Monthly archives: August, 2013

Reading & Leeds 2013

leeds

As mentioned earlier I’m heading to Leeds Festival this weekend. A Friday night spent at Kenwood House in London watching Suede means I’ll miss Nine Inch Nails, but there’s plenty else I’m raring to see.

If you’re heading down make sure you wake up early on Sunday (Friday at Reading) for Decade. They’re a five piece ‘post-hardcore’ band from Bath with hooks that will get stuck in your head for days. I’ve been playing them on the Kerrang! Chart for a couple of weeks now and they’re opening up proceedings on the Lock Up/Rock stage. Check out the video for ‘Never Enough’ below.

Also, there’s a handful of other great R&L warm-up gigs this week if you’ve been lucky enough to get tickets – primarily Green Day tonight at Brixton Academy (supported by the excellent, Frank Turner) and Bring Me The Horizon at, ahem, a tattoo parlour in London. The latter is so over-subscribed that even their PR guy told me he his only chance of getting tickets was by entering a competition! If you’re there, you have my envy.

See you at Leeds!




The Day The Whole World Went Away

Nine Inch NailsNine Inch Nails, The Scala, 20/8/2013: Review

You don’t really need me to tell you how good this gig was – you know the story. Nine Inch Nails are an incredible live band. They possess a frontman capable of delving deep into his unconscious to deliver some of the most intense performances known to man. They boast an enormous back catalogue covering everything from metal, industrial, goth, disco, to glam, pop. dance and everything in between and they’re back after a six year hiatus with an album that promises a spectacular return to form, playing a TINY venue as a Reading and Leeds warm-up. Needless to say, tickets sold out in minutes and people were practically selling their mother to get in. All of that is patently obvious.

BUT what I didn’t see coming was an epic light show that wouldn’t look out of place in an arena, a brutal cover of David Bowie’s (NIN-esque) ‘I Believe In Americans‘, a surprisingly talkative Trent Reznor, a brutal moshpit for Terrible Lie, and (however many times you’ve seen it before, it never ceases to surprise) the sight of grown men crying to the dark balladry of Hurt that gets you every single time. Epic.

Of course, this was just a warm-up for the madness to come this weekend at Reading and Leeds Festival. Their previous performance, in 2007, was so captivating that frankly, The Smashing Pumpkins were blown off stage, and I certainly don’t envy Biffy Clyro this weekend. Unfortunately I’ll have to miss this, as I’m heading to Suede at Kenwood House on Friday, but I’m heading up to Leeds on Saturday and looking forward to checking out Frank Turner, Deaf Havana, Bring Me The Horizon, Twin Atlantic, Chase and Status and Eminem (in that order!).

(Re NIN, Cleverly I turned up 20 minutes before showtime which meant I was literally right at the back with no chance of moving, so the above pic is sadly the best I could do!)




Cut my life into pieces…

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In recent years I’ve really gone off rock clubs. Too often they really do take themselves seriously, and so, so many of them seem to insist on playing the same tracks in the same order every week and making the minimum effort possible. An awful lot are TERRIBLE at online and social media and therefore fail to create any sort of excitement or buzz about their night. This is particularly troublesome with weekly nights, since there are inevitably going to be weeks where it’s extremely difficult to get the punters through the door, and a lazy approach to proceedings is hardly going to help. Many are struggling and/or shutting down up and down the country against a difficult economic backdrop and frankly, I’m not surprised.

However, for a couple of years now I’ve been following the online buzz of semi-regular rock night Last Resort but for one reason or another never made it down until Last Resort 9 in June this year. I quickly concluded that it is by some distance the best rock club I’ve ever been to, for a variety of reasons not limited to the below..

1. It doesn’t even try and take itself seriously.
2. The music is largely rock emo, nu-metal and pop-punk from the early 00’s when most of the crowd were growing up.
3. There are regular social media updates on Facebook and Twitter, not just from the official accounts but from the promoters themselves, creating a buzz from months beforehand.
4. Every night is a separate ‘event’ to be treated as such. It’s only on a few times a year, which means it’s always rammed.
5. The music is amazing. Yes, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, and (bizarrely) not everyone wants to hear 8 Limp Bizkit tracks in a night BUT equally nobody is apparently afraid to drop a Katy Perry, a Rihanna track or even bloody Usher when the moment calls. And why should they be? In this day and age nobody wants to hang around with people who think they’re too good for pop music, especially after a few drinks!
6. There appears to be about 20 DJ’s. Presumably they are only playing a few tracks each, but it means there’s a great buzz around the decks.
7. It’s completely FREE and is bang in the centre of London.
8. Oh and everyone, without exception, is completely battered.

The next one is Last Resort 10 on Saturday 7th September it’s at The Star of Kings in Kings Cross, and it’s completely free!

In the meantime, get involved with the banter on Facebook and Twitter.




‘You know how many sick trainers I own?’

Hacktivist

I’m not normally one to bang on about novelty cover versions, but I’m happy to make an exception in the case of UK grime / metal crossover act Hacktivist.

They’ve been bubbling under the surface for a few months now, and as you can see from the video, have been sending audiences into a frenzy this summer at Download and Germany’s Rock am Ring festival. They’ve been performing this cover of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Paris in their sets for a while, and due to fan demand have released a video and free download:

They’re touring with Enter Shikari later in the year (whose cover of Insomnia by Faithless, incidentally, is well worth a listen..)

The climax of which will undoubtedly be the Vans Warped Tour show on November 17th at London’s Alexandra Palace alongside Rise Against, Billy Talent, Anberlin and many others. It’s also right by my flat, so I may well hold an afterparty. Watch this space 😉




It’s moments like this where silence is golden

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Bring Me The Horizon have just released the video for ‘Go to Hell, for Heaven’s sake’

It basically shows them having an absolute whale of a time destroying Warped Tour over in the states.  Not that we didn’t know that was happening anyway.

It should also serve as a taster for their upcoming Reading and Leeds main stage performance, which HAS to be off the scale. Check it out below!