He’s still only in his teens, but R&B’s latest and hottest superstar has already come a long way since making his UK chart debut, almost exactly three years ago. And on the second night of his first ever overseas stadium tour, this small town boy made good couldn’t afford to be complacent as he faced the challenge of building a live reputation here from scratch.

On the evidence of last night’s hugely entertaining show, he won’t have much to worry about. Deafening pyrotechnic bangs and equally ear-shredding squeals greeted his entrance – strapped to a wire cable, and slowly descending head-first towards the stage.

As the opening song Wall To Wall got underway, and the ten-strong dance troupe began to strut their stuff, it became clear that this would be more of a visual spectacle than a conventional concert. Apart from the drummer and the DJ, all of the music was pre-recorded – including all of the backing vocals, and even some of Brown’s lead vocals (although in fairness, his lip-synching was kept to a tolerable minimum). If a song contained a guest vocal, such as Lil’ Wayne’s rap on Gimme That or Jordin Sparks’ verses on No Air, then the vocal was simply played from tape.

If Chris had been any less of a performer, we could have been looking at an embarrassing flop. Thankfully, he possessed enough charisma and energy to carry the show virtually single-handedly.

Just as the corny audience participation stunts threatened to take over, Chris brought on his secret weapon. To gasps of astonished delight, his girlfriend Rihanna casually strolled onto to the stage, dressed in a simple top and jeans, singing the opening lines to Umbrella. The couple performed it as a duet, with Chris adding some new lines and even his own chorus: “You can be my Cinderella, ella, ella…”

Rihanna stayed around just long enough to treat us to a full vocal version of Live Your Life, before wandering back into the wings with a smile and a wave – leaving Chris to face his newly jealous female fanbase. “I apologise for bringing a lady on stage”, he simpered. “You know I love you.”

The surprises didn’t stop there. A few minutes later, Brown and two of his male dancers re-appeared at the back of the main floor, hidden under a tarpaulin. This was whipped away to reveal a flimsy disc-shaped performing area, which was then winched halfway up to the roof, as fireworks fizzed beneath it. Ropes were used to tilt the disc at varying angles, allowing Chris to mime a couple of sexy “slow jams” directly to the back rows of the venue, or back out towards the main arena. And if this wasn’t quite enough excitement, he ripped his vest off for good measure, hurling it into the clawing throng below.

From then on, it was a straightforward home sprint to the end. Having changed into some fetching beige leisure wear, Chris belted out a sequence of his biggest hits: Run It, With You, No Air and Kiss Kiss. His biggest hit Forever was saved for the encore, its live vocals filtered to produce the required machine-like effect.

This may not have been one of the most musically authentic shows that the Arena has ever seen, but it was certainly one of its more entertaining displays of crowd-pleasing showmanship.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

You wouldn't know it from this burnt-out husk of a blog, but I've been blogging like crazy for months and months. But it's all been on the village website, and that's a very different form of blogging - and in terms of writing style, you'd scarcely even know that it was me doing it. It takes many hours of every week, it involves a lot of behind the scenes work, and I absolutely LOVE doing it - because the site has made a genuine, tangible, positive difference to village life. Never underestimate the motivational power of second-homer's guilt!

(Although in truth, the village stopped feeling like our second home a long time ago.)

There are six of us on the village blog team - three full-time administrators and three part-time contributors - and we work remarkably well together, pooling our different skills, perspectives and areas of interest. As a result - and I didn't see this coming twelve months ago, when we were trialling the site - the blog is updated several times a day, every day, almost without fail. Since we launched in late March, we've only had one day with no new posts at all, and between us we've already racked up a whopping 1191 posts in nine months. And people still think nothing happens in small villages? I think these people might have us confused with (shudder!) the suburbs.

Over the past month, our stats have been spiking to a surreal degree, for reasons already mentioned. Over 20,000 page views in December for a village with around 500 on the electoral roll isn't normal, and it's unlikely ever to be repeated. Of course, we're all as pleased as Punch - but as a seasoned veteran of the medium, this is not altogether unfamiliar territory, and I'm aware of the attendant hubristic dangers. For that reason, I'm looking forward to a general calming down in the new year, and to a restoration of business as usual. We can't be on the telly every week!

Without a doubt, launching and maintaining the village blog has been this year's biggest personal achievement. Away from that, it's been a year of constant gig-going, with dozens of reviews in the Evening Post to match (none of which have been written 100% sober, thanks to that lovely 6am copy deadline). I've learned to surf the wave of anxiety that washes over me on every walk home, and to embrace it as an integral part of the process. Which is all to the good, because I've historically never been much good at managing fear.

The same holds true for the artist interviews, which are in some ways another exercise in terror management - but I've enjoyed honing the skill of extracting the maximum possible amount of information from my subjects, within the confines of a 15-20 minute phone conversation. OK, so Liza and Jennifer were f**k-ups, even if the finished pieces made for entertaining reading - but I had a good run this year, with personal favourites including Gary Numan, Phil Oakey, Boy George and Vince Clarke (from the Eighties Survivors wing), and Martha Wainwright, The Hold Steady's Craig Finn and Elbow's Mark Potter (from the Contemporary Artistes wing). Oh, and Martha Reeves, who was completely charming and adorable, and left me more posthumously star-struck than any other artist (I floated about in a happy swoon for the rest of the day).

And then there was the day job, which chugged along nicely this year, credit cruches notwithstanding. In geographic terms, I work on my own (albeit in a friendly office), and I spend much of my working day in close contact with people whom I've never met in person. It's a curious existence - but as with the artist interviews, I quite enjoy presenting an edited version of myself, and managing the image which I portray. Interestingly, both exercises feed into each other in terms of confidence building, and dealing with the unfamiliar (again, two historically weak areas).

Nevertheless, and despite being busier than ever before (whatever happened to that quaint concept known as "free time"?), there have been periods when 2008 has felt curiously static - particularly when contrasted with the event-packed rollercoaster that was 2006, for example. Looking back on it all now, I think I'm beginning to grasp what this year was really all about: consolidation, concentration, application, and the steady building of new skills. And that's not such a bad way to spend a year, is it?

A Happy New Year to all my readers!

Update: I've listed some additional highlights of 2008 in the comments.

Ah, what a list this is! From where I'm sitting, this has been a stunning year for albums, nudging me to conclude that 2008 has perhaps been this decade's finest year for music.

(The one disappointment has been the lack of African music - but then I did rather take my off the ball in that regard, having Mali-ed myself out by the end of 2007.)

1. Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid

An album I rate from a genre I hate (middle-youth indie-lite mope-rock, to be precise). Piercingly honest, palpably heartfelt songs of love, loss, loneliness, friendship and second chances. Pitch-perfect performances, exquisitely produced. You owe it to yourselves to see them live. (But maybe not at Wembley Arena in March. I can't see how the intimacy would scale up.)

2. Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel

Local boys done good (for once). Everything that the Klaxons promised, but didn't deliver. Rowdy and screechy and all over the place. Am I supposed to be too old for this sort of thing?

3. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

You have to be wary of albums which knock you out on the first listen, as this usually signifies a series of rapidly diminishing returns. And sure enough, I did reach a point over the summer where this felt somewhat played out. As it turned out, this was nothing that a couple of months of "laying down" couldn't cure. An obvious pick, but the critical consensus got it right on this one.

4. Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too

Perfect travelling music: epic, expansive, atmospheric, with slow builds towards intensely pleasurable peaks. (I want to say "soundscapes", but it's such a wanky word.) Is this Cosmic Disco, Nu-Balearica, or both, or neither? It's so hard to keep track of these things. Shades of Jean-Michel Jarre and Jan Hammer along the way, and I never thought I'd be mentioning them in a positive context.

5. Hercules & Love Affair - Hercules & Love Affair

Smart, sexy, moody New York neo-disco, from the ones who got away on the gig-going front. (Did they HAVE to come to town on the same night as Public Enemy?)

6. Portishead - Third

I have to be in a Certain Mood for it, stark bleakness not being my strongest aesthetic suit. Consequently, this is my least played album in the top ten. But when the mood is right, the effect is staggering. If I were but starker and bleaker, this would have topped the list.

7. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive

I've had to vault the bar of their Springsteen-isms, and it's a bar which prevented me from getting to grips with their earlier work - but there's something new here (an expansiveness? an authority? an added depth and weight?) which keeps pulling me back, and a seemingly bottomless lyrical and conceptual richness which should keep me returning in weeks to come. In this context, Craig Finn's comment that "hopefully on someone’s 75th listen, they get something that they didn’t get out of the 74th" is most reassuring. There's no rush. Give it time.

8. Lone - Lemurian

Woozy, hazy, sun-bleached wonkiness from Nottingham's king of the wow and the flutter. An imaginary soundtrack for the summer that never was.

9. Barry Adamson - Back To The Cat

Did I just say "imaginary soundtrack"? Perplexingly overlooked film noir magnificence.

10. Bellowhead - Matachin

English folk done in a big band style, by a veritable supergroup drawn from folk's new breed (Spiers, Boden, the boys from Faustus). Jollier than its more Brechtian predecessor, and hence my feelgood album of choice for that crucial first beer on a Saturday evening.

11. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
12. Solange Knowles - Sol-Angel And The Hadley St. Dreams
13. Grace Jones - Hurricane
14. Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir - Ten Thousand
15. Lau - Lau Live
16. The Dodos - Visiter
17. Geeneus - Volumes One
18. Amadou & Mariam - Welcome To Mali
19. The P Brothers - The Gas
20. The Bug - The Zoo

21. Laura Marling - Alas, I Cannot Swim
22. Joan As Polce Woman - To Survive
23. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
24. Martha Wainwright - I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too
25. British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
26. Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
27. Neil Diamond - Home Before Dark
28. Paul Weller - 22 Dreams
29. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
30. Rokia Traoré - Tchamantché

31. Estelle - Shine
32. Lambchop - OH (Ohio)
33. Jamie Lidell - Jim
34. Benga - Diary of an Afro Warrior
35. The Breeders - Mountain Battles
36. Various / Fred Deakin - Nu Balearica
37. Mary Hampton - My Mother's Children
38. Shearwater - Rook
39. Kanye West - 808s & Heartbreak
40. Teddy Thompson - A Piece of What You Need

41. Drever, McCusker, Woomble - Before The Ruin
42. Faustus - Faustus
43. Kelley Polar - I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling
44. Camille - Music Hole
45. Various / Charles Webster - Defected presents Charles Webster
46. Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
47. System 7 - Phoenix
48. The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
49. Scooter - Jumping All Over The World
50. The Rascals - Rascalize

And what were your favourites? Do tell.

Labels: albums, lists, popmusic

1. If I Were A Boy - Beyoncé
2. Blind - Hercules & Love Affair
3. The Bones Of You - Elbow
4. What’s It Gonna Be - H "Two" O ft Platnum
5. Happy House - The Juan MacLean
6. Magpies - Joan As Police Woman
7. A&E - Goldfrapp
8. American Boy - Estelle ft Kanye West
9. Time To Pretend - MGMT
10. Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz House Mix) - Paleface ft Kyla

11. Focker - Late of the Pier
12. One Day Like This - Elbow
13. Williams' Blood - Grace Jones
14. In The Air - Perempay 'N' Dee ft Katie Pearl
15. Entropy Reigns (In The Celestial City) - Kelley Polar
16. Bongo Jam - Crazy Cousinz ft Calista
17. Paper Planes - MIA
18. The Bears Are Coming - Late of the Pier
19. White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes
20. Viva La Vida - Coldplay

21. Spotlight - Jennifer Hudson
22. As I - Geeneus ft Katy B
23. I Decided (Part 1) - Solange Knowles
24. That's Not My Name - Ting Tings
25. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa - Vampire Weekend
26. Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) - Beyoncé
27. Ready For The Floor - Hot Chip
28. Weather To Fly - Elbow
29. I'm Right Here (Perempay 'N' Dee remix) - DJ MA1 ft Sophia
30. Space And The Woods - Late of the Pier

31. Pretty Amazing Grace - Neil Diamond
32. A-Punk - Vampire Weekend
33. Sandcastle Disco - Solange Knowles
34. Ghosts - Laura Marling
35. Blue Ridge Mountains - Fleet Foxes
36. Broken - Late of the Pier
37. Falling Again - Wookie ft Ny
38. Swagga Like Us - Jay-Z & T.I. ft Kanye West & Lil Wayne
39. Sequestered In Memphis - The Hold Steady
40. Devil In A Blue Dress - Donaeo

41. Paris - Friendly Fires
42. Skinny Love - Bon Iver
43. Oxford Comma - Vampire Weekend
44. Mercy - Duffy
45. Leviathan Bound - Shearwater
46. Veronica's Veil - Fan Death
47. Love Lockdown - Kanye West
48. Green Light - John Legend ft Andre 3000
49. Bathroom Gurgle - Late of the Pier
50. Need U Bad - Jazmine Sullivan

51. Daddy's Gone - Glasvegas
52. Divine - Sebastien Tellier
53. Stay Positive - The Hold Steady
54. He Doesn't Know Why - Fleet Foxes
55. Time To Let Go - Perempay 'N' Dee ft Cleo Sol
56. Shut Up And Let Me Go - Ting Tings
57. African Warrior - Donaeo
58. Starlings - Elbow
59. The Devil Don't Mind - littlelostdavid
60. In The Hospital - Friendly Fires

61. Wearing My Rolex - Wiley
62. Fools - The Dodos
63. Fuckaz - The Bug (ft The Spaceape)
64. Sabali - Amadou & Mariam
65. Human - The Killers
66. T.O.N.Y. - Solange Knowles
67. Great DJ - Ting Tings
68. Telephone - Erykah Badu
69. Sun Machine - The Shortwave Set
70. I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You - Black Kids
71. Jumping All Over The World - Scooter
72. Zero M2 - Benga
73. Gabryelle (D-Malice Refix) - DJ Technic
74. Waving Flags - British Sea Power
75. Put A Donk On It - Blackout Crew

Labels: lists, popmusic

1. Leonard Cohen - Manchester Opera House - June 19th (10)
2. Liza Minnelli - Royal Concert Hall - May 30th (10)
3. Elbow - Leicester De Montfort - October 16th (10)
4. Late Of The Pier, Fan Death - Chameleon Arts Café - November 30th (10)
5. Elbow - Rock City - April 14th (10)
6. White Denim - Bodega Social Club - July 7th (10)
7. The Dodos, Euros Childs - Bodega Social Club - September 14th (10)
8. Gary Numan (Replicas tour) - Rock City - March 5th (10)
9. Lou Reed (Berlin tour) - Royal Concert Hall - June 26th (10)
10. Gong - The Forum, London - June 15th (10)

11. Fleet Foxes, J.Tillman - Trent Uni - November 2nd (9)
12. Duran Duran, The Duke Spirit - Arena - July 6th (9)
13. British Sea Power, Make Model - Rescue Rooms - January 22nd (9)
14. The Breeders - Trent Uni - April 10th (9)
15. Girls Aloud, The Saturdays - Arena - May 20th (9)
16. Yazoo - Royal Concert Hall - June 11th (9)
17. Public Enemy - Rock City - May 28th (9)
18. Duffy - Bodega Social Club - March 7th (9)
19. Holy Fuck - Bodega Social Club - October 15th (9)
20. Glasvegas - Bodega Social Club - January 31st (9)

21. Lorna Luft: Songs My Mother Taught Me - Royal Concert Hall - February 11th (9)
22. Yazoo - Civic Hall Wolverhampton - June 12th (9)
23. The Hold Steady - Rock City - December 9th (9)
24. Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir, Congregation - Bodega Social Club - August 13th (9)
25. Barry Adamson - Rescue Rooms - April 6th (8)
26. The Beat, Neville Staple - Rescue Rooms - March 6th (8)
27. Alison Moyet - Royal Concert Hall - January 23rd (8)
28. Laura Marling - Rescue Rooms - November 4th (8)
29. Show Of Hands with Miranda Sykes - Rescue Rooms - November 27th (8)
30. Nouvelle Vague, Gabriella Cilmi - Rescue Rooms - February 7th (8)

