albini in full mummy bandages, stocky bassist Bob Weston as a spectacular Frankenstein and elfin drummer Todd Trainer in a truly frightening Dracula outfit – reap laughs, but their searing rock bulldozes down the visual gimmicks matter.

Their hearts lie with brooding experigrunge, but they delve into thuggish metal and experiment with Spanish guitar licks and psych-fuzz instrumentals. ‘The End of The Radio’ with its plodding, monotonous bass thuds and Albini’s vocals, which unravel like a doomy transmission over the airwaves, clunks out at testing tempo, but they end on the rifftastic ‘Watch Song’, where Trainer and Weston’s dual rhythm monolith blasts with fantastic punk gusto – one of the best pulsing powerhouses around.

There’s no going backwards with London duo Gentle Friendly.

Verse/chorus/verse is not for them.

Instead, amongst the mass of tangled wires that snake around the Luminaire stage into endless effect pedals, iPods and unidentified boxes, the pair sit, building sounds to rapid completion before quickly moving on to the umpteenth section of any one composition.

David – red-headed, Etonianlooking singer/keyboard-basher – kneels side on to the audience, sometimes gently humming into two microphones, often retching into them, as his instrument rests on an old suitcase. In front of him is drummer Daniel, surrounded by a sparse five-piece kit that seems to have been very bad indeed, with an electronic organ within reach for him to stretch his fingers on throughout the evening. Bar the occasional – if essential – turn-offthe-wheezing-zombie-in-theamplifier-noise-now nod, it’s tough to tell why David and Daniel face each other. Completely in their own worlds – Daniel’s a universe of ferocious Health-styled drum assaults, David’s a place where eyes are tightly clenched to face grimaces and loud yelps – the pair play independently of each other, and yet completely as one, like a couple of Jedis with a penchant for creating loopy, multi-layered blasts of noise core.We are believers.

GRAMMATICS Night & Day Cafe, Manchester 07.10.2008

By Kate Parkin ▼

Looking like Graham Coxon and dressed like Granville from ’70s BBC comedy Open All Hours, Grammatics singer Owen Brinley is at once wittily acerbic and endearingly geeky. Pouring down scorn from on top of spindly legs, he twists awkwardly like a foal learning to walk, and the horse-y comparisons are not unfounded, as

the bass-lines of ‘D.I.L.E.M.M.A’ distinctly resemble a certain popular math-rock band. Emilia Ergin’s sultry musings on the cello add much needed depth to ‘Polar Swelling’ as she sneers at the hapless audience. Like an operatic version of Interpol’s ‘Obstacle 1’, it courses steadily around the room, enveloping everything in its path.

Wrapping his slender fingers around a bottle of red that has been his constant companion throughout the evening, Owen seems to carefully cultivate the image of a tortured soul - the opening refrain of “Everyone loves a breakdown” seem an exercise in self-indulgence as he stands like a condemned man on the edge of the stage. ‘Relentless Fours’ soon proves to be more than sum of its parts, mixing a capella whisperings with four-to-the-floor rock freakouts, a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the Blank Generation.While on the surface Grammatics may look like average indie pretenders, in reality they tick all the right boxes: Pretentious? Yes. Argumentative?

Definitely. Relentlessly compelling? Absolutely!

THE WALKMEN ULU, Holborn 28.10.2008

By Chris Watkey ▼

One of the few credible survivors from the post-Strokes NYC explosion,The Walkmen have taken a different path from their more famous contemporaries.

