No Hands Zine #1

NO HANDS ISSUE ONE

fanzine BRADFORD

NO PANTS? I LLU STR ATI O N: J O B I LLI N G LS E Y W W W.U P F LU N G.C O.U K

M U S I C W O R D S L O C A L C U LT U R E THINGS OF INTEREST

NO HANDS No Manifesto

NO

Hands is a good night out, or that is what we want it to be, and it is also a good read.

You've got your eager mitts on the first copy of The No Hands Fanzine and we hope you enjoy reading it.

a table and talk about putting on gigs and that might happen and sometimes we talk about making t-shirts and badges and that might happen too. We might even go a second fanzine if you like reading this one, and we like making it.

Because that is what No Hands is about, or what we want it to be about, enjoying a fanzine, enjoying a night out with your mates, enjoying a dance and somewhere to go in Bradford. That is what we get out of it, that is what we want you to get out of it.

So enjoy this 'zine and the night you picked it up at and if you have an idea for something to do in Bradford and are looking for some help getting it going then come talk to us and we will help out.

We don't really have a manifesto at No Hands, no one takes any money out of it, we just want to have a good time with some good people and make this corner of West Yorkshire a little bit better.

And we don't really know what we want to do with it. Sometimes we sit around

Looking at a photograph of Allen: stood, back arched, a couple of years before a vicious malignancy ate his liver, his peaceful, political eyes staring back at mine, beard full of obscene and beautiful letters and dreams of Neil still hidden up his sleeves.

On the wall behind him a picture-framed Whitman with mad beard himself, watchful, expressionless face lined with history, and Allen’s hands clasped, entwined plum fingers, dark-veined and blotchy, aged from a life so full of life.

Three sharp-tongued pens protrude from shirt-pockets always poised to slam ‘Nam, Nixon, napalm, Nagasaki, or love Naomi, Louis, Eugene, Jack.

And Peter, his last, enduring love.

John Joseph Holmes

Now his room is bare save Walt on the wall and with good grace he waits for something, death perhaps - his final trip, or Greyhound to Naropa humming ahs and oms holy as Buddha.

And Allen, the Earthly Allen, gone now to meet Naomi once more, her sanity restored as his mad poems still resound from North Beach to East Tenth Street Bowery, Brooklyn, Columbus, Castro, West Coast void and vortex, howling howling howling always and always howling.

corner

Elegy for Allen Ginsberg

poet’s

PlaysPOP LEON

As No Hands resident 37 year old PopKid, I thought it would be a nice way to kick off this first fanzine with a brief mention of my favourite stuff from the past year..

LEON’S TOP FIVE TRACKS OF 2010 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER CA S S O LET TE - N OT J U ST A N YO N E Hailing from Florida, Cassolette’s first release was Not Just Anyone on a split 3” single on Cloudberry Records, and is a slice of pure pop to warm the heart on a cold Bradford evening. One of only two songs currently available, I can’t wait to hear more.

B E ST C O A ST - C R A ZY F O R YO U The title track of their cracking first album, which combines 60s girl group vocals and fuzzy surf guitar, singing songs of love and devotion, and inspiring much the same feelings in the listener. Gorgeous.

TH E H I STO RY O F A P P LE P I E - YO U ’ R E S O C O O L

Honourable mentions must go to Rabbit Kids by Shrag, Catch Your Cold by Evans The Death, and Again

by Sad Day For Puppets. You can hear me play all these and more every month at No Hands, and remember kids, Indiepop ain’t noise pollution!

LC x

So new the paint is still wet, London’s The History of Apple Pie have the sweetest harmonies you’ll hear all year, and this song is so beautiful all you can do is sigh…….(sigh).

There debut tape release on Cool In A Crisis was split with the equally smashing Sweater Girls.