31. Human League, ABC, Heaven 17 (The Steel City Tour) - Royal Concert Hall - December 3rd (8)
32. Spiers & Boden - The Maze - September 15th (8)
33. The Temptations, YolanDa Brown - Royal Concert Hall - October 29th (8)
34. UK Eurovision Preview Party (Ani Lorak, Bucks Fizz, Sirusho, Nanne Grönvall, Laka, Maria Haukaas Storeng, Isis Gee, Morena) - The Scala, London - April 25th (8)
35. System 7 - Rescue Rooms - February 15th (8)
36. Faustus - Playhouse - September 11th (7)
37. Drive-By Truckers - Rescue Rooms - August 7th (7)
38. Vampire Weekend - Sheffield Academy - October 22nd (7)
39. Martha Wainwright, Angus & Julia Stone - Rock City - November 3rd (7)
40. CSS - Rescue Rooms - October 13th (7)

41. Joan As Police Woman - Rescue Rooms - December 10th (7)
42. Black Kids, Team Waterpolo - Rescue Rooms - July 2nd (6)
43. Y Not Festival (Whiskycats, The Rusticles, Esteban, The Moutown Project, The Fallout Theory, New Groove Formation, Max Raptor, Toufique Ali, Anthea Neads, Jackel) - Pikehall - August 1st (6)
44. Menomena - Rescue Rooms - February 28th (6)
45. The Twilight Sad - Bodega Social Club - March 25th (6)
46. Pete Burns - Nightingale Birmingham - April 5th (6)
47. The Rascals - Rescue Rooms - June 4th (6)
48. John Barrowman - Royal Concert Hall - April 9th (6)
49. Westlife, Hope - Arena - June 24th (6)
50. Laura Veirs - The Maze - February 12th (6)

51. The Ting Tings - Rock City - September 24th (6)
52. Here and Now Tour (Rick Astley, Bananarama, ABC, Paul Young, Curiosity Killed the Cat, Johnny Hates Jazz, Cutting Crew) - Arena - May 9th (6)
53. Heavy Trash, Powersolo - Bodega Social Club - September 30th (6)
54. Delays - Bodega Social Club - March 4th (5)
55. The Futureheads - Rescue Rooms - June 3rd (5)
56. The Orb - Rescue Rooms - May 15th (4)
57. Will Young - Royal Concert Hall - November 28th (4)
58. Seth Lakeman - Rescue Rooms - April 23rd (3)
59. Boy George - Royal Concert Hall - February 8th (3)
60. MGMT - Bodega Social Club - February 28th (2)
61. Seasick Steve - Rock City - October 9th (2)
62. Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong - Rescue Rooms - May 19th (1)
63. Dolly Parton - Arena - July 1st (1)

Labels: gigs, lists, popmusic

As a gesture of solidarity in these credit-crunched times, Mike and K have reined in the worst of their excesses...



WISHING YOU ALL A REASONABLY MERRY CHRISTMAS,
WITH LOVE FROM MIKE AND K.

So much for the "winding down gently before Xmas" pipedream, then.

Look, I thought there was an unwritten code that said: IF you're one of the poor Buggins' Turn saps left in the office during Holiday Fortnight then FEAR NOT, because it's basically about providing Emergency Cover and no one will really care if you alternate between last minute shopping and pissing about on the Internet.

Evidently not. But since I've got half an hour to kill while waiting for something to happen on Ye Olde Heritage Mainframe, I thought I'd pop in to wish my remaining reader a Happy Holiday.

But if Work Time has been busy, then it it has been as nothing compared to Leisure Time - which for the past week has meant spending every available waking hour looking after the village blog. Three reasons for this:

1. We're running an online Advent Calendar, which we've augmented with extra pay-per-view windows featuring various villagers in saucy Calendar Boy/Calendar Girl poses. To this end, K has stepped - all too easily, I might say - into the role of Smut Peddler In Chief, wielding his SLR lenses with lethal charm before a parade of willing lovelies. Meanwhile, we've been featured in the local paper, and I even gave a jolly interview to the mighty media force that is Ashbourne Community Radio last week.

Perhaps it's a good job our vicar's moving on in the new year, as our community's slow slide into moral degeneracy becomes all the more apparent. But as we're raising funds for the rebuild of our Memorial Hall, all moral qualms must rightfully be quelled for the greater good...

2. Ah yes, the Memorial Hall. Last week, we received the excellent news that our village has been awarded £500,000 of Big Lottery Fund money to assist with the rebuild - the largest such award in the country from the BLF's Community Building Programme. Having vaulted that particular hurdle, there's now the small matter of raising the remaining funds needed to make the architects' plans a reality. And, er, K is on the Fund Raising Team. So, no pressure then.

3. Oh, and lest we should forget, there's also the small matter of Tom Chambers from our village (or Strictly Our Tom as we now like to call him) winning this year's Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday night. Down at the village pub, where the landlady had installed a giant widescreen telly for the season, we all went quite potty with delight - especially when Strictly Our Tom thanked us during his acceptance speech. Grown men were crying! Corks were popping! It were bloody brilliant!

And they say that nothing ever happens in small villages? I don't think there's ever been a week quite like it.

On a more personal front, there has been a particularly Exciting New Development in the past few days, but it's still early days and I don't want to jinx it by going public prematurely. Ooh, but I'm itching to spill. But I shan't. God, this is the worst kind of blog post, isn't it?

Time's up. As you were. Happy Christmas.

Having supported Rufus Wainwright in 2005 and the Guillemots in 2006, Joan Wasser made her Nottingham debut as a headline act last night. In contrast to the self-effacing modesty of her previous shows, she radiated a new-found authority, looking glamorous and sleek with her newly auburn hair and sparkly gold frock.

Technical problems with Joan’s keyboard disrupted the flow of the first few numbers, loosening her focus and disrupting her concentration. Bolstered by the amiable patience of her audience, she soon warmed up. Switching to guitar for the bulk of the more muscular, rock-tinged second half, her performance stepped up a notch, her playing markedly more expressive.

A jumbo-sized packet of Doritos were handed into the crowd, and passed around like communion wafers. From this point on, Joan was on safe ground. The goth-like rumblings of Christobel worked better live than on record, and a sublime Magpies benefited from fine falsetto harmonies, courtesy of her bassist and drummer.

Dedicated with fervent glee to “our new president”, To America segued into a thunderous version of Furious, which climaxed with a no-holds-barred, free-form freak-out. As Joan repeatedly slammed her fists into her keyboard, those earlier technical glitches became much easier to understand.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

Patience was rewarded last night, as The Hold Steady compensated for October’s cancelled show with a storming 90 minute set. Just three nights into the rescheduled UK tour, singer Craig Finn could already spot familiar faces in the crowd. These people knew every word of the band’s dense, multi-layered mini-dramas, and they took eager delight in roaring an equally delighted Finn’s lyrics back at him.

Drawing on the experiences of his late teens and early twenties, Finn’s songs capture a world of reckless youthful excess, creating a complex narrative which runs through all four albums. There’s a nostalgic, almost mythological quality which invites comparison with Springsteen – but where Bruce can get bogged down in earnest worthiness, Craig never allows the darker undertows of his lyrics to stand in the way of having the best time possible. He’s the bespectacled college boy who hung out with dangerous “townies”, the geek made good, the thirtysomething who was given a second shot at success, and who has seized that opportunity with both hands.

Slamming from song to song with scarcely a pause, and with a set list that changes nightly, the band peaked with an exultant Sequestered In Memphis and an anthemic Chips Ahoy.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

(Photo taken by rhanke)

When you started the “From The Jam” project in 2007, how much of a risk did you think you were taking?

As some people already know, I played a couple of times with [original Jam drummer] Rick Buckler’s band The Gift in 2006, which was basically the line-up that we have now. I knew that Russell Hastings was doing a fantastic job of lead vocals and guitar, and having Dave Moore as the second guitarist and keyboard player added to the sound. So I just gatecrashed the band, really. Obviously there was an element of risk, but I knew we could perform those songs as well as we ever have done, and do them justice.

But of course, we couldn’t take anything for granted. When we announced the first From The Jam tour in May 2007, obviously we were all a little bit apprehensive: wondering what the Jam fans would make of it, and would they actually come to see the band, and so on. But then the tour sold out within days, so obviously they voted by buying a ticket.

The fans seem to have accepted the line-up, and accepted Russell and Dave with open arms. So any apprehension or fears were soon dismissed, because the reaction we got up and down the country has been phenomenal.

I imagine that within the first two or three dates, you must have realised that the risk had paid off.