Rather than descend into selfindulgent bilge a la Casablancas and Co., this lot have kept their edges pretty keen.Tonight gets off to an inauspicious start though, with a seemingly mute Hamilton Leithauser mouthing words into an unresponsive mic.Then the soundman finally wakes up, flicks the switch and the resultant howl is greeted with a huge cheer. And in fact it’s Hamilton’s vocals that elevate this band from the ordinary to the exceptional – somewhere between a strangled yelp, a crooner’s mewl and a slice of white soul majesty, their caustic power can chill a spine when Hamilton www.loudandquiet.com

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Gang Gang Dance at Hoxton Bar & Kitchen. Pic: Danielle

really turns it on.The rest of the bands meanwhile, are visually anonymous onstage but their music crackles with a vicious energy. It’s raw, uncomplicated rock ‘n roll, with swirling keyboards and a somewhat incongruous occasional brass section adding an extra layer to the sound. A couple of mid-set plodders precede ‘The Rat’, which after all these years is still their signature tune. Frantic energy, righteous anger, sneering rock ‘n roll… these are the qualities with which The Walkmen survive.

GANG GANG DANCE Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen 11.10.2008

By Kate Hutchinson ▼

Ladyhawke at The Scala. Pic: Simon Leak

TV On The Radio at Cargo. Pic: Danielle Goldstein

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Brooklyn boasts so many electrifying ‘world’ rock acts that it’s making us limeys turn green – and not with scurvy. African rhythms in tact, they’re selling out the Astoria (MGMT), causing brawny men to faint (TV On The Radio) and, well, just being brilliant (Yeasayer). Not so, Gang Gang Dance.That’s not to say they’re not fantastic (they are) but tonight’s show has been downsized from ULU, to the annoyance of fans in granddad jumpers elbowing for breathing room.Wearing a baggy prog-rock teeshirt and jogging pants, and with a tusk earring peeking out from under her wild plaits, endearing vocalist/ drum-pad thumper Liz Bougatsos recalls alpine scenery, howling wolves, full moons and feather headdresses. She sits you on her raft and rows you into a mainland drenched in Native American mysticism and compass-spinning electronic art rock.They forage through more club-ready terrain, as on latest album ‘Saint Dymphna’, and semi-melodious track ‘House Party’ is their closest to a pop song, with Bougatsos’s Kate Bushisms emerging atop the disjointed synth stabs and dual drumming. But for the most part, their acidic, polyrhythmic instrumentals and disorientating yet awkwardly danceable disco nuggets are an acute reminder of why we’re glad

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these Warp-signed experimentalists will never reach the success of Vampire Weekend.

estionullut vulla

LIQUID LIQUID The Barbican 04.10.2008

By Sam Walton ▼

Liquid Liquid’s sprawling influences stretch from LCD Soundsystem to Bloc Party and back across the Atlantic to modern New York hip hop, meaning that although most of the songs performed tonight are largely unknown and over 25 years old, there’s a queasy familiarity to the sound.The result is that watching these sharp-suited 50-somethings play lick after lick of tight, punky house music and dub feels a bit like witnessing an old magician from yesteryear come out of retirement to debunk all his progeny’s tricks.

But aside from the history lesson, what is so refreshing here is to see relentless, aggressive and futuristicsounding dance music played entirely organically, without an electronic instrument in sight.

Nothing here is programmed.The drummer is not wearing headphones. He is not playing to a pre-ordained click.With these old hands, what you see is what you get – a single, four-headed organism, thumping drums, marimbas, bass guitars and all manner of percussion to create the most natural dance music you’ll ever come across.

LADYHAWKE + EVIL NINE The Scala, Kings Cross 07.10.2008

By Chris Watkeys ▼

There’s always a risk that Evil Nine’s kind of rock/rap/electro crossover will come out of the tin sounding slightly pre-dated.

Thankfully, this sassy four-piece (when live at least) skilfully avoid that pitfall.Tonight they deliver a hard-edged synth assault, merged with monolithically heavy twin

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bass and almost-rapped vocals shot venomously down the mic; meanwhile, bright melodies seep through the grinding noise like honey through a toxic sea.

