Blogs
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Adam Ficek Rants About... Indie Music Babyshambles' drummer speaks about his beloved genre...
By Adam Ficek on 2 June 2009
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In the first of his monthly blogs for Gigwise, Babyshambles drummer and Roses Kings Castles man Adam Ficek gives his take on indie music.
My beloved Indie.
The good old days, ya da ya da, before MGMT, before The Libertines, before the Strokes, before Blurasis, before The Stone Roses, before the La's, there existed a very oddball, sixth-form, shadow-lurking music called 'Indie'. This strange animal was rarely seen during the dayllght hours of the mainstream pop charts, it would creep around in the common rooms, universities and the late night radio shows of a few brave presenters, only showing it's face to those willing to chase and discover. Today's 'Indie' is an altogether different beast, a strong, confident marketable genre-brand that proudly struts it's musical might around the jungles of Topman and H&M.
So where did it all wrong, or right? How did it transcend into the mass market?
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Why Are Kasabian Always Lumped With Crap Bands?! The Leicester lads are much more than The Enemy's contemporaries...
By David Renshaw on 1 June 2009
Kasabian. What a band, seriously - I think they're brilliant. They're a band who have released two hugely successful albums and established themselves as one of the country's premiere live acts (second to Bruce Springsteen at this year's Glastonbury at The Boss's request) yet the four piece from Leicester are regularly derided and dismissed alongside the lad-rock wannabees like The Courteeners and The Enemy. Perhaps it's Tom Meighan's big mouth (too many examples to list, how about comparing Madonna to his old male gym teacher?) or Serge Pizzorno's football skills but the creative and inventive side of Kasabian's music seems to get lost in the tidal wave of tossed lager and column inches that seem to surround them.
Kasabian's music has always had an experimental edge to it too. This isn't going to become an indulgent think piece about how Kasabian are the new Animal Collective, they're not. However listen to 'Stuntman' from the bands second album 'Empire' or 'U Boat' on their self-titled debut and you hear a band indebted to the likes of LCD Soundsystem and Neu! (the band featured on a tribute album to the German pioneers recently) not a band trudging out the same old material time after time. As for their new material, well it might just be their most adventurous to date. Their new album (due June 8th) has the bonkers title 'West Rider Pauper Lunatic Asylum' and songs such as 'Fire' and 'Underdog' certainly help the record live up to the ostentatious title.
It's a shame then that the band will spend much of the Summer touring with Oasis, a partnership which will only compound preconceptions. Maybe one day people will look back and realise that Kasabian are the cream at the top of a piss weak crop of bands they are aligned with, bands who want to write about 'What's really going on'. Kasabian make 'music for the people' but they've got the ambition and scope to look beyond the immediate four walls and go through the looking glass. That's what makes them interesting and deserving of more attention and less lazy dismissal.
So who are the bands you feel deserve a more varied audience? Or the ones who have been adopted by an unlikely group of fans? How about Annie who has been making the chart dominating music of Lady GaGa and Little Boots for years to no avail? Or Gossip, an underground punk band adopted by middle England as their 21st century disco queens? Personally I've always found the dismissal of The Kills as style over substance infuriating as their albums are always the right mix of retro and futuristic excellence. On a more extreme level of acts getting strange audiences did anyone ever see Regina Spektor or Feist turn up on ITV's divorcees club Loose Women? Very odd.
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Seven Days On The Road With Sad Day For Puppets As they tour the UK...
By Anna Eklund on 1 June 2009
Ahead of the release of their debut album, 'Unknown Colours', Sad Day For Puppets have been keeping a diary of their UK tour for Gigwise. Check out what they got up to at the recent Great Escape festival in Brighton, as well a special in store gig in London, below...
Saturday
Me and the drummer Micke meet at half past four in the morning. A lot of people are still out partying. We pick up the rest of the band and go to the airport. Around three o’clock in the afternoon we arrive at Brighton and The Great Escape. The seaside is beautiful! It’s kind of special to see the horizon, maybe even more if you are raised in the woods, as I was.
The evening’s venue is a wooden circus tent from the 19th Century. The light inside the tent is warm and I get a warm feeling from the audience as well.
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King of the Absurd - What Could Happen During Jacko's Comeback Shows? From Swine Flu and Jarvis Cocker to the return of Jesus Juice...
By Daniel Melia on 21 May 2009
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So Michael Jackson has already postponed four of his shows at the O2 Arena in London this summer, well we never saw that one coming! To be fair to the self proclaimed King of Pop he does have a few things to worry about, what with everyone under the sun trying to sue his ass and also that small case of skin cancer that he may or may not have.
