Well the scores are firmly affixed to their respective doors and after months of anticipation Reading Festival line-up was released upon an expectant public last night. I was lucky enough to nab myself a ticket in the pre-sale last year so I missed out on the utter carnage that was seemingly hundreds of thousands of young music fans scrambling to purchase their Weekend Camping passes. All I had to do was sit back, relax and tune into the Zane Lowe as the first instalment of the line-up got announced. Your hatred is understandable.
My feelings on what’s been announced so far are pretty muted. I think the headliners are all fairly sensible, if slightly predictable, shouts. Kings Of Leon and Arctic Monkeys are well due their slots and Radiohead will clearly be the festival’s crown jewel. Further down the bill however, there is less and less to get excited about. Kaiser Chiefs retain a position they held three years ago, Bloc Party seem to be on permanent rotation as main stage also-rans and The Prodigy, although providing a tasty prelude to Arctic Monkeys, will be performing the same set at both Download and Isle Of Wight festivals earlier in the festival calendar. The same can be said for the rest of the supporting cast who seem to be a motley compilation of Reading veterans.
As always though, there’s still much more to be announced including NME/Radio One, Festival Republic, Lock Up and Dance Stage headliners. Word on the street is that Lostprophets will be taking up the formidable task of counter-posing either KOL or Radiohead on the Friday or Sunday evenings. Other acts that are being bandied around but remain unannounced include Doves, Frank Turner, Death Cab For Cutie, Anti Flag, 36 Crazy Fists, Little Boots, Black Lips, Rise Against, The Parks Dept and The Rakes.
If you haven’t got a ticket yet and still want one, it’s worth pointing out that ebay is not your only remaining option at this point. Credit cards will have been rejected, many will have made accidental purchases beyond their six per household allocation and most importantly you will no longer be able to buy a ticket on the door this year. Such factors point to a high probability that a second batch of tickets will be released at some point over the next couple of months.
Still congratulations are due if you made it through the maelstrom and have your ticket in the bag. See you on the barrier for the Fall Out Boy then?
It’s taken a fair bit of time for the unreliable cesspit of all things digitised that is my laptop to realise that failure is not an option when it comes to uploading tenderly compiled mix tapes. This one’s called ‘Born In The USA’, a not so subtle reference to The Boss and more importantly a hint to the mix tape’s contents. All the artists included are of course from the land of stars and stripes, so expect some Dylan, Cash and Buckley but also a liberal sprinkling of lesser known talents worth checking out. This week due to popular demand I've added artist and song title tags to the tracks, so you'll lose the mystery but hopefully have a better idea of what you're listening to.
You can download the mix here.
You will need Winrar or WinZip to open the folder. You can download Winrar for free here (select Winrar 3.80).
Enjoy
Disclaimer: Commercially available MP3s are for word-of-mouth purposes only. If you like any of the music featured here, please purchase it to support the artist and enjoy higher quality audio. If you are an artist or represent an artist and would like a file removed, please contact me.
Once upon a time, the process of forming a band meant writing songs in C major about buying your girl a steak dinner, meeting her parents and if you got lucky, brushing your hand against her thigh whilst everyone squeezed into the pew for Sunday mass. A succession of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks quickly put pay to this scenario by getting thousands to sing along with lyrics about the down and dirty, even if the experience itself still meant a morning spent in the confession booth. One band however, saw this growing trend in rock & roll and took it a step further than the rest.
On their 1965 debut ‘Here Are The Sonics’, the Seattle based band covered such varied subject matter as cars, Satan, psychopaths, guitars, girls and drinking pesticide for kicks. As was not uncommon at the time, the majority of this LP is comprised of covers of popular songs from the era such as this pile-driving cover of Richard Berry’s ‘Have Love Will Travel’. However, all such interpretations were fed through The Sonics’ pioneering formula of howling feedback, chugging drums and bone chilling screams. The band carried this rich vein of form onto 1966 follow up album ‘Boom’ continuing the theme of subtle of subversion with opener ‘Cinderella’. Yet despite garnering a cult following, the band failed to crack the mainstream and subsequent attempts to water down their sound for commercial success met with widespread antipathy. As a result, The Sonics remain a band in the mould of The Velvet Underground, ignored in their own time but revered over subsequent decades.
