Loud And Quiet 20 – Wavves

LoudAndQuiet Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 20 / 100 percent improved

Wavves

garage grunge royalty

The Vaselines Cerebral Ballzy Disclosure Offset Toro Y Moi 2:54 Ă˜ya Festival

Dude! Where’s my intro?

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Stephen Pope (bass) & Billy Hayes (drums) of wavves

There are many sights we thought we’d never see; among them a Brooklyn gutter punk puke on stage, a German techno kid smother his balls in Nutella and a wasted youth break their knee whilst standing still at a London festival (quite impressively). These harrowing/thrilling events have all passed in front of our eyes over the last month, but none are more surprising than the sight of Wavves on our front cover.

Having found Nathan Williams’ 2009 debut album spectacularly average, we, like many others, presumed that this year’s ‘King Of The Beach’ might harbour a decent enough tin can, lo-fi track here and there but little else worth mentioning. Boy do we feel stupid! Something akin to The Beach Boys playing Nirvana, Williams’ new album is a simple enough garage record in many respects, but it’s also one of the best albums we’ve heard all year – a collection of big hooks, self-deprecating lyrics and (a rather novel idea in the world of today’s DIY scene) vocals you can actually hear. It is not the album you’d expect from a 23-year old who had a more turbulent ’09 than Katie Price’s ‘area’. It is, quite simply, impossible for us to ignore.

And Wavves aren’t the only slackers done good in this issue. When Cerebral Ballzy [page 22] aren’t emptying their breakfast, lunch and dinner on stage, they’re… well… skating and drinking. But, when they’re not doing that, they’re making the dumbest, funnest hardcore around. And Radfest 2010 [page 44] was a day full of dossers proudly bragging their latest accomplishments, even if The Vaselines [page 18] have managed to make us all seem like prolific so and so’s by taking over twenty years to follow their debut album of 1989.

We’ve travelled this month too, to Germany for Melt! festival and Norway for Oya, which pitches itself as something of a Scandinavian ATP, and does a damn good job of living up to expectations. Later this month it’s our turn to play host at Offset Festival [page 14], as we curate the Loud And Quiet Stage on September 4th. But please, no puke, Nutella or crippled joints.

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C o n t e n ts

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Photography by GABRIEL GREEN

07 .................. . Bands / Do / Sick / Things 08 .................. . Underdogs / Are / Over 10 .................. . Singles / And / EPs 12 .................. . One / Badass / Song 14 .................. . Festival / Of / Sonic / Delights 18 .................. . Sex / With / Vaselines 22 .................. . Skate / Drink / Thrash 24 .................. . Studies / In / 2-step 26 .................. . Waster / To / Wavves / Star 32 .................. . The / Modest / Mouse 36 .................. . Cheerleaders / And / Wolves 42 .................. . Norway / Melts / Doom 44 .................. . Nutella / Covered / Balls 46 .................. . Ladies / Love / Nerds 50 .................. . Robbie / Beats / Barlow 04

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Contact

info@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet 2 Loveridge Mews Kilburn London NW6 2DP Stuart Stubbs Alex Wilshire Art Director Lee Belcher film editor‑ Ian Roebuck Editor

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advertise@loudandquiet.com Contributors

Bart Pettman, Chris Watkeys, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Danny Canter DK. Goldstien, Dean Driscoll Eleanor Dunk, Elinor Jones Edgar Smith, Frankie Nazardo, Holly Lucas, Janine Bullman, Kate Parkin, Kelda Hole, Gabriel Green, Lisa Wright Mandy Drake, Martin Cordiner Matthias Scherer, Mike Burnell Nathan Westley, Owen Richards Polly Rappaport, Phil Dixon, Phil Sharp Reef Younis, Sam Little, Sian Rowe Sam Walton, Simon Leak,Tim Cochrane Tom Goodwyn,Tom Pinnock This Month L&Q Loves

Duncan Jordan, Jenny Miles,Tim Cochrane, Vanessa Cotton The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opini ons of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2010 © Loud And Quiet.

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Bands do the sickest things Mandy Drake is tired of on stage shock tactics from bands that don’t need them

Rock’n’Roll: whatever nonsensical sub-genre of stringed things might live in your CD racks and line your bedroom walls, it’s nothing if not a proud beast. Credibility is the currency and without it a band can find themselves signing on and eating last week’s poop quicker than you can say, “yeah, our band’s cool, Fearne Cotton’s into us!”

This being one of three unwavering traits of the game (along with drugs and delusions of grandeur and selfimportance), most savvy folk are keen to remind us that “it’s all about the music, man!” Ask a band about their anti-designer (designer) mops – or their nearly-but-not-quite-matching jackets, or their makeup, or their naughty new video that’s fucked squares right off – and that’s the response you’re most likely to get. It’s nonsense, of course, but while it’s obvious that bands have been ‘about the package’ since The Beatles suited up, the way in which they present themselves onstage has long been a chance to snatch indie kudos points too.

Unfortunately, some will do

anything to chalk ‘em up. Like hardcore punks Cerebral Ballzy.

We interviewed the band for this month’s issue, and very nice they were too – friendly and funny. We also saw the band’s debut London show at The Old Blue Last in Shoreditch, where singer Honor introduced their 7-inch single ‘Puke Song’ by sticking his fingers down his throat and…well…puking at our feet. The crowd’s response was a hefty groan of disapproval, as if one massive, deflating organism. And I too threw out an “urgh”-sounding sigh, but not just because voluntary vomiting adds nothing but grot to any gig. In this case it felt desperately forced – a talking point of how ‘real’ Cerebral Ballzy are. How credible. How un-Fearne Cotton. Only it wasn’t real. A lot of effort went into the puke; a lot of tonsiljabbing. It could have easily been kept down until the end of the band’s set, which, indecently, was the hardest, fastest hardcore show I’ve ever seen, and an impressive talking point in itself.

It’s as if truly independent bands like Ballzy – bands who

push the “all about the music” line the hardest – feel obliged to prove their punk status with these giddy vulgarities. Iggyisms, you might call them. It was he who started the shockrock ball rolling after all, dabbling in self-mutilation when he wasn’t jumping into mosh pits and flinging peanut butter around the place (a far sillier, less offensive extension of The Stooges’ music).

For folk like Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne and later Marilyn Manson, the genuinely nasty stage stuff was replaced by a host of amusing theatrics like those found in a West End pantomime – Ozzy biting the heads off of rubber bats; Manson’s keyboardist playing his instrument as it hangs hilariously from a gallows – but plenty have attempted to prove just how punk they are with obscene stage tricks that involve real blood, real bodily fluids, real rank sights that many wish they could un-see.

Because let’s face it, the story of L7 singer Donita Sparks throwing her used tampon into the crowd at Reading Festival (1992) is enough to turn your

stomach without having been there trying to dodge the thing.

Thankfully, the idea of being viler than the man to your left was over as soon as it begun, when the man to the left was GG Allin. Considered by many to be ‘the most extreme punk ever’, Allin rejected anything that remotely whiffed of conventional, and what could be more conformist than a live show that doesn’t feature a naked bald man covered in his own blood and faeces? Allin was the king of vulgar stage acts (usually scatologically-based) and even vowed to kill himself on stage. And he played some tunes too, not that anyone really cared about that too much, just rather how fucked up he could get. He’s an extreme case, but it’s easy to be known as ‘those mad dudes who piss in their own mouths’, rather than a pretty great garage band. Just ask Black Lips. Because while the shock thing will do when your music won’t, it’ll tar the most promising of punk bands who don’t really need it anyway. So, L7, you’re forgiven. Ballzy, you’re not. And that’s a compliment

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Books

By Janine & Lee Bullman

A Rocket in my Pocket: The Hipster’s Guide to Rockabilly Music

By Max Decharne (Serpent’s Tail) King of the researchers, Decharne inspires rebellion with new book ---------------------

Underdogs are Over The xx have made us finally turn on the outsider (for now), says Danny Canter

There’s nothing we like more than an underdog… except for a favourite. It’s why commentators go all high at the end of sentences while watching Brazil play football, and why Nick Clegg had to buddy up with ‘them’ despite that Goliathsparring time we referred to only as ‘Clegg Mania’. Really, we only like an underdog if the heels they’re yapping at aren’t those of someone we like more – usually a worthy, superhuman recipient of all the attention; one who’s top of their game for good reason, like Tiger Woods or Roger Federer.

Last year, the Mercury Music Prize proved just how pissed we can get when the little man successfully topples a giant or two – or little woman, rather.

Speech Debelle may not have been the most obscure artist on the 2009 shortlist but sat amongst hopefuls like The Horrors, Bat For Lashes, Florence & The Machine and La Roux, most never thought she’d win the thing.

(Unfortunately, that included her label, Big Dadda, who didn’t ensure that they’d pressed enough copies of ‘Speech Therapy’ to cater for the demand a winning album generates – a cock-up that the singer soon left them over). When she did win, our recurring bluff was called. We didn’t cheer that an unknown had instantly become a fixture on the news; we groaned

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that a famous person hadn’t won.

A year on, as the Mercury once again attempts to successfully judge ‘The Best Album of the Year’, with little acknowledgment of just how insane it is to compare a banjo pop band to a fifty-two-year-old mod and a British rapper, we’re set to be a lot more pleased with the evening’s result.

For once, we are not pretending we’d like an outsider to win. We’re backing the 2-1 favourites and their masterfully understated record of dead space, hushed vocals and saucy sex songs; an album that has hung around TV trailers more than ‘Standing In The Way Of Control’ and seen its writers go from bedroom practise sessions to being covered by Shakira in twelve months. The support for The xx is in fact so huge that you have to wonder why any other band (save for Wild Beasts and Mumford & Sons, perhaps) would bother showing up at the award ceremony on September 7th at all.

This year’s rank outsiders are Kit Downes Trio – an experimental jazz band from Norwich who’ve paid their dues playing the kind of bars that still feel smoky three years after the ban was introduced.

They certainly deserve a nod from the prestigious award as much as, say, Laura Marling or Biffy Clyro; more so than Dizzy

Rascal who is now the most nominated artist ever, thanks to a frankly appalling fourth album. But to win would definitely be more embarrassing than to turn up and be mistaken for a group of waiters. Just ask Belle & Sebastian. They flattened the 1999 Brit Awards by winning the ‘Best Newcomer’ gong and inspiring who-the-fuck-are-they? looks of confusion from every face in the already-known crowd (ya 5ives, ya Steps etc), regardless of that being the award for Best NEW comer.

The Mercury Prize may be a different kettle of tosh (still silly in the way that all award ceremonies are, but going further in celebrating new, often-alternative music than any other red carpet do on earth), but a crumpled mug or two would definitely be seen if anything but ‘The xx’ was written inside the winner’s envelope.

To think that we’ve fully turned our backs on the underdog, though, is a little hasty. This year it really is a case of The xx being deserved winners and deserved favourites – two titles that rarely align.

If Plan B had been given a nomination and made the favourite as expected, we’d still be dying for the winners envelope to feature the words ‘The group of waiters on tables six’.

This is a guide in which ex-Gallon Drunker and legendary London lounge lizard Max Decharne turns his attention to Rockabilly – the reverb-drenched, slap bass sound that crawled from the deep South in fifties America. Where today we are assaulted from all sides by check-shirted posho careerists clogging up Myspace with a slew of indie drivel, A Rocket In My Pocket harks back to a time when musicians both looked and sounded genuinely dangerous, and rebellion couldn’t be bought off the peg in Top Man. As with all of Decharne’s books, his love of the subject and extensive research is obvious, the tone somewhere between fan and scholar, and if Rocket In My Pocket doesn’t make you want to go out, get drunk, listen to Charlie Feathers and get into a fight, then you have no soul. Wild.

My Improper Mother and Me

By Esther Fairfax (Pomona Books) If only more biographies were written by offspring...

--------------------The latest release from the ever reliable and intriguing indie publisher Pomona is an autobiography with a difference.

My Improper Mother and Me is a compelling portrait of the notorious, outrageous German émigré Lotte Berk as relayed by her daughter, Esther Fairfax. The book reveals the inner workings of a bohemian life lived to the extreme. Cajoled to dance in Paris at the age of 15, Fairfax’s incredible tale goes on to embrace drug addiction, sexual liberation, poverty, isolation, fame and, finally, hope. Well worth a look.

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s i n g les & E Ps

01 Summer Camp Young (Moshi Moshi) Out Sept 6

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Since Summer Camp melted a heart or two (hundred) with debut single ‘Ghost Train’ (a song so nostalgic and sweetly take-hometo-your-mother it’s also made this 6-track EP) they’ve been continually described as “hazy”, “dreamy”, “lo-fi”, “naively charming” and so on. And not unfairly, either - Elizabeth Sankey’s vocals could easily acquit her of smoking-gun homicide and Jeremy Warmsley’s chiming instrumentations are just as doe-eyed. ‘Young’ starts with a different side to this duo though, and one we could do with seeing a bit more of.

‘Round The Moon’ pitches seasick organs next to lead vocals from Warmsley that warble and bubble as if under water, not unlike Brooklyn’s Blank Dogs. There’s

still a heavy undercurrent of twee present (especially once Sankey pipes up with an expertly cooed refrain of “we danced all night and we held each other tight”), but there’s also a sense of mystery there. Danger even. It’s soon back to teenage woes, though – ‘Was It Worth It’ talks of being upset at a boy’s parents house; ‘Why Don’t You Stay’ asks us to “think back to the summer”, just in time for those “hazy” adjectives to pop up again - and while it’s no bad thing, per se, it feels a little like Summer Camp are hearing those comparisons and driving towards them, while clearly, as the more sinister ‘Veronica Sawyer’ also attests, they’re best when they flirt with darker sounds and themes.

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Not Squares

No Age

Dels

Release The Bees

Glitter

Shapeshift

Deerhunter Revival

(Pogo/The Richter Collective) Out Aug 23 -----

(Sub Pop) Out Aug 23 -----

(Big Dadda) Out Aug 23 -----

(4ad) Out Aug 23 -----

Dance crumblies Faithless have beaten the reaper all these years not with one banger, but with one immaculately placed drop in one song. For them, “I can’t get no sleep” chills many a spine to this day, and has Maxi Jazz and Sister Bliss still playing Glastonbury in their late 40s/early 50s. Belfast trio Not Squares clearly know the power of a spoken refrain in amongst relentless trance synths and electronic thumps. Their “get ready for the launch” is a simple “release the bees”, purred by a Nick Cave sound-alike. And boy does it work!

This’ll keep Not Squares going for some time.

The ‘long version’ of ‘Glitter’ that appears on its 12” release is only so due to a pretty needless creaking hum of feedback that scrapes on for the longest two-minutes of your life. Still, it’s worth the extra pennies for ‘In Rebound’ a rattling fuzzy/clean B-side far superior to that of ‘Inflorescence’, which appears on the 7” version, buzzing about nicely enough but sounding very much like a No Age off-cut. Back to ‘Glitter’ itself: it’s definitely this duo’s best single yet, low on the tin can production and featuring themes that aren’t just audible but pretty life-affirming.

There are almost too many neat tricks to get a handle on here tricks that propel Dels far further ahead of his grime peers and pals; from the misleading, Bay City Rollers-esque intro that’s soon met by Kieran Dicken’s unquestionably British vocal (all deep and reminiscent of early Kano) to playful name checks of Bret The Hitman Heart.

What makes ‘Shapeshift’ really special though are the beats and electronics from Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard. Thick, syrupy and imitating Crystal Castles’ Atari-meltdown sound (if they listened to funk, not metal), this rapper and electro wiz could be grime game-changers.

We’re so used to finding Deerhunter staring at their shoes and coyly getting on with their trademark ambient rock sound that ‘Revival’ - the first glimpse into fourth album ‘Halcyon Digest’ - at first seems like a totally different, uncharacteristically confident and jolly band. It’s a jaunty departure from their previous work, clearly inspired by the sixties and sounding like Spinal Taps’ pre-metal ‘Listen To The Flower People’. Having tittered at that for a second, ‘Revival’’s serenity is welcome as Bradford Cox and co. finally seem as content as their talents should allow them to be.