Is this the end of the woes for Jacko and his fans? Will the shows go without a hitch from here on in? We very much doubt it! In fact, knowing the history of his career we can only think that the 50 shows will turn up some of the weirdest events in the history of live music. Could Bubbles return from the dead and attack Jacko on stage? Will Elizabeth Taylor be unveiled as one of the backing dancers?
Here are five things we think could happen during the 'This Is It' concerts.
Jackson Appears On Stage For Less Time Than The Press Conference
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5 TV Music Shows That Need Bringing Back The Banana Splits are back, so why not?...
By Andy Day on 20 May 2009
The Banana Splits was the theme tune to my early childhood, every Saturday morning I was plonked in front of the TV addicted to the exploits of 4 grown men wearing furry animal suits (things haven't changed too much) running around at double speed to, what seemed at the time, the greatest music on the planet. Fast forward a few decades and The Cartoon Network are set to bring back Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorky to the small screen. This is good news for kids everywhere, as we all know TV was much better in the old days
It's fair to say that The Banana Splits have influenced a generation of bands who fire out feel good, fun 60s tinged pop. Supergrass have been a carbon copy of The Banana Splits at various moments in their career, not to mention making cheap plastic sunglasses look cool. And that got me thinking, what other old music shows are we missing out on? In a Justin Lee Collins moment I donned a furry wig, some extra chest hair and thought about five TV music shows that were worth Bringing Back....
Top Of The Pops
This should have happened already, The Monkees were ace. No one cared that they didn't really perform their own music, so it won't be a problem to stick some shambolic nobodies in a house and get them to pretend to be somebodies. Just make sure the music they pretend to release is as good as I'm A Believer instead of anything Chantelle might have come up with.
The Young Ones
How many hangovers were spent watching Miquita Oliver and Simon Amstell make some pompous pop star feel extremely uncomfortable with some embarassing line of questioning? The show was killed and ass raped by Alex Zane and Alexa Cheung pretending to be the show's original hosts, but still nothing has held a candle to it since. Find some new blood and get this show back on, gotta beat Shipwrecked innit.
The Word
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White Light Parade - A Message To Gordon Brown A state of the nation address to the Prime Minister...
By J Yates on 18 May 2009
When you grow up in a town that has nothing to offer but drugs and violence, a crap night out and a bleak future, when there’s nothing worth doing but slamming off school or going to the job centre to be told there’s nothing they can do for you, the only way we could find escapism was to write songs about real life and poems about common sense. Once we started touring it became apparent that other people are experiencing the same problems that we are, in other cities of not so Great Britain.
The ‘House of Commons’ poem came about with the album title and songs about 3 years ago. Originally written as a song, I felt it was more poignant as a poem and complimented our lyrical content. It sends out a strong message that we are being cheated and lied to by the government so they can line their pockets with gold (something that at the moment is poignantly apt with the expenses scandal) as we watch our nation fold.
We don’t want to come across as killjoys we are just predicting what’s going to happen if we don’t sort it out. Our songs are as much about hope as fear and are inspiring and confrontational... Our words are our weapons.
We feel that the only way of having a voice or expressing your opinions these days is to stand up for what you believe in, or in our case sing about it. As a band that have a young following that may not be into politics in the geeky sense, still get what we are about and feel our songs and poems relate to them.
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10 Tour Riders Good Enough For A Money Grabbing MP With Lil Wayne, The Killers and more...
By Scott Colothan on 12 May 2009
As the scandal over MP expenses grows and grows, I take a look at 10 music riders that are so extravagant and zany that the stars in question could almost pass as those “greedy swines” over at Westminster. In fact, some would even make those multiple home owning bastards blush.
Featuring Lil Wayne, The Killers, Amy Winehouse, Rage Against The Machine, Rihanna and more, below are some of the finest riders to be found on The Smoking Gun. From huge sums of hard cash upfront to presidential suite hotel rooms to bucket loads of booze, the riders are truly any promoter's nightmare:
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Rheumatoid Rock n' Rollers - Better Off In Retirement? 2009 has been overrun by has-beens!...
By Hazel Sheffield on 11 May 2009
Touted to be the year of the solo female, 2009 has instead taken an unexpected musical turn in quite the opposite direction. It’s the old boys who have been snatching the limelight from the electro-pop princesses, and the trend is all set to ascend sharply with the onset of the festival season. Last month Sir Paul McCartney kicked off California’s Coachella festival in what has been called an ‘energised’, if imperfect, performance. Leonard Cohen and Morrissey also appeared at the weekend event in the Indio desert. Then there’s Glastonbury, which will feature the double whammy of Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen headlining the bill this June.
Save for Morrissey, who clocks in at a sprightly 49 years, all of these artists have hit the big six-oh (Springsteen celebrates his this year). And yet they’re still going, rheumatically rocking and rolling around stages, prune-faced and stiff-fingered, and selling out shows in seconds. Times are hard, but can this really be the recession forcing hexagenarians to tour well into retirement, decades after their respective heydays? Or are we seeing the pop cultural equivalent of Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption – rock stars institutionalised by their craft, unable to kick the gigging habit?
