Crystal Castles - The Roundhouse, London 15/10/10

There’s something about the Camden’s Roundhouse that makes any gig feel like you’re about to attend a historical event. Maybe its the act of ascending those endless stairs and entering that huge colosseum like arena.

Soon after the brilliant HEALTH end their support slot Crystal Castles, that’s Alice Glass and Ethan Kath (and a live drummer), hit the stage and begin their feral electronica.

Each song is more thunderous and more abrasive than the last. Sounds such as ‘Baptism’ and ‘Crimewave’ hit everyone in the room with neither subtlety nor apology. The lights are blinding and the music is deafening, it’s an assault on both the senses and conventional ideas of what a live show should be; you can barely even see the band past the lights.

For some it’s easy to become lost in the shear pretense of it all and to wonder what on earth their point is, the excitement in the air is only infectious if you’re willing to tear yourself away from this naive idea that art should mean something.

On the rare occasion that Crystal Castles’ music attempts to encode any thought or feeling (look at recent single ‘Celestica’) it’s so fleeting that it feels as if they’re trying to convince even themselves that they are something as opposed to nothing. Soon enough it falls back into the same vacuous drone of sassy white noise coming from Alice and repetitive beats coming from Ethan. It’s their unpredictability that makes them so predictable.

Annoyingly however, in this room, in this part of London, with this crowd, and under those strobe lights they make perfect sense. Look around, the crowd are as riotous as the crowd for any punk or metal band. As Alice runs across the face of a security guard the only thing stopping her being swallowed be the sea of arms and shoulders is the tension of the microphone cable, people treat her like the messiah. At times (fleetingly again) the spectacle along with the deafening sound of it all can make your hair stand on end.

Crystal Castles aren’t trying to convey love or hate here - They aren’t trying to convey anything. Instead they’re just chucking paint at a blank canvass and inviting their audience to do exactly the same. Maybe the only thing cooler than giving a shit is not giving a shit - God, I hate that I understand them.

The Vaccines - 27th October, The Cornerhouse, Cambridge

***Published November 2010

One minute and twenty five seconds of their set opener ‘Wreckin’ Bar’ is all that The Vaccines needed to snare the attention of every soul at The Cornerhouse that night. Similarly six months, a few tracks on the web and a badly exposed photograph of a girl with her face out of view was all it took for them to cause the same buzz that hit The Strokes, The Libertines and even The XX not so long ago.

‘Hello we’re The Vaccines from London, and this is...a song’ says singer Justin Young three or four songs in to the set before dancing across the stage and almost taking out his guitarist. Their presence in the room is striking enough to improve the mood tenfold the moment they hit the stage. It’s seems like the band have realised very early on that taking pop music seriously is about as silly as taking a goldfish for a walk.

It’s their direct sound, thick with irony and reverb that keeps causing comparisons to the great gun wielding pop-producer of the 60’s Phil Spector. Now any idiot could tell you that punk and indie has been borrowing from Phil’s formula since the late seventies, but The Vaccines are not The Jesus and Mary Chain and they are certainly not The Ramones; they’re just The Vaccines, and that’s what’s so bloody exiting about them

It’s all over very quickly, the set lasts around twenty minutes before the band run off the stage and outside the venue to hand out free T-shirts from the back of their Transit van. I asked Justin (who used to perform acoustically under the alias of Jay Jay Pistolet and tour with Mumford and Sons) what he made of the Phil Spector comparisons. 'Flattered' he said before talking animatedly about Spector’s work with various girl-groups and his influence on The Beach Boys. He seemed genuinely dumbfounded that so many people were interested in meeting him after only their eighth gig.

That’s right, it’s only their eighth gig - most bands this young arrive at venues like this to play to the barstaff and the support acts. It’s easy to be suspicious of hype like this but watching them play live genuinely felt like watching something special unfold.

Everything Everything - Anglia Ruskin SU Academy

***Published November 2010

From Manchester (cue references to historical indie obscurity) Everything Everything have steadily risen from being just another wacky indie band on the BBC Introducing Stage to having their first album Man Alive hitting the top twenty in album chart sales. Their busy tour hit our very own SU academy on the 5th of September.