TH E B L A N C H E H U D S O N W E E K E N D - T H E L A S T R I D E Darren and Caroline formed The Blanche Hudson Weekend following the break up of The Manhattan Love Suicides and gave us 3 fantastic EPs last year. From The Letters To Daddy EP on Squirrel Records, The Last Ride is my fave of the lot.

A highlight of Indietracks for me, playing only their second gig together.

TH E PA I N S O F B E I N G P U R E AT H E A RT - S AY N O TO LO V E Another highlight of Indietracks. As the Pains get bigger, maybe 2010 will be the last year people will say “The Pains of what??” when I talk about them. One of two singles put out while they work on their second album, this one has all the uplifting jangle you need to get you through the day.

Play Loud!

TH AT B R A D F O R D TH I N G AND A LIFE OF

There was a night in Bradford where Frightened Rabbit and Twilight Sad played supported by a couple of Bradfordian acts. The smart pop antics of Le Tournoi were a blast of the highest order while Fourteencorners were a class apart mixing a kind of modern beat with razor sharp observational lyrics.

It was - to date - the biggest triumph of the Granadaland night at The Love Apple and in retrospect was its peak. Having had pretensions to build one previously Bradford had a genuine, bona fida music scene. I covered it for www.dalliance.co.uk, and loved it.

Now things have changed.

No more Sunday night's watching My First Tooth at Blank Generation, no more Delius gigs, Laura Groves had an album launch as Blue Roses in Leeds. That seemed to signal that something was over, although as the product of the scene one remains proud of that lass.

And so the Bradford gig goer travelled, to Leeds.

A life of wandering then with the sound of evenings finding random bands still ringing in the ears. Looking back the finest evenings of those years - only three or four years ago - were the random bands. Dinosaur Pile-Up wowed within three bars of their gig in Bradford, The Lodger went down a storm and those bands were kept close to heart having seen their evolution. It is more difficult to chance an evening on a gig of unknown bands when one has to trek to Leeds to do it.

Leeds station platform for the 23:22, the uneven car park of the Brudenell Social Club.

Harsh, unlovable place.

Driving over to Blackburn to see Goldheart Assembley at the very type of gig we used to get in Bradford seemed to highlight the point.

We were a wandering people now, the Bradford gig goer, and the effort of getting to venues would end up as being reserved only for the named act.

For them a trip to Leeds, and disappointment.

The Nation of Shopkeepers with so little done to transform it from office worker's pub to gig venue offer few good views but a decent Sunday

dinner. It is a Palace compared to the sticky floors and poor sightlines of The O2 Academy which seems to be a venue unique in having everywhere en route for somebody to the bathroom. The Met University is better and Faversham has some charms but these are forgotten as the result of another night in The Cockpit 2 with the stench of uncleaned toilets and stale sweat thick in the air.

And the people going to gigs Leeds, so rude.

Is there no empathy, no feeling of kinship, no understanding that when the band starts playing you should stop talking? All this wandering wears a man out and gigs become more a chore than they used to and are less impressive. At The Yeah Yeah Yeahs I give up and resign myself to being stuck behind basketball players who want to chunter between themselves. I recall The glory of The Duchess of York less than a mile away in the early 1990s. Back then everyone seemed to only enjoy themselves if everyone was enjoying themselves.

Further afield, to Manchester, to Newcastle.

Some gig require more travel and of course Arcade Fire were never going to play The Love Apple but Newcastle's Cluny offers Jens Lekman while Manchester gives us Okkervil River and there are times that one is left to wonder what might have been had the scene not spiralled away.

What growth would have been experienced had the young promoters been nurtured and supported and what the results of that growth might have been.

Thinking about this makes one wistful, makes one hope that the baton is taken up again.

MICHAEL WOOD W W W.D A LLI A N C E.C O.U K

BRADFORD MUSIC

ARCHIVE

By Leon Carroll

Travelling into town upstairs on the 614 from Wibsey with a lass called Becky, I noticed there were quite a few cool looking kids on there. They were talking about going to see The Wedding Present.