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Reviews by D. Canter, M. Drake

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T

he Internet has done wonders for aspiring musicians.

Whereas once, the only way to get noticed was to doggedly gig your tits off and spend penniless hours stuffing envelopes with demos and timidly hopeful covering letters, now all you seem to need is a social networking profile with an uploaded mp3. Consider the case of 2:54, two sisters whose sole track was instantly picked up and reposted by the likes of Gorilla Vs Bear, VICE, The Independent and The Fader, the lattermost of which pointed out that the girls ‘look like badasses’, which indeed they do, in their black threads, their rock’n’roll tattoo-peppered arms lifting sweating pints of lager in a dim corner of an understated Dalston boozer (they’re locals).

Colette is draped in a loose shift dress, leaning to one side as though the dense London heat were leaning on her, trying to share her chair, while Hannah is inexplicably ensconced in a black leather biker jacket and looking cool in every sense of the word, despite the oppressive temperature – definitely badass!

Both seem a little bewildered (though not unpleasantly so) by the snowball of attention their music has collected. The infamous track ‘Creeping’, from whence the media interest sprung, is a gorgeously abrasive dose of shoegaze, with a backbone built on harsh, metallic guitar crashes, coupled with sensual, deep and drowsy Mazzy-esque vocals and a stung, swollen bass line. There’s an intriguing darkness to the music, and a weight, which is beautifully counterbalanced with an effortlessly nimble, punktinged drive. Where did this hybrid of sounds come from?

“I don’t know, it just kind of came out,” says Hannah. “I mean, we listen to a lot of stuff but I don’t think we took much from it.”

“Yeah,” agrees Colette.

“There was no plan, Hannah just started writing pieces of music and sending them to me.”

The sisters used to be in a punk band called Vulgarians, who were quite a hardcore outfit – “fast and loud”, as Colette describes it – but split up round about Christmas time. At that point they both dropped their guitars and didn’t touch them again until May, when they started sending each other bits of tracks, eventually meeting up and finishing the songs together.

The end results were drastically different to their previous output with Vulgarians (or ‘the other band’ as they refer to it) – “Completely different!”, the sisters laugh.

Both Hannah and Colette play the guitar, and Hannah also took up bass and drum duties for the recordings they’ve made. But how the hell does that work when

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they play live?

“Oh, we haven’t played live yet,” says Colette. “We’ve done everything in our bedrooms, that’s just how it’s been, we only started a couple of months ago.” She explains that they don’t want to play gigs with a backing track and a drum machine, and their main method of playing and recording has been bedroom sessions with Garage Band, waiting for one or the other’s flatmate to go out – as Hannah puts it, “so we can make a racket in peace.” Now they have a proper rehearsal space and have found a bass player and a drummer to complete the live band. That’s what the girls have been up to today, they’ve been in the studio rehearsing (without the newly recruited boys), and the plan is

to lock themselves away in said studio until October, working on the body of work they’ve come up with thus far, getting it ready for a live set. So is this it, ready to rock and roll?

“This is it,” says Colette confidently “the Real Deal!”

“We want this to be a life,” agrees Hannah.

“That’s the dream, for making music to be what we do,” Colette continues. “There’s no set plan, but we’d like to make a really special record – a collection of songs.”

This rough plan sounds vaguely familiar… Talk to anyone in a band that’s still finding its sea legs and they tend to fall into two categories: Hellbent on world domination within the next fortnight, or playing it by ear, keeping the game plan

vague, and focusing on making good music. For now, 2:54 reside in a sub category of the second option, the Hang On, There’s A Piece About Us On Which Website? category. Again, not outrageously out of the ordinary, thus is the power of the net that all you need is a MySpace and an uploaded track and the blogs are falling over each other to give you a shout out and re-post your mp3. In theory. It also helps to be making the right kind of music at the right time, and that’s exactly what 2:54 are doing, albeit completely inadvertently.

They admit that there are a lot of female voices about at the minute, “There’s commercial stuff like Florence, then there’s bands like Beach House,” says Colette “but I don’t think

2:54

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As long as it’s good enough, one song is plenty to launch a career P h o t o g r a p h e r : o w e n r i c h a r d s W r i t e r : p o l ly r a p p a p o r t

anything that’s going on at the moment bears any reflection on what we’re doing.”

“As far as how we write,” Hannah explains, “I don’t think we pay much attention to what else is going on.”

“Of course we’re wary of being lumped in with something,” concedes Colette “because there’s definitely a new breed of female fronted bands, or allfemale bands.”

Hannah: “But I don’t think that will affect us too much. I think we’re just… well, we’re just writing songs.”

“We’re just doing our own thing,” they both say, almost in perfect unison.

The big hope is not to get lumped in, and they consider themselves to be very lucky to be in a position to be able to shy away from marketing schemes for now. “You have to already have a reputation as a band,” explains Collette. “Part of it is going to be us getting slightly more public, then getting press, and it’s just what happens, we’re going to get categorised and that’s fine, as long as people come to the shows, like the shows and like the music, it’s fine.”

Hang on, ladies, intervention time: You do have a reputation as a band, and you do have press (among other things, you’re in the middle of an interview) thanks to ‘Creeping’ going ever so slightly viral. Didn’t you have anything to do with that?

Sending it round?

“People just grabbed onto it,” says Hannah, still sounding a bit mystified by the whole thing. “I don’t know how.”

“Word of mouth,” says Collette. “Gorilla Vs Bear got hold of it and that was it, just…dominoes.”

They’re clearly both pleased that so many people like the song, but there seems to be a catch. “We are ferociously independent,” Colette firmly states. “For as long as we can just do it ourselves, we will.”

One last thing, care to explain the (let’s face it, pretty odd) name of your band?

The sisters named themselves after a moment in their favourite Melvins song. “It’s at two minutes and fifty-four seconds, the calm before the storm,” explains Colette. “A lot of choral singing, good build up,” they laugh.

Hannah and Colette are really into the Melvins, a classic example of the ‘lot of stuff’ they listen to from which it’s debatable they have taken any influence. Listen to those biting guitar licks though, and try to convince yourself those heavy, buzzing jabs haven’t been saturated with a love of postpunk by way of stoner metal…

“There must be a Melvins song in us!” There so is, and when you’ve recorded it, do us a favour and post it online.

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Kieran Delaney is the man responsible for one of our favourite festivals of the year, and all it’s cost him is every second of his spare time P h o t o g r a p h e r : T h o m a s K ava n ag h W r i t e r : S t u a r t s t u bb s

There are countless extra curricular activities one can do from a day job; hundreds of schemes to keep self-loathing at bay while you make money for someone else. The top ‘companytime-fancy’ is most probably running a club-night inbetween Facebook updates and looking busy, or perhaps starting a small record label, blog or fanzine. For Kieran Delaney, curating alternative festivals has kept him from clock-watching away the past ten years, and his ‘proper job’ isn’t even that bad. He’s a graphic designer, and a good one.

Now in its third year, Offset Festival is a valid distraction shared by a number of Kieran’s friends (including the folk behind Experimental Circle Club, Artrocker, Holy Roar and us) but it remains, largely, a one-man show, pieced together in his spare time. And that makes Offset all the more impressive, as it continues to show up mainstream, money-splurging events by featuring bands far more alternative than a Dizzy/ Florence collaboration. It’s “two days of sonic delights; from the influential to the cutting-edge,” says Kieran. It’s just a shame that it’s only two days.

Kieran: “I remember suggesting that we try it as a camping, two-day event rather than a oneday thing, but I don’t think I realised at that point how much work would go into making it two days. And yeah, it takes up shit loads of time, and I bore my girlfriend to hell, and I bore my friends to hell, and even going to festivals over the summer I’m talking about, ‘what about this, what about that?’, and yeah… it’s boring.”

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Offset is two weeks away now, how are you feeling about it?

“I’m actually incredibly excited about it now. This time last year, and the year before, I was really nervous but I found myself in Brighton with friends last weekend and they asked how’s it going and I said, ‘well, I’m having a day off, so it must be alright.’”

Is everything on target?

“It’s all on target. We’ve just made another announcement because one of our problems is that we constantly want to put more and more on. There’s a lot of good bands out there and we get a bit carried away – like, ‘we’ve got 200 bands on this year; is there any way we can make it 250?’. It has to get to a point where we say, ‘No!’.”

Why the hell did you start this festival?

“I do quite regularly think, why the fuck do I do this, but on the weekend it makes sense. When we started off doing one day festivals, which was nearly ten years ago now, it was a different state of affairs – there wasn’t a festival every weekend of the summer, and now it feels like anyone who’s got a back garden has a festival over the summertime. But look, there’s so many festivals that seem to be taking off the second stage at Reading, badly, and the only reason we continue to do it is because we feel like we’re representing something that’s not being represented. ‘Artrock’ is the term that we’d loosely use, but it’s something that isn’t done, or isn’t done as well as it should be.”

After the festival how long do you have off before you start thinking about the next one?

“About a day. I want to get to the point where I’m re-booking

bands at the festival. I’d like to get to that point where as a band come off the stage I’m like, ‘Yeaaah, well done, you’re in for next year!’.”

And how depressed are you the day after it’s all over?

“To be honest there is nothing worse than that lull that you get after, because you’ve worked for a year on something and it goes in such a tiny amount of time, and you just hit a low.

You just have to start again. A week after the festival last year I was talking to Paul who helps out on the main stage and I was like, ‘right, let’s start a label’, because you just have to do something to soak up that hatred you’ve got for the loss.

I cannot imagine how Michael Eavis feels. That must be like walking out into Sariavo. That man’s life is odd.”

Are there any other festivals you like?

“I really admire Truck Festival if I’m honest. It’s one of those festivals that’s been going for ages and hasn’t had its praise sung. They had shit all money and they’ve just kept doing it and never tried to turn it into something that it shouldn’t be and I really respect that. And obviously it goes without saying that ATP is the one that everyone looks up to, and for Offset, our ultimate aim would to be like a British Primavera, really – to be able to put on lineups that almost shouldn’t be able to sell as many tickets at they do; that are just the right side of wrong. That’s our ultimate aim.”

Tell us about Wine Gate [an incident in 2008 when a certain band demanded certain ridiculous wines in their dressing room] and what you learnt from it.

“What I learnt from it was that

you can spend 10 or 15 years of your life worshipping a band and believing every single word they sing on your favourite album and have all of that wiped within a minute of dealing with them. I won’t name the band, but it was a big post punk band who were very left-wing in their beliefs but when they turned up they asked for the most ludicrous rider I’ve ever seen in my life, which had specific wines on that meant we had to phone around wine warehouses to find out that the cheapest wine was two hundred pounds a bottle, and they wanted around eight of each. The thing is, it’s hard to get to a band to explain to them what it is that we’re doing and how small the festival is, and how it’s good for them to do it, musically.”

Who’s worth checking out at the festival this year?

“I think the one for me is Cluster. It’s quite special to have them. They’re playing on Sunday daytime and it’s going to be really interesting to see these guys that have achieved so much, musically – just absolute legends. One of the guys was forcibly conscripted into the Hitler Youth and we’ve definitely never booked someone that was in the Hitler Youth before.”

I’m in a band and I want to play Offset, what’s the best way to get your attention?

“What I’d say is definitely send me an unsolicited demo CD or cassette with badly scrawled writing on the front… No, I mean, I know this sounds like a load of shit but we do listen to every single band that applies to play Offset, and there are some absolutely awful bands in this country. There are people scraping the bottom of every barrel of every genre there is.

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10 Reasons to go to Offset

01. Cluster Berlin’s Cluster are a definite highlight with a back-story as impressively intriguing as the ambient, often-bleak krautrock they’ve been making since 1969. They’ve worked with Michael Rother of Neu! and Brian Eno, been sponsored by the church and dodged the Nazis to make their extrapatient brand of space rock.

02. Atari Teenage Riot Also from Germany’s industrial, creative centre, ATR offer a far different Berlin sound to that of Cluster’s. Their digital hardcore – originally inspired to fight against fascism and the neo-Nazis that had started to engulf 90s German techno – we hope will still be as ferocious as it ever was.

03. Male Bonding Last year, having released a handful of limited 7-inches, Male Bonding were the goodtime hit of our tent, knocking over microphones as they were swamped by fans jumping around on stage.

Now, they’ve released the best garage grunge album since way back. It’s only right they’ve been invited back to play the main stage.

04. Liquid Liquid In late 70s New York, you were either disco or punk, and yet Liquid Liquid became ‘post’ the pair of them, bridging the gap between the angular sounds left on the corpse of punk and the dance music that would conquer the 80s. Listening to them now you can see where The Rapture got all their best ideas.

05. Telepathe Since releasing their muchunderrated debut ‘Dance Mother’, Telepathe have been patiently piecing together a follow up while becoming Julian Casablancas’ favourite band. For their second album they’ve worked with Benny ‘I Kissed A Girl’ Blanco so maybe they’ll give us a taste of a new, monster pop sound.

06. Factory Floor They were on the cover of last month’s issue having released just two limited EPs, which says a lot about how highly we regard this avant-garde dance trio. Live they sound more brutal than ever these days, turned up to MBV loud as they refuse to play with any convention.

“Last year they made people vomit,” says Kieran.

07. Mystery Jets After all the sonic bullying your ears will take at Offset, the chances are you might fancy something unquestionably melodic at some point. In 2008 The Maccabees gave us that; this year it’ll come from their pop idols Mystery Jets, who’ve written a masterful, swooning album that makes 10cc waltz with The Mac.

08. Blue On Blue Dee Sada is no stranger to Offset. She’s played every one (ok, so that’s two) but that was with gothic crusaders An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump. Now at the helm of Blue On Blue, she and her band offer a jubilant take on early 90s, jangling pop that catches its breath by crawling to the sound of 80s heartache.

09. Your Demise Last year Offset introduced a hardcore stage, which turned out to be reason enough to go to the festival. This year is no different, and while you can take your pick of shreddy belchers, we suggest catching Your Demise who sound like every great skateboarding wipeout montage you’ve ever seen.

10. The whole of the Loud And Quiet stage Oh, c’mon, at least we made it number ten! And besides, as well as Telepathe and Factory Floor, this year we’ve booked Lovvers, Comanechi, Teeth, Egyptian Hip Hop, Graffiti Island, Golden Grrrls, Athens Polytechnic and Please. That lot have to be on a list of reasons to make Offset 2010!

P i c s : O W EN R I CH A RDS / G A B R I EL G REEN / TOM COC K R A M / PH I L SH A RP / LEON D I A PER

BUT we have found some great bands that way, like Death In Planes who we brought over from Italy last year. Basically, the point of our festival is… there’s no way we can’t be personal with everyone that gets involved. Our email addresses are easy to get hold of, you can find me DJing in a shitty bar in London most weekends, so just come and hand me a CD and I’ll pretend I give a shit. Ha! No, I’m joking. Just be good.”

What if I’m in a reggae band?

“Then you get double of my time.”

You need a bit more reggae, I think. Pato Banton, maybe?

“Well, as soon as he becomes as influential as he deserves to be, he’ll be there.”

Do bands approach you in the street and ask to play?

“Yeah, it does happen. Sometimes people will hand me a CD while I’m DJing and say, ‘play my song next’, which is quite hard to deal with. I’m not nasty enough I don’t think. I’m not very good with confrontation. But yeah, people sometimes approach me. I guess it’s not that annoying.”

What’s new to Offset this year?

“In the past we’ve focused too much on music… well, not too much but we spend too much time arguing about bands, so this year we’re going to try to bring other stuff in. We’re having more arty stuff this year – a bigger vintage clothing fair, a Victorian funfair, things like that. We just want to make it so that there’s more things to do other than music… but to be honest, just go for the fucking music – there’s so many good bands there and it’d piss me off if you spent your whole time shopping for clothes.”