Ladyhawke, on the other hand, is unashamedly retro, her vocal style a close relation to eighties icon Kim Wilde’s, her musical inspiration seemingly carried straight from that decade through a fog of dry ice. Pip Brown herself exudes rock ’n’ roll cool, a mop of blond hair hanging over her eyes while she dispenses buzzy electropop gems like ‘Dusk Till Dawn’; a synthdrenched delight filled with more hooks than a butcher’s shop window. Somehow, though, the atmosphere in the Scala is curiously flat and Ladyhawke and band never really engage.There are a few false starts, a string of isolated moments of pop euphoria, but even ‘Paris Is Burning’ is somewhat muted and the band don’t ever drop into the glorious groove of which they’re capable. Ladyhawke’s razor-sharp talons seem a little blunt tonight.

THE VULGARIANS The Macbeth, Hoxton 14.10.2008

By Danielle Goldstein ▼

Vocals, guitar, bass and drums start collapsing in on each other like staggering drunks as The Vulgarians build into ‘Black Eye’, slapping on the rhythm thick and fast before it falls apart in the near-empty Macbeth boozer.The turnout may be slim, but it’s a cold Tuesday evening and this London fourpiece aren’t prepared to let anyone go home without roasting their cockles a little. Playing lo-fi punk with raspy female vocals,The Vulgarians are akin to Patti Smith with a stubbed toe, aimlessly lashing out at Sleater Kinney.

Colette, the temptress who possesses such a voice, holds the fort with unfaltering nonchalance and a side sweep to turn Donald Trump green, whilst the rest of the band have a severe air of concentration about them, aside from the bassist Jim who flops over his instrument like a wooden

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puppet, his legs spread as far apart as his spray-on jeans will allow.

They bustle through ‘Wishbone’, the riff resembling a hyperdistorted Black Lips, and they part on the angst-ridden ‘Reflector’. Its guitars creep vine-like around the rest of the layers, holding the track together as they hammer their instruments, then they abruptly drop them to the floor with a thank you. Unnervingly hypnotising.

DIESEL xXx PARTY Matter 11.10.2008

By Phil Dixon ▼

A veritable smorgasbord of indie’s young pretenders offer up collaborative efforts comprising of both straight renditions, new interpretations of their songs and offbeat covers – some of which delight, some disappoint. Of the less appetising performances, Florence and the Machine’s cover of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’, backed by Drew McConnell and omnipresent cover-merchant Mark Ronson, falls short of the desired kitsch value and remains somewhat cheesy despite Florence’s undeniable sass. But a buffet such as this serves more than enough treats. Lethal Bizzle’s electrifying set finally shakes the room alive somewhere around midnight, storming in with punk-tinged ‘Police on My Back’ via ‘Bizzle Bizzle’ and its dutty dancehall to climax so effectively with ‘POW!!’ that the elated crowd barely notice him leave the stage.The evening’s coup des graces though is Filthy Dukes’s set, first joined by Philadelphia hip-hoppers Plastic Little for an energetic mid-crowd performance on ‘2Pac Robocop Rock’, then by The Whip’s bassist for some mad party space disco for the 23rd century, laden with electro drum pads and delectable cowbells.Which just leaves the line-up’s youngest guns Kitty, Daisy and Lewis – surely up way past their bedtime – to serve a refreshing aperitif with their twee, ’30s speakeasy jazz. Delicious.

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TV ON THE RADIO Cargo, Shoreditch 03.10.2008

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

Urban festivals, on paper, are up there with iPod in terms of great ideas of this century. But unlike the boxed emblems of convenience and cool, none are ever as rosy as we hope them to be. A venue change from the expanse of Hearn Street Car Park to the relative coffin of Cargo does Concrete And Glass few favours tonight, as every ticket holder camps down from 9pm until 1am for the two-day happening’s main event. Industrial noise relentlessly claps away over the PA like a Guantanamo Bay torture drill – oddly we beg for its return as Telepathe’s soggy squib of a set disappoints beyond boundaries we’ve not seen pushed since The Teenagers. And then, with self-inflicted, clawed-gouges to our cheeks, we are rewarded.