Yeah – it’s all right selling the tickets, and the shows selling out in advance, but you’ve still got to come up with the goods. On that side of it, I didn’t have any doubts, because we’d had rehearsals beforehand. I knew the band were sounding great, so it’s nice that what you feel and what you hope for comes off – and it has done.

Before that, you were in Stiff Little Fingers for fifteen years. During that time, did you ever publicly perform any Jam songs?

I joined Stiff Little Fingers around 1990, when I spoke with Jake Burns. He said that Ali McMordie was leaving the band, and would I like to come in. I think we did play Smithers-Jones on the first tour that I did with them, but that was it. It was just an introduction to me to joining Stiff Little Fingers, and it was fun to play that one Jam song. But the From The Jam tour of May last year was the first time that I’ve played all those songs in a long, long while.

Was there a time when you thought you’d never play the Jam stuff again? Or had you always got it in the back of your mind as a possible option?

I didn’t think I’d be playing them again, to be perfectly honest. Over the years, Paul [Weller] had mentioned that he wouldn’t want to reform the band, and I was quite happy being in Stiff Little Fingers. It is a cliché, but I’ll say it anyway: you don’t know what’s around the corner.

We stumbled into forming From The Jam, just from doing a couple of numbers with Rick’s band in 2006. It kind of snowballed from there, and now here we are in 2008, with a winter tour of the UK, and having pretty much toured the world earlier this year.

So nothing was pre-meditated, and I didn’t really know. I’d occasionally hear a Jam song on the radio and was still very proud to hear it, because the actual production on the records still sounds very contemporary.

You struck lucky with Russell, who does a fine job as lead singer and guitarist. What makes him such a successful front man?

Russell was a big Jam fan. He was a young lad when the Jam were going, and he was at the last concert that the band performed in Brighton in 1982. He loved the music and the image and the whole package. And so we were very lucky. He was just a natural, to step in and take lead vocal.

I like the way that he’s able to channel the spirit of the songs, without ever coming across as some kind of impersonation.

Exactly. I’m glad you said that. He doesn’t try to emulate Paul. The tone of his voice is similar to Paul. If you close your eyes and listen to some of the vocal sounds, you think: that’s Paul, isn’t it? Then it’s just slightly different phrasings here and there, and he brings quite a lot to the table. He’s his own man. He was obviously very nervous about stepping into the role, but the fans have really taken to him. I do think he deserves it, because he’s a great front man, and he performs those songs with all his heart.

At your first Nottingham show at the Rescue Rooms, the old “We are the mods” chant made a comeback – and then about four numbers in, the chant changed to “Who needs Weller?” I’m sure they were just being cheeky, but that’s when I thought: Russell’s cracked it!

(Laughs) It may have settled the nerves a bit. But we wouldn’t be doing anything now without those great songs, of which Paul wrote the majority. I’m still very friendly with Paul, and so that’s their opinion, and in a way it was cheeky - but it caused a wry smile. It was quite amusing at the time, and obviously for Russell he probably thought, yeah, I seem to have fitted in OK here!

Does he have a full and equal say when you’re deciding on your set list?

Yeah, it’s very much a four-way thing. It’s difficult, because of the great wealth of songs that we’ve got to choose from. For the set that we’re playing in December, most of the singles will be there, and they probably will be forever – but it’s really difficult to choose the album tracks.

We all draw up a list beforehand of what we would like to play individually. There are obviously common denominators in there. There are certain songs where you go: oh, you want to play that one as well, great, OK! But we can’t possibly play them all, so we just get into rehearsals and go through each number. Some will sound better than others, so we’ll say: OK, that’s made the decision; we’ll play that one instead of that one. But it’s a nice sort of problem to have.

And will there be any new compositions?

Yeah, we’ve been saying this since we first got together! (Laughs) But we’ve had a bit more time recently to concentrate on the new material. There will probably be a couple of new songs in the set, which we’re very pleased with. We’ve only got to the demo stage, so we’ll see what the audience make of them.

Who wrote the new songs?

Again, it’s all four ways. You live and learn! (Laughs) With The Jam, it was whoever came up with the initial idea, and that was usually Paul. But it was very much a three-piece band, all those years ago, and the fairest way of doing things in 2008 is to split the songs four ways.

Is any physical product coming out to accompany the tour?

There’s a double DVD, which was released in November. The first DVD is a live concert that we did at The Forum in Kentish Town in December of last year. The second DVD is a series of interviews with the band. From my point of view, it’s really interesting to listen to Russell and Dave chat about how they feel about being part of From The Jam, because we hadn’t really spoken about it that much. Gary Crowley [DJ and radio presenter] also chats to Rick and myself. We go through all the Jam albums and chat about what we can remember about recording each one of them.

When the original Jam split up in 1982, you ended on a real high. Did you split at the right time?

I don’t think it was the right time. Like you said, The Jam were riding the crest of a wave. It’s what every band aims for, and the quality of the music was still there. I don’t think we’d dried up, or that we’d taken it as far as we could musically.

As you must be aware, Paul decided he wanted to leave the band. We tried to talk him out of it and we suggested other alternatives, such having a break for six months and taking a rest. There was a lot of pressure on all of us, and in particular Paul, because of the record company saying that they needed another Number One album and another Number One single. But Paul had obviously made up his mind and that was the end of it.

Maybe he just felt weighed down with the whole “spokesman for a generation” tag. After The Jam, he took a real step back from those “state of the nation” songs.

Well yeah, he went off to do the Style Council. If Paul knew that’s what he was going to do, he kept it a very closely guarded secret. Maybe he thought: well, I’m going to go off in this musical direction and I want to use different players.

When I heard the Style Council, it really wasn’t my cup of tea. So it made a bit more sense. Having heard what he wanted to do, I don’t think my heart would have been in that particular musical direction. Having said that, with the later stuff and with what he’s doing now, I really personally love it.

The new album is his best work in years, I think.

It’s a great album. Paul and I have renewed our friendship, and we’re talking a lot more these days. We’re on good terms, and that’s very nice to have as well, so what more could you want? We’re not playing together, but we may do in the future. But it’s nice to have him as a friend again.

If the three of you ever did get back together again, it would be a totally different gig. You’d be on the arena circuit, and I think that something might get lost along the way. Whereas it’s great to hear The Jam’s music in these smaller venues.

I don’t think the three of us will ever get together again, but there might be a possibility that I do something totally new with Paul at some point. I don’t know if or when. But as for The Jam, don’t hold your breath! (Laughs)

And I think you’re right – it may get blown out of all proportion and lose a lot of what the Jam were about, if Paul did join. If he came back to the band and it was arenas, it probably wouldn’t work. It would work financially! (Laughs) But it would lose everything else of what we were about, really.

That’s all my main questions, but I have got a couple of cheeky extras for you, because I can’t resist the opportunity to take you to task over some of the lyrics of Down In The Tube Station At Midnight. It is one of your greatest songs, and I know you didn’t write it, but I’ve always found some of the lyrics a bit puzzling.

Firstly, there’s the moment when the man in the song uses a vending machine, and the line goes “I put in the money and pull out a plum”. Now, even in 1978, I don’t remember seeing vending machines that sold fresh fruit! Was that a metaphor?

(Laughs) You’ve got me there! I think you’d best ask Paul about that. That’s one that has bemused me for a while.

And then we meet his assailants, who “smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many right wing meetings”. What is the maximum quota of right wing meetings that you might reasonably attend, before being tainted by their characteristic odour?

Well, I wouldn’t want to go to one! They were cheeky questions, you’re right.

And right at the end of the end of the song, when he’s lying semi-conscious on the platform, he says “the wine will be flat and the curry’s gone cold”. Now then, sparkling wine with curry? These people were fancy...

Now, I can answer that one. It could go off, couldn’t it? I’m not sure what wine he was drinking, but it may have been a Lambrusco or something! (Laughs)

She would have done better to have left the cork in until he got home – but thanks for clearing that up.

You’ve made me think about those other couple. I’ll put my thinking cap on. But it was a pleasure, anyway!

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

(Photo by Juror8)

I’ve been listening to your last couple of albums this week, particularly the most recent release Stay Positive, and even three or four listens in, I feel I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the songs. There’s a lot for listeners to get their teeth into, isn’t there?