If you could book anyone, who would it be?

“One of the guys in Sonic Youth said he liked the sound of the festival. That’d be good, wouldn’t it? Yeah, that’ll do me.”

N-Dubz, The Courteeners and Jamiroquai. Which would play Offset?

“N-Dubz. Definitely. They’re genuine innovators. Mindblowing. I think the problem for us is that they’re just a bit too obscure for us at the moment. If they move a bit towards the mainstream then they’d tick all our boxes.”

If someone said to you, I’m going to start a festival, what would you say to them? “‘Oh piss off!’ No, I’d say, do something different. Just look around and see what’s been done and if what you want to do hasn’t. Y’know, a bit of reggae maybe. Actually there’s a reggae festival on Offset’s site in a couple of weeks. It’s called One Love after the Bob Marley song.”

What kind of horror show would it take for you to give this up?

“All I know is this – at the worst moments of doing Offset, when I’m saying things like, ‘maybe I won’t do it next year’, it’s complete and utter shit; I will always do Offset. It might be to 30 people in a hovel somewhere, but I’ll always do it. I’m damn sure about that.”

Kurt Cobain professed The Vaselines to be his favourite band, covering the Glaswegians three times and even naming his daughter after one of their founding members. Why, then, has it taken them twenty years to write a second album?

Photographer: ph i l shar p Writer: d. k . Go ldstei n

The name The Vaselines might have passed you by because, well, they haven’t been around for 20-odd years, but they’re finally back with their lovely three-chorded lo-fi garage-pop and it’s time you got to know them.

The duo – comprised of Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee – formed in 1987, released two singles (‘Son of a Gun’ and ‘Dying For It’) and split before their debut LP ‘Dum Dum’ made it onto shop shelves.

They went on to follow different career paths and solo projects but a heavy-handed championing from late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain prevented this Glaswegian outfit from slipping into non-existence. By proclaiming them his favourite band and covering three of their tracks on Nirvana’s compilation ‘Insesticide’ and the ‘MTV Unplugged’ live record,The Vaselines name was saved from a Room 101-type fate.

Kelly and McKee may have reformed for one show in 1990 to open for Nirvana in Edinburgh, and started touring together again by 2006, but they’ve only just got round to releasing that long, long awaited second album, ‘Sex With An X’, and when it came down to it, they only spent 12 days on it.Which begs the question, what took them so long?

“I started teaching primary school [children],” McKee informs us. “That took up quite a lot of time so I didn’t do any music, but when I started to do stuff again I

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realised how much I actually enjoyed it.”

Meanwhile Kelly managed to stay in music.

“I’ve been lucky enough to have a couple of records out [with Eugenius],” he explains “but otherwise I just played shows here and there. I haven’t done any proper jobs like Frances.” As he speaks a smile lights up McKee’s face, like a cheeky child and she blurts: “Of course, there was the lap dancing and strip bars that you haven’t mentioned you were doing…”The grey-haired Kelly blushes and stutters a little before professing that “she’s making things up now.”

“The men didn’t really go for it, but he tried. He was all beefed up for a bit; fake tan, slick, oily,” she continues before Kelly reproaches her and she admits “sorry, that was me!” and giggles endearingly.

After the couple broke up in the Eighties they debated keeping the band going but Kelly confesses that he didn’t think they’d be able to do it. “Because we were writing from our personal experiences,” he clarifies. “And it just seemed like the right time,” adds McKee. “I don’t think we could have written the songs in the same way, it wouldn’t have been fun. It would have been awkward.” So what finally brought you back together?

“Are we back together?” McKee asks, smirking. “My kids are calling Eugene daddy,” she jokes as Kelly replies dryly: “Let’s get back to reality, shall we?”The pair laugh again, which shows how comfortable they feel around each other and although McKee

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“We just never could play that well, So if you happen to be an excellent guitarist you’ll never sound like The Vaselines, no way!”

is constantly cracking jokes, Kelly isn’t quite the shy, retiring type he appears.

It was when the two began touring their solo projects together in 2006 that they finally started writing new songs to plump up their sets. “We realised that down the line something might happen,” says Kelly “but we didn’t really talk about it.We didn’t plan it so that we wouldn’t think it was going to be us back in The Vaselines.” And then Sub Pop, who are renowned for first signing Nirvana, asked them to play a festival out in the hometown of Seattle, and the band realised that a reunion could well and truly be on the cards.

Working with producer Jamie Watson again, who produced ‘Dum Dum’, Kelly and McKee worked out a vigorous schedule so that they could spend a minimum amount of time in the studio, and the result is a pleasant blend of the duo’s harmonies with the old hurried rhythms that peppered their juvenile punk tracks. And of course the smutty lyrics are still in play.The title track, for instance, boasts: ‘It feels so good it must be bad for me, let’s do it again’, which is reminiscent of ‘Dum Dum’ (‘I get on my knees and do what I please’) and ‘Teenage Superstar’ (‘I got one thing on my mind girl’).

“Neither of us wanted to take 20 years to make the record and then spend six months in the studio,” McKee tells us of ‘Sex…’. “I don’t like to work like that. I think it needs to be in the spirit of it and it needs to have energy.You could say we’re slapdash about things, which yes, I have to say I can be, but the problem with music now is you can flog it to death and I didn’t want to get to the stage where I really hated the music I was doing.”

Kelly explains that they didn’t have the money to spend any longer in the studio even if they’d wanted to. “We were paying for it ourselves so we couldn’t decide to spend four weeks doing it. All the money we earned on tour last year we spent on making our record, so we just had to get on and get it finished. It was intense; though by the end of it we were thinking it was never gonna end, even though we knew there was an end point. It seemed that every day we just had

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to get to work. It was like, ‘We have to finish that song by six o’clock this evening so we can do the next one’. In our wee notebook we ticked off everything that we’d done.”

That doesn’t sound too slapdash at all. “Well, we knew what we were doing before we went in.We rehearsed for a couple of weeks, full on, so we’d done all the work beforehand, which really helped. So we knew what was going on in the songs.

Except for the lyrics, we didn’t have some of the lyrics.”

“We had to do a few late-night lyricwritings.We nearly stole the lyrics from another band, mind you,” McKee mentions before erupting in laughter once again as Kelly lets us in on the joke. “Someone left lyrics behind in the studio,” he smiles mischievously. “Kind of heavy-rock, ‘Hey mamma, gonna rock you all night’ kind of lyrics.”

Speaking of lyrics, with a 20-year gap, surely there would be a dramatic change in the topics they cover? They’re no longer sprightly twenty something’s at the start of life; they’ve lived through many years of the music industry, raised families and had to tackle mid-life crisis.

“I don’t think they’re any more mature,” says McKee. “I think the big difference is where the first album deals with relationships and a sense of…um…” She trails off. “The lyrics were about relationships, but I think these lyrics, from this new album deal with…oh I don’t know, what do they deal with?” McKee chuckles as she looks questioningly towards Kelly, who sits in silence, arms crossed and blank faced.

“I think a few of the songs are about our relationship,” she continues “and the fact that we’re not together any more. In ‘Poison Pen’ there’s a lot of that going on.”

“Yeah, but fictional,” Kelly interjects quickly. “It’s just taking things we’ve gone through and turning them into fiction.That’s [‘Poison Pen’] just a couple having an argument, not really agreeing on anything.”

McKee lets us know that she thought it was about them and laughs awkwardly when she realises it isn’t. “Don’t take it so personally,” says Kelly “they’re just songs.”

he two split writing duties pretty evenly. “Aye, there was a lot of that,” Kelly confirms.They bounce ideas off each other, and a particular track McKee recalls being a joint effort is ‘The Devil Inside Me’. “I had just learnt to work Garage Band,” says McKee with pride. “I put it all together and sent it back with a little guitar lead line and another vocal and it just brought the whole song together.”

“That’s an aspect I really enjoyed,” asserts Kelly. “Because it gets a bit lonely working on your own. Sitting and writing the lyrics was really fun, just coming up with stupid ideas and then…”

“There was a time,” McKee cuts in quickly “when we were just laughing our heads off because Eugene brought out this dictionary of rhyming words.”

“We never used it,” Kelly interrupts before we start to suspect anything and McKee sits there like the Cheshire Cat. “We never used it,” she emphasises slowly. “But we were tempted.”

So although the lyrics may not have changed much, we wonder if they feel that time has had an effect on their sound. “With the sound of the record,” Kelly starts “we wanted people to listen to it and know they were listening to a Vaselines record.”

“We didn’t want to think too much about it,” McKee carries on. “We just wanted what came naturally.We put aside the fact that there’s 20 years between our old record and this one and just wrote. Because there’s no way we could write another ‘Monsterpussy’ for example, so we didn’t even try, there’s no point.”

While The Vaselines were getting their feet back on the ground they enlisted the help of Stevie Jackson and Bobby Kildea from Belle & Sebastian, who, along with the likes of Dum Dum Girls and other lo-fi girl/ girl-boy groups nowadays, sound heavily influenced by The Vaselines. “We taught them everything they know,” grins McKee. “A lot of people say that to me,” Kelly utters, perplexed. “I never for one second thought, ‘they [B&S] sound like The

Vaselines’. Maybe we’re just too modest.”

“The difference between The Vaselines and Belle & Sebastian is that the Belle & Sebastian guys can play, and like, shit, we can’t,” chuckles McKee. “They had to dumb down [for us].They re-taught us those songs.

They were very patient with us, I have to say.

But then,Vaselines songs were always written around the fact that I’d only just learnt to play the guitar, so any more than three chords and I would be hitting Eugene with the guitar, saying, ‘I can’t play that, just get that away’.”

“We just never could play that well,” she maintains. “So if you happen to be an excellent guitarist you’ll never sound like The Vaselines, no way.”

“They’re so horribly talented, it makes me sick!” Kelly faux-sneers and draws out his words with disgust before laughing it off.

So, now that the band are ready to tour again with new material, heading around the UK for a couple of weeks and a month-long stint across the US, have they thought about their future and the possibility of a third record? “It’s really hard,” McKee almost whines. “We need to see what people think of [‘Sex…’]. But the main thing is to make sure that you like it and I feel really happy with it, so for me that’s enough. Not that I don’t care if other people like it, I really hope other people do.”

“We haven’t talked about doing another one, this was as far as we could see when we were making this record. I think it’s a long way off,” Kelly replies. “I think we should stick to every 20 years,” suggests McKee as Kelly ponders, his hand reaching to his chin.

“We’ve been lucky with songs which meant we could get cracking on this one straight away, but we’ve got no tunes, so we’d have to start on the next one from scratch. I always thought we should go electro-pop and get Mark Ronson in, and make a completely different record, a high-energy disco record.We could get dance routines and matching outfits like Same Difference.”

McKee laughs in agreement and we leave the two, completely bewildered as to what The Vaselines might throw our way in another 20 years.

02 Cerebr al Ball zy

US hardcore really is about more than just sounding like Black Flag P h o t o g r a p h e r : LEON D I A PER W r i t e r : s t u a r t s t u bb s

Cerebral Ballzy are that band you’ve heard being described as ‘the new Bad Brains’ for the past six months, because a.) three of them are black, and b.) their dumb-ass hardcore is also played uncomfortably fast. Black Flag is another name that crops up a lot, but then isn’t it always? Why these comparisons are wholly justified though is because of Ballzy’s genuine old school spirit. Most hardcore punk bands sound like Bad Brains, Black Flag and Minor Threat in some way, but few are willing to relive the early 80s US hardcore scene to the bloody, shit-stained letter. Hundreds write songs like Ballzy’s thrashy ‘Sk8 All Day’; few actually do it. And even at their most enthused and least poverty-stricken, Henry Rollins and Greg Ginn would have secondguessed driving to Canada to play one show in a garage.

“We did that ‘cause we’ll fucking play anywhere, man,” reasons singer Honor.

“We’ve played birthday parties in upstate New York for, like, 10 people,” adds guitarist Mason.

That Toronto show ended up being the band’s biggest release to date, available on tape cassette only and featuring all the inter-song toilet humour a growing Beavis or Butthead needs. “I need to take a shit,” moans Honor in his deep, caned drone by way of an ‘are you sitting comfortably?’. “I think I’ll wipe with my T-shirt,” he continues as he introduces the opening ‘Shit Rag’. Safe to say, it’s not a ballad, and yet ‘Live In Toronto’ isn’t a pointless, loose mess of noise either. It’s pretty tight. Tuneful even. And tracks like ‘Underage Drink Forever’ and ‘Drug Myself Dumb’ are nothing if they’re not mindless, chaotic fun.

In speech, Honor talks a cartoonish, dropout purr, like a stoner with severe hay fever (as does second guitarist Jason), but on stage he whines as if from The South – the crack addict cousin of Caleb Followill

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who wasn’t allowed in Kings Of Leon. He laughs ‘hur hur’, not ‘ha ha’. And he’s very funny.

All of Cerebral Ballzy are, perhaps because you need to be to resurrect the rough and real genre of US hardcore.

“We just finished a tour of the States,” says the band’s tallest member, Jason “and it was wild. The punkest of punk.

We were playing in basements, sleeping where we’d played, in random peoples’ houses.”

“We spent the night with an ex-Nazi in Ohio,” adds Honor.

“He was awesome!”

“My pockets were filled with weed forever,” continues Jason.

“He came to our show and was like, ‘I’ve got pot and drugs and booze at my house – you guys are coming!’.”

“Twenty minutes into the house he was cracking shit over his head,” says drummer Abe. Honor: “Yeah, we get there and we can see all these swastika tats up his neck, and he’s wearing a onesy, like a pyjama outfit that zips down to his feet, with little booties and everything.”

Jason: “And we had a bottle of wine and he says, ‘do you want me to open that for you?’, so I’m like, ‘yeah’, and he just breaks it on the top of the doorway and starts drinking it with mad glass shards going everywhere. It was out of control.”

As well as hardcore punk, Cerebral Ballzy’s likes include drinking and skating, although not necessarily in that order.

“We just met skating in New York,” explains Honor. “That’s one common thing we all have – to skate and party. In a place like New York you can’t really meet similar kids unless you have a common goal, y’know? Like if we were all reading Harry Potter books we would have met in the library or something.”

“We’d just skate together and party and then one day we realised that we all like punk music and played different instruments so we wrote ‘Anthem’,” continues Jason. “We

get to drive around The States and just skateboard and party.

It’s kinda like the best thing to do.”

There are plenty of good reasons why Cerebral Ballzy are getting so much attention right now (they thrash the hardest, look the best, write the dumbest rants that are whinged rather than barked and they really do care for nothing else), but while plenty of UK hardcore bands tussle next to each other, from Shitty Limits to Throats to Hang The Bastard, we don’t hear too much about new American hardcore bands, least of all from New York. We know Brooklyn for clever alt. indie like Yeasayer, T.V. On The Radio and Dirty Projectors, credible synth pop from Telepathe, Small Black and Salem, and a hell of a lot of garage bands penned into the Captured Tracks stable.

“You’ve not heard of the New York hardcore scene ‘cause we it, dawg,” laughs Honor to approved chuckles from his band.

“Nah, New York is the kind of place where you can find whatever you’re looking for if you look for it, and there’s a lot of fucking rad hardcore bands doing it in New York but a lot of them hardly play shows and I think we’re the only band doing what we do and are playing every week.”

“We got tired of the Brooklyn pop/synth shit,” says Mason “and were like, ‘fuck it, we’re gonna play with guitars and scream.’”

Honor: “And there’s been many-a-time we’ve played with those bands and thrashed it out and got kicked out.”

Abe: “There’s a list of venues that I’ve never been in before but can’t walk into.

Whatever, man.”

