Live

Don’t worry about the road being rough —Wayne Coyne has a ball. The Lips abort the challenging Embryonics for a night of dry-ice, lasers, confetti, crowd-balling and all the usual fearless malarky. Tom Collins has the details.25/11/2009 November saw Wayne Coyne and his band of psychedelic-punk musicians feature at The London Troxy for two sold out nights of Flaming Lips based mayhem, accompanied by their usual array of props, toys and stage dancers. After emerging from behind a giant video Continue Reading

Able-bodied Northerners, Starsailor trim the mainsail and unfurl the spinnakers ahead of new album release, ‘All The Plans’ with low-key gig in London. Sh*tloads of photos and tour dates included Don’t ever go claiming that middle of the road, moisturised Coldplayers like Starsailor don’t suffer for their art. James Walsh literally took a shot up the arse tonight, he informs us, in order to play this low-key club comeback ahead of fourth album ‘All the Plans’ – OK, it was Continue Reading

A surreal and healthy dose of Maryland burlesque momentarily brightens the scruffy raincoat-reality of an anonymous social club in Leeds. Irfan Shah was there to see the rainbow.04/06/2008 It’s sweetly ironic that the man behind Atlas Sound is knelt over his effects peddle as if he’s just had sand kicked in his face. Bradford Cox plays his set of ambient emo-tronica in a crouched, almost foetal position, picking at his guitar and hunched over his pedal controls with the rapt Continue Reading

Cave and his Seeds bury lazy Lazarus with a Saturday Nigh Opera of visceral, feedback-drenched lunacy and soul wrenching discord. And plenty of smut.22/05/2008 If a gentlemanly seeing-to can exist, and is not an irredeemable oxymoron, then that is precisely what the Bad Seeds have unloaded tonight. And if such a thing can be physically served up, then the dosage must be measured in grandiose lashings rather than anything more conventionally decimal and finite. It is a breathtaking thing to Continue Reading

James Berry gets over the flamboyance and the beguiling eccentricity of Bromsgrove’s finest worksongs to meet expectations of the band half-way.07/04/2008 gUiLLeMoTs, contrary to some popular opinion, are an enthralling ménage-a-quatre of creativity and contradiction, a rainbow splurge of eloquence and ambition, a simian swinging within the caged containments of sequined pop but negating those enforced borders by darting so lavishly and with such enthusiasm from available branch to available branch. Their audience, to put it plainly (and possibly loyal Continue Reading

Similar sounding retro rock standard after retro rock standard. Riding on the back of a rampant feedback serpent, The Raveonettes prove that pleasure really can be that straight-forward. It really doesn’t matter what The Raveonettes played tonight. Every song they did play was as painted-on tight, pitch and metronome perfect, bulbous, hip-shaking and as don’t-stare-straight-at-it-put-your-sunglasses-on-god-damn-it gleaming as the next. And indeed the last, and the one before that. And so on. And their back catalogue in itself (four albums old Continue Reading