With a hefty wind-chime hanging from his guitar’s head (and you thought he was eccentric), David Sitek mans his battle station to begin a heightened whirring of new album track ‘Love Dog’.

Cargo sounds muffled and second rate, but as ‘Dreams’ follows, chased by ‘Wrong Way’, a particular ferocious ‘Dancing Choose’, and a raging ‘Wolf Like Me’,Tunde’s ardent vocals particularly turn agitated, jostling elbows into air punches.Was the excruciating wait worth it? Very nearly.

MAPS & ATLASES The Regal, Oxford 13.10.2008

By Elizabeth Dodd ▼

Punk is dead: long gone are the glue-fuelled days when mashing a 6-string was enough to make you a musician. From Foals to Battles, indie kids everywhere are breaking out from behind powerchords, Grade Eight theory certificates in hand. Colour, who are spacious if not really immediate, open tonight with shards of IDM support.Their shifting math tempos are completely absorbed by the

bizarrely curtained bar in which the Regal Theatre has chosen to house tonight’s sonic scene for Maps & Atlases.These timid headlining chic-sters flick straight through tab-happy ‘Witch’ and into newer material - tech chord changes between stilted, awkward vocals – opening out as they shift gentle synths to harsh mixes. In terms of musicianship it’s extraordinary. Gloriously, R’n’B closer ‘Artichokes’ packs denser hooks but, just as you start to invest more than your pocket money in the band, M&A shudder gently offstage. Mathrock is overwhelmingly written for musicians. As a skill-centredshowcase Maps & Atlases’s set is faultless.Visceral? No: if it’s experimental soundzones you’re after, math’s your scene. But it’s not going to change your world – for that you might need to revisit that obliterated 6-string.

FRIGHTENED RABBIT Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen 02.10.2008

By Rebecca Innes ▼

These strapping Glaswegian lads are thundering, to say the least.

Frightened Rabbit have smartened up and seriously stepped up their game: gone are the shaggy mop tops they sported not long ago, and they’re a great deal less sweaty than previous gigs have known them.

Although early on in the sprawling Shoreditch festival of Concrete and Glass, the Rabbits perform with infectious tenacity, thrilling the ram-jammed audience with tracks like ‘Old Fashioned’ and ‘Modern Leper’, delivered with an irresistible masculine insouciance.

The introduction to ‘Heads Roll Off ’ receives a raucous reception, with lyrics like “While I’m alive / I’ll make tiny changes to us / till my head rolls off / I’ll make tiny changes for us,” revealing lead singer Scott Hutchison’s delicate heart that lies beneath the boisterous onslaught of thrashing guitars and drums. His lyrical eloquence, combined with his raconteurs’ melodies, steeped in tenderness, is more than enough to

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shame their army of indie rock contemporaries, but their fragility is lost on the rowdy crowd.

Tonight, Frightened Rabbit are not so much a nervous creature caught in the headlights, but the monster truck roaring towards it.

GLAM CHOPS The Buffalo Bar, Highbury 11.10.2008

By Elizabeth Dodd ▼

Crunchy credit, global recession – who left is idealistic enough to part with money and get filthy with a band in catsuits? The City is crumbling around us but – as Eddie ‘Art Brut’ Argos and his troupe of dancing girls remind us this Saturday night - it’s never too late to go Glam. Pop-punk machinists Shrag preface the set with outstanding seething riotgrrrl fury. A Le Tigre album in meltdown, they mix synths with breakdowns, samples that rip fills and rests: a recalcitrant spit in the direction of commercial girl pop.

That in mind, it’s going to take more than excessive face paint to convince anyone we’re in for a glam rock revival. Luckily, Glam Chops have shameless energy to spare – rock’n’roll catapults this rollercoaster of sequins from opener ‘European Festivals’ to rockabilly ‘Eddie Are You Ready’.

Tongue is definitely not in cheek, and the band jam a tribute to their heroes that doesn’t allow time to think but you’re probably too busy dancing with the hipster next to you anyway.Whether Glam Chops ever make it to those European Festivals is immaterial: unselfconscious and strangely lovable, they’re the novelty band every scene needs on its windowsill.