“But hey, I don’t want to make it sound like there’s a war between us and those bands,” says Honor. “Like, we’re friends with The Black Lips – cool people are cool people – but, like you were saying earlier, there is a tight community of that shit, and there is a lot of shit. It’s saturated. I mean, do

you think those bands honestly surf!?”

Perpetuating any Black Flag comparison, Ballzy’s friends and neighbours Japanther introduced the band to Raymond Pettibon – the younger brother of Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn and the illustrator responsible for the band’s iconic four-bar logo and stark, disturbing, hand-drawn sleeves. “He came to our gig and said the same thing as other people,” says Honor “that we reminded him of being in 1982 again. So we just hung out with him and he’s a really cool guy.

He’s probably going to do our album artwork for us.”

That being the case, presumably Ballzy’s debut album won’t come – as their debut 7inch, ‘Puke Song’, does – in a stencilled grip-tape sleeve.

Many believe this packaging decision to be a petulant but brilliant statement of destruction – ‘Puke Song’’s jacket ruining any other record it comes in to contact with. The band say it’s far simpler than that.

“Just why not?” says Honor.

“We were thinking about what could be our cover and we thought a dude skating, a dude skating and drinking, a dude skating and vomiting… y’know…”

“Again, it’s skating and punk,” continues Abe “the complete package. About two years ago when we first met we had a brilliant idea that we were going to chip in about two hundred dollars and buy a lifetime supply of grip-tape, and two years later we’re still skating the same decks we had, so we thought, this is fucking pointless, so we had to think of something to do with it.”

So we can expect griptape Tshirts soon?

“We already made griptape condoms, actually,” says Honor.

“They’ll be for sale on the website soon. Girls go crazy for ‘em.”

“Not to be used with women with previous conditions such as Chlamydia,” says Abe. Honor: “… or vaginas.”

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d i sc l o s u r e 2 Brothers. 2 tracks you need to hear. 2-step with real brains.

P h o t o g r a p h e r : H o l ly l u c a s W r i t e r : S t u a r t s t u bb s

“One radio station in Ireland thinks that we’re twins,” says Guy Lawrence. For that to be true of him and brother Howard, poor Mrs Lawrence would have had to have been in labour for three years, and that would have been something you’d have read about in the papers, like when really old people have kids. Guy is nineteen, Howard is sixteen and the pair have been making minimal, downbeat 2-step since Burial clipped and tripped his way out of their area code.

“We’ve been making music our whole lives,” says Guy “it’s more that we’ve only just put a name on it recently, and we’ve only been making this kind of music recently.”

It’s a tale that we’re hearing more and more, especially of young folk south of the Thames, in and around Howard and Guy’s hometown of Croydon. But Disclosure (named not after a dodgy Demi Moore/ Michael Douglas vehicle but

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rather a randomly selected word on Guy’s car tax renewal form) don’t peddle the well spun line of ‘we-just-started-muckingaround-with-sounds-cos-we-werebored’. They’re not selfprofessed loners or socially awkward weirdos who’d take a sampler to the pictures if they could. They are, rather proudly, two brothers from musical stock – their father a “really good guitarist” who was once signed to CBS and mother a professional singer – who’ve both studied music academically. “We’ve got musical parents,” explains Guy “so before this it would be me on the drums, Howard on bass, mum on the piano – as cringey as it gets, really. And then we both started playing acoustic guitars – not writing songs, just more technical stuff – and then we just got so into the new music that was coming out of the dance scene.”

The dance scene – or at least the best bits of it – just so

happened to be being played out on the brothers’ doorstep. So, while Howard was entering his obligatory, teenage emo phase, Guy was discovering grime and later Benga and Skream, having gone to school with the former’s brother. “But then it merged,” says Guy “and we both started listening to people who were coming out like Joy Orbison and Floating Points.”

Now, they agree on more things than two teenage brothers should. They agree that Burial was the real entry point for them getting into the ambient, electronic music they make today; that dubstep is “far less expressive than 2-step” and thus far more boring; that once Howard begins getting involved with the recording and production process “there will be more fights”.

Until then, with studies in music technology under his belt, Guy lays Disclosure’s soulful UK garage to tape, and next month

the first two songs recorded by the duo are being released by Moshi Moshi.

‘Offline Dexterity’ and ‘Street Light Chronicle’ are both propelled by that faithful, classic 2-step combo of clipped beats and chipmunk’d vocals that sound as if they’ve been phoned in from the top of a distant mountain. On ‘Offline Dexterity’ there’s a nutty synth riff that loops over and over too, and Howard says that the groove of the bass is thanks to Jamiroquai (a big influence). B-side ‘Street Light Chronicle’ further points to Disclosure’s funk leanings, featuring an organ that gently throbs the same three notes that’ll groove your night bus all the way home. In many ways, it’s like a lot of negligible 2step – expert in its simplicity, comfortably making minimal plus minimal equal something intriguing and hypnotic. But Disclosure’s tracks also have something that resembles soul,

no doubt because Howard and Guy still listen to a lot of Motown – once again, more guitar-based music.

“It is weird,” ponders Howard “because that’s what we’ve grown up on – band music. Our dad used to play us a lot of Genesis and prog-rock too, so this couldn’t be more different. We’ve had to listen to so much horrible stuff, but I still listen to prog every now and then. It’s got its place.”

“I think our parents like the music we make now,” says Guy “because it’s quite listenable, it’s not heavy dubstep or anything.”

“But it’s not their thing,” says Howard. “I don’t think they’d listen to it if their sons weren’t making it.”

Guy: “No, but they don’t hate it. They just give mumsy answers like, ‘it sounds really clear, guys. Well done!’ or, ‘it sounds like it could be on the radio’.”

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W A VV E of transformation

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P h o t o g r a p h e r : G ab r i e l g r e e n W r i t e r : s t u a r t s t u bb s

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20 0 9 was a y ea r o f e xt r e m e h i g h s a n d low s fo r N at ha n W i lli a m s .

I n t h e ey es o f t h e m u s i c p r e s s h e c o n sta n t ly da n c e d b e t w e e n DIY ga r ag e h e r o a n d s p o i lt, u n g r at e f u l wast e r . H i s n ew a lb u m c o n f i r m s h i m to b e ve ry m u c h t h e f o r m e r n hour before we meet Wavves for the second time, Nathan Williams updates his Facebook status to read, ‘I hate everyone and everything… No exceptions!’.This is bad for two reasons – 1.)

We most definitely fall into the ‘everyone and everything’ category, and 2.) The last time we met Williams, we hardly hit it off.

Back then (in March ’09),Wavves were a duo whilst on the road, completed by drummer Ryan Ulsh. Neither of them were the sharing type. Slouched backstage before a London show, they mumbled their way through our line of questioning, managing a shrug every now and then to let us know they weren’t paralysed from the neck down.

‘Sulky’, you could have called them; ‘unimpressed’ was perhaps even made for that precise moment in time.The truth is that hardly anyone ‘hit it off ’ with Wavves back then, but last year was a very strange time for the San Diego boy who picked up a guitar to save himself from working the till at American Apparel.

Williams is a dude in the truest sense of the word. A 23-year-old Californian with a love for weed, skateboarding and Nintendo, his slack garage pop completes the package of stoner kid into all things rad. And stoner kids that play bedroom-produced lo-fi garage, as we all know, are the darlings of

buzz-blogs and hip media.The baby-faced Williams went as far as being dubbed ‘this century’s Kurt Cobain’ – the saviour of US indie. Only he didn’t deliver ‘Bleach’, he gave us ‘Wavves’ – a woozy, half-effort of a debut album, dipped in heavy reverb to cover the fact that Williams wasn’t all that superior to others reviving hazy, hissy beach music. Furthermore, the ‘new Kurt’ began behaving more and more petulantly, not just I-dunno-ing his way through interviews but clanking his way through shows with little visible effort.

He and Ulsh parted ways following what is now considered Wavves’ most infamous stand, at Primavera Sound 2009. Fed up with his singer’s insults to the crowd, and reluctance to play more than a handful of improvised chord patterns, Ulsh poured a pint of beer on Williams and left the stage.

The following day, Nathan admitted he was addicted to alcohol, and that his drugs of choice that evening had been Ecstasy,Valium and Xanax.Wavves had gone from anonymous dropout to Pitchfork poster-boy to villain of the year in the space of seven months, and many would-be-fans had washed their hands of him.We certainly had, not so much for Primavera or the moody, teenage veneer, but for the disappointing album, which had seemed so promising

when we first heard ‘So Bored’. But if 2009 needed to happen to give us Wavves’ third album (his second was a virtual carbon copy of his first, called ‘Wavvves’), then so be it, because ‘King Of The Beach’ is one hell of a U-turn.

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ith Nathan William’s new Facebook status sixty minutes old, we find him, new bassist Stephen Pope and drummer Billy Hayes backstage at Cargo, Shoreditch.

They’ve driven here from France and have slept for two hours. All three of them are sat surprisingly upright (no slouching here) along the same wall of their dressing room, because the small, hot, closet-like space pretty much demands it.They’ve one beer left in their ice bucket and they’ve run out of weed for the first time in as long as any of them can remember. Despite all this, the new incarnation of Wavves appear relaxed, happy and willing to chat.Very willing.They babble on, easily distracted by each other and making up comically recurring untruths, like what year it is and Nathan’s actual age (it fluctuates over the next hour but ends up being approximately twelve). It’s like playing

ADHD Chat Roulette with real people – as soon as we start talking about Men In Black II, we’re done; we’ve clicked ‘next’.

“Can you believe that the douche from Muse’s dad is in The Tornados?” is one sudden, off-point train of thought from Billy.

“The Saturdays!? WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!” goes an outburst from Nathan.

Our discussion therefore plays out: question; relevant answer neatly given over the next thirty seconds or less; five minutes of reignfree, lawless chatter; laughter to end. If nothing else, it’s a lot more fun than a huff and a shrug.

“The new album sounds about five hundred pounds heavier than the previous two,” says Stephen, who, along with Billy, had his fair share of garage infamy when Jay Reatard sacked the pair of them shortly before his premature death in January of this year.

“Oh, more than that!” challenges Nathan. “Six hundred?”

“I weigh two forty,” says Billy.

Stephen: “Well, I don’t weigh three hundred! C’mon man!”

Billy: “Okay. I weigh five, these are a slim hundred each.”

“I know that you’re, like, four twenty,” says Nathan to his drummer “and Stephen, you’re like six sixty. I’m an even twelve

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pounds.”

Stephen: “You’re twelve years of age.”

“I just fattened up the drums,” finishes off Billy in time for a bout of laughter.

“Nathan played with his little scrawny wrists and I’ve got these fat tomahawks.”

There’s a valid point in amongst all the weight deliberation. ‘King Of The Beach’ is a far less puney record than anything Nathan came up with in his mum’s garage. Even the Phil Spector-ish, sleigh bell-rattling ‘When Will You Come’ sounds like it’s been on the protein shakes, and it’s probably Wavves’ most mellow track yet. Billy is clearly a more powerful drummer and Stephen increases the number of instruments heard by a third.

Nathan appears to have fallen for an extra beastly distortion pedal that he uses as sparingly as Kurt Cobain, stomping from clean and jangling to loud and grungy on most songs.

“Before we went into the studio I said I wanted to make my ‘Nevermind’,” says Nathan “but the only reason I said that was because instead of a thin, trashcan sounding record like the first two, I wanted to make something full and big and studio sounding, like ‘Nevermind’ is.Y’know, when you’ve got a million dollar studio in front of you, you’d be stupid not to use it. I can make another record at my mum’s house anytime. She’s not going to turn me away.”

“We had no time to figure out what we wanted it to sound like,” adds Billy “so we were like, ‘Nathan, what do you want it to sound like?’ and the quickest, easiest way to be like, ‘I want it to sound big’ was to say, ‘I want it to sound like Nirvana!’. It’s easy for retards, older guys like us. I’m forty four! I don’t know who Take On The Radio is, or

The Fly Boys, or The Run By Sandies. I don’t know these guys! I like Iron Butterfly!

I like Jethro Tull!”

“The Run By Sandies is not one of your favourites,” interrupts Nathan.

“I learnt that from this guy,” says Billy, pointing back at his singer.

Nathan: “But you mean the Drive By Truckers.”

Billy and Stephen are the kind of stoner double act you usually find goofing their way through a Kevin Smith movie, constantly talking about pot and getting high.They’ve played together for years and are funny, sarcastic and self-deprecating, sometimes in the space of a single sentence.

They joke that they’re using Nathan to make money on more than one occasion but are unshakably loyal in reality, defending him when the prickly subject of Primavera eventually crops up, or any other topic that could be seen as a criticism.

“Nathan’s our meal ticket, to say the least,” says Billy. “We’re taking this guy for a joyride to the bank, my friend. He’s a cruel boss and a cool friend.”

“For some reason most adoption agencies won’t let Billy and me adopt Nathan,” adds Stephen “because they won’t let gay couples adopt kids.”

Billy: “And apparently we’re not gay, they said, we’re just two guys who want to make money off this kid.”

Stephen: “Yeah, it’s been really hard for us to exploit him.”

But Wavves is a three-piece now, right?

“I dunno,” says Billy. “I mean, what if Nathan hires a bunch more guys because he wants to do some other thing? I dunno. He’s already threatened to replace us with hunks and body builders. He said, ‘you and Stephen are fatties, I want a couple of hot, muscular beasts up there’. And we said, ‘that’s fine, that’s fine’.”

“Well, I gave them an option,” says Nathan. “I said, either you guys slim down or I’m gonna get hunks.”

“It’s not about the slimness,” protests Stephen “it’s about the strength and power, man!”

Nathan: “But I do want oily hunks, who are Puerto Rican.You’re not Puerto Rican.”

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ing Of The Beach’ was recorded in very different surroundings to that of ‘Wavves’ and ‘Wavvves’, ironically marking the first time Nathan had made a record nowhere near the beach, but rather in Oxford, Mississippi. It was “horribly cold,” says the singer, but a chance to record in Sweet Tea Studio (last used by Animal Collective to make ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’) was too good to pass up.

“Bars close at 10 o’clock in Oxford,” Billy tells us “so there really is no partying.

It’s like, ‘oh, it’s zero degrees outside and there’s nowhere to go? Okay, we’re gonna stay here and work on this.’We could go to the movies but the movie theatre closes at 4pm!”

Sweet Tea also came with producer Dennis Herring [Modest Mouse/The Hives] who insisted that Nathan’s vocals were not to be swamped in woozy reverb this time around.

“I argued with Dennis a lot about that,” says Nathan. “That was a big one. I was a little bit nervous at first and wanted to bury

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my vocals like before. And Dennis was like, ‘no, I don’t think I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna put my foot down right now’,” says Nathan in a stereotypical southern twang.

“But after the second song I kinda got used to it. I was a little insecure, that was my deal, but I’d never want to say that because it makes me sound like a pussy.”

Billy: “I heard the dude from The Strange Boys, the first time he heard his voice without reverb at Jay Reatard’s house, he cried. And other guys in the band said it’s true.”

On Herring’s part, it was a masterstroke that’s given ‘King Of The Beach’ its most notable departure in sound. Before, we were uncertain what Nathan was singing about, or if he could actually ‘sing’ at all; now, there’s no question that he can, and his new songs are full of youthful exhilaration, love, defiance and a sizeable whack of selfloathing. He sings “I hate myself, man, but who’s to blame / I guess I’m just fucked up, or too insane” on ‘Take on The World’, “I bet you laugh right behind my back!” on ‘Idiot’, and “My own friends hate my guts / So what? Who gives a fuck?” on ‘Green Eyes’. A lot of the time these sentiments of doubt ride a wave of melodic, upbeat, pop grunge, but Nathan Williams is clearly a little hard on himself.

“Sometimes,” he says “but I also talk about how awesome I am too, like on ‘King Of The Beach’. Everybody always talks about, in interviews now, ‘do you hate yourself?’.Well, yeah, I do. I have to hang out with these jokers all day.You’d hate yourself too!”

