What’s in an influence, eh? At what point does inspiration blur unkindly across of the boundaries of theft? It’s a question that has held court in a million pub debates: did Oasis rip off The Beatles? Did Gene copy the Smiths? Do the likes of The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand continue to plunder he archives of bands like the Gang Of Four? My own view is that there’s a point at which the hand that guides the pen of the Continue Reading
Fair play to them, since the release of ‘Insomnia’ in 1995, Faithless have matured into an internationally respected act. Selling in excess of 1,000,000 in the UK alone the band’s recent ‘Greatest Hits’ album went triple platinum. A group of UK musicians described originally as a cross between trip-hop and dance, Faithless garnered attention for tracks like ‘God Is A DJ’ and ‘We Come 1’. Attempts to blend a range of genres into a mixtape sounding collection of sounds gave Continue Reading
Difficult to believe on the minimal, buzzing evidence of ‘Praying Mantis’ alone, but Rui Da Silva is the Portuguese producer and DJ, whose single ‘Touch Me’ (featuring the vocals of Cassandra Fox) topped the UK Chart in 2001. But that’s not all; Rui has also achieved a certain amount of notoriety as a remixer of Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Play’, the Lighthouse Family’s ‘Happy’ and Yoko Ono’s ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. So how does one leap from the environs of mainstream dance Continue Reading
“There’s poetry in an empty Coke can / There’s majesty in a burnt out caravan” The mainstream can be an exciting place, and is, sometimes. But ordinarily it’s quite a dirty word, for something so clean. The oddballs know to congregate elsewhere, somewhere darker and with less ventilation. Would David Bowie still become the biggest pop star in the country (or a pop star at all) were he rooting around in the dressing-up box for the first time in 2006? Continue Reading
Seems utterly pointless knocking the second half of something that has already managed to shift 225,000 copies, although it would be fun trying. Compilations of this type are always going to piss off as many people as they please as they’re often too broad upon which to deliver a sizable punch and knocking them out entirely is well on nigh impossible. True enough the first disc may represent little more than a ‘Now That’s What I Call House’ retrospective with Continue Reading
In the early eighties New Romantic legends-to-be The Human League were just beginning to become bona fide pop stars, when three of their number left. And while The Human League went on to become the thinking person’s Abba, Glenn Gregory, Ian Craig and Martin Ware formed Heaven 17, in many ways a similar set up with less make up fewer hits but more critical kudos and, arguably, greater musical ambition. And here they come again with the re-release of their Continue Reading
Since the beginning of this year, They Might Be Giants have been releasing a free monthly podcast. Irfan Shah was given a guided tour round some of the highlights so far… Here they come again, parodic, rhapsodic, flippant and ingenious. They Might Be Giants, a dozen or so albums down the line, are as close to a twenty-first century Bonzo Dog Band as it’s possible to get, with their huge span of musical styles, the twisted joy of the music, Continue Reading
Nostradamus probably would have been our best hope, but not even he could pull out a fresh scroll, ink his quill and hazard a guess at this. Or at least if he did we couldn’t decipher the reams of cryptic twitterings in time, in which case we’ll apologise to the mystical beardy lunatic. But he must know that already. 7 years ago a band appeared with an album, ‘Showbiz’, a rigid and occasionally histrionic take on the discipline of angst Continue Reading
Shock factor was never the only dynamic at play, but it was key. When Brooklyn’s curious art-misfits TV On the Radio arrived in 2004 with their debut, ‘Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes’, there was arguably nobody else on the face of this planet making music as sizzlingly acute, as fiercely shaken. Warped barbershop? Minimal percussive millennial soul? Jazz shoegaze wall-of-sound odd-hop? Sure! It was a deeply stimulating ride along a convoluted route from A-Z through the city’s underbelly, hitching figurative lifts Continue Reading
Opposites attract, don’t they. Which must be why, as summer heaves up the gas mark to hitherto unbearable heights, the band who slope into town in black t-shirts and leathers, cranking out dense psychedelic rock and gazing their boots a fresh sheen seem like such a very good idea indeed. Better even than iced tea and a White Magnum. Yes, that good. In reality of course they couldn’t ever have existed without triple figure temperatures, clearly being the result of Continue Reading