FRYARS The Last Days Of Decadence 11.10.2008

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

True to its namesake, Ditch was an east London bar you’d fall into,

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usually drunk, scrambling around for ‘one final drink’. Now, true to its namesake, the venue is a lush, wooden-panelled, 1920s-drinking den for flappers and squiffy gents.

Futuristic may be the synths that frYars arrives with tonight but his melodramatic croons are also fittingly apt for the basement’s new attire. Bellowing his folk-tronica, Ben Fryars, at 6ft 6”, would be a peacock fop if he wasn’t the shy, charming type. He apologetically “hopes you can dance to this also,” as the sinister ‘Olive Eyes’ is surprisingly certain, demanding and forceful, delivered in a perfect, deep warble. ‘Madeline’ jutters around with a confident, lightfooted grace, even if the cavernous acoustics of Last Days don’t match the space’s sleek dress. Still, what else but ‘Happy’s’ refrain of “if it’s making you happy, there’s nothing wrong with the state you’re in” to make us shrug “knickers to it all, Jeeves, let’s have another gin fizz”?

DAVID CRONENBERG’S WIFE The Victoria, London 10.10.2008

By Sam Walton ▼

David Cronenberg’s Wife is not, regretfully, a solo female singer with an admiring hubby, Dave, watching from the wings.They’re actually a wonderfully grumpy sixpiece, ploughing the early Nick Cave/Mark E Smith furrow with aplomb. In fact, so ingrained is their shambling, scratchy demeanour that they may well be an independent band of the mid’80s, teleported forward to the twenty-first century: they don’t interact with the audience, they mumble into their mics and show a tentative grasp of tuning, but just like The Fall and The Birthday Party in their finest years, the band – and particularly leader Tom Mayne – have a peculiar onstage presence that encourages you not to look away. And what a crappy destroy in the band’s precision it augments in aggression, with the two-note melodies and buzzing guitars taking on a captivating snarl. www.loudandquiet.com

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FILM

DVD

07/10

ZODIAC (The Directors Cut)

09/10

Choke Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kelly Macdonald, Anjelica Huston Director: Clark Gregg. Released 21/11/08 Clark Gregg is a brave man for taking on this tricky adaptation of a Chuck Palahniuk book for his directorial debut, as it guarantees comparisons with the other Palahniuk adaptation to have reached our screens so far, Fight Club. Such comparisons are a mite unfair, if unavoidable.

The novel itself touches on similar themes to Palahniuk’s incendiary debut, once again charting a male protagonist’s disconnection from the modern world - literally so in the case of Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), who spends his days as an ‘historical interpreter’ at a working medieval village.To pay for his mother’s expensive psychiatric care,Victor has come up with a scam whereby he pretends to choke in restaurants, to be saved by an unsuspecting rube who out of pity will put it upon themselves to support Victor, contributing cheques toward phantom dental surgery. It’s when visiting his mother in hospital, whilst

04/10

Burn After Reading Starring: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, John Malkovich Director: Joel & Ethan Coen. Out now Following the triumph of No Country For Old Men, it had seemed that the Lebowski/Miller’s Crossing Coens of old were back, so it’s particularly alarming that this misstep is all their own - whilst fans could point to the fact that the Coens didn’t write The Ladykillers or the unfairly-maligned Intolerable Cruelty, no such excuses can be made for Burn After Reading, a film made from their own original script, which, CIA movie parody or not, feels lazy, and a far cry from their usual

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trying to ascertain who his real father is, that Victor meets his mother’s doctor Paige Marshall (Macdonald), who hits him with a bizarre revelation about who he might really be.