“Imagine squeezing blood from a stone,” proposes Billy “one you know, who’s like 12 years old. Imagine how I feel. I’m depressed.

I want more money in cash. I mean, we’re getting paid just fine, but I want him to

“A lot o f th e th i n g s I d i d w r o n g ar e wh y we ar e wh e r e w e ar e . t h e r e ’s a r i g h t way o f d o i n g t h i n g s, o r a p r o f es s i o n al way, an d t h at j ust was n ’t th e way I di d th i ngs”

make more money for us to take it from him.We’ve got this account set up…”

“I don’t know anything about this,” says Nathan “but they do talk about it in front of me, freely.”

“It would make it awkward if Nathan acknowledged it,” says Billy “and by the time you leave here he would have forgotten.

We’ve got those Men In Black, headclearing devices.”

There’s a dangerous sounding pause.

“But, errr… Men In Black II is great,” says Nathan. “If we could soundtrack any movie it’d be MIB II.” Not the original?

“No,” says Nathan. “Two is the alien birth scene, where the alien pukes on Will Smith.”

“And I like a pre-existing relationship between the two agents,” adds Billy in a pseudo-Newsnight Review tone. “Like with Batman, you don’t want to know the backstory of how he met Robin and Alfred, like how Alfred killed Bruce Wayne’s parents.

We’re actually like Nathan’s Alfred.We killed his parents and now we control his bank account.”

I’m not sure that’s right.

“Yeah, it is,” insists Billy. “Alfred killed the parents to get to the money.”

“But anyway,” says Nathan “I don’t hate myself or anything.You just feel differently on different days when you write songs.”

By that premise, Nathan must have been feeling pretty good when he wrote the album’s title track – a song with a defiant hook of “You’re never gonna stop me!”. It sounds very much like a message to those who wrote Wavves off towards the end of last year.

“Not necessarily,” says Nathan. “It’s just a general statement. Sometimes that’s how you feel, and we all like the motivational aspects of pop rap and southern rap in general. Like, ‘Fuck you! I am the king!’. It’s a very positive message. It’s easy for people to get down and feel defeated and I think it’s good for people to know that it doesn’t matter what people think. Just do your own thing.”

“My usual frame of mind is everything is going to stop me,” laughs Billy “so when I hear that, I think…aahhh.”

“Who’d have thought that a 14 year old would be able to teach two 44 year olds so much cool stuff?” says Nathan.

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he following day Wavves are not sat along the same wall in a weed-less, hot, sleep-deprived state.They’re smoking an apple bong (that’s an apple packed with weed) in an east London photography studio before playing The1234Shoreditch festival.

They’re even more relaxed than the previous

evening (apple bongs have that effect) and patiently wait to be shot by our photographer, Gabriel, one at a time.

“People just hate us,” says Billy, matterof-factly and passing the apple to his right.

“They’ll give us a four out of five but not say anything positive, just how fat and lazy we are. Like, how do they know how lazy we are?” he asks. “And how can we be lazy if we are always on the road?”

The knives are still out for Wavves because modern media has a collective memory like that of a learned elephant.

Forgetting Nathan’s rocky 2009 is going to either take a long wait of many more days and nights, someone else fucking up even more spectacularly (the smart money’s on Gaga), or for ‘King Of The Beach’ to be followed by at least two more albums that perfectly combine the summer melodies of The Beach Boys with the adolescent aggression of 90s grunge.

“A lot of the things I did wrong are why we are where we are,” says Nathan, optimistically.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, dude,” insists Stephen.

Nathan: “I know, but there’s a right way of doing these things, or a professional way, and that just wasn’t the way I did things.”

“When Drake cancelled his European tour, I’m sure it was because his mum was having surgery, but even if it wasn’t, he would have come up with a fake reason,” says Billy. “He didn’t just say, ‘I don’t wanna do it!’.”

“I just didn’t know any better,” says Nathan. “Nobody had told me any of this stuff. People asked me questions and I just answered them, but I need to stop talking about drugs in interviews too, man. For my mum.”

By the time we come round to discussing Primavera (‘the most epic onstage meltdown a band of their small size could conjure’, as Pitchfork.com dramatically put it) the subject seems as irrelevant as it no doubt is. But that doesn’t stop the jolly atmosphere from frosting up a little.

Nathan inflates his cheeks, exhales and slumps sideways. Just as he’s about to answer whether he remembers the show or not, Billy offers, “I wasn’t even that fucked up and I don’t remember it, just because it was so long ago. I’ve played, like, 300 shows since then.”

Stephen gives a simple explanation of, “It’s not significant at all”, which is followed by an awkward kind of silence.

What we want to know, though, is if that episode, which was preceded by all of that expectation, excitement and criticism, was a turning point in the story of Wavves? The morning after it the band was back to being just one man, a European tour was cancelled and Nathan spent the rest of the year figuring out a new album, moving to LA and

plotting a return that deserves to be the biggest comeback since John Travolta said “Royale with cheese”. It must have had some affect on Nathan.

“Yeah,” he says “but, like, again, I didn’t record this album because some guy who writes a blog that thirteen people read said, [Nathan adopts a typical nerdy voice] ‘Wavves played a bad show’.”

“I’m sure the people that wrote that really negative stuff about that show have really, really good sex lives,” jokes Billy “but beyond that, I’m sure they’ve never been in a band and played a bad show. If they were ever in a band, I’m sure all of their performances were top notch.”

“I still say it wasn’t a bad show,” says Stephen.

Billy: “Well, who hasn’t played a really embarrassing show before?”

Stephen: “Are we talking about last

night’s show, because Primavera doesn’t exist.”

It’s hard to tell who’s more fed up of the Primavera question – Nathan or his band of ten months who weren’t involved in it. Over time it’ll no doubt morph into another rock’n’roll myth, like Alice Cooper killing chickens on stage and Marilyn Manson mugging a puppy. Hell, take a look at the YouTube clip of it now and you’ll see that – while a little cringy – the tale has already been blown out of proportion somewhat.

But, once again, if Nathan Williams needed a scare like Primavera to create ‘King Of The Beach’ then so be it. He says himself that Wavves are where they are now because of everything he did last year. All we know is that at the end of 2009, in our ‘Yearly Review Issue’, ‘Wavves’ was our disappointment of the past twelve months.

Now, Nathan Williams is on the cover.

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toro y moi the modest ‘leader’ of this year’s buzz genre P h o t o g r a p h e r : PH I L SH A RP W r i t e r : D A N I EL DYL A N W R AY

Toro Y Moi – or Chazwick Bundick – is a mere 23 years old and has already been credited with near enough creating, or certainly co-creating, an entire genre that seems to be sweeping through the minds and record collections of every music fan around at the minute – the now ever-familiar ‘chill-wave’. He is reserved, timid and gently spoken. His fragile hush and sunken head often almost resembling that of a naughty boy been called to the headmasters office, this is clearly someone who is more comfortable in front of an instrument than an interviewer. However, once we get going he opens up and that timid nature transforms into nervous energy, which subsequently turns into enthusiasm and humble gratitude.

Catching up in the middle of his European tour, it’s clear he is somewhat bewildered by his success. “Ah, it‘s crazy,” he says. “I mean it‘s fun, but it‘s a totally different lifestyle.”

Chaz is fresh out of college, recently graduating with a degree in graphic design (he does all his own artwork too), so has gone from student to touring artist, travelling the world within a very short time span. He gently sips on his coffee as I try to plough through a lukewarm red-stripe before it becomes plain warm. He ultimately seems relaxed to the point of ambivalence, yet still somewhat pensive. So is he comfortable with being labelled as one of the pioneering artists of the chill-wave movement?

“I’m comfortable with it and it doesn’t really bother me but I don’t know if it’s the right description [for my music]. It’s very broad; all the artists that have been clumped into that [genre] are all so different. I mean there is similarities in the production and influences but the actual songs I feel like everyone has their own thing going on.”

We talk of his new single ‘Leave Everywhere’ and I mention its more rudimentary, garage-

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esque approach compared to the electronic disfigurement that was ‘Causers Of This’. It seems the laptop is being sidelined and the guitar fore-fronted in his new musical ventures. “The next album is not at all like the last album,” says Chaz. “I‘m starting songs with guitars or piano, no samples or anything like that.”

So how was the writing process approached for the first record in comparison?

“It started with a rhythm, either with a drum sample or something I programmed really quick and then I would try to get a feel and go from there.”

And does the speed that you write and record mean that we can expect the new album this year?

“Erm, yeah, around winter”.

Although Chaz now has a live touring band after feeling “uncomfortable” and “naked” when doing his solo laptop sets, he has still played everything himself on his new album.

Learning piano from the age of eight and guitar from twelve it seems music has run through his blood for years. “My mum forced me to play piano and I hated it,” he winces “but I’m pretty glad she did now! Then drums and guitar were my personal leanings.

“At the start, I naturally gravitated toward the guitar because I was rebellious and really into punk music, but now I’ve gone back to the piano.”

It seems both ambition and progression are elements never far from the front of Chaz’s mind. Having been handed the responsibility to figurehead an entire genre he is willing to leave it behind before it’s even really made any lasting impact.

Depending on how you look at it, it’s either plain restlessness or Toro Y Moi’s creative driving force, although Chaz says, “It‘s sort of both. On the new album I‘m definitely trying to create newer sounds.”

This determined and progressive mindset could also extend to the constant tampering

and disfiguring of tempos and structures on his debut album, ‘Causers of This’.

“I‘ve always tried to do stuff like that,” he says. “I track the vocals and then I cut and paste the layers a lot.”

But do you have clear visions of what the songs will sound like beforehand?

“Oh yeah.”

Often it is spoken of people’s personalities mirroring their music (kinda like dog owners looking like their pets), and to some degree this is almost exactly true of Chaz Bundick. Toro Y Moi’s debut is tantalizing. It teases and tricks the listener into thinking he is going down one road and then throws him down another at the nearest unsuspecting fork on-route, or simply stalls him still. In many senses the album embodies manipulation as much as it does creation – a behavioural tool as much as an art form – and when speaking to Chaz he is often the same, giving you glimpses or promise of an avenue he’s about to go down and then stalls. I often wonder if his persistent intention is to leave me constantly questioning and analysing, much like his album does. Subtlety and an unrelenting sense of understatement seem to sum up Chaz pretty well, which coincidently is a more than apt description of ‘Causers Of This’ too. And it’s refreshing to encounter someone who seems so content just being immersed in the creative process of making music – anything that comes as a result of that is a bonus… or a curse.

There is not a shred of pomposity or ego that rears its head throughout our encounter, just meek reflection and careful thought. It’s clear his ambitions are reflected in his current listening habits. Chas is a fan of film score composers, right now, and that clearly yet quietly proclaims the grandiose intentions and ambitions of this rising young artist.

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re SEPT vi 10 ews Al bums

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Abe Vigoda Annuals Black Mountain Chief Crocodiles Crystal Fighters Dead Confederates Edwyn Collins Everything Everything Frank (just Frank) Freelance Whales Grinderman Interpol Junip Kano Klaxons Nick Garrie Rose Elinor Dougall Pacific!

The Count & Sinden The Hundred In The Hands The Tamborines Underworld Women Zola Jesus

Live

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

Brontide El Guincho Lovebox Melt! Ă˜ya Festival Radfest The1234Shoreditch Wild Nothing Y Not

-} www.loudandquiet.com

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Al bums

Grinderman Grinderman 2 (Mute)

By Sam Walton. In stores Sept 13

09/10

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The hype surrounding the second record from Grinderman – the stripped-down, balls-out rock incarnation of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – is not your standard album build-up schtick.

Since July, 30-second “trailers” for the record have been appearing on YouTube, depicting (among other things) a beautiful nymphet emerging from milky bathwater, a wolf pacing around a penthouse suite and, most nightmarishly of all, a red-eyed cheerleader grinning wildly through bleeding gums. Each finishes with ‘Grinderman 2’ bulleted across the screen and “COMING SOON” fading up from the darkness. Disquieting, cinematic and darkly funny, the clips capture the loose cannon spirit of this album, despite not containing any of its music – like their first record, this is an album of theatrical villainy and stylised gore, but unlike that LP there’s now more poise to the carnage; a

sense of intent rather than freewheeling madness.The visual touchstone for the debut was a picture of a masturbating monkey on the sleeve – this time round it’s luxuriously produced and wonderfully subversive films.

But if Grinderman have become less feral in their approach, they’re no less tough when they want to be. Opening track ‘Mickey Mouse & the Goodbye Man’ is a glorious statement of intent, a five-minute hissy fit of feedback and squall that sees Cave and a mystery accomplice perform doubtless murky acts on an unsuspecting lady. Similarly, ‘Heathen Child’’s repeated chant of “You think your husband/ wife/children/government will protect you?

You are wrong!” is brilliantly urgent, and the satanic snarl of ‘Evil’ is all the darker for the band’s newfound composure.

Most impressive, however, is the album’s centrepiece.When ‘My Baby Comes, She Comes’ starts as a slyly gyrating samba complete with gypsy fiddle-playing and rueful lyrics (“has anyone out there wasted their lives / On booze and drugs and husbands and wives”), before

erupting into a slackened, super-heavy swamp groove that’s the aural equivalent of watching horrendously captivating replays of ultraviolence in super slow-mo. Compositionally accomplished, expertly played and, to slip into the vernacular for a moment, rocking like a motherfucker, it’s an awesome recording – a hardened criminal compared with the first album’s petty thieves.

It’s not all serious though.While admittedly there isn’t a ‘No Pussy Blues’ moment here, ‘Worm Tamer’’s treatise on premature ejaculation – “my baby calls me the Loch Ness monster / Two humps and then I’m gone” – and maintains Cave’s form for witty selfdeprecation, while ‘Kitchenette’’s executioner, with glass eye and false teeth, is pleasingly daft.

But the more serious tone is a reflection of a stronger record: Cave has scored two films since the last Grinderman album, and that has clearly rubbed off on his hairiest project, making it bolder and grander.The sense of abandon remains, but ‘Grinderman 2’’s more calculating malevolence makes it even more exhilarating.

07/10

06/10

06/10

09/10

09/10

Junip

The Count & Sinden

Women

Abe Vigoda

Nick Garrie

Fields

Mega Mega Mega

Public Strain

Crush

(City Slang)

By D. K. Goldstein. In stores Sept 13

(Domino)

By Reef Younis. In stores Aug 23

(Jagjaguwar)

By Nathan Westley. In stores Aug 23

(Bella Union)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Sept 20

The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas (Elephant Records)

If Junip have passed you by, they’re a Swedish trio fronted by alt-folky Jose Gonzalez who’ve already released two EPs but are finally ready to show off their sweet, gentle rhythms in the shape of this debut album. It opens with the beautifully catchy ‘In Every Direction’, the organ humming through Gonzalez’s wavering, tender vocals and moving quickly onto ‘Rope and Summit’, which is just as captivating. All over the record vocals echo above mantric rhythms of a Yeasayer vein. Hints of Radiohead can also be found, especially in ‘Off Point’, which builds upon layers of synth over hypnotic riffs.With Elias Araya on drums and Tobias Winterkorn on organ/synth, Junip formed in the mid-nineties but were put on hold while Gonzalez pursued his solo career – a break may well have given them time to hone these deep and intricate stylings.

Herve’s been a busy boy the last 12 months, which makes it all the more welcoming that his debut album as The Count has finally seen the light of day. Carrying a booming party spirit, ‘Mega Mega Mega’ is heavy on the bass lines and cramming styles. From the buzzing bass bump and Cool Kidsesque drawl of opener ‘Do You Really Want It’ to the arcade sirens of ‘Desert Rhythm’, there’s plenty of cut and thrust before ‘Panther’ nicks a beat from Riva Starr’s Macbook and perks things up with a lively slice of catchy accordion.