Listening back on tracks such as ‘Psycho’ though, I’m filled with a sense of nostalgia for a period I’ll never get to experience. For the days when you could cut your own bit of magic in a recording studio the size of a tin can by playing three chords as hard and fast as you’re road weary guitar and tone deaf amp would allow. Better times maybe not, more simple ones almost certainly.
Being a student journalist can be a pretty unrewarding job sometimes. You constantly churn out article after article, spurred on by the naive notion that someone out there will read your piece and maybe even give a damn about your opinion. On rare days though, this job will make you feel like the dogs bollocks. The day I got to meet and interview White Lies was one of these days.
Somehow in the period between ‘White who?’ and UK album chart toppers I’d managed to bag a chat with the boys on the Birmingham Academy date of the NME Awards Tour 2009, thereby catching the band in the very midst of their ascendency. Truth-be-told, White Lies seemed more than aware that they’d out grown the student media talk circuit as when we entered their dressing room, the announcement of yet a another interview was met with a collective groan.
Nevertheless, both Harry McVeigh (lead vocals, rhythm guitar) and Jack Lawrence-Brown (drums) proved themselves to be professionals to the core and after a chat on the merits of tour catering, my dictaphone was switched on and it was time to roll with the questions.
You started out as a post-punk ‘Fear of Flying’ before making the switch to the bleaker, starker sound of ‘White Lies’. What prompted the change?
Harry:“Fear of Flying was very much a band we were in when we were growing up. We started that band when we were fifteen/sixteen years old and we started White Lies when we were nineteen. Between those ages you learn a lot and you change a lot as people and we just learnt through the experiences in that band how to write songs, how to record songs and basically everything you need to know to become a success in the music industry. Eventually we reached the point where we wrote some really good songs, ‘Unfinished Business’ being the first song we wrote as White Lies, and we decided to hit the nail on the head, finish the old band and start again as White Lies.”
You got picked up by Fiction records after your first twenty-five minute gig in the new incarnation. How did you cope with the prospect of having to write in the studio to complete the album?
Harry: It’s certainly very different, but I think it was easier for us than it would have been for others because of the way we write and also, because of the fact there’s a distinctive sound to our band. So yes, we did write five songs in the studio but it was very easy to make them good White Lies songs. I think sometimes it’s good to be under a bit of pressure to write because otherwise you just end up producing a ‘Chinese Democracy’ or ‘St. Anger’.
I always take it as a great sign when a band puts out an album that’s ten tracks long, I think it shows an absolute confidence in the songs on offer. Was this a conscious decision with your LP or was the track listing borne out of necessity?
Jack: It was a combination of both really. I think from an early stage we knew that the album was going to be ten tracks long for two reasons. One, we wanted to keep it concise and put out a real statement as an album. The other reason is that we’re just no good at writing b-sides we never finish songs knowing that they’re going to be b-sides, so we actually only have thirteen tracks in our repertoire.
The media at large have been keen to label your album as 2009’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’. Both LPs were released in the midst of a recession. What effect, if any, does the current economic climate have on your music?
Harry: It depends how the public want to perceive it. I see it as kind of unrelated. In terms of the Joy Division thing, they’ve never been a big inspiration to us although we get compared to them all the time. I suppose the comparison comes from the way I sing and partly the way we dress. It’s not really music that we listen to. We’ve never really been interested in songs that are connected to the political or the here and now. Our songs are based on feelings and emotions that span the history of time.
You recently celebrated a UK number one album yet you’re currently third on the bill of the NME Awards Tour. Does this disparity between status and billing upset you or is it a grounding experience?
Harry: No I think we’re a pretty grounded band. In May we’re headlining our own tour and we’re just looking forward to getting prepared for that. Doing things like this is really good practice for us. This is the first time we’ve played venues this size and you shouldn’t do that on the top of a bill, that’s just crazy. We weren’t expecting our album to go to number one and even if we were I still don’t think we’d have wanted to headline something like this.
The NME Awards tour is traditionally billed as a hub of creativity. Is this the case?
Harry: We get along very well with the other bands on this tour. We toured with Friendly Fires and Glasvegas before. We toured with Glasvegas in December last year and we’re touring with Friendly Fires again in America later this year.
Any possible collaborations on the cards?
Harry: You know I think Florence is a fantastic singer. If she agreed to do it I’d love for her to sing on one of our songs. [Lo and behold later that night: YouTube]
A lot of more morbid bands find their personalities tarred with a ‘suicidal’ brush by the media. Do you live out the strong emotions expressed in your songs or is this kind of typecasting a complete fallacy?