Yeah, the idea is that hopefully on someone’s 75th listen, they get something that they didn’t get out of the 74th. It’s pretty dense, and a lot of it relates to songs on other records. But you end up writing music that you yourself would want to hear, and I think my favourite records are like that.

Taken as a whole, your four albums form an ongoing narrative, which is almost like a novel. I’ve also heard it compared to episodes of The Wire.

It’s funny, because I’m a huge Wire fan. It does have a serial quality, in that people who are paying attention from the beginning get these updated chapters. Maybe it’s because of our age. We’re a little older, and we certainly are from the classic era of the album, rather than downloading one track at a time. So we tend to look at an album as one big thing that we’re trying to accomplish. I write songs in regard to the other songs on the album, each time we do one.

The comparison with The Wire scared me, as I’ve only ever tried to watch the series once. It was the first episode of the fourth season, and I couldn’t work out what was going on. A friend who’s a Wire evangelist said: well, come on, you wouldn’t start reading a novel at Chapter Four, would you? So, comparing it with your work: is it OK for listeners to start listening with Album Four, or do we all need to start from the beginning and work forwards?

You can absolutely start wherever you want, and hopefully if you enjoy it enough you’ll work your way backwards. But especially with the first record, it maybe only hinted at the stories that were to come. So I think the new one is as good a place to start as any.

What story is Stay Positive telling?

Stay Positive is a record about holding onto useful ideals as you grow older, get more responsibility, and become an adult. I’m 37 years old, and the idea of aging gracefully is a tough thing, especially in rock and roll. The theme of the record is that idea of staying true to yourself, while taking on more responsibilities. Not avoiding being an adult, but embracing it - but at the same time not giving up some of the things that you hold important.

This sounds like the stuff of which mid-life crises are made. As to whether you can lead a rock and roll lifestyle in your thirties, is that a dilemma which the band is actively wrestling with?

When we’re on the road, I spend almost all my time trying to stay healthy: drinking a lot of water and exercising. Being in a rock band at my age is none of the things that you might have thought it was when you were 15 or 16 years old.

Do you have any role models for aging with dignity as a rock performer?

Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young are two people that have aged well. They aren’t really tied to one particular era or moment, so the music they make is timeless. It crosses decades better than things that are caught up in the trend of the moment.

Neil Young and Lou Reed strike me as people who lost their creative mojo for a while, and then returned to form in their forties. Do you think it’s OK to go away and regroup for a few years?

Yeah. I’ve just read Neil Young’s biography, and he was off the mark for a while. He was doing stuff that was weird, and not super-interesting. But it’s about keeping at it, and being an intelligent person. Just keeping being creative.

There are a set of characters – Holly, Charlemagne and Gideon – who were referenced on your first three albums. They’re not mentioned on the new album. Why did you move away from them, and are they in any sense still present?

I think they are still present. I left it open as to whether they are or aren’t, by not using their names – but I think that they still inform the record. I wanted to increase the mystery on this one. Separation Sunday, our second of four albums, was really a linear story – it told the story from front to back – and I wanted to do something a little murkier, and a little tougher to figure out, hopefully with the same rewards.

I get the sense that different songs are sung by different characters from different viewpoints, and you’re trying to piece together what happens from there.

There’s also the concept of an unreliable narrator, that I like a lot. Is what the guy’s saying true?

For your long term diehard fans, you put in quite subtle back references to previous songs. You might even repeat a lyric of an old song in a new song. Does that ever rebound back at you? Do you ever get hardcore fanboys coming up with incredibly detailed questions, and maybe over-analysing?

I know there’s somewhere on the internet that you can find an analysis of all these lyrics, and I haven’t looked at it for that reason. Sometimes I do get questions from people: does this mean this? And I say: no, I never thought of that.

You can just smile your enigmatic smile, and say: that’s for you to work out. (Laughter) But I’m curious to know how your live audiences react. I went to see Drive By Truckers recently, who strike me as fellow travellers. They’ve got a detached, slightly literary style to their lyrics. When I saw them, the crowd seemed to split down the middle. In this case, it was literally down the middle. On the left hand side, you had the serious listeners who were concentrating on every word, almost stroking their chins with concentration. Over on the right, you had a bunch of really drunk people who were throwing themselves around, crowd surfing, and responding physically to the music. Do you get a similar mix at your shows?

It’s not so much right-left as front-back for us – but up front, it usually gets pretty wild. It used to be that we’d come in and we’d see the big barrier between the stage and the audience – especially in England, where they’re more common in the smaller clubs – and we’d think: ah, that doesn’t seem necessary. But it’s now got to the point where I’m pretty excited when I see the barrier! (Laughs) A year or two ago, we started to have problems with people coming on stage a lot, and we do have shows that get really wild.

Does that mix vary from city to city, or from country to country?

It does vary. In the States, you can get really different reactions from city to city. The shows tend to get wilder in smaller towns, and more so in middle America. In places like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, you have pretty mature crowds.

If you were a member of your own audience, how would you react? Would you be down the front, or standing still and concentrating at the back?

I’d hopefully be somewhere in the middle. When I go to see bands, I like to get up real close, but I’m a little too old to deal with getting trampled. But sometimes you can sneak up in front of the wild people. It really depends on the show, and how the club’s laid out.

How much of what you’re singing about is derived from real life experience, and how much is purely imaginary?

It’s mostly imaginary. The characters are built out of composites of people I knew, especially from the age of 17 to 23: when you’re younger, and maybe a little dumber. But each one is not based on a certain person in my life. These are the types of things that I was around for a while, but not specifically. There’s a lot of partying and abuse and things like that in the songs, but I wouldn’t say that was part of my life any more than the average American teenager.

But there are some things that pop in from my life. Certainly I make a lot of reference to Minneapolis, my home town. That’s something I can specifically describe, or picture where these things happen. It’s a way for me to put something real – real details – into the songs.

I find it an interesting approach. I’m so used to seeing bands performing as if they have personally experienced all the emotions in their songs. That’s the default, if you like. Whereas bands like yourselves and the Drive By Truckers are going for a different approach – maybe a more detached approach. Is there a danger that it can get a little too dry and detached?

I don’t think of it as detached so much; I think of it as cinematic. You’re trying to tell a big story, that may or may not have happened to you. Songwriters are so often expected to be opening up a vein and letting their heart flow out, whereas a film maker can do whatever he wants. No one thinks that Quentin Tarantino actually shoots people, for instance. He’s just telling a story through film. We get compared to Bruce Springsteen a lot, and that’s the one thing I think I did definitely take from Springsteen. He tells these huge, epic stories that I don’t really think happened to him.

There’s a direct cinematic reference in the album’s final song, Slapped Actress, which references a movie called Opening Night. What’s the story there?

It’s a John Cassavetes movie, and it’s really fascinating. I’m not usually so moved by film but this one emotionally moved me. There’s a huge separation in the film between performance and audience. It’s about an actress who’s refusing to admit that she’s aging. As an actress, she trades on her beauty, which she’s losing. It was a compelling thing to see as a performer, because it highlights the difference between performance and real life. The title of that song relates to a scene where Seymour Cassel wants to slap the lead actress, Gena Rowlands. They’re rehearsing for a play, and he says: I have to slap you. She says: well, why don’t we just fake it? It’s a play; you don’t have to really slap me. But he says: no, I have to slap you so that it will look real. And there’s an interesting kind of paradox there: that you actually have to slap someone, to make it look real to the audience of a play.

That reminds of a Chinese film, Farewell My Concubine. There’s a scene of corporal punishment in there, which you assume was staged. It was only after seeing the film that I realised that the director had sprung a surprise on the actors, and actually did beat them hard – so the expressions were accurate.

Yeah, lots of actors since then have said: that’s not totally uncommon.

On Constructive Summer, you “raise a glass to Saint Joe Strummer”. You say that “he might have been our only decent teacher”. Did you ever see the man in action? Did you ever meet him?

Yes, I did meet him. He came to see my old band in Minneapolis in November 1999. The Mescaleros tour was in town, and he ended up at our show afterwards, and really enjoyed it, and hung out with us for a couple of hours. It was a really brilliant night. He’s a hero: for his music, but also the way he carried himself was very inspirational.

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

You first played Nottingham in 2005, supporting Rufus Wainwright and also performing with him during the main set. What memories do you have of that tour?