Inevitably it has its lulls and adrenaline crashes – the mindless repetition of ‘Roll Out’ and chart fodder of ‘Addicted to You’ might take some shaking – but as the tired, half-lid comedown of ‘You Make Me Feel So Good’ washes over, it neatly caps the story of a heavy night out. Minus the hangover.

It’s the way in which Women’s sophomore album bursts alive with a chaotic stream of discordant noise, fully intent on grabbing attention at the first given opportunity, that serves as an instant warning that what follows is going to be far from an easy listen.What ensues is a moodaltering eleven-track lesson in Velvet Underground-referencing, avant-garde experimentalism, and it’s due to this arduous nature that ‘Public Strain’ requires heavy concentration and repeated listening before the magnitude of both its complexity and sonical scope can be fully absorbed.

Beneath the heavy, upper layers of pretension and atonal feedback that poignantly crust this record, lies a thinner slab of almost traditional Sixties song-writing craft that binds it all together and stops ‘Public Strain’ from falling into being a disorganised mess.

To have your negative conception of a band so utterly reversed that you actually doubt your ability to correctly assess your own taste in music is a bit scary. Abe Vigoda’s second album, ‘Skeleton’, whilst being hailed by knowledgeable outlets, to this reviewer was little more than a soundtrack to flannelshirt-wearing douches dryhumping each other in Barden’s Boudoir. ‘Crush’, the follow-up, still has some of that early jungle fever, but the temperature overall has dropped to levels that require buttoning up. ‘November’’s chiming guitars are most reminiscent of the breathless punk of old, but the disco beats of ‘Throwing Shade’, the brooding Cure-guitars of ‘Pure Violence’ and the synth-pop of ‘Repeating Angel’ suggest a band that has looked for new influences in the right places and come up with a record that is so good it’s almost frightening.

By Edgar Smith. In stores Sept 6 In 1969 Nick Garrie, an ex-pat British drifter got discovered in France and given a record contract and a 56 piece orchestra. After the promos were pressed, the owner of the label topped himself and everything fell to pieces, Garrie became a French teacher somewhere in sleepy England and the LP became a super-rare baroque pop masterpiece, copies occasionally changing hands for a grand or so. Reminiscent of The Beatles,The Zombies and with something approaching the surreal songwriting genius of early Marc Bolan, Syd Barrett or Brian Wilson, it’s like a Christmas and a Birthday for anyone who likes brightly psychedelic, cathartic tunes and the beautifully-aged aesthetic of 60s production. Almost every tune is a standout but ‘Ink Pot Eyes’, ‘Deeper Tones of Blue’ and ‘Stephanie City’ are particularly breathtaking.

Crocodiles Sleep Forever (Fat Possum)

By Edgar Smith. In stores Sept 13

06/10

Considering they make the kind of slacker rock that tends to coincide with a too-high-to-function outlook, the arrival of Crocodiles’ second album only a summer after their first is something of an unexpected feat.Then again, they’ve always been amongst the more focused (and rewarding) exponents of that invogue, garage/dream pop sound. Having blown us away with the first record, number two, it has to be said, is a little disappointing. Of all the directions they could have gone in after ‘Summer of Hate’, this Nuggets and Girl Groups-indebted one is the least interesting, giving us a couple of reliably psychedelic and truly cool tracks but also too much filler and one terrible ballad, ‘Girl in Black’ (presumably for wife and Dum Dum Girl, Kirsten ‘Dee Dee’ Gundred). As title and cover suggest, the lyrics explore death with a shades-on detachment and, once this starts to grate, you get the impression another years’ worth of work would’ve yielded something less repetitive. www.loudandquiet.com

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03/10

07/10

04/10

09/10

Everything Everything

Underworld

Annuals

Barking

Count The Rings (Soutterain Transmission)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores Sept 6 North Carolinians Annuals have spent their early years (and this band started when they were just thirteen) opening for some of the world’s most innovative and joyful acts, with lengthy stints on tour with both Calexico and the Flaming Lips, among others. Being surrounded by happiness all the time has clearly rubbed off, as their second full album, ‘Count The Rings’, is bursting with warmth.

Made up of gentle, lilting rhythms and summery pop hooks, its eleven tracks wash lightly over you, gradually growing in your mind, before becoming fixtures for days.

‘Eyes In The Darkness’ is a dreamier Vampire Weekend, ‘Hair Don‘t Grow’ is like vintage Weezer and ‘Loxstep’ like a Libertines track helmed by Phil Spector. ‘Count The Rings’ is a wonderful indie pop record. Full of energy, verve and life-affirming tracks. Not far from perfect.

Crystal Fighters

Frank (just Frank)

Star of Love

The Brutal Wave

(Zirculo)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Sept 13

(Weird)

By Laura Davies. In stores Sept 6

By Reef Younis. In stores Aug 30

(Cooking Vinyl)

By Sam Walton. In stores Sept 13

Most of the PR stories that accompany album promos are pretty bland: generic, superlativeridden run-throughs of a band’s history and music.The story behind ‘Star of Love’, however, is – if true – incredible. In a nutshell, the album is a reinterpretation of a crazy operetta written by the late grandfather of one band member, discovered after his death. And the tale runs much deeper than that.

Meanwhile, though, let’s talk about the music.The opening handful of tracks showcase the sound – a spacious wind-tunnel blast of electro. ‘I Do This Everyday’ has a hard edge, and brief undercurrents of heavy metal guitar – it feels like balancing on a knife blade, listening to Soulwax dangling members of Megadeth on puppet strings, while elsewhere ‘At Home’ is a cute, conventional pop song with an almost ABBA-esque feel.

This is a great debut.

Crashing into ‘The Brutal Wave’ with a Police-esque vibe, opening track ‘Beneath’ is a carbon copy of everything great that Sting ever attempted. But then the vocals kick in and it all goes horribly wrong. An equation of Morissey’s depressed lullabies (‘Mr Itagaki’), plus a poor mimic of Ian Curtis intensity (‘Le Son du Trottoir’), equals a dinge that should have been left in the 1980s. Frank (Just Frank) – not actually one person, but French duo Chris and Kirti – cannot get away from the bad synth comparisons. At times there is a Stone Roses meets The Cure promise (‘Die in Bed’) and a blouse-wearing, Johnny Marr-ish guitar riff or two worth swaying to, but for the most part, this debut is just forty minutes of drummachine-induced RSI (think the opening of Top Gun) and repetitive uninspiring vocals. Step away from the 1980s best-ofs Frank.

Everything Everything might have had their heads and minds turned by an increasingly early critical kiss of death, but instead of whittling down their rampant imagination to wheeze out a neat, glossy threeminute nugget of steaming chart banality, they stole the spirit of Steve Mason, borrowed a few Dirty Projectors and unleashed Jon Higgins to emphatically walk a fine falsetto line to rival Hayden Thorpe’s vocal dramatics. After being ambushed by the rampant ‘Qwerty Finger’, the jittering ‘Schoolin’ showcases the band at their skittish best, but it’s on ‘Tin (The Manhole)’ where Higgins’ pure vocal is allowed to take front and centre. Lingering over a simple, shimmering Four Tet-esque backdrop, it’s a refined moment of clarity amidst the zeal and wild indie twists, and it lends ‘Man Alive’ an enduring elegance that’s as arresting as it is unexpected.

Underworld’s sixth studio record seems to have all gone a bit Pete Tong – literally: largely absent from ‘Barking’ is the duo’s trademark no-nonsense techno and in its place is the kind of trance synths and boringly straight house that used to pepper Tong’s Friday night Radio 1 show in the late 90s.

‘Barking’ still holds a few intriguing surprises though.The biggest is a closing piano ballad, with a haunting melody and baleful vocal that sounds nothing like Underworld and is totally out of place on the album but nonetheless is eerily beautiful. Also impressive, and slightly more in keeping, is the bass-heavy dubstep of ‘Hamburg Hotel’ – the only contemporary-sounding track here. But it’s not enough. It’s taken six albums and 20 years of working together, but finally, sadly, Underworld are starting to sound out of date.

Man Alive (Geffen)

Zola Jesus Stridulum II (Soutterain Transmissions)

By Polly Rappaport. In stores Aug 23

08/10

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www.loudandquiet.com

The last time we had an influx of female vocalists onto the scene, we were presented with the likes of Laura Marling and Florence Welch, which was fine in a Pretty Girls with Pretty Voices kind of way. Of late though, we’ve had a few proper ball-busters stomping about, such as the deep and sensual Bat For Lashes and the ethereal and sinister Fever Ray, and we may now add Zola Jesus, aka Nika Roza Danilova, to the list.

Wrapped in menacing synth drone and sombre, resolute percussion, Danilova’s classically trained voice is at once strong, supple, wrenchingly emotive and utterly terrifying. As Zola Jesus, she paints apocalyptic aural canvases, her desperate shrieks of, “How will we survive” on ‘Manifest Destiny’ creating a sense of chaos, while her empowered mantra, “This will all be yours” suggests that not only is this woman ready to face the impending apocalypse, she’s orchestrating the bloody thing. A challenging record, yet oddly accessible and completely thrilling.

07/10

06/10

The Hundred In The Hands

Edwyn Collins

Kano

Freelance Whales

Black Mountain

Losing Sleep

Method To The Madness

Weathervanes

Wilderness Heart

(Heavenly)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Sept 13

(Bigger Picture)

By D. K. Goldstein. In stores Aug 30

(Mon & Pop / Columbia)

By Laura Davies. In stores Aug 6

(Jagjaguwar)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores Sept 13

Mr. Collins, it’s good to have you back.This release is notable for two reasons: firstly, it’s the ex-Orange Juice frontman’s first newly written material since his very serious illness five years ago; and secondly, it features an indie-tastic array of collaborators and co-writers including members of Franz Ferdinand,The Cribs and The Magic Numbers.The first track to sink your teeth into is ‘What Is My Role’, which smacks both of the Collins punk-pop template, and early noughties indie. It’s a potent, fizzy, noisy combination. And you can’t accuse the man of failing to keep his finger on the indie pulse – The Drums feature on ‘In Your Eyes’, another highlight. Elsewhere though, things are a little onepaced and pedestrian, and while ‘Losing Sleep’ is, in places, a collection of highly listenable songs, it’s never gonna keep you up at night.

East End boy Kano returns with his fourth LP in five years and there are more pop-culture references in it than a copy of Heat magazine. Opening track ‘2 Left: Topic of Discussion’ drops names left, right and centre – Andre 3000, Faithless, Beyonce, Metallica – and it’s not just lyrically that the stars are featuring on ‘Method…’ but vocally too – Hot Chip loaning their sultry, ethereal harmonies and jerk-rhythmed Casio-esque beats for ‘All + All Together’.Wiley raps on ‘Get Wild’ while Michelle Breeze croons a chorus on upcoming single ‘Upside’. For a grime record Kano’s taken an incredibly poppy path.Where ‘Typical Me’ and ‘Ps and Qs’ were dubstep beat-based with hypnotic rhyming, tracks like album closer ‘Dark Days’ and ‘Spaceship’ bear soulful R&B choruses that make the LP more accessible to all those grime day-trippers.

Sufjan Stevens beware, there’s a new floaty pop band in town. A cutesier Arcade Fire, Freelance Whales are ready to carefully deliver their soft folk into our lives – just so long as you can recall their instantly forgettable name.

Being signed to Frenchkiss will help, of course.The home of Local Natives and Passion Pit know when they’re on to a non-offensive good thing and the beautiful, twinkling melody of standout track ‘Hannah’ could just be the single to launch them. Sounding somewhere between Mumford & Sons and Death Cab for Cutie, the five-piece from Queens, New York, are a Secret Machines for the Gaga generation - technically proficient but easy to swallow.

While they’re not going to set the music world on fire (see the almost pointless one minute lullaby ‘Danse Flat’), ‘Weathervanes’ is a good stab at safe modern pop.

Black Mountain’s third record suits its title. ‘Wilderness Heart’ is a gutsy album with ambitious arrangements, epic instrumentation and huge choruses. Heavily indebted to 70s and early 80s rock’n‘roll, it’s full of Zeppelinstyle solos, Floyd-esque soaring harmonies and a wide-eyed lyrical sensibility straight out of the expansive plains of the band’s native Canada. Helmed by Dave Sardy, who’s become known for his ability to harness a band’s psychedelic tendencies and still produce an album that you don’t need a metric tonne of mindaltering substances to enjoy, only two tracks break the five-minute barrier, and there’s nothing approaching pretentious on show.

Especially not ‘Old Fangs’, which is a barnstormer complete with a wicked guitar solo. Not the most original record ever, but one with enough heart to make up for it.

The Hundred In The Hands (Warp)

By Nathan Westley. In stores Sept 19 One trouble often faced by bands hailing from the cultural epicentre that is New York is that there is a certain level of expectation instantly levelled on their shoulders the second they step out of the cities boundaries.The Hundred In The Hands’ may not be appearing on these shores with such a large fanfare, nor with the usual high level amount of hipster cache their neighbours may have previously, but instead arrive with an album of high class pop tunes that positively fizzles with youthful exuberance.

Generally upbeat in its eleven-song strut, it traverses a well defined line that pinches from Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ guitar-led post-punk, seventies disco and wistful eighties synth pop that’s then shaken into a colourful, fevering frothy mix that should rightfully propel this boy/ girl to heights seen by the most deserved New Yorkers.

07/10

06/10

07/10

Interpol Interpol (Soft Limit)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Sept 13

06/10

Interpol are now a long, long way from the ‘Joy Division copyists’ tag which dogged them around the release of their 2002 debut, and three years have passed since 2007’s superb ‘Our Love To Admire’. It’s been a long absence from a band with a towering reputation, and one that’s seen them lose the enigmatic Carlos D. After the opening thrill of recognition, though, ‘Interpol’ begins to feel a little samey.The production, as ever, is slick yet icy cold, like a contract killer in a sharp suit, and on ‘Summer Well’ Paul Banks’ vocals, always detached, seem almost physically separate from the music – sung from a distant place, or the top of a tall building.The problem here is that amidst the dry ice and echoing guitars, there’s no standout track.

Devotees will still love the chilled, clinical atmosphere of these songs, but those hoping for an expansion or diversion in the classic Interpol sound will be left disappointed.This record gives the impression of a band whose well of inspiration is almost dry. www.loudandquiet.com

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08/10

02/10

08/10

07/10

Rose Elinor Dougall

Dead Confederate

Chief

Pacific!

The Tamborines

Why Without

Sugar

Modern Rituals

Narcisuss

Camera & Tremor

(Scarlett Music)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores Aug 30

(Kartel)

By Polly Rappaport. In stores Aug 23

(Domino)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Sept 29

(Vulture)

By Edgar Smith. In stores now

(Beet-Mo)

By Sam Little. In stores now

It seems like forever since The Pipettes made indie boys go all boogy-woogy in their Topman drainpipes, so it’s somewhat surprising to see that founding member and now solo singer Rose Elinor Dougall is still only 24. On the evidence of her debut album she has used the two years since leaving the band to remove herself as far as possible from her old band’s ridiculously catchy, 60s girl group sound and carve out a new songwriter-pop persona.The vocal’s still icily smooth, but the tone of the tracks are somewhat more sombre - no ‘One Night Stand’ on this record. Instead, there is talk of a bottle “being empty once again”, drum brushes, string sections, the odd lovely bit of twee (‘May Holiday’) and some aimless crooning (‘Watching’) but nothing that really matches the succinct brilliance of The Pipettes’ finest moments.

Dead Confederate’s debut was a raw, raging grunger of a record, riddled with dark psychedelic anger and Grohl-worthy kit smashing.The angry conviction of the music was compelling but the album itself was coming loose at the seams. ‘Sugar’ is a far more subtle, multifaceted take on the band’s brand of psych-grunge – the smouldering reflection after the tantrum.The disquiet and furious drive of its predecessor is more focused, sometimes just simmering under the surface, as on eerily nonchalant track ‘Run From The Gun’, but often manifesting in the crunchy, guttural guitar wails hurled across the album’s length.