Those who witnessed Dylan doddering around the stage at the O2 recently can’t have failed to notice his declining health – the arthritic dancing, the staccato bark of forced vocals, the ban on photography to save face (quite literally). There was a delicious nostalgia in glimpsing the ultimate counter-cultural icon, even from the distant reaches of that utterly soulless arena, but it was precious recompense for renditions of songs warped beyond recognition, and the almost belligerent reluctance of Dylan to engage with his adoring audience.
Nonetheless, the two nights sold out in seconds, and by rule of simple economics Dylan’s so-called ‘Never Ending Tour’ shows no signs of slacking just as long as demand for tickets continues. Though Dylan has all but relinquished guitar-playing live, instead settling for the comfortable confines of the organ and harmonica, many of his old-timer colleagues are still attempting the guitar-work with which they first found fame. Neil Young, whose coming Glastonbury headline set might not match Jay-Z’s in terms of controversy but still seems somewhat questionable, now relies heavily on the superior musicianship of his band. Astonishingly, his much reviled new album Fork In The Road upset fans by pushing back the release of best-of Archives. If ever there was proof that aged musicians are surviving on reputation over output, this is surely it.
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Where Have All The Indie Beefs Gone?! Why 2009 is in desperate need of more verbal slanging matches...
By Scott Colothan on 7 May 2009
With Wayne Coyne awkwardly side-stepping from 'pricksgate' earlier this week - the hilarious Arcade Fire beef he instigated and a fallout which I reckon had great potential - 2009 is starting to look like a dire year for indie beefs.
The Coyne vs. Arcade Fire incident aside, the last six months or so have been a barren wasteland for band feuds. Christ, even degenerate pop stars have had their handbags out more often than our purportedly opinionated, gobby rock stars. Yep, we've had to settle for slim pickings like Lily Allen calling Katy Perry a 'copycat' or Little Boots saying Leona Lewis has a “lack of personality”. Harsh words eh? Christ, even fucking Mick Hucknall has got more verbal bile to get off his chest than our music idols.
I'll give Noel Gallagher his dues, the feud stalwart has taken to bashing those pesky Kaiser Chiefs, the aforementioned Simply Red troll and Madonna. Yet, the Oasis man's vitriol has either spectacularly fell on deaf ears or has merely provoked lacklustre remarks back (Whitey from the Kaisers called Noel “a bitter old man” - kind of ironic when he's a 35-year-old man performing songs about, and for, kids?).
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my music feuds to have a bit more humour than this. I'm not exactly promoting violence (except in extreme cases, of course), but some unfounded words and a splash of venom never go amiss. Beats mutual arse licking any day of the week in my book. Better still, sometimes rock stars can come across like fucking idiots.
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Huw Stephens On The Opening Night Of BBC Radio 1's The Fringe The DJ blogs from Swindon for Gigwise...
By Huw Stephens on 5 May 2009
Just before BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend happens this weekend, The Fringe is in full force in Swindon. A week of free gigs in four different venues in Swindon, rather than a foppish haircut, it's kicked off. On Monday I went to the 12 Bar in Swindon to see the first night of the Fringe gigs, which celebrate and highlight the local live music scene in Swindon and Wiltshire. I sat down with Daniel Garett from BBC Wiltshire and Steve from Frequency magazine to pick the bands who are playing all this week, while Lyndsey Boggis from Radio 1's Live Music team has organised the week.
Radio 1's Fringe gigs are legendary by now. When I joined the station it was perfect timing; The Fringe was in Cardiff and the city was buzzing with so many free gigs happening. It brought a huge focus on the city and its scene, and the legacy has continued. Hopefully the same will happen in Swindon, creating a unique atmosphere, getting the local scene involved in the huge free festival, and showcasing brilliant new music.
I loved the line up on Monday. 12 Bar's a really good venue, with the Karlucci March opening up to a rammed venue, all of us loving their rock n roll. The Volt, from Bath, make bluesy raw rock which intricate and powerful and got the crowd going. The Shebeats have some killer pop tunes, again powerful but fun and giving everyone who'd have one a CD of their brash tunes. Headliners The Alfonz seem to be the toast of Swindon at the moment, and rightly so; they were confident, have good tunes, and left us wanting more. The Beatbullyz were in the crowd, excited about their gig on Sunday on the Introducing stage at the Big Weekend, and the atmosphere on the night was electric. And that was just the first night; there's more to come!
Find out more about this weeks BBC Radio 1 Fringe Events here
Listen to Huw on BBC Radio 1 Wednesdays 21:00-22:00 & Thursdays 00:00:02:00. For more information click here
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