18 December 2013 Pantomime season is once more upon us, and the heaviest and most bludgeoning pantomime of all is rolling into town. My first ever concert was Black Sabbath – a scary 38 years ago, and so when a friend who couldn’t make this week’s reunion tour offered me his ticket at a Christmas party last weekend, I was sufficiently inebriated to be unable to refuse. Arriving […]
live review
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Dublin 14 December 2013 Set phasers to phase. Listening to the recent Wooden Shjips album Back to Land is a very different experience to seeing the band play the album live. That’s obviously true of every record. Every artist. Every band. But some more than others. And Wooden Shjips more than most. Fortunately both experiences are excellent. Back to Land (Thrill Jockey)is as good a slice of mellow […]
London 10 December 2013 We leave the pub and head down towards Entrance F. The night is cold and dark, breath highlighted as white wisps against the blackness, lights pinpoint bright like stars. It’s perfect. And now the excitement is building, as the phalanxes of the black-clad, the long-haired and silver jewellery-bedecked are massing. What a truly a rag-tag army it is too, as diverse in its composition […]
The Island, Bristol 22 November 2013 The venue’s an abandoned police station, now converted into an arts centre/studio space. The grim nature of the place gets more pronounced as you step deeper into the building, those institutional hues greying against the eerie wipe-clean gloss of the white tiling. The cold concrete and red-bricked Victoriana, dower, depressing as the flaking magnolia, or the raggedy plastic bag spectres barb wire […]
Portland, Oregon 19 November 2013 Portland was at it’s finest on Tuesday night, for this sold-out performance of Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner and indie staple Bill Callahan, who used to make music under the Smog moniker before returning to his given name for a series of well received albums. We’ve entered the real rainy season in the City Of Roses, but it was clear and frosty night. […]
London 15 November 2013 After some mix up on the door where I had to admit to being me twice (not sure why anyone would want or even pretend to be me), I make my way down a crowded staircase into a packed Borderline. I’d not been here since the ill fated Deviants gig a few months earlier so it was good to see the place heaving with […]
London 9 November 2013 The Black Heart is filled to capacity to witness Jex Thoth’s first ever London date. I’ve been waiting and wanting to see this band live since the release of the first album, but for some reason every time they planned to tour here it fell through. So its only now, two albums and two EPs into their career, that they are hitting British shores […]
London 5 September 2013 In the lead up to the first London gig in thirteen years from Manuel Göttsching we have been treated to a certain amount of media nonsense situating him as a godfather of minimal techno.
London 23 June 2013 There is a particularly caustic line in “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s scathing critique of changing musical fashion, that sums up perfectly much of what happened between the mid Nineties and the early Noughties: I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars. After 1994, […]
Café Oto, London 19 February 2012 71 years old, and with the gravitas of a Prussian general contemplating one final glorious attack on Paris, free jazz saxophone legend Peter Brötzmann swings into Old London Town for a two night stand at Dalston’s Café Oto, E8’s achingly hip home of improvisation, experimentation and general squealing and freeping of every sort. Only a short hop, skip and jump from The […]
O2 British Music Experience 25 October 2011 I had never been to the O2 before, but had heard lots of horror stories about it. Apparently it had poor sound, bad visuals, over priced drinks, and terrible for people with vertigo. Luckily enough I was not headed for the main arena – that joy was to be for Cliff Richard’s blue rinse brigade – I was going to the […]
The Borderline London 25 February 2011 “We are the survivors, the eternal survivors……” This phrase may have crossed Nik Turner and the rest of his Space Ritual cohorts minds at some points over the years. But here they are still playing some of the best darn space rock this side of the Andromeda galaxy. Before I start reviewing the tracks played I must make a special mention about […]
The Lexington, London 19 January 2011
It's a red-light night tonight at The Lexington, north London's finest whiskey bar and excellent venue to boot. Red décor and red lights make for a surreally-flattened visual experience, as if watching tonight's bands during one of the more blood-soaked sections of Suspiria. But there's no gothic horror show from Eat Lights, Become Lights - their take on psychedelic immersion is far more in the Düsseldorf tradition, as befits what is effectively Klub Motorik's house band.
The Scala, London 11 December 2010 The first time I saw The Orb play live was at the time of the release of their album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. At that time the techno/ambient/trance scene was at an all-time high with a plethora of new bands using psychedelic images and pushing at making the underground become overground. The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” drifted through the spring and summer […]
The Vortex Jazz Bar, London 27 September 2010 My view of this evening is tainted in about 200 different ways and as I haven’t drafted this review I don’t know what you’ll make of it but hang on a minute. I have to explain that when I was younger and more energetic and had more brain power with which to be creative I did used to review music; […]
Rascals, Bangor 2 March 2010 For a supposed “Land of Song”, Wales has thrown up surprisingly few truly great musical mavericks over the years. Sure there’s been John Cale and David R. Edwards, and maybe Gruff Rhys and Brian Lustmord but that’s about it. It may then raise an eyebrow or two that despite her scant handful of releases to date, I wouldn’t hesitate to add relative newcomer […]
Koko, London 14 December 2009 The cavernous space of Koko, once known better in the days of music hall and indie rock dance club as the Camden Palace, turns out to be eminently suitable for hosting bands whose raison d’etre is shifting air pressure through the application of low end to the somewhat notoriously loud speakers of the PA. Koko may not exactly have the acoustics of a […]
Islington Mill, Salford 8 December 2009 Ever vampiric, the avant-guard periodically replenishes itself on fresh blood in pastures new. Jazz, psych, prog, industrial and Dance have all fallen prey during the past half century, and now it’s the turn of that seemingly most reactionary of genres, metal. The signs had been there as far back as the early 90s, with the Melvins, Sleep and Earth all forging new […]