Oh, I have great memories, for a number of reasons. The fact that Rufus gave me a chance to open for his band was priceless, really. I knew that I was going to be opening for a bunch of true music lovers, so I really got my act together. I would have anyway, but I guess it just scared me a lot more. And then with touring and singing every night, there’s no better way to learn what you’re good at, what works and what doesn’t work. Rufus wanted me to sing in all these different ways that I wasn’t used to: REALLY LOUD! at times, or purposefully nasal, to get different timbres. That was really educational and interesting.

Were you also collaborating with Antony Hegarty [of the Johnsons] at around this time?

I joined Antony’s band around 1999, a couple of years after I started writing my own songs. I stopped playing with him in 2004, when I began touring with Rufus.

Collaboration seems to have been quite important to you along the way. Your name pops up on various albums, from Rufus to Antony to the Scissor Sisters. That suggests that you must be easy to work with, and flexible to other people’s ideas.

Well, I hope so. I find it fun to see how other people work. I go in with a very open mind and I like to make it as fun as possible. Music is the greatest joy of my life, and usually everybody else’s that I’m working with. So it’s wonderful fun, to be making the best of what happens by combining a bunch of brains together.

Compared to your debut release, your second album To Survive has a more contemplative, delicate feel. It also strikes me as less immediate than its predecessor; you have to put more work in as a listener this time round.

It depends on each person, but this record is pretty dense. You have to give it a moment, and I think it probably takes a little bit more time.

There’s also more of leaning towards piano in the arrangements.

Yes, definitely. Piano is the last instrument I learned, so it’s the most fun, and the most free for me to write on.

I know that much of the album was composed while your mother was battling with a terminal illness, so one might expect the dominant themes to be loss and mourning. However, a lot of the songs also seem to be celebrations of new love, so there’s an interesting contrast of emotions at work there.

You’re right about that. I love being in love, so there’s always going to be love songs on my records. I was very much in love when I was writing some of those songs. But it seems like a lot of people mistake some of the songs about my mum as love songs, and some of the songs they think are about love are about my mum. That’s kind of nice for me, because ultimately it is the same thing. And then I’ve also got a couple of songs about my government, that has taken a FABULOUS turn for the better recently! Thank the Lord above!

So you’re still surfing that wave of elation? I guess he hasn’t had a chance to disappoint anybody yet...

Well, he certainly has a giant job in front of him, but if anybody can do it, it’s going to be that guy.

I guess that relates to the final song on the album (To America), which you perform as a duet with Rufus. So many of the songs have been so deeply personal up until that point, but then it’s almost as if you’re looking outwards towards the world again.

That song has really complicated implications, but it’s really a hope for the future, and for a return to democracy for my country. Some people think it’s cynical or sarcastic, and it sure is not. I am not a cynic or a sarcastic person! I’m an optimist, even though it’s not hip. I don’t care, I’m not hip!

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

A tidal wave of Eighties nostalgia swept through the Royal Concert Hall on Wednesday night, as three of Sheffield’s most celebrated pop acts came together for the Steel City Tour. In happy contrast to the cost-conscious Here And Now packages, stylish stage sets had been constructed for all three acts, properly reflecting their art school roots.

Glenn Gregory’s broad, beaming smile never left him for a second, as Heaven 17 whipped through a well chosen selection of chart hits (Come Live With Me), cult hits (Fascist Groove Thang) and even a brand new song. Many of the tracks were subtly beefed up with contemporary dance rhythms, including an epic, show-stopping Temptation.

Bravely, ABC opted to include three songs from Traffic, their most recent album. These blended in well with their Eighties back catalogue, which included six selections from the classic Lexicon Of Love. Performing in front of a red velvet backdrop, a sharp-suited Martin Fry looked happy and relaxed, and sounded in as fine a voice as ever.

The Human League might be a nostalgia act these days, but their futurist tendencies still shine through. Their stage set was all clean white surfaces, retro-modern gadgetry (were those the remains of a vintage IBM mainframe?) and dazzling computer-animated visuals.

Like Glenn and Martin before him, Phil Oakey’s sturdy baritone placed him firmly in the “bellowing foghorn” school of Eighties pop performers. As ever, his commanding vocal presence was balanced by the endearingly unschooled voices of Susan and Joanne, whose occasional off-key wobbles merely added to their charm. Seemingly impervious to the normal aging process, 45-year old Susan vamped it up something rotten, flirting with the front rows and revelling in our attention.

The League’s hour-long set climaxed with the evergreen Don’t You Want Me, a properly arty Being Boiled, and a truly glorious Together In Electric Dreams.

Set list.

Heaven 17:
(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang
Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry
Geisha Boys And Temple Girls
I’m Gonna Make You Fall In Love With Me
Come Live With Me
Let Me Go
Penthouse & Pavement
Temptation

ABC:
The Very First Time
Poison Arrow
Show Me
How To Be A Millionaire
Date Stamp
Ride
Love Is Strong
All Of My Heart
Tears Are Not Enough
When Smokey Sings
The Look Of Love

Human League:
Seconds
Mirror Man
Open Your Heart
Love Action (I Believe In Love)
Empire State Human
The Lebanon
Louise
The Sound Of The Crowd
(Keep Feeling) Fascination
Tell Me When
Don’t You Want Me
Being Boiled
Together In Electric Dreams

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

Fan Death are Dandi and Marta, an electro-disco synth-pop duo from Canada. They’re tiny and giggly and eager, full of fresh-faced fun, a bit arty, and quite brilliant. If there’s any justice in the world, you’ll be hearing a lot of them in 2009.

Late Of The Pier are the biggest and best act to appear from this part of the world in living memory. Last night saw them return to Nottingham for a barely advertised show in a tiny café above a card shop on Angel Row. It was the launch night for Sausage Party, a new venture from the Liars Club crew. Half the crowd seemed to know the band personally, making for an uncommonly friendly vibe that felt more like a private party than a standard rock gig.

With no raised stage area, visibility was tight. The front rows were asked to sit on the floor – which they did, for all of five minutes. As the spiky, punchy set progressed, a kind of collective frenzy engulfed the room. The singer surfed the crowd, before scaling a wobbly speaker stack. The moshers shook the floor so hard that fears were raised for the ceiling below. “Please don’t dance”, the singer pleaded. “Or else YOU’LL DIE.” The sense of danger merely heightened the mood.

An unforgettable night, from one of the most exciting young bands in the country. We should be proud.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

Having plied his trade on the arena circuit for the past few years, Will Young has returned to theatres and concert halls for his current tour. For his fans, it’s a chance to see him in a relatively more intimate setting. For Will, it’s an opportunity to showcase his skills as a singer, rather than coast on his status as a pop star.

If last night’s show was any fair measure, then there’s still some work to be done. An unsympathetic sound mix tended to bury his voice in the arrangements on the more uptempo numbers, most of which were stacked up in the first half of the show. This did his delicate, reedy voice no favours, leaving him sounding somewhat lacking in presence and authority.

The breakthrough came with the ballad You Don’t Know, performed to the accompaniment of a single guitar. At this point, Will seemed to find his focus, giving a sincere performance which carried emotional depth and weight. This stripped down mood was carried through to Let It Go: the title track from Will’s fourth album, and one of the strongest songs on there. Following the poor chart performance of current single Grace, it has the potential to restore his hit-making status.

From this point onwards, Will was on safe ground. Bounding around the stage in a loose, scooped neck T-shirt and a pair of impossibly tight trousers that looked more like leggings, he looked dressed for a dance class rather than a concert performance – but this casual attire suited his relaxed, informal manner. The banter flowed, as cheeky calls from the audience were answered with witty ripostes and off-the-cuff anecdotes. This wasn’t an evening for considered artistry and solemn song craft, but a light-hearted coming together of a much-loved personality and his adoring fanbase.

The evening’s most bizarre moment came with the encore, which saw Will in fluorescent gloves, making “jazz hands” and throwing all manner of unlikely shapes, for a tango-flavoured Grace Jones cover (I’ve Seen That Face Before). Sanity was restored for the inevitable closer Leave Right Now: the only one of his four chart-topping singles to be performed (All Time Love being the other major omission), and still his most enduring classic.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

(An edited version of this interview appears in today's Nottingham Evening Post. You might also enjoy the audio version.)


