I’ve written a lot of reviews over the years. This is the home of pretty much all of them since about 2003.
I was last at Resistanz in 2014, ending three straight years of attending the festival, with various other life commitments (and Whitby, more often than not) meaning it hadn’t been possible for us to return for some time. But, when certain bands got announced this year, a plan was quickly hatched, and we found ourselves […]
When I was ten or eleven, at the end of the 1980s, we got satellite TV. Partly this was to allow my father, raised in part in Germany on a British Armed Forces base and a fluent German speaker, to watch German channels (and most importantly his beloved Borussia Dortmund). But it also had a […]
I’ve been attending Infest since 2000, and this was my twenty-fourth edition (including the two mostly-online editions, one of which I DJed at, and I contributed video interviews with bands to both of them). It’s seen a lot of change over time – both as styles of music within the wider alternative/electronic/etc scene have come […]
Back in 2021, in the midst of lockdown, Dutch band De Staat started to think differently. After six albums and a moderate level of success – helped by viral hit Witch Doctor in particular – attention turned to releasing songs attributed to colours as states of mind. Red for the dark side, yellow for the […]
A pretty intense thirty-six hours of travelling across the southeast – I covered well beyond 200 miles without ever really intending to – saw me finish my Saturday at the Cart & Horses in Maryland (Stratford), to catch the second gig by the reformed Killing Miranda. [cardoza_facebook_like_box] /Click Click /009 /Killing Miranda /Date /30-Dec 2023 […]
Cold Waves XI was my fifth trip to Chicago, and over the course of the weekend, it was suggested to me more than once that I’m becoming an honorary Chicagoan, such is the frequency that I’ve made it over across the past decade.
Just four months ago, I was beginning to be resigned to the August Bank Holiday being devoid of one of my favourite events of the year. So when we finally set foot in the new venues, it was very much a feeling of joy that we’d got there at all.
Remarkably, I believe that this was my last rescheduled gig in the aftermath of lockdowns and shutdowns, after a few years of next-to-no gigs, followed by a 2022 that seemed to be spent trying to catch up. This particular tour was one of those rescheduled at least once, maybe more, and indeed the headliners had […]
It’s fair to say that since I first started going to Whitby in 2004, things have changed. The people running gigs at the Spa have changed (twice, now), the people coming to Whitby has continued to change, and remarkably some fringe events continue to thrive away from the limelight. There has been epic drama, on […]
That what started out as a hastily-scheduled event to celebrate the life of Jamie Duffy has turned into a large, multi-day, multi-city festival over the past decade is something of wonder: but what is also great is how it has fostered a wider family of sorts, one of multiple groups that come together from all […]
One of the obvious casualties of COVID since early 2020 was live music, both in the form of gigs, and festivals. For many, both 2020 and 2021 were almost entirely devoid of the kind of communal joy that these events can bring, and parts of my life certainly felt that bit emptier without them – […]
It’s been a long time since I was last at any kind of festival in person. The last one I went to was the all-dayer 10 Ten Years of Chaos in February 2020 (/Memory of a Festival/034), and the last multi-day festival was Infest 2019 (/Memory of a Festival/033) – so with COVID still looming, […]
It is remarkable to think that I first heard Empathy Test for myself just five years ago. That first time was back at S.O.S. #2 at Electrowerkz, the second instance of a small-scale indoor festival that followed the Alt-Fest debacle – part of a groundswell of support that was inspired by Alt-Fest’s great promises and […]
I have to admit that it has been a while since I had last thought about Brainclaw before 2020. They have jolted back into my view thanks to the sad news that former member Tara Lessard passed away over Christmas, and that appeared to, finally, spur David Giuffre into finishing the long-promised album that I […]
For me at least, there are a number of links between Katatonia and Paradise Lost.
Promenade Cinema rather burst out of their native Sheffield a couple of years ago, with a handful of striking, elegant singles and a sensational debut album LIVING GHOSTS, that this site saw fit to award Album of the Year on /Countdown/Albums/2018. I still love that album, too, and did have a little fear in the […]
As I noted recently in my chat with the promoter on /Talk Show Host/058, Chaos Theory Music have reached their tenth anniversary by being a fearlessly uncompromising promoter, doing things in different ways and indeed bringing diverse, interesting music to an increasingly open-minded crowd. Which meant that their tenth-anniversary celebration at The Dome and Boston […]
My gigging in 2020 has perhaps started slower than usual – I didn’t see a single show in January – but this might be down to the fact that by all accounts, there wasn’t a lot going on in January in our part of the music world. It was almost as if after a traumatic […]
For the last couple of years, one Saturday around this time of year has seen me head to Electrowerkz for the latest London edition of the BEAT:CANCER shows – and indeed take photos of the bands, and write about them too.
The seemingly inexhaustible jukebox that is my brain has a regular supply of new music added to it, by account of my voracious appetite for new songs and new artists to excite me. But amid the constant playlist updates are some releases that have been there for what seems like forever.