The real triumph here is the new found sense of dynamics, akin to ‘Mellon Collie’ era Pumpkins, which is most prominent on the enthrallingly slow-burn title track and sinister closer ‘Shocked to Realize’. Mesmerising stuff.

Anything I have ever read about this band mentions Neil Young in some capacity.Well, Neil Young once said after the success of his only number one song, ‘Heart of Gold’, “This song put me in the middle of the road.Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”

If ‘Harvest’-era Young is middle of the road, then I don’t know what this is and I certainly have no idea why people are even muttering its name within any proximity to Neil Young’s. Mediocrity cannot even sum this up – it is so putridly meandering and insipid that on occasions it turns the stomach. It is a genuine slog to listen to this album; the songs are weak, flaccid and lifeless drabs of half-arsed Americana. If someone played me this and told me Domino were releasing it I would think it was a joke. Sadly it’s not.

‘Narcissus’ is a prog-y, euro-disco/ synth-pop concept album based on the Narcissus and Echo myth from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. Now, before you say ‘that sounds like the worst thing ever’, Pacific!’s sophomore album is, in fact, pretty fantastic. Originally conceived as a ballet for Gothenburg’s dance studio Atalante (one which will be running from October for anyone with a lot of spare cash, a penchant for flying and a habit of totally trusting magazines), it’s a monumental and strange endeavour, drawing on the sounds of Pink Floyd, OMD, Daft Punk and Berlin Bowie to create a beautifully taut and well made piece of art - just check out the ever-expansive, spacey title track.

Granted, this record’s not for everyone but in a world where everyone was stoned and in love all the time, it would make number one.

Last year The Horrors claimed that they’d made an exhilarating summer album that encapsulated the feeling of running down a hill.

‘Camera & Tremor’ is this year’s equivalent, of sorts. Its dreamy shoe-gaze is less marred by gloom than the Southend punks’ ‘Primary Colours’, but there’s a lot of similar influences here, including the Velvets and a healthy smothering of The Jesus & Mary Chain. After an OK start of BRMC-ish, motorific cool, the band’s debut really gets going around ‘Falling Slowly’, which has the whole hillrunning thing going on, but the legs of those that stampede under an acid washed sky belong to the cast of The Breakfast Club. Its nostalgic innocence makes it an album highlight, as is ‘Sally O’Gannon’, for its baggy psyche whine that could have been Ride’s best song. For fans of no-nonsense, up-beat shoegaze, it’s hard to beat.

Klaxons Surfing The Void (Polydor)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Aug 23

05/10

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www.loudandquiet.com

Klaxons’ debut album was, if nothing else, a triumph of oddities that made them far more exciting than New Rave-deniers would have ever admitted, filled with audacious tricks like a “DJ” sample from a standard Yamaha keyboard.The drums expertly tumbled about the place and the themes were cosmic, because, well, why not? It was a mess, alright, but a brilliant mess.

‘Surfing The Void’ isn’t that much tidier, which is a good job, because the ‘Horseman...’-esque nuttiness of the title track and new sonic screech of ‘Flashover’ are what give this record its rare glimmers of excitement that resemble those first felt when hearing this band.

That and ‘Echoes’, which is the only straight-up pop song here, and the band’s second best track yet. But while Klaxons are still singing about other worlds and astro-stuff, sloppily to remind us that music is fun, the only oddity here is ‘The Same Spaces’, which sounds like Hard-Fi, and the fact that Klaxons have managed to make a largely average sounding album.

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Live

2010 Festival Special

01

02

Øya festival

▼

Oslo, Norway 10-14/08/10

By Edgar Smith Pics: Jan Erik Svendsen

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www.loudandquiet.com

Open the front door and you’re likely to encounter a universe bursting at the seams with all manner of shit music, shit films, pointless suffering, horrible people, and a number of regrets so large it means nothing.To get-over these hiccups, people travel and go to music festivals.While there are a skip-load of moral tales about how ‘leaving won’t solve your problems’, and while going to Reading this year will definitely only up your count of shit music and regrets, it seems on the evidence of this weekend that sometimes escape works. Øya festival is low on wacky fringe details, rape, and burning people alive when the sun goes down (the staples of UK fests) and instead keeps things strictly simple: an astounding line up playing on stages that sound impeccable. A mix of oddball indie acts, big names, and local gems, it was so good that you could miss someone with the calibre of Panda Bear, Motorpsycho or Raekwon and barely notice.

The torrential downpour of the first day gave way at about six to coincide, serendipitously, with Sleepy Sun.The San Franciscans would embody 21st Century

freakiness if Wooden Shjips hadn’t just pipped them to it, and their jowly bassist looks gloriously stoned and contented – few people in rock’n’roll can pull off a double chin so well.

From their stoner psych-pop and acid folkinflected jams, sustained with beautiful girl/boy vocals and far-out tribal drumming, it’s then off to their garage ancestors Iggy and The Stooges on the main stage. Presumably to make use of re-found ‘Funhouse’ saxophonist Steve Mackay, they play mainly from ‘Raw Power’ (with added sax parts) and ‘Funhouse’, dropping in a few of the (much) weaker songs from 2007’s ‘The Weirdness’ and ending on their debut’s centrepiece, ‘No Fun’. Halfway through, Iggy introduces his “Famous Norwegian backing dancers” in an old-time, American Big Band announcer voice. “Even with all the oil money,” he continues “there are still some evil little shits who wanna come dance on stage with The Stooges.” Seemingly an unstoppable, freewheeling Overhuman, backstage he pants and hobbles his way into a waiting minibus; a reminder that, if you haven’t already, you should see this brilliant, monstrous creature and

outright living legend before he calls it a day.

From the most rammed show that we catch, to the least; King Midas Sound, playing the Klubben tent on the last day were surprisingly bereft of the skanking followers you’d expect.

The superlative avant-garde dub types experience some laptop demons on stage and although Kevin Martin (aka.The Bug) seems peeved by them, they actually give the affair a lo fi charm and affirmed ‘it’s live’ nature, reliant on real-time talent and skill. Kiki Hitomi and Roger Robinson’s vocals float above her additional electronics and his wildly bowed Fender to create a whirling, stratospheric headfuck.You get the impression that the more leftfield side of bass music – here manifested as noise-laden, mutant future-dub – hasn’t quite caught-on here, yet; indeed, on the continent.

“No one has any fucking clue who we are,” Martin told me later.

Drift a few 2-steps towards the middle-ofthe-road though and Oslo’s youth will go apeshit, as evinced by M.I.A. and Major Lazer’s soundsystem onslaughts.The former headlined the first night (we say Stooges were robbed, but

01 M.I.A. 02 LCD Soundsystem 03 Øya’s main stage 04 Pavement 05 Major Lazers 06 Iggy & The Stooges

Local Talent The best three Norwegian bands at Øya introduce themselves Altaar

03

L&Q: How’d you describe your sound?

“The easiest way to describe it is doom metal meets contemporary noise. We call it Mersey-Doom, (haha!) as Andreas is a big fan of Merseybeat. The idea was to do a band without boundaries, which sounds banal but if there aren’t any at the beginning you can do pretty much whatever you want.”

How can such a comfortable, well-off country spawn such thrilling music?

“It’s boring to say it in interviews but it’s hellish from November till April, it’s a rotten place.

Scandinavia’s pretty intense, Oslo got rated as the drug-addict capital of Europe recently Heroin’s cheaper here than in Kabul.”

04

Tôg

05

06

still) and though she has the tendency to come across as a disingenuous drama-school type, barking ineloquently about problems that she sees with radical simplicity in interviews, you’d be a bit of a spoilsport purist to deny that this corporate dancehall didn’t rock with at least the spirit of its influences. Major Lazer are more authentic-sounding and yet simultaneously more deviant and progressive and, as such, their party rocked harder – something wasn’t plugged in for the first two or three tunes resulting in an unintentionally huge drop. It’s enthusiastically compèred by Skerrit Bwoy – a man that can still bounce about and verbally crowd-pummel after an onstage vodka and cognac binge – and Diplo drops some old school digital dancehall, a smattering of album tracks and Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’ with unparalleled deftness.While he showed how DJing-as-live-set should be done, dwarfing the efforts of whoever was on decks for Big Boi, the latter’s set was nonetheless a goodtimes selection of oldies that, although not giving us much insight into his new album, did rock the place with crowd favourites from the awesome ‘Stankonia’.

Falling somewhere in between the festival’s penchant for credible big-hitters in urban music and its idolising of timeless guitar heroes (if you opened this page to bask in the light of Pavement, hang-on just a second) were The xx - mercury favourites and closers of the second stage on the last night.Theirs is a subtle pop music; one that has to be taken gently and not really scrutinised too harshly or compared to its forbears (it wont stand up to them).Watched from side of stage though, with the last of the dusk light and fireworks splayed over skyscrapers in the background, they really are quite good, their set sounding typically contemporary and delicately calibrated; the drum machines operated with the softest of finger taps on trigger pads.

Much as I’d like to drop-in more than a mention of the Flaming Lips’ elaborate day-glo adventure, Diskjokke’s trippy outing with a Gamelan ensemble and Cymbals Eat Guitars’ well-crafted indie rock, there ought to be a little space dedicated to what people were calling the ‘Golden Triangle’ on the second night; LCD Soundsystem, followed by Yeasayer (2nd

Stage), before main stage headliners Pavement.

Our generation’s Talking Heads start with ‘US vs.Them’ and, though it’s sad they don’t then play ‘New York, I Love You…’ or ‘Losing My Edge’, they sound simultaneously bigger, more danceable, experimental and violent than on record.Yeasayer are slamming and Pavement almost defy explanation.They play only their very best songs (so mainly from ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’) with a consciously retrospective timbre (“Hey, we’re Pavement and we’re from the ‘90s”). Malkmus, along with a select few alterno stars, has played guitar for so long that he will always look like a teenager. Cue effortless cool and an incredible creative flare; ‘Stop Breathing’ had people crying and encore ‘Cut Your Hair’ - well, I’m sure you can imagine.

I’ll avoid any half-arsed, patronising analysis of the way Norwegian culture breaks-away or converges with ours in trying to explain why Øya was such fun. Rather I’ll offer the theory that when you get this many good bands together in one place, the overwhelming weight of rubbish in the world just melts away.

L&Q: Can you pick-out the roots of your sound for us?

“I guess it’s the local music scenes. Back in Stavanger, bands like Kaizers Orchestra and Helldorado showed me desertrock and gypsy music. Also, I really enjoy Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores, along with listening to requiems, black metal and Radiohead in high school. The house/electro references probably came from the influence that French and Swedish house have had on Norway in the past years.”

Does Oslo have a healthy music scene?

“Yes, and it has everything to do with money. We get loads of grants, free rehearsal spaces, and can afford instruments off of our parents’ money.”

M egap h o n i c Th r i f t L&Q: Everyone says you sound like Sonic Youth.

“There is a link, there’s no doubt about that and we love Sonic Youth, but the fact that everyone compares us to them takes away focus from what we’re trying to do… it’s Jazzmasters and Jaguars with noisy sounds, you know.”

You’re form Bergen, how’s that city compare to Oslo?

“Better, haha! Bergen’s scene is more compressed, everyone knows everyone and plays together. We know lots of nice bands from Oslo, but the Bergen scene is really good.”

www.loudandquiet.com

43

Live

The1234Shoreditch

Y Not

Shoreditch Park, London 24/07/10

By Danny Canter

Pikehall Farm, Matlock 30/07/10 - 02/08/10

By Kate Parkin

▼

▼

In 2009,The1234Shoreditch was plagued by eight years of rainfall in five hours. Or at least that’s how it seemed at the (wet) time. A year on, it’s not just the weather that’s largely improved – the lineup also shames what’s been before, with Fucked Up sitting atop a bill previously crowned with The Rakes.

Below Canada’s hardcore royalty are Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls,These New Puritans and Comanechi, but two extra large crowds amass for two extra large bands, separated by various oddities and levels of ridiculousness.

Peter Hook presenting the whole of ‘Unknown Pleasures’ without a hand from anyone else involved with the seminal record’s creation was, let’s face it, never likely to be great, but as the bassist warbles through Joy Division’s and post-punk’s greatest work, sometimes imitating Ian Curtis’ baritone croak but mostly giving it a Vic Reeves club singer spin, most soon trade the red-faced novelty for Flats in the Rough Trade Shops tent. In Hooky’s defence, as clearly misjudged as his performance is – and regardless of his motives – he couldn’t have performed in front of a more difficult audience.The 1234 folk not only know ‘Unknown Pleasures’ like the back of their Ray Bans but, quite rightly, adore every second of it. And even if they didn’t, there’s a definite sense of the unimpressed hanging around Shoreditch Park – Wavves getting mumbles of “fuck off ” between songs, for no real reason; Fucked Up receiving a reception far more muted than their ferociously belched set deserves.

The Silver Machine (a super group covers band featuring Bobbie Gillespie, Glen Matlock and Zak Starkey) are therefore the clear hit of the day, holding the impressive crowd they pull with renditions of Troggs, Creation and MC5 songs that have Gillespie characteristically snaking about in a black cowboy shirt and Matlock resting a boot on his monitor.They’re good, and so too is The1234Shoreditch, at heart and in style.

Starting out 4 years ago as a ramshackle gathering of mates in a quarry,Y Not now plays host to 4,000 people sprawled over the Peak District Hills. Placing host to bigger acts alongside local talent, it attracts a dedicated band of followers who willingly braved last year’s sold out mud bath.This year we return to blue(-ish) skies and the same relaxed welcome. Psychedelic folksters Goldheart Assembly the first palpable hit, as they lay down hooky swooning harmonies in their science teacher jumpers, inciting swelling murmurs of approval from the crowd.This years action focuses, though, on the small tent where The Brute Chorus’ infectious brand of hip-thrusting, fingersnapping rock’n’roll gets the blood pumping.

The fractured tribal beats of Crystal Fighters then whip the crowd into a bouncing frenzy.

Striding around stage to the animalistic roar of ‘I Love London’, singer Laure looms, shrouded in a cloak like a dance-floor shaman, rallies his Catalunyan mob.The tent is rammed to bursting when Darwin Deez breaks out into a hysterical, loose-limbed body-popping routine, dreamy pop song ‘Constellations’ firmly plastering grins on faces as arms wheel aeroplane-like to ‘Radar Detector’. It’s some of the best fun to be found all weekend while Turin Brakes (remember them?) surprisingly offer a sublime ending to day two, the shimmering guitars of ‘Oblivion’ still lifting hairs on the back of the neck ten years on.

Finally the sun breaks through and while some shuffle off to snooze in the hay, there’s still time for one last party, and Imperial Leisure know how to deliver. Dousing the crowd in champagne to an infectious clash of brass and drums, tunes like ‘The Beast’ are the make us move even if our bodies don’t want to.

Steering clear of the temptation to become a corporate cash cow,Y Not still feels like the same gang of mates, but bigger and messier.

Pics: Greg Holland / Chris Seddon / Ben Eagle

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Melt!

Ferropolis, Germany 16th – 18th July

By Reef Younis ▼

From glazed-eyed kids running rampant with Nutella covered ball bags, to the searing 38 degree heat, this year’s Melt! was three days of unexpected extremes.

A festival of contrasts – from its resident earthmovers mordantly rearing over the skyline to the starlit skies and rolling farmland of rural Germany – it always feels like an invasion as revellers wholeheartedly indulge in an endless wave of selfdestruction before taking the care to tidy and bag their trail of dead before they leave.

Under the Megatrons’ industrial presence, Melt’s wild eclecticism really comes to the fore with producers like Four Tet, Pantha Du Prince and Chris Cunningham sidling alongside the rambunctious party sets of A-Trak, Riton and Tiga, the strobed atmospherics of Massive Attack, and the swirling stoner rock of Black Mountain.