Unflinching from the graphic sexuality of the novel - Victor cruises sex addiction groups and fetish websites, and suffers an unfortunate mishap with some anal beads - Clark Gregg is to be commended for taking on the challenge of bringing Choke to the screen, and braving those inevitable comparisons. His inexperience as a director shows at points - he’s guilty of some sloppiness a perfectionist like David Fincher would never allow for. There are also some moments – in particular the flashbacks – which are clumsily handled but Clark has drawn excellent performances from his perfectly-cast ensemble - Sam Rockwell once again proves he has the charisma to make even the sleaziest character charming - and, whilst dialling down Victor’s self-loathing and playing the story more as a straight comedy, the key themes and scenes from the book are largely intact. It may not go down as a modern classic, but as Fight Club’s oversexed younger brother, it certainly holds its own.

meticulously composed output.

Aiming for an all-star return to the Fargo blend of quirky comedy and violence, it lacks that movie’s heart, dialogue and any semblance of a coherent plot. Whilst there are moments of amusement - Brad Pitt’s bighaired dipshit and an excellent JK Simmons cameo provide most of those - there’s a disturbingly cobbled together, ‘that’ll do’ air about this. Most staggering of all is the dawning realisation that, yes, they really are going to end the film like that, which even after just 90 minutes cheats audience of the time they’ve invested in what passes for a story. Coens fans are well used to being teased; this time they might actually feel insulted.

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. Director: David Fincher Out now There are many instances of films being under-appreciated upon release, to later be retrospectively recognised as a masterpiece David Fincher’s phenomenal Zodiac is surely one of those films.

A staggeringly well-made retelling of the hunt for the serial killer who terrorised the Bay Area in the late60s and 70s, it’s a film about obsession, made by a director with an obsessive attention to detail (check the making-of doc to see just how minute the details are that Fincher gets into) that itself inspires obsession, not least in admiring the direction and central performances from Gyllenhaal, Downey Jr and a brilliant Mark Ruffalo. Somehow forging a sense of closure from an open-ended true-life tale, it’s a superb achievement and worthy of future recognition as a classic.

GONE BABY GONE Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris Out now

08/10

Those that have followed Ben Affleck’s whole career, rather than just the bit where he was one half (or perhaps less) of ‘Bennifer’, will be aware that for all his previous bad career decisions, he is in possession of a fair amount of real talent - having proved so in early fare such as Chasing Amy, he went on to remind everyone once more with his turn in Hollywoodland, not forgetting the Oscar with Matt Damon for the Good Will Hunting screenplay. Adding another string to his bow with this assured directorial debut, Affleck paints a gritty, affecting picture of his Boston roots, whilst his younger sibling Casey follows up his astonishing performance in The Assassination of Jesse James with another wholly believable portrayal of a man wrestling with inner conflict and guilt. One of the year’s most haunting films.

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PARTY WOLF PHOTO CASEBOOK“2’s company, 3’s a party!”

...yeah Rod, my effort at last night’s Come Dine With Me was pretty astounding.

Think I’ve got the shit show in the bag

HOROSCOPES Scorpio

Nice one mate.

You up against any top crumpet?

For too long now you’ve been out of the frame. But just because the dizzy heights of yesteryear have passed it doesn’t mean that you’ve been left out in the cold completely.This month, as the moon ends its cycle-athon, you’re due to discover a new sense of hope. An old hairy friend will rear they’re head once more to let you know you’re not alone, and the letter ‘W’ is important. I don’t wanna give too much away but it’s basically Wolf from Gladiators. He’s behind you.

Awwooogaaarr!

There is this one blonde with a cracking pair. Looks a bit like your Penny mate. But keep your voice down, she stayed last night and is just out the shower

TIGHTWAD TIP

Thanks for the meat balls last night. I’ll show myself out

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Phoarrr!

You jammy git PW!

I love KFC, and always have the family bucket, even though they’ve stopped including a Vienetta within the reasonable price. So here’s a tip of what to do with the bucket packaging once you’ve mopped the Colonel’s grease from your face. Quite simply make it into a trendy container for all of your most precious belongings. It looks fab and protects even my extensive book collection that I care about.