Photo taken by rodc, September 2006.

Along with fellow Sheffield acts ABC and Heaven 17, you’ll be participating in the forthcoming Steel City Tour. How did the idea for the tour come about?

It might have been my idea, but people have thought that I’ve claimed ideas which weren’t mine before! I just remarked at a meeting with our manager that one day we would have to do a tour with all the Sheffield people. He seemed to go off with that and get it somewhere, which seemed like a nice idea.

Did anyone need much persuading to join the line-up?

I think people always need loads of persuading. There’s all sorts of different things going on. Everyone wants to be on a stage, and then everyone’s thinking: ooh, can we afford it, or can we afford not to do it, and will it put our status up or down, and all of that. So I should think there’s been loads and loads of behind the scenes stuff.

We [the Human League] are more resigned to working live. We’ve done it for years and years and years now. At the end of the year, we’re going to go out and do a live tour, because after thirty years, we’ve realised that it’s our job.

The Human League Christmas tour has become an annual tradition, hasn’t it?

Well, we’ve been doing it for a really long time; I think it must be ten years or so. And it’s always great to have a little wrinkle. The worst ones to do are the ones where it’s just us on our own – because when we have to do an hour and a half, we just run out of hits. We have to have one or two songs where we’re begging the indulgence. But luckily on this one, our set will be a little bit shorter and we can have a bit of a storm through the hits.

The most immediately startling thing about this line-up is that you’re touring with Heaven 17, as two of them [Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware] were founder members of the Human League. Is this the first time that you’ve appeared at the same event?

It isn’t. We have done various little things. We all went through a period of doing PA appearances in the early 2000s, and a thing called Here And Now that we did with Tony Denton, and we got together on a couple of those.

Really, the Human League is Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh’s. I came along and joined, then they branched off and I continued it on. But I actually like the lads very much. At the time when I joined, I think they would have had Glenn [Gregory, Heaven 17’s vocalist] as the singer, but he happened to be working in London at the time. But then he was massively hospitable to us. When we toured in those days, we had no money at all, so if we were anywhere near Glenn, he’d say: come and stay at our flat, I’ll feed you up and make sure you’re all right.

You split from Martyn and Ian at the end of 1980. It must have seemed like there were huge musical differences between you then, but perhaps those differences dissolve away over the years?

I don’t even know if it was musical differences. I was more inclined towards commerciality, maybe because I was brought up with three older brothers, and I’d grown up with pop music, and I loved pop music. The Heaven 17 guys were maybe a little bit deeper and more philosophical than me. I’ve always said that my favourite band is probably Slade. I really wanted to be in a pop band with our photos on the front cover, and maybe they had a more long term artistic sort of thing.

During the late Seventies and early Eighties, all three of the bands on this tour were associated with an emerging Sheffield music scene, which was mostly centred on electronic music. Did it feel like a proper scene at the time?

It really was a scene. I didn’t know the people until after I joined the band, and then I found that all these things were going on all over the place. Ian Burden, who eventually joined us, was in a band called Graph, and I became a very big Cabaret Voltaire fan. For a couple of years, I didn’t miss a show that they did.

So there were rivalries, but then again there was really good stuff going on. I would have loved Richard Kirk to bring Cabaret Voltaire on this tour. I don’t know whether anyone sussed that out, but I’m still a big fan and I see Richard around in Sheffield.

We all knew Martin [Fry, of ABC], because he was running a fanzine at the time. We knew Martin before he was in ABC, when we played shows with [his previous band] Vice Versa.

Do you have any theories as to why that scene, which consisted of people working in broadly similar areas of music, suddenly sprung up at that time?

I’ve often wondered about it myself. Sheffield was a very European kind of city, strangely. We had two art colleges, and we had a council that really tried to pour money into supporting the arts. All the guys in the Human League apart from me were in a theatre group called Meat Whistle, which was council funded. That was where they got their ideas together, and maybe that was why they thought it should be a little bit more theatrical, electronic, and maybe a bit more cabaret, than just going and doing the rock band thing. Which Def Leppard were doing down the road anyway, with massive success.

That’s interesting. So there was council money, and there were links to the arts. In Nottingham, we have slightly more inhabitants than Sheffield, but we have a dramatically less prominent music scene.

Things seem to go in waves, though. The odd thing is that music often does really well when people haven’t got any money. You’ve got nothing to lose. I think if someone had given me a good job somewhere, and a company car and all that, I wouldn’t have been out until two or three o’clock in the morning fighting with my friends to try and get one tune and not another tune, and scraping by, and living in vans and so on. Sometimes it’s bad for people when they’re doing really well.

That tradition of electronic music from Sheffield has continued over the past thirty years: from Warp Records through to acts like Moloko, and then with the whole Gatecrasher era. Do you feel in any sense like one of the founding fathers of that tradition, and are you acknowledged as such?

I tend to think of myself more as an observer. I always seem to join in on someone else’s thing, which has been very interesting. I ought to write a book about it one day: the way that I’ve often been standing at the back of the room, while someone important is doing something good. I think the League is more or less in that tradition.

The Gatecrasher era gave us the chance to say that something good was established with electronics: something that was an alternative to rock. I loved Gatecrasher, actually.

I wish I’d been. I never got the chance. We’ve got a Gatecrasher in Nottingham now, but it’s obviously not the same thing.

That scene got so big that it couldn’t continue, could it? But Gatecrasher is certainly the best nightclub I’ve ever been to. It was incredible.

Some remixes of The Things That Dreams Are Made Of came out at the start of the year, which did quite well in the clubs. Did you have any involvement in that?

Only in that we said yes. I really enjoy all that stuff. I’m feeling slightly miffed at the moment that people tend to ask me to be the voice on something, or the front of something, as I’m killing myself trying to write some new stuff at the moment. But I do really like to hear the remixes going on, and getting some new ideas going.

So people ask you to be featured vocalist on their tracks, like you did with The All Seeing I? [Phil supplied guest vocals on their 1999 hit, 1st Man In Space.]

It was better with The All Seeing I, because I knew the lads anyway and so that made a bit of sense. Quite a few people ask me, and it seems that what they really want me to do for some reason is to be in the video – which is odd, because I don’t look particularly good or anything. But they think that maybe that would get it in the paper, or something!

So I’m fighting shy of that at the moment, and trying to do a new electro-glam-disco album. We’ve got a load of new material. We’ve gone in quite an interesting direction, and we’re just trying to wonder how to put it out. The business not being what it is at the moment, we might end up putting it out ourselves.

I was wondering about that. I believe you’re currently unsigned, but maybe in this day and age it doesn’t matter, because you can bung it out yourselves.

It’s a real big help if you are signed. I know that’s the model that has died now, but I’ll tell you, it’s absolutely brilliant to walk into a room, and have someone say: what would you like? And you say: oh, can we have £200,000 and then we’ll start making an album? And by the way, we need £200,000 to live on while we’re making it. And the guy says yes. That is a really good feeling, and I miss it! (Laughs)

If you were to distribute your own music, you’d need your own official website. You must be one of very few bands left that don’t have an official site, and I don’t quite get why not.

It’s because I never wanted to be the guy that drove the Rolls Royce into the swimming pool after Keith Moon. If I could have done it first, I would love to have done it. But we’ve always tried to go down a different stream to everyone else. And I think, in a way, we didn’t make the most fuss of that in the papers. Because if everyone’s doing rock, we’re going to do electronics, or if everyone’s off doing white soul, we go over to Minneapolis and do Prince-y sounding stuff, and then people are surprised.

I just didn’t want to do [a website], because 10,000 other bands do it. So there’s got to be some other way. Right now, if I had a million in the bank, I would say: I’ll do it on 12-inch vinyl. My friend Dean who was in The All Seeing I had a couple of record labels where he put everything out on 7-inch vinyl. And it was really lovely, and it was dead arty, even if it didn’t get to quite as many people.

Vinyl is the format that refuses to die. They’ve even re-introduced it into some American supermarkets, which you wouldn’t have expected.

I love it, but maybe not for the sound. I love it because it’s physical. I think we miss the fact that you used to have to make that decision. You’d play one side of an LP, and then you had to get up out of your chair, go over, take the arm off, turn it over and say: I want to listen to the second side.

