I’ve written a lot of reviews over the years. This is the home of pretty much all of them since about 2003.
We are very much in the time of new bands, new styles, and a distinct dearth of live venues in London. This has resulted in a few things: gigs that sell out quickly as there aren’t the available venues to upgrade to, venues we’ve not been to in a while as promoters appear to be […]
Somehow, despite the feeling I was just getting started, I’m already home, (mostly) unpacked and finishing this write-up of another great edition of Infest. It has long since become far more than just a music festival that I attend because I want to see a few bands – it’s an extended family.
A word of warning: in the future, if you see that I’m attending a show in June next year, just know that for the past three or four years now, I’ve been unlucky enough to be gig-bound on the hottest day of that month. Gigging indoors in the heat is never fun, of course – […]
Nearly halfway through 2019, and the gigs keep on coming. After a week off (I was away in Greece), there were three shows back-to-back as we entered the second week of June. Two of those shows were relatively big, high-profile events – the return of Bikini Kill at Brixton on Monday, and then the return […]
Syd.31 are not your average punks. For a start they are punks by way of electronic music and industrial. But also they are punks by way of a political-based higher education (as explained three years ago when I talked to them on /Talk Show Host/027), and exposure to the music growing up far away from […]
I’ve long felt Katatonia to belong to the lineage of underappreciated bands in metal. They are a band that have been around for a remarkably long time – they initially formed in 1991 – and shed their early death-doom roots early on. Indeed it could be said that Jonas Renkse’s move to clean vocals for […]
The career of Randolph & Mortimer has been a strange one thus far. While Sheffield-based, his earliest work slipped out unnoticed over here in the UK, and was picked up first by the European industrial media. amodelofcontrol.com first talked to them on Talk Show Host: 005 in summer 2013 (!), but had actually covered early […]
In one of those weird quirks that seem to happen more often than they should, two industrial bands from Vancouver (one featuring a previous member of the other) are releasing new albums within a couple of weeks of each other. One is decades into it’s career – and frankly don’t really have anything left to […]
Back in the mists of time, there used to be a steady stream of all-day “festival” events in the London goth/industrial scene. There was Gotham, there was Black Celebration, and probably a few more that I’ve rather forgotten about. They often had a good mix of bands, to appeal to the widest group possible, and […]
I don’t often go to Goth Festivals for music. There, I said it. Whitby, for me, long since became a social holiday, where I catch up with old friends and play football – I only occasionally see bands there. Most of the rest of the festivals I attend, of course, are broadly industrial or electronic […]
About this time last year, I attended my first BEAT:CANCER show, which was something of a voyage of discovery in what felt like a parallel scene, with a good number of people I rarely saw at other shows I attended, and a number of artists that I’d never come across before.
Twenty years of a festival existing is nothing to be sniffed at. Sure, bigger festivals have existed much longer (Reading dates back into the sixties, while Glastonbury is a few years younger), but in the current crowded festival environment, a smaller festival lasting twenty years is an extraordinary achievement. Particularly when the twentieth edition is […]
“Local” bands in London are ten-a-penny, but finding ones I actually like, or want to listen to more than once, or go to see live, are rather rarer. Move into the nominally industrial/rock/metal sphere than I frequent, and the pool of available bands gets ever smaller.
The last day of the ten day period of All Points East at Victoria Park was also my first ever attendance at one of the festivals in that park. Like my own “home” park Finsbury Park (I live within 100m of it), it is extensively used for live music over the summer period, which probably […]
This has been, and will continue to be, a very busy week. This was the third gig in as many days – a disappointing Ho99o9 show on Sunday night, that was so unengaging I left twenty minutes into their set, and then a much better Author & Punisher/Trepaneringsritualen show on Monday that left my teeth […]
It is rather remarkable, now I think about it, just how fast 3TEETH have risen in the industrial ranks. I only came across the band five years ago – their first appearance was on Tuesday Ten: 180 in early July 2013 – and I can thank my friends at I Die: You Die for tipping […]
Two Fridays on the trot out at small gigs in London, away from the centre. In recent years, particularly as rampant development has swept away much of the Alternative landscape from Central London, unexpected corners of the city have popped up as useful places to put on smaller gigs.
My habit of writing lengthy gig reviews often means that I don’t have the time to do some shows that I attend justice, so, this new Click Click series will hopefully mean I get to write more about the gigs I attend.
I’ve been meaning to write about a few of the gigs I’ve attended this year, but various things – not least my working day and other commitments – have rather reduced the time I’ve had to do so. I’ve seen a defiant Nadine Shah show at the Roundhouse, which while also being an emotional “dream […]
2018 has continued, in our corner of the musical world, pretty much as 2017 left off. The sheer number of new releases has meant that for this site at least – a one person endeavour, in the main – it has been difficult to keep up, and pressures of real life (job, other commitments) have […]