A few hours before the show I was ushered behind the stage by a distracted looking tour manager. I’m introduced to Lead vocals Jonathan, Bass Jeremy and Guitar Alex (who promptly fell back to sleep on the sofa and stayed that way for the remainder of the interview). Jeremy is tall and well spoken, Jonathan is wearing surgical scrubs.

I asked the about their openness towards pop music and if they felt it was something that is translated directly into their sound

Jeremy - Definitely. Just for not wanting to let go of the basic totems and emotion caused by shape of a musical phrase I suppose.

Jonathan - We like the hidden sadness in shiny commercial pop music, when you take it apart and look at its bare bones theres of lot of real melancholy in the actual writing of it, I think maybe we take that on a bit.

EE’s music does teeter between shiny pop and outright pretension, resulting in a tongue-in-cheek charm that infuriates as many as it delights. Something quite rare about the band themselves is the attention to detail in both the lyrics and the music behind it. I asked them to explain the elements of the music that they thought about first when constructing a song and how they approached recording it all.

Jonathan - ‘Errm...chords and harmonies and rhythm is what we start out with. It’s very rarely an extended lyric, it might be one or two phrases. Some of our recording is really slick, some of it is really cheap. On one of our demos we had this horrible synthesized harpsichord. We always assumed we’d swap it out for a real one but the producer said “No this part of your sound, keep it in!” Some of the bedroom demos we made were included on the album as well because there was something about them that made them worth listening to in that state. It would’ve probably killed it if we did it again.’

Finally I asked them to list some bands they’d been listening to recently, they were refreshingly vague in their response.

Jonathan - ‘We really like the Foals record, the Arcade Fire album as well. Besides that...R Kelly put a new album out, we love that.’

Jeremy - All I’ve been listening to is jazz of late. The Bad Plus released a new album, we all love it. Especially him, he’s jazzed-out .

A few hours later the que outside the canteen that is live venue is reassuringly long. Clientele including the late-teens NME crowd and a few cynical bearded musos who must have been impressed by EE’s stellar performance on Jools Holland a few weeks back.

When they finally hit the stage the band deliver a tight energetic performance. Jonathan's twitchy falsetto voice hitting every syllable and the rest of the band’s noodling is perfect. Fully conscious this time, Alex proves to be an incredibly skilled guitar player. The set is full of everything we knew from the album already and some new songs, including an a-capella tune with vocals from every band member (believe me, it sounded much better there than it does being read from this sheet of paper).

It’s all too easy to dismiss Everything Everything as a half baked attempt of industry hacks to pocket the EMA grants of naive sixth-formers (one writer at pitchfork.com dismissed the lyrics that reference internet culture as ‘the self-absorbed musical equivalent of having 12 browsers open at the same time’).

Yes, they are a squeaky clean pop group when you put them next to the music press’ so called ‘slacker rock’ scene that may or may not be happening at the moment, but delve a little deeper and you’ll find a collective of people that love having a comprehensive taste in music so much that they want to be in the band that does everything. Hence ‘Everything Everything’ I guess.

Reading Festival 2010

**Published September 2010

I’ve got this theory that whoever it is that’s up there allocating fate and cosmic irony was having a right old laugh this year. After years of having to brave the pouring rain GLASTONBURY saw the bluest skies imaginable; READING on the other hand run afoul of a downpour Wednesday evening leaving the campsite swampy enough to test the thickest of Wellies. Still, we soldiered on. Most of us had endured scumbag touts, dodgy websites and obscene ticket prices to get us through the gates and a little slime wasn’t going to dampen our spirits, no matter how much it looked like the Mud Flats of Alaska.

Friday’s party atmosphere at the main stage was eventually kicked off by gypsy-punks Gogal Bordello who's terrific presence made all concerns about the weather seem completely trivial. Later Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil shocks everyone with his Hulk Hogan-esque bleached beard and pink trousers. I’m just happy to hear an appropriate mix of their recent balladry and their pre-Puzzle wackiness.

