Time’s a rodeo. Or so sayeth Dawn Landes – better half of crossover folk-country type, Josh Ritter and sometime member of Hem. And whilst I’m not sure exactly what it is she’s trying to say (I mean, I was reliably informed by Garth Brooks that it’s bulls and blood, dust and mud and the roar of a Sunday crowd – but I could be getting it mixed up with Sunday League football, so I don’t know). Whatever it is though, Continue Reading
As a dedicated ‘indie-kid’ I remember being round at my girlfriend’s flat in the equally dedicated bohemian quarter of Sheffield’s Broomhill district. It was late, we’d both been drinking and we were sitting down to share that inevitable post-pub spliff. And being a sort of club-sort she casually dismissed the ‘His n’Hers’ Pulp disc I pushed at her, and instead bunged into the CD player something that sounded as if we’d been surreptitiously lowered into a subterranean chamber in Tibet Continue Reading
You know, not so long ago, even the likes of Mike Oldfield had to lump on a bird’s vocal to even stand a chance of pushing of vinyl onto the average attention-deficit teen, but with the likes of Four Tet, M83 and a shitload of others turning out instrumentals as prodigious, ‘tubular’ and downright peculiar as lark tongues in aspic, the trade has become almost credible. So credible, in fact, that even Paul Smith of Maximo Park is down as Continue Reading
Not the most auspicious of starts – and certainly not the coolest. Loose collection of fiddle-packing blues and jazz misfits get invite from University lecturer to demonstrate recording trickery by taking a band into the studio and letting the rest of his students watch as they bang out a couple of the tunes they’ve been working on (but clearly not finished). Yes, there’s something faintly clinical about it, something fairly hokey, but when you learn that the producer they invite Continue Reading
If you were in any doubt as to the reach of Patti Smith’s influences as punk and poet, watch the concert scenes where luminaries such as Bono and Thom Yorke huddle on the sidelines and watch their hero with all the gauche admiration of teenagers. That’s the kind of devotion Smith has inspired in the great and the good and the misunderstood since the 70’s and this documentary, filmed over eleven years (from 1995) is a gently engrossing look at Continue Reading