Indie

Reviews

You can’t polish a turd. Whoever said that? Were they onto something or were they just talking shit? The reality was something we knew all along: the turd was quite happy feeling shit. When you’ve been unceremoniously squeezed out of someone’s arse and suffered the ignominy of being chewed up, absorbed and subjected to the usual slings and arrows of the exhausting digestive process, you’re unlikely to respond positively to the demands of civil society, style or no style. Turds Continue Reading

Live

Elbow @ Brixton Academy, London, 15.04.08

Crud’s own seldom seen kid takes a seldom taken look at this year’s most seldom seen band. James Berry attends yet another Elbow gig. And who can blame him. New single, ‘One Day Like This’ out 02.06.08 It’s one of the great modern pop curiosities. Could we start the rumour now that Chris Martin has accumulated a kidnapped mass of Elbow fans, possibly in a cavernous bunker deep under his snazzy Belsize Park pad where they’re starved of daylight and Continue Reading

Live

The National / Annuals @ Astoria, London, 22.05.2007

Manfully bridging the divide between the uncomfortably withdrawn and absorbingly eccentric, James Berry recoils at the loaded springs of Annuals frontman Adam Baker and the momentous slow-burn of Arcade frontman, Mat Beringer. Love Broken Social Scene but haven’t got the concentration to keep up with the every movement of such a twitchy many-limbed creature? Perhaps we could interest sir in a more manageable animal? Annuals, numbering six, are certainly a more tax-return-friendly size, but their productivity trails sparks and they Continue Reading

Features

Breaks – Big Deal Interview

BiG DeaL !! SiGNED, SEALED, DELiVERED ~ YOUR NEW BEST BAND!! Crud’s Alan Sargeant pokes and probes the industry mechanics of ROUGH TRADES ‘s latest signing, the BRAKES. Here’s how they got signed. Here’s how they celebrated. Here’s how they intend to f**k it all up. Just sign here boys … Here’s the deal. Here’s the BiG DeaL. That shitty four-piece you’ve been in with your mates since Year 8 eventually managed to get some daft industry type to hand Continue Reading

Live

Mull Historical Society Bush Hall, London, January 2003

A Scottish Clearlake? Surely he means a ‘loch’? James Berry laments the passing of the separatist approach for Mull. There is a fucking chandelier in our line of sight! Actually there are six of them hanging over the whole of this plush interior. There is carpet! White plaster moulds of babies in the buff, clinging for dear life to shields around the upper perimeter of the room! Individually lit sunken wall spots for portrait paintings (!), replaced in this instance Continue Reading

News

They’ve been together now for 50 years, but it finally looks like it could all well and truly be over for those Blur boys, if Graham Coxon’s rumoured departure is anything to go by. According to the UK’s Daily Mirror story, the split was the result of recent tensions between the guitarist himself and Damon Albarn. Whether or not it’s true that Coxon ever referred to Albarn as a ‘loquacious genre-hopping, market-oriented crowd-pleaser’ has yet to be confirmed by any Continue Reading

News

They’ve been together now for 50 years, but it finally looks like it could all well and truly be over for those Blur boys, if Graham Coxon’s rumoured departure is anything to go by. According to the UK’s Daily Mirror story, the split was the result of recent tensions between the guitarist himself and Damon Albarn. Whether or not it’s true that Coxon ever referred to Albarn as a ‘loquacious genre-hopping, market-oriented crowd-pleaser’ has yet to be confirmed by any Continue Reading

Reviews

Is This It? ~ The Strokes

There was always going to be a desire to dislike this album and verbalises it by way of a glib pun using its goading title Is This It? Luckily for anyone with a sense of humour, that did not happen.The truth is, nothing could possibly live up to the expectations this debut had got going for it. The only debut album in recent memory that has had the music press likewise slavering all over themselves in anticipation, was the ELASTICA Continue Reading