Absolutely – you’re committing to the act of listening, rather than randomly flicking shuffle on your iTunes. When you started up, and especially when you first started having hits, you and a lot of your contemporaries would talk about “subverting” pop, or of taking control of pop and redefining it. How much of that was just talking it up? Did you just want to be pop stars anyway?

It’s really hard to tell, because you change. As soon as you have a few hits, you immediately become a very different person – and to be straight, we always had a plan to have hits. When Martyn Ware asked me to join the band, he brought round a copy of I Feel Love by Donna Summer. It wasn’t that we wanted to be obscure European musique concrète people. We really loved pop music, and we wanted to be a bit like KC and the Sunshine Band as well.

I got that right from the start. The first thing I ever heard was an early cover of You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ on a Peel session. That was a completely radical idea at the time, because “electronic music” meant alienated urban robots or whatever. So perhaps you were the original New Romantics?

I thought we were the first people who were called the New Romantics. I thought Rick Sky [tabloid showbiz journalist] said it in an interview with The Star about us, but now some other people are claiming it. Spandau Ballet’s manager is claiming it now, isn’t he?

There’s also a lyric in an early Duran song. [“Like some new romantic looking for the TV sound”, from Planet Earth.]

God, I didn’t know that. Duran were always a little bit rocky for me. I was really into Japan and John Foxx, but as soon as they put guitars on it, then I’m only a punter because I don’t understand it. They’re twanging these things and these notes are coming out – but I can’t see on a screen what they are, so I get confused.

I shared your sense of purism when Duran came along. I’d already heard it from Japan, basically. But I always sensed with the Human League that there was some kind of grand plan behind the scenes: right down to the design of the record sleeves, and the period when you colour coded your singles, Was there a grand plan, or was it all smoke and mirrors and you were just winging it as you went along?

There was a grand plan, and most of it just didn’t work. Every time you thought you were going to have a huge record, no one bought it. And every time you slipped one out quietly, thinking: oh my God, why are we putting this out, we had the big hit.

We were nicking ideas left right and centre from people, all over the place. A lot of our plan was basically George Clinton. The colour coding was referring to George Clinton: we’ll have a Parliament, and a Funkadelic, and a Brides of Funkenstein. It will all be different things, and we’ll roll it all together, and maybe at some stage all the people who like all the different things will buy all of them.

I’ve got one more question. With you and Heaven 17 on the same tour, has the door been left open for an onstage reunion? Maybe a jam on Empire State Human, or something like that?

I would be really surprised if that happened. For a start, I think the question is: who’s going to be doing Being Boiled? I would be surprised, because we’ve all got pretty solid stage set-ups that we would be terrified to deviate from. I guess it would be more likely that we get together in the studio at some stage.

And if you did that on stage, you’d have Martin Fry standing in the wings, thinking: well that’s all very well, but where does this leave me?

Yeah, and he’s probably the best singer who’s going to be there.

He played Nottingham on the Here and Now tour, earlier in the year. Of the seven acts on the package, ABC were unquestionably the best act of the night.

Well, he is such a good singer. He was fantastic on the records, and he’s much better live. It’s frightening.

So the futurists of old have become kind of the nostalgia acts of today – but it seems to me that you’re all very reconciled, and very happy with that aspect of your work.

I guess so. I mean, we’re all approaching retirement; we haven’t got any fight left. I’ve just gone out and got a new dog, so I’m worn out from trying to walk him!

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

(This article also appears in today's Nottingham Evening Post.)

They may be the biggest band to emerge from this part of the country in years, but Castle Donington’s Late Of The Pier are in no hurry to play a major home-coming gig just yet. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Instead, the band’s next Nottingham gig, which takes place on Sunday, will be in a tiny venue called the Chameleon Arts Café, above Clinton Cards on Angel Row. And since the venue only holds around a hundred, tickets inevitably sold out within a few hours.

The night in question, which rejoices in the name of Sausage Party, is the joint brainchild of the band and promoter Ricky Haley, best known locally for his wildly successful Liars Club nights.

Mike Atkinson caught up with Ricky this week, to find out more…

How did the idea for Sausage Party came about?

As you have probably noticed, Late Of The Pier are doing alright for themselves of late. I’ve been running Liars Club since March 2003, and the boys from the band used to meet up there, with the aim of one day being the house band!

Well, they’ve probably shot a bit too high, and are too big to play every week. So we thought: let's do it anyway, but give it a name that plays down the hype and squeeze it into an even tinier venue.

Sausage Party was just a fun name that I had. When I worked on the door of The Social, you would get groups of lads pushing their faces against the window, and then wheeling away saying "Come on, let’s go somewhere else, it’s a bleedin' sausage party in there." In other words, there were no girls!

The whole idea, what with myself being a full time tour manager and the band being on tour all the time, is that we are finding out about new music from constant touring, and then bringing this weird bunch of ideas back and feeding it to the Nottingham party monsters. You never know quite what you'll get in a sausage!

Are the band going to have a continuing involvement in future Sausage Party nights? And will there still be future Liars Club nights elsewhere?

Liars Club is myself in the third person, really. I run it all myself, unlike a lot of club nights, and it gets a bit much. This is why I occasionally do co-promotions with other like-minded promoters, such as Damn You, Exalt Exalt, Mantile, INVSBL FKRS etc.

I decided to stop my weekly Saturday at Stealth in May, and took a four month break which coincided with the Dot To Dot festival happening. I really needed a break to keep myself excited in running events. So Liars Club happens on an impromptu basis these days.

Late Of The Pier may not always play live at Sausage Party. But they will curate, promote and DJ at the nights, which will be reliant on having myself and the band, plus a line-up of other acts, in the same place at the same time. It will take some doing, but when it happens, BE THERE!

What led to you choosing the Chameleon Arts Café as a venue?

We decided it was a perfect setting, as the guy that runs it is a real crazy character and the venue itself is like someone's living room. It has real character and anything goes. It's secreted enough to keep the riff raff out, and makes it seem like a house party amongst friends

This all sounds, dare I say it, a bit elitist. Then again, there's something to be said for tight-knit, closed communities, as a lot of creativity can come from them. What's your take on that?

Liars Club always used to be called elitist, but to be honest I tried doing loads of free entry nights, and they just filled with people who weren't really interested. They just ended up intimidating the crowd who were there for the music, and who wanted to escape that kind of thing.

Late Of The Pier specifically wanted to do a small intimate venue, and it’s not elitist to want to do a show for the people who have supported the band since Day One. Without this show, there wouldn’t have been another one until 2009 – but that one will hopefully be bigger and better than anything before.

What's the best advice for people wanting to come along to future events?

If people want to keep informed, they can search out the Sausage Party Facebook group, and we’ll have a website and a MySpace page, but we don’t really intend on handing out flyers or posters at this stage.

I also gather that you’ll be giving away CDs at the door on Sunday night. What can we expect on those?

Oh yes. I’m due to meet the band this week, as we both have a few days off. We will be sitting in our living room, and running a little conveyor belt of CD burning and labelling as a thank you to everyone who is coming to the night. Expect new unreleased music, and plenty of gems that we have dug up from here, there and everywhere. I don’t want to see them on eBay after Christmas, either!

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

Photo taken in Trowbrisge, July 2006, by perlmonger.

Veterans of the sit-down folk club circuit they may be, but last night’s mesmerising show at the Rescue Rooms demonstrated that Show Of Hands’ current “Standing Room Only” tour was a gamble that has paid off. As vocalist Steve Knightley remarked, stand-up venues give the crowd a chance to bellow along to their hearts’ content, without risking the glares of their neighbours.

For a band that remains firmly off the radar of anyone unfamiliar with the English folk scene – despite a seventeen year career and three sold-out appearances at the Royal Albert Hall – it was remarkable to observe the fierce loyalty of their audience, who greeted many songs like old friends. The night’s biggest crowd pleaser was Cousin Jack, a stirring tale of migrant mine workers, while the trenchant Country Life (“The red brick cottage where I was born is the empty shell of a holiday home”) proved that the tradition of the protest song has not yet been extinguished.

As the set progressed, the music took a darker, more brooding turn, Knightley and his partner Phil Beer switching to fiddles for a stunning version of Innocents’ Song. The set closed with the anthemic Roots, whose outspoken polemic roused the crowd into one final massed bellow.