Yesterday I visited BBC Radio Manchester, at the impressively futuristic Media City UK in Salford (which, when lit up at night looks just like a spaceport), to tip some bands for the coming year.
The show goes out on Sunday night, so I can’t tell you which bands I staked my flimsy reputation on yet, but needless to say it was a uniquely stressful half-hour – not only because I was suggesting who might ‘make it’, but also because I was asked to comment on the state of the modern music scene, and where it was heading next.
Well. This is awkward. Didn’t Lissi Dancefloor Disaster feature on ANBAD last year? What are they doing astride the top of the Best Of 2011 List? Have I lost my mind?
Well, in answer to the first question: yes, they were on ANBAD in 2010 – I saw them play a short, brilliant gig to an empty room underneath Oldham Street in Manchester and simply had to tell someone about it.
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It’d be rude of me to begin this post without first making the proper introductions. Ringo Deathstarr, as you may already be aware, are the band from Austin who sound like they should be from Manchester circa the early-90s (ie SHOEGAZE). Bar any slight sensations of geographical displacement, that shouldn’t be too hard for you to bend your brains around.
Got this new 3 days ago, sad times. DANANANANAYKROYD has announced that they will split up after their upcoming (and last) tour. The Glaswegian band will also digitally release a single for the last time on 7th November. It’s called Think & Feel taken from their 2nd album, There Is A Way, produced by Ross Robinson in LA. You can hear it here.
Well. Here’s a thing.
An all-new Midweek Mixtape, brought to you by none other than the NEW Official ANBAD Mascot, Alex “Cheese” James, of ‘Blur’ and ‘signed a big deal with a Wal-Mart-owned supermarket chain’ fame.
Now, instead of merely listening to a bunch of new bands and thinking about them, you can listen to the bands, think about them and enjoy a slice of salad cream-flavoured cheese – in the shape of bread!
Given that I’ve spent the last three days writing about gangs of kids fighting police in the streets and unprecedented looting sprees in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and other English towns and cities, it’s hard for me not to see everything through a riot prism. (Ie a prism that doesn’t have any glass left because it’s all been smashed.) I go to get the milk out of the fridge for a cup of tea, I hurl it across the room at an imaginary police officer…
No Flash are a band. They’re a band in Manchester, a city full of other bands, gloomy gigs, shifty promoters, and people who like to tell you how all of those things mean much more to them than they do to you.
It can be hard to be heard above the din.
Being in a new band is tough – and that’s partly why bands are bands: you may well be penniless and frustrated, but at least you’re all penniless and frustrated together, right?
Next weekend the excellent, exciting, and excellently exciting Sounds From The Other City festival is taking place in Salford, and all week, ANBAD is showcasing the pick of the bands playing there.
For the benefit of international readers, Salford is a big grimy city right next to Manchester, which is another big grimy city. (If you’re still unsure, it is all in that bit of the UK that’s not London or Stratford.)
Do today’s new bands still want the same things out of their chosen profession
side-project-reluctantly-funded-by-a-dreary-office-job as they always have? Or are their aims now different?
Take a quick look at the tour blog of Official Friends Of ANBAD, The Bedlam Six, and you’ll be soon be able to decide if the rock life is for you. It’ll mainly hinge on whether or not you like squeezing into a Transit van with seven other people, whilst careering your way around Austria’s weird, golf-course-like countryside.
Today, a rarity: an ANBAD live review. It’s one of an interesting gig for those interested in new bands, though: the NME Awards tour, which provides a helpful snapshot of what is deemed to be now in the UK by both the NME and the teens that treat it as the music bible.
The Shockwaves NME Awards gig at Manchester Academy drew curious punters from across the social spectrum, but for the hoards of teens, it was Mecca. Finally, the bands they have only read about, or listened to online, or squinted at garbed videophone footage were playing for them.
They dressed to capture, as best they could, the look of rock ‘n’ roll detrius. The boys were Primark Sid Viciouses – deliberately dazed, stained, and quasi-lairy; the girls dressed in a style that occupied the awkward halfway-house between instinctive prettiness and designated trashiness.
When I tell people I’m in a band, I get a couple of textbook reactions. The most common is “Are you the singer?” and another is “Is it an all girl band?” The numerous occasions I’ve heard a guy tell...
Photos from a recent FOE gig - a friend of our friends Hold Your Horse Is - she’s gonna be big!!! Read the gig review after the jump.
Shots of North Carolina’s folk-rocking Avett Brothers’ stop in Glasgow - 22.08.11
Read the review of the gig here.
Take a look at the acts and art on offer at this year’s Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Included are the likes of Fight Like Apes, Lykke Li, Sea of Bees and Seasick Steve. Photos from our own...
Good time with Bad Guys. Photos from the May 29th gig at the Old Blue Last. Read the review by the Bad Guy himself, Stuart London after the jump.
Artrocker.com exclusive: for fans of White Lies and Crocodiles we’ve got some fresh pictures from their UK show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire earlier this month, courtesy of Alessandro...
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