Next (maybe the performance of the entire weekend) it’s Queens of the Stone Age. They’re on mindblowing form, it was like somebody unleashed the Kraken and made it sexy. Their set was stuffed with fan favorites like ‘I think I lost my headache’ and ‘Misfit love’ and some obvious (but no less perfect) choices like ‘No one knows’ and ‘Go with the flow’. Finally after busting out one last guitar storm in ‘A song for the Dead’ Josh Homme smirks down the microphone and simply says ‘Guns ‘n’ Roses’. There’s scattered laughter in the crowd, who know already that the other ginger bloke’s band who are up next aren’t going to match that in a million years.

They could have at least turned up on bloody time though. Guns ‘n’ Roses (or Axl Rose and a few mates) wandered on stage 58 minutes late, by which time a sizable chunk of their audience had wandered back to the campsite. Everyone else had to sit tight while the band waded through songs from their recent turd ‘Chinese Democracy’ and the occasional hit before embarrassingly their set was cut short due to a noise curfew. Needless to say, seething hatred radiated from the population for the rest of the evening. Axl is about as cool as wearing socks and sandals to a wedding reception.

Most of Saturday felt like a build up to the reunion of the ultimate ‘will they, won’t they’ band, The Libertines. They did show up however, punctual as a German train and to the opening music of Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll meet again.’ It was a great set and despite a certain members tired history of unreliability they truly pulled it out of the bag. ‘Time for heroes’ causes such a riot in the first fifty rows that they had to momentarily stop playing due to safety concerns. Wonderful.

A surprisingly small bunch stuck around to watch Arcade Fire’s headline slot. Presumably everyone else wanted to watch some predictable drum-and-bass at Pendulum on the NME stage. Didn’t matter though, it just meant that the informed minority had a better view of one of the best live bands on earth. Some highlights (of a flawless set) were ‘Intervention’, ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains’, ‘Power Out’. Then finally, because any other choice would have just been silly, ‘Wake Up’. It was bold, euphoric and so pleasing to see them playing the space that they’ve deserved for so long.

Sunday was a great chance to relive the music you loved in your early teens. Now you’re older and maturer you make out like you’re only going to see Limp Bizkit and Blink182 because of some ironic double standard. When truth be told, this music makes you want to refuse to do your homework as much now as it did ten years ago. Limp Bizkit eventually won everybody over and was hugely entertaining.

Anyone who ever listened to Blink182 throughout their teens probably knew already that their live performances were among the worst, but this little fact didn’t seem to stop most of the festival wanting to see them play on a stage way bigger than their music was capable of filling. It was true though, their performance was terrible. Tom Delong constantly got his own lyrics wrong then even stopped singing altogether to point out that he ‘sung the last verse super-badly.’ It didn’t matter though, if anything the set was saved the complete stupidity of it. That and them putting an end to the weekend with their rendition the old classic ‘Family Reunion’ - You’ll have to look up the lyrics yourself because I’m certain they wont let me print them in this publication...

Delphic - The Junction - 16/03/2010

***Published September 2010

So, Delphic. For those of you who try to not to be influenced by relentless radio airtime or BBC sound of 2010 polls (Mika came 1st in 2007, What?!) Delphic are an alt/electronica four piece, who had recently propelled into mainstream consciousness via immense critical acclaim and tours with The Streets and Bloc Party. In March 2010 Delphic appeared to a packed-out Junction in Cambridge.

I was lucky enough to chat to synth player/singer Richard Boardman a few hours before the show. There were some pleasantries. Yes I have heard the album. No it’s not Cambridge Uni it’s some other one nearby. Yes I’d love a glass of orange juice. Richard is a proper gentleman, despite the bands moody image and relentless critical praise. I mentioned the success the band had been having and asked if there a specific event that tipped it off?

‘I don’t think there was one particular event unfortunately it more of just a really natural build. We started gigging in 2009 and we were writing an album at the same time, we were really conscious to not be one of those bands who are suddenly like ‘Whoah, you’re just the next big thing’

Delphic have been hailed by many as the long awaited new blood to fill the gaping void in Manchesters famous indie music scene, comparisons are consistently made to classic acts like New Order. Despite this, they don’t seem phased by this heavy burden. I begin to ask ‘Does it irritate you that people always seem to want to relate your music back to Manchester or...’. He interrupts,apparently he fully understood my question long before my sentence was complete.