Thing is they said it was at the Queens Hall Cellar Bar, and that’s where we were going, only we were going to see The Sheepskin Children cos my mate from Morrisons, Chris Northrop, played keyboards. Turns out the shambolic Bradford indie boys (Chris had to crouch down with his keyboard on a bar stool for the lack of a proper stand) were supporting David Gedge and co in a 'secret' gig, but I wasn't quite cool enough to know how cool I was to be going to such a cool gig. Both bands were great in

their own way by the way. My only memory of the Sheepskin Children set though is their cover of 'Best Years of Our Lives' by Modern Romance. I was still only 16 and unfamiliar with The Wedding Present apart from bouncing around to ‘Kennedy’ on my first few visits to* Tumblers, but they played a brilliantly frantic, noisy, sweaty set to us and a load of Leeds fans who were jumping up and down chanting “Lets go fucking mental”.

At least that’s how I remember it, it’s a long time ago now. 3rd November 1990 in fact. Be nice to get one or both bands back on stage in Bradford, just over twenty years on. Bloody hell, twenty years!"

STRANGE BRADFORD

By Lauren Padgett

Lauren recommends the Bradford Industrial Museum Legend has it that a network of underground tunnels run beneath Bradford. One tale is that an X marked flagstone in the cold kitchen of Bolling Hall (Museum) leads to a tunnel running to Bradford Cathedral, allowing the owners of Bolling Hall a safe passage if ever under attack. To further add to the mystery, one rumour is that a sword was discovered underneath the X marked stone.

I was told that years ago, a couple of boys were allowed to explore the tunnel by a museum attendant (obviously before the country had gone health and safety mad) and they found themselves as St John’s Bolling Church half a mile away.

The legend of the underground network is also connected to the old pubs of

Bradford. A tale once told talks of a pub owner in the city centre running out of beer and asking a friend (another pub owner in the city centre) to bring some barrels over for him.

As he waited, he did some stocktaking in the cellar. After some time he started hearing a noise coming from underneath him. He then heard banging and saw his friend emerge from the ground demanding help lifting the barrels up that he had rolled from his pub through the tunnel. It was explained that his friend knew about the underground network and had been using it for years. The two of them once decided to explore the tunnels further but were cut off at certain points by large locked gates. These locked gates are controlled by one man, apparently the oldest man

in Bradford, who has the only set of keys for the gates. At one point, they followed one passageway and worked out that they were underneath the Midland Hotel, Forster Square.

Historical truth and evidence to support these claims is hard to find, and the legends and tales read like a plot to the bad film . . . or Ghostbusters with the ‘Gatekeeper’ and ‘Keymaster’.

However, there may be an element of truth in them as Bradford Beck runs underground in a series of channels and tunnels beneath the city centre (and has done since the mid-19th century) and the forgotten railway lines of Bradford have left behind abandoned tunnels to be explored by a brave few.

FILM

These Films Are Linked #1: The Social Network

By Michael Wood The Social Network might end up with a second set of Oscars for director David Fincher as he somehow makes the legal squabbles and coding of lines and lines of PhP that was the start of Facebook into a fascinating and effective story of the corruption of a young man.

Fincher's take on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sees him selling his soul piece by piece seeing our the flawed nerd allowing acceptability and friends to fall by the wayside as he amasses an Empire to cocoon himself.

Chasing a success which seems as much based on revenge as anything else the young Harvard man is a Henry Hill for a modern generation and like Ray Liotta's gangster in Martin Scorsese's 1990 classic Goodfellas Zuckerberg is left at the end of the movie that for all his triumphs and the respect he has earned he will never be able to live the life of "an ordinary snook."