Jack: I think that it’s fair the media have picked up on that because it’s quite clear that our lyrics are fairly dark. Most artists and songwriters usually choose to vent those emotions through their art. It is one side to our personality but it doesn’t really sum us up as people. I don’t think you need to be on the verge of suicide to write music like that. That’s not how life really works and that’s not the right way to look at it.
You recently shot the video for your next single ‘Farewell to the Fairground’ in Nikel, Russia. How did the setting suit the song?
Harry: I think certainly with the Farewell to the Fairground video, the location fitted the song perfectly. It’s the kind of place you can go to and almost do what the lyrics are written about, but in a way that’s not cheesy.
Jack: Those videos have left a lot of people feeling completely confused. There’s such great YouTube beef surrounding them. You get some people leaving comments like ‘This is utter w**k! What is this fake David Lynch s**t?’ and others are will say ‘This is the best video I’ve seen in five years!’ and that’s exactly what we wanted to do.
Finally, what are your post-tour plans for the rest of the year?
Harry: Hopefully at some point we’ll celebrate the fact we’ve had number one album. We found out the news in Russia, in the middle of Siberia, in a town that mines nickel and so it was pretty hard to focus on that. It’s just going to be more touring for the rest of the year really.
‘To Lose My Life’ the debut album from White Lies is out now (MySpace)
Innocent bystanders can barely speak for shock, mother’s cling to their children lest they be corrupted by its malevolent force, the faces of once puritan fanatics are red raw from nights spent howling into the darkness, the headline reads: “Yeah Yeah Yeah’s go disco”... anyone would have thought it was the end of the world. Maybe the illustrious music critic collective have spent the majority of 2009 thus far trying to find the African influences in Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Tonight’ but the whirlwind of consternation that New York’s most musically talented band would chuck some synths into their glam-punk mix took me by surprise.
For the record, ‘It’s Blitz!’ does represent something of a departure for Karen & Co. Indeed for a large chunk of the album resident guitar hero Nick Zinner ditches the axe in favour of a chorus of orchestral electronics. A ‘switch of instruments’ tagline, doesn’t really give a fair representation of the album though. The real pink elephant in the room on the YYY’s third LP is the lack of the in-your-face immediacy that characterised the best moments of previous efforts ‘Fever To Tell’ and ‘Show Your Bones’. Even on lead single ‘Zero’, the B-movie pastiche of primal riffs and carnal front woman is replaced by a pulsating rhythm, slowing building into a glorious rebel-rousing anthem. It’s the YYY’s Jim, but not as we know them.
Not that we ever had any need to be worried of course. With a production team of Nick Launay (Arcade Fire, Talking Heads, PiL), along with TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek behind the mixing desk, one really couldn’t imagine a safer pair of dab hands to bring the band’s art pretensions to the foreground whilst leaving the ‘rawk’ to skulk around in the shadows. One noticeable result of this sparser arrangement is the (further) allocation of centre stage to Karen O. Whereby once O could writhe around in a wall of Ramones-esque chaos courtesy of Zinner, drawing a dubious line between style and substance, the spotlight that ‘It’s Blitz!’ brings can’t be simply offset by a blood curdling scream.
Dutifully she rises to the occasion, portraying a softer more sentimental side previously only seen on the likes of ‘Maps’ and ‘Cheated Hearts’. Though never knowingly subtle, O can at least deliver grand proclamations with ironic understatement such as that of ‘Flow sweetly hang heavy / You suddenly complete me’ on album highlight ‘Hysteric’. Equally, the aptly titled ‘Soft Shock’ proves true to its promise of a skuzzed up lullaby, smugly drifting along on a wave throbbingsnyth and tremolo guitars without ever feeling the need to burst out into a flash of bedlam.
As such, ‘It’s Blitz!’ is a record that never truly announces itself. Even its most dance floor friendly moments ‘Heads Will Roll’ and ‘Dragon Queen’ gently creep up on you. First with a foot stomp, then a careless swaying of the arms, before culminating in a full on head bopping frenzy. It’s this pervasive sense of quiet confidence that makes the LP so impressive. By ripping up their own copy book in order to start again the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s have made their best album to date. Just don’t mention that ‘D’ word to anyone.
