Whether it was because I was the kind of eleven year old who saw the doc martens, the crew-cuts and the ill-advised dancing as somehow threatening, or whether it was because I had the kind of humour ordinarily found at the end of a ward for the terminally ill, I was never able to share with my classmates the joy of catching the latest Madness video on Thursday night’s Top Of The Pops. ‘Baggy Trousers’ might have been a right Continue Reading

LA indie band, Viva K came in the wake of the death of a Beatle. On the first anniversary of the death of George Harrison, the four musicians who would later become Viva K were spending a typical night drinking at the hipster nightclub, Spaceland. Introduced through mutual friends, the four discovered their mutual admiration for Beatle George Harrison, his music and his role as the first musician to successfully export Eastern influences into modern rock. So what you’d naturally Continue Reading

Soundtrack specialist: Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe, Just Like Heaven OST, Shrek 2, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. It seems Imogen Heap is hoping that the simple plan of being in a thousand different places at once, lurching unspectacularly from behind the curtains of film halls everywhere, being half-audible in a scene already stolen by a talking donkey, or crow-barred into a medley of songs only heard as the credits roll and Continue Reading

Take one superfly international playboy, DJ Dimitri from Paris and one legendary Krush Posse hip hop space cadet DJ Muro from Japan, stir in a convincing collection of some of the most underrated disco classics around and fill it to the brim with old school hip hop, a touch of soul and some party crackers then play the whole thing through a philly’ funk filter and you have a 2-CD selection of mix tape magic. Heaphone heroes present an alternative look Continue Reading

Let’s face it, you never really took country music that seriously until you realised that all your favourite bands declared mad love for the late, great Johnny Cash. Up till that point you brushed the entire genre aside like an empty Rizla packet and Saturday’s losing lottery ticket. You screwed it up, tossed it to one side and forgot about it along with all the other things you’d tried to ignore since entering adulthood. In an effort to streamline your Continue Reading

Here we go. Something that fails to arrive in a fanfare of hype and superlatives but which still manages to yield a very small modicum of joy. It may fail to bang down the door to your heart and make a beeline for all you most treasure but The Muckraker’s gentle and inconsequential brand of country-flavoured pop at least pauses to provide a polite ‘hello’ by way of introduction. True it may be more likely to tap gently before entering, Continue Reading

It’s a lying-in-the-gutter-staring-at-the-stars thing: The Murmur look like a street gang and play like Desolation Angels. And they’re a real band in the best sense of the word – enjoying a loyal fan base, managing to excite the palates of jaded rock stars such as Robert Plant and gigging relentlessly like a bunch of rag tag Flying Dutchmen. With ‘Vietnam Morning’ their second studio album, it’s easy to see where they sit in today’s musical landscape, nestling between unassuming scouse Continue Reading

The question is, how long can one remain entirely defined by distractions? That is the art of rock n roll of course, manipulating hedonism into a necessitous guise and selling it on hard and fast. Doherty’s, and therefore Babyshambles’, problem though is that he’s convincing nobody that this is how it’s supposed to be. Like that well-meaning-but-crackers old chap from The Fast Show, Pete popped out for 5 minutes to get a reprieve on his reputation by writing a record Continue Reading

There’s really no doubting that the thoroughly ad hoc and improvised collective the world has come to know as the Wu-Tang Clan fed its army of rappers on a diet of thinking differently right from the very start. A loose assembly of some nine MCs springing out of the Staten Island district of New York, it was always going to be a broad, vital and eclectic affair, propelled naturally by a fine balance of interests and individual stars. Named after Continue Reading