‘...When we started we knew this would happen. We were wondering if we should do the same that thing that The Ting-Tings did and say we came from a different town altogether but then we thought that Manchester really needed some newer bands. There’s not really much going on in the city. What’s the last really good band that’s come out since Elbow or Doves? But not even those bands have really taken the city by the balls. So we thought that we should just add something back to Manchester because we’re all proud of the city. It doesn’t irritate us but yeah, people do take it too far.’

Their live set is a striking, bold display of textually rich-improv and seemingly endless strobe lighting. The crowd swaying, bopping in that terribly polite Cambridge sort of way. For many the highlights are singles Counterpoint, This Momentary and Doubt. For me it’s their set ender Acolyte, the song gradually builds layer upon layers before a swooping arpeggiator lick drives it into a euphoric, hypnotic trance. I mentioned the song to him and asked if there was any point to their live set that epitomizes them.

‘Acolyte’s my favorite to play live, that song kind of epitomizes the whole band and the whole concept behind the record really, we don’t have to limit ourselves to doing a three minute tune with a verse and a chorus and we can just make it as long as we want - eight minutes in this case. But I guess the whole set is just one big song, it adds a different dimension to the music compared to the album. We’re really reluctant to let anything die down to that point when people can nip to the toilet or something, we wanna make sure we never give people that moment. And if we ever notice that moment in a set we’ll try and mix it up for the next time or just add something really obnoxious and loud and then drop into something else. We take a lot from DJ sets and bands like The Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk. Its nice to be able to contrast that with a big guitar solo from Matt. It’s a nice juxtaposition and hopefully adds something unique.’

Finally, I asked ‘How would you pitch the band Delphic to somebody who hasn’t listened to music since 1975?’ Slightly phased by my silly silly question he hazards an answer:

‘Err, well. Early synthesizers were about in ’75 and Kraftwerk were messing around taking apart organs and Pink Floyd were messing around with early moods and stuff like that. So I guess I’d say ‘Look at these kind of things’. I’d have to give them a bit of history. But, people in 1975 they’ve got so much to come. They’ve got punk, they’ve got all that electronic music, I’m not sure it would make sense to them. ’

So are Delphic really the Manchester band to place fingers on the citys rich history? - It’s too early to tell. What is striking about them however is how focused and confident they are with their sound and performance, despite being only 18 months old. The certain thing about them is that they do have the potential to be huge.

Ian Brown - Corn Exchange 7/12/09

***Published December 2009

At a feeble twenty years old I may have been the youngest person at the Corn Exchange that evening. Floods of late twenties/early thirties men still donning that token Adidas stripe top (zipped-thru to the chin) all here to watch ex Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown perform his own brand of spacey Madchester theatrics.Tonight was going the be the most 90s night Cambridge had seen since err, the 90s. - Not that that was a bad thing of course. Even my companion Richard got partially shellsuited for the occasion.

Brown struts on stage with that recognisable arrogant swagger. The lighting team instructed to make him look as messiah-like as possible. Oozing confidence he bops his shoulders to the competent beats made by the rest of his band. Opening track ‘Love like a fountain’ results in a graceful sway from the audience. Who are careful not to spill their pints, careful not to look like they aren’t having fun. It’s not long before the band play the excellent ‘F.E.A.R.’ The room fills with blinding light, pints are spilled, grown men begin singing their hearts out. All of the sudden the £27 entry fee seems almost justified. I’m having a ball. Eventually Brown takes a break to play with his audience. He makes pincer motions with his hands and accuses the rowdy heckler at front of being a lobster before simply stating ‘This is Cambridge, I thought you people were supposed to be smart.’

There’s almost no denying it; Brown’s music is ever so slightly silly. But the singer’s persona and the conviction he uses to deliver each song is not without its charms. Looking at the crowd and their complete adoration of the King Monkey himself it’s clear I’m not the only one who’s figured this out. However, I guess something about the entire affair seems a little forced. Did I come here to see Ian Brown play or did I come here to watch the guy who sung ‘I am the Resurrection’ in 1992? It wasn’t until the band started the encore with the bulletproof classic ‘Fools Gold’ that I realised that I was probably standing in a room full of Stone Roses fans, myself included. And whether this is saying something about the vitality of Brown’s earlier work or about the quality of his solo work since I’m not entirely sure. But I suppose none of this matters, Brown is still an excellent showman after all these years despite his music swaying occasionally towards the pointless.