Friday begins innocently and amiably enough with Two Door Cinema Club easing us into a ten hour session before Pantha Du Prince takes the easy atmosphere to heart with a wasteful 15-minute intro that does little but frustrate.Thankfully there are no such languorous subtleties with Archie Bronson Outfit who play it hard and straight, defying the fading evening heat in heavy woollen ponchos. At the Desperado Beach stage, with a lake view and toes curling in beer-swilled sand, Jamie XX drops the BPM in line with the temperature with a cool, minimal set before Black Rose pick up the pace with two hours of pumped, perky house to really kick-start the festivities.

But with lightning cracking over the lake, Kieran Hebden supplements the angry

thunderclaps with a spectral set of space exploration and silhouettes, steering us into an introspective oblivion of deep, twinkling electronica. Back on concrete, the all new Kele Okereke mixes the sensitive with a few kickboxing skills before Foals confirm their status as a band worthy of main stage billing with a set of taut, yapping energy.

Somewhat less intensive, Saturday begins with The Big Pink gloriously booming out of the intro tent. Indulgent, grandiose and all encompassing, it’s a set almost usurped by The Futureheads undiminished zeal, leathertight rhythms and direct reminder that after their label wrangling, they’re as decisive and dogged as ever.

Meanwhile, Chris Cunningham does his utmost to send us skulking tent-wards with otherworldly nightmares and an aversion to sudden movement before Chromeo and ATrak share some reciprocate brotherly appreciation, and invite us to party down with effortless Miami disco, sliding funk and basement bass lines that welcome Tiga’s seamless selection and a murky grey dawn.

Bruised, broken and subsisting on Jagermeister alone, we stumble into an easy Sunday morning and a bite-size Sunday evening. Riton and Fake Blood show little consideration for tired minds and limbs, picking up from the triple threat of the night before, and battering what’s left of the wreckage with ravaging electro that gets leaden feet moving on impulse and adrenaline alone.

Humanely, festival headliners, Massive Attack slow everything to a heartbeat, the crowds funnelling to the main stage to watch a decelerated master-class of ambient trip hop, and as a stripped down ‘Teardrop’ lingers, and the smoke swirls, the strobes beam and bounce off Melt!’s giant metallic residents, silently passing judgement, 20,000 intruders appreciatively howl theirs one last time.

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Wild Nothing The Harley, Sheffield 23.07.2010

By Daniel Dylan Wray ▼

Radfest

Lovebox

Corsica Studios, Elephant & Catle, London 08/08/10

By Stuart Stubbs

Victoria Park, Mile End, London 16-18/07/10

By Edgar Smith

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All-dayers, by their very nature, are rad.

They’re a chance to drink, BBQ, flash tats and wear caps while seeing a whole bunch of DIY bands in one or two rooms with minimal effort. Outdoor festivals involve a lot of walking; all-dayers can be conquered on knees if required. And Radfest – hosted by massive garage fans Sexbeat – is the king dude of this relatively new phenomenon in the world of UK DIY. Last year’s venue of choice was The Victoria in Mile End – our favourite gothic boozer, festooned with the heads of stuffed beasts. Corsica Studios is somewhere near a hundred times more sinister. Most things are in Elephant and Castle. But in the window-less warehouse venue’s dark corners, dappled with various swirling projections, Radfest lives up to its name over ten hours on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

What we repeatedly learn today is that slackers aren’t so slack – they can and do improve. Dam Mantle once blurred the line between genius and madman, with electronic glitch-craft that was original but also plain bonkers. Now, as he throbs even if the crowd don’t, he’s twisted his 2-step into something listenable and touching, even.

Cerebral Ballzy have mellowed too… kinda.

Six days ago we saw them play harder and faster than Minor Threat at double speed – this afternoon, their skater hardcore still whines and thrashes but boasts a few melodies too that make them more accessible than they’d probably like to admit.

Trash Talk are Radfest’s non-movers – as doomy and dangerous as ever, all somersaults into the mosh pit – while the end of Graffiti Island’s hiatus sees them return as a fourpiece, playing a weightier brand of surf garage that improves tracks like the already brilliant ‘Head Hunters’ to no end, and Bo Ningen keep the indulgence just the right side of cosmically impressive.

Hold Radfest in Henry Rollins’ arse next year and we’ll still be there.

Love hasn’t been cool since before I was born, so it’s a curious choice of title for a festival that so obviously has its eyes on the disposable income of cool, young whoevers.

The adjunct ‘box’ is stranger still, but we’re dealing here with the brainchild of Groove Armada, with whom it’s better not to ask questions but to just ‘chill’ etc. Over the last few years though, this shindig has grown from its dance roots into a versatile three-day mammoth, aimed at those Capital punters too lazy for anything outside of the M25.

This seemed to give the weekend a takeit-or-leave it vibe and in spite of efforts to broaden its musical palette, it’s on familiar beats-based turf that Lovebox performs best.

The line up might’ve screamed ‘adroit-mixof-classics-and-newbies’ and given us one awesome Bryan Ferry-shaped, exclusive centrepiece, but the live acts tended to disappoint. Ellie Goulding is (surprise) the worst. By miles. ‘We’re under the sheets and you’re killing me,’ goes the chorus to one of her knock-off Eurhythmics songs.Whoever she’s singing about, you’d have to sympathise with them. Mystery Jets are equally nauseating, Roxy Music (minus Eno) and Dizzee Rascal (minus integrity) are good but not great and I sadly slept through Grace Jones but I’m told she was, as usual, very good.The highlight (actual surprise this time) is The Noisettes – a band criminally under-appreciated by virtue of one very over-played number one.They eloquently knock-out that creepy-as-fuck ‘Pure Imagination’ song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and a gifted cover of ‘Ever Fallen in Love?’.Their brand of new wave soul is also paired with some neat, pre-war stage décor that has all the music critics in the crowd humming ‘hm, poppy and credible’ to their patient friends. And, fittingly, it’s hard to find a vision of love more cool and contemporary than thousands of people singing ‘I’ll never forget you’ with absolutely no one in particular in mind.

This is Wild Nothing’s first ever UK show and it is a peculiar experience. Oozing The Cure from every seeping orifice, they somehow manage to amalgamate the best parts of the band’s early, disjointed and angular post-punk with the synth-drenched pop beauties that came in the later days.

Tonight, things are far more guitar driven than the blissful and delicate sounds emitted on record, though, and their record-to-live transition is comparable to that of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: sweet and luscious on your stereo yet surprisingly boisterous and noisy on stage, essentially capturing both ends of the spectrum in one fell swoop.There is a nervous energy that flows from the band, as they are still in such an early incarnation (so much so that we may as well be watching them in their garage practicing), which subsequently adds an alluring and endearing quality to their set.You just know that every little mistake would mean the world. And as they fuck up their encore quite magnificently, the fact they even have an encore to play at their first ever UK show says it all really. A fragmented but warming glimpse at what Wild Nothing are capable of.

brontide The Albert, Brighton 02.08.2010

By Nathan Westley ▼

When the word ‘instrumental’ is used in conjunction with describing a band’s sound, both ‘post’ and ‘rock’ usually have a tendency to follow not too far behind (not rarely followed by an eye-roll or two). But tonight, in a narrow upstairs pub room, the intricately minded trio of Brontide prove that these two, four letter words do not always need to appear. Never ones to settle for the obvious, they instead thrust themselves away from the simple idea that it is best to batter the audience with stereotypical quiet/ loud/even louder dynamics and instead rejoice in presenting a

more complex game-plan that cherishes having an overriding melodic sense and a toughened, deeply valued spine. Bounding headfirst into a frenzied, strong willed and equally hard fought performance, it swings to being a danceable hard-hitting version of Math rock that’s rich in overly complicated rhythmic riffs and shifting time signatures, at times so complicated that it’s as if the trio have each swallowed a copy of a PHD level algorithmic textbook, digested the mind-melting formulas contained within its pages and developed a habit of regurgitating them back in a highly consumable musical form that’s easy to comprehend. People should want to get acquainted with this band. Not unlike Battles, they make clever easy.

El Guincho The Lexington, Angel, London 06.08.2010

By Sam Walton ▼

El Guincho’s club-friendly brand of exotica – steel drums, high-life guitars, tropicalia rhythms – is so sampledelic that attempting a “live” incarnation could be either futile or very expensive. Indeed, as tonight’s support act Chad Valley so ably proves, stabbing at a keyboard while singing over a backing track does not a captivating live show make. So it’s a pleasant surprise that El Guincho (Pablo Diaz-Reixa to his mum) has extra musicians in tow and that his set, while continuously locked into a computerised click, maintains the flexibility and looseness of the Latin funk and afrobeat to which his records pay homage. Despite the added bassist and guitarist, though, the band is as static as its music is frantic, which remains disconcerting even after Diaz-Reixa requests to have the stage lights extinguished (“we need a Spanish dance party vibe!” he insists). His music is impressively unique in calling to mind any number of genres and acts (not least tonight Animal Collective and Manu Chao), while simultaneously sounding nothing like any of them.

Unfortunately this illusion of alchemy is somewhat pricked by his total lack of stagecraft – but watch an El Guincho show with eyes closed and the magic lives on.

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Cinema review

film

By IAN ROEBUCK

Gainsbourg Starring: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta Doug Jones Director: Joann Sfar

8/10

Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Cinema Preview It’s still hip to be square, especially on the big screen…

-----Sixteen years after Robert Carradine faced up to the frat boys in Revenge of the Nerds it seems the film’s title has finally come to fruition. Ladies love Daniel Radcliffe, the world worships JJ Abrams and everybody wants a job from Steve Jobs, so, bar bad music taste, questionable narrative skill and ludicrous clothing, the geeks are getting away with it. Look no further than Comic Con 2010 where the clamour for fan boy affirmation hit a frenzied high, Angelina Jolie’s appearance confirming that geek is indeed cash, sorry…chic.

The trend doesn’t look like subsiding as two films that make Broderick’s War Games look like Laugier’s Martyrs come crashing our way. First up Scott Pilgrim vs.

The World, a comic book adaptation of hyper-real proportions, imaginatively directed by Edgar Wright and expertly played by Michael Cera in what’s surely a tailor made role for his flannel-faced brilliance. It’s a simple premise, Scott Pilgrim must defeat his new girlfriend’s seven evil exes to win her heart and the film has every ingredient to kick Kick Ass’s ass. From an 8-bit style Universal logo, to Kieran Culkin (and Jason Schwartzman), to a jaw dropping Seinfeld homage, it’s swimming in sumptuous detail.The soundtrack alone

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is enough to wet the spider-man sheets with Nigel Godrich supplying the score, Broken Social Scene chipping in and a politely penned letter from Edgar Wright to Nintendo resulting in the Zelda theme as a gift. Even the tag line oozes promise, ‘an epic of epic epicness’.

The brains behind this are the folk at Big Talk Productions, and the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost led company also responsible for Paul, another movie destined for nerd cloud nine. Still in production, Paul is a Pegg and Frost-starring comedy about two sci-fi nuts embarking on a pilgrimage to Area 51. It’s on this journey they encounter a fugitive alien inevitably called Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen). Early production buzz suggests this is the vehicle that will finally see the duo’s inner geek unleashed to full stretch, delivering on the promise of Spaced and their subsequent smashes Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

This time around though, they’re without Edgar Wright. Stepping into his customised Converse is Gregg Mottola, the man behind Superbad and the saccharine but underrated Adventureland. Like Scott Pilgrim, Mottola has an embarrassment of riches on set, Jason Bateman pops up (Arrested Development again, Jeffrey Tambour makes an appearance too) and Sigourney Weaver also shows her face. Ellen Ripley jokes aplenty then.

Brave, stubborn and unapologetic, Serge Gainsbourg revelled in his divisive status as a French icon, and he’d have loved this prickly biopic, which colours his character with both charm and venom in equal measures. Boldly directed by Joann Sfar, more commonly known for new-wave Franco-Belgian comics, this could well be the most striking debut of the year. Full of brash strokes, imaginative set pieces and daring scripting, Gainsbourg doesn’t pull any punches.

Sprawling and episodic we follow Gainsbourg through his childhood fantasies (persecuted for his Judaism, he escapes through playfulness) to full blown fantasies (getting his mitts on Bridgette Bardot, much to his fathers astonishment). It’s this character development that startles, the film changing tone from enchanting innocence reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are to eccentric abandon, recalling the recent Bob Dylan fest, I’m Not There. A fantastical journey, Sfar takes us from boy to man introducing Gainsbourg’s alter ego La Gueule to illustrate his corrupt personality and mischievous nature – a grotesque puppet played handsomely by Doug Jones who should be used to dressing up by now having been the Pale Man in Pans Labyrinth. La Gueule coaxes Gainsbourg from his insecurities confirming the singer’s Casanova status and catapulting his schnozzle to superstardom.

If you’re going to record ‘Je t’aime…Moi Non Plus’, arguably the sexiest song ever written, then you’re going to get a lot of action and Gainsbourg gets it in droves.

It’s the women around him that shape Gainsbourg. None more so than Jane Birkin or ‘little Miss England’, whom the Frenchman settles and finds some kind of peace with. As Birkin, Lucy Gordon steals every scene and her untimely death soon after the film’s release tempers the production in sadness, its already melancholic tone amplified by her suicide. Sfar and Gordon dazzle but its Eric Elmosnino as Gainsbourg himself who shines the brightest, a thrilling performance that encapsulates the singer’s charismatic je ne sais quoi.

I AM V 5 YEARS OF LOUD AND QUIET MAGAZINE

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party wolf Photo Casebook “Party on Robbie: Pt 7”

It doesn’t have to be like this, Gary!

You can just let me re-join the group and we can go get a Wagamamas

You’d love that, wouldn’t you? For me to put all the weight back on!

Well, fuck you Robbie!

MEMOIRS Beep beep. It was another text from Becks. ‘I dun badness again’.To be honest, I was starting to get sick of my new admirer. He was a serial texter and I seemed to be the only number stored in his phone. I was getting de ja vu. I’d spent years wiping the arse of my co-star, Mat, and now it looked like I’d be doing the same for a national treasure.

Mat. I hadn’t thought about him for some time. I wondered how his band was going. Shit, probably. He always wanted to be a cool pop star, like Boy George or Darius, but who was he kidding!? Not me, that’s for sure - I was too busy being the toast of the town and signing breasts... sometimes of women. “Know when you’re onto a good thing!” I’d warned him. “Just keep hanging on to my coat-tales.” But he didn’t listen.

He’d made up his mind that he wanted to step out of my enormous shadow. After being replaced by Alfonso from Big Brother 12 on Hole In The Wall, I thought he’d be back. But then I thought a lot of things. I thought I was getting a whole monkey for opening this Jumping Jacks night club. I wasn’t.

Beep beep. It was Becks. ‘I dun badness again’.

Fine, have it your way, big man

I DID IT! I BEAT BULLY BARLOW! I’M BACK IN TAKE THAT!!!

Lonely hearts “It’s not weird, it’s a sexy Facebook”

GoOutWith MyFriend.com Peter

Area: Children: Diet: Employment:

Fin!

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“

Wayne has this to say about Peter: Peter is the best. He does a dance when he scores the goals. He looks like a robot.

He is very tall. Taller than a house. He is thin like a twig. I likes twiglets. We play football together for England. He looks like a robot. Peter is rich and has a 42 inch leg.

He showed me how to use the computer.

He is a good teacher. Hang on, he’s telling me what to write. He says that it would be good if you have big boobs. If you have big boobs call him to go out. He is richer than you can ever imagine. He does have an ex girlfriend but she’s a scab. He says, you’d have cheated on her soon enough too!

Peter responded by saying: Nice one Wayne. Like the bit about the robot. Think that’s important :-)

“ “

“

Tottenham Nope Robotic dancing Kicking the balls

Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious.

29, looking for birds