Fincher's film gives us Zuckerberg as a potential Icarus - flying high but the wings

What Josh Watches

would surely melt - and one recalls Steve Coogan's portrayal of Anthony H. Wilson in Michael Winterbottom's 2002 24 Hour Party People As the TV presenter turned Factory Records impresario Coogan and Winterbottom give us a man who rose high but crashed to Earth Icarus style. Wilson addresses the audience in the first reel to compare himself to the Greek man of myth saying "If you get it, great. If you don't, that's fine too. But you should probably read more. " In the end though the movie looks at Zuckerberg as a tragic sort, unloved but not unable to love, and in that way recasts the classic Frankenstein story - well visualised in 1994's underappreciated Kenneth Branagh directed Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Like the Monster aptly and verbosely portrayed

by Robert De Niro Zuckerberg could have take it all - the hate, the jealousy, the betrayals - if only the maker had crafted him someone in his image, to love.

guardians and “culture warriors” including Bill O’Reilly in regards the show’s themes of teenage sexuality and drug use, the same themes that provoked little more than some half hearted harrumphing from the Daily Mail here, have lead to child pornography charges being filed Stateside!

This says something about the greater creative freedoms offered to UK TV writers. Remember rolling your eyes at that episode of Friends in which the gang are shocked and appalled that Chandler - oh the humanity - smokes? Naturally as good as the US Open a broadsheet newspaper or engage in imports can be, as a country we have a need to tell conversation with any clued in pop culture vulture in the know and you’ll no doubt hear it said that television our own stories, ones that touch on our own culture.

Personally I’ve always found the fetishism of drama is experiencing something of a golden age. materialism and the upper-middle class lifestyle so By “television drama” they tend to mean “American prevalent in US TV alienating. While the best of US TV television drama” and the path that has lead us from is often doggedly grown up, it’s been the youthful, The Sopranos though The Wire to Mad Men has irreverent and often genre-centric shows that show off undoubtedly changed how we think of television as a medium. No longer ephemeral wallpaper or cinema’s the best of British. For an example check out BBC3’s Being Human staring its third series as we speak hick cousin, DVD has made TV series something to or E4’s wonderfully imaginative Misfits be savoured as complete lasting works of art.

I think perhaps what British TV needs is its own Here in England we’ve been slow to catch on, looking “Brit-Pop” moment in which we reject the US template on starry eyed at the HBO style dramatic monoliths and paying scant respect to our home grown offerings. and forge and celebrate a TV storytelling language that is uniquely and exclusively our own.

Ironically, over in the States however many of our shows are rabidly followed cult favourites.

This has lead to many UK shows getting the US remark treatment - most recently E4’s oftJoshua Wynne misunderstood teen drama Skins – the proverbial shit-storm in teacup from the countries moral

Massive Thanks...

Michael Wood Leon Carroll Dom Sheard Craig Sheehan Ben Holden Richard Brass Mark Husak

Louise Phelan Dave Owen Jo Billingsley Joshua Wynne Lauren Padgett John Joseph Holmes

If you would like to contribute to No Hands Fanzine in any way then get in touch with one of us!

The Heralding of Spring: Steve Wright's Big Show, 19/01/11, 2.05pm approx....

Spring, the transitional period between Winter and Summer. The exact timing of Spring varies according to local climate, cultures and customs. Laymen and women like us here at No Hands mights see the first peep of a Daffodil or even a Crocus as a herald of Spring's onset. But on Radio 2 a portentous event led to a strange declaration by wise DJ Steve Wright.

The nations best loved DJ, not previously known for his superstitions, was clearly deeply affected by the event.

STEVE: "I'm still pretending that Spring is here" NO HANDS: That's wishful thinking in the depths of winter Steve. But his next statement shocked us to the core.

STEVE: "I know it's here! I just saw a Thrush sharing some gristle, just on the windowsill here on the 6th Floor, with a Seagull" NO HANDS: Conclusive evidence that Spring is here from the venerable Radio Show host.

STEVE: Pause......"Which is kind of heartwarming really I think".

NO HANDS: Heart warming indeed. It melted our frozen winter hearts. Thanks Steve.

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