Bowling for Soup - Corn Exchange 20/10/09

***Published October 2009

Is there anything you could expect from a band called ‘Bowling for Soup’ other than complete stupidity? Well, no. But the crowd of fifteen year olds didn’t come here for anything life changing and neither did I. BFS are an unbelievably catchy pop-punk band formed in 1994 Texas Years later they are still playing the same tunes with the same sense of naivety and immaturity. Their original fanbase may have grown up a little but they sure haven't.

The tour is to promote their seventh album ‘Sorry for Partyin’ and they are supported by The Leftovers, MC Lars and Zebrahead. The three sets gave me plenty of time to work out how to use the expensive camera I had rented for the evening, but not much else really.

The set begins with their 2000 single ‘The Bitch Song’ which tells the story of a man so devoted to his lover it makes him stop caring about her horrible personality (‘You’re a bitch But I love you anyway/you can’t sing but you still put me to sleep’). Surprisingly, this song is pretty sincere in its own little way. The set continues and the security staff have a hard time dealing with the sea of sweat covered school kids crowd surfing over the barrier and upsetting the photographers.

The band are sure to fill their set with the regular crowd pleasers such as ‘High School Never Ends’ ‘Punk rock 101’ then my favorite ‘Girl all the bad guys want’. Except a handful of new tracks including the moderately funny ‘My Wena’ - where singer Jared declares his love for a girl called Wena (or his penis, It’s not made entirely clear).

Of course, their set finishes with the 2004 single ‘1985’ which lasts a good three minutes longer than the original recording because lead singer Jared wanted to hear the audience sing the final chorus in an Antonio Banderas accent. The audience are having fun but nowhere near as much fun as the actual band are having. I’m not ashamed to admit that I still love this type of music and I might not ever grow out of it. Maybe it’s because the music reminds me of past times or maybe its because I’m secretly still 13 years old. Either way you’d be surprised how often I put away my Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen CDs to be replaced with this joyful brand of pop-punk silliness.

The Cure NME Big Gig 2009 - O2 arena 26/2/09

***Published May 2009

When I was fourteen I stayed up until one in the morning on a school night to watch an MTV documentary on my favorite band Blink182. The set-up was that they named a band they loved, played a music video, then named another and so on.

About half way through they named some weird bunch of goths from the 80s called The Cure, then showed a music video involving them locked in a cupboard that was falling off of a cliff. It was awesome.

It took me about six months of research before I found out that the song was called ‘Close to Me’ and it was from their 1985 album The Head on the Door. Quickly The Cure replaced Blink182 as my favorite band and it stayed that way for a very, very long time.

Probably through forgetfulness, bad luck or just plain laziness it wasn’t for another six years that I finally got my boney little fingers on a ticket to see The Cure play live, and, as it turned out, was well worth the wait. Even worth waiting for uber-fashionable musical Topshop advert Crystal Castles to finish their support slot.

So, how can I sum up this gig? Well, the answer is I can’t. They played everything. And for a band with a back catalogue as diverse as theirs this is a bold statement. From the shamelessly romantic pop of ‘Just Like Heaven’ to the post punk of ‘Killing an Arab’ to the epic gloom of ‘Disintegration’. (I literally poo’d my pants when they played this). The way that a song from all thirteen albums was picked out acted almost like a history lesson. Paying respect to a certain portion of their fans, the aging goths who had clearly been listening non stop since 1981. - And these are real goths, not the kind who sit in their rooms and listen to Marilyn Manson because their mums made them do their homework instead of go out...

The part of their set that really got me, and I mean slapped me in the face, was their encore when they dug up such dinosaurs as 10:15 Saturday Night, Jumping some else's Train and then finally Boys Don’t Cry. Songs that singer Robert Smith had probably written in his late teens sometime in the 70s. The fact that a blissful little pop song like that could fill somewhere as huge as the 02 Arena has got to suggest something here.

I left that evening grinning, safe in the knowledge that if they had played ‘Close to Me’ (Not my favorite Cure song, just my favorite song ) it probably would have altered the way I listened to it - and why the hell would I want to alter the soundtrack to so much of my adolescence?