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 […]
This winter in the UK has seen another time where the weather has seen fit to make an already crap time (lockdown) even worse. There’s been heavy snow, storms, lots of rain, frankly it’s been a dreadful time that really hasn’t helped with the feeling of being trapped in one’s home.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
“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.
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.
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 […]
Some statistics: over 2017, I saw 114 live sets, across 45 days-worth of events (I count festivals by the day, so Infest covers three days-worth of events). Remarkably, by the way, my wife Daisy saw 18 days-worth of the 45 with me (perhaps a larger number than usual!).
It is easy to forget, sometimes, that what we call “our scene” in the industrial world is not one homogenous entity. While bands that reach wider popularity will naturally appear on DJ playlists just about everywhere, there are a whole load of bands – either new or that have been around for a while – […]
For many, gigs in the heat of summer evenings are a tough sell, particularly in small venues (outdoor, festival shows of course are a different matter entirely). However, the summer is paradoxically a busy time for indoor shows, and two came up this week on consecutive evenings, and they were very different.
The announcement of a European Skinny Puppy tour earlier in the year (“Down the Sociopath Too Euro 2017“) was, I have to say, a bit of a surprise. It has been seven years since their last UK appearances at least, and in the meantime they’ve released the excellent Weapon – but that was four years […]
One of the must-see shows in the calendar for the past few months finally arrived over the weekend.
I rather wondered, after the first time I saw Sunn O))) live, whether I could physically stand going a second time. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it, it was just that the after-effects were like nothing I’d ever experienced after a gig.
This has been a quiet year.
For the third year running – although it was a bit touch-and-go this year with the wedding and everything else, and my wife chose not to come along this time – the last weekend of September meant a trip 3,960 miles to the west of London. To the city of Chicago, to catch up with […]
Over the weekend of this year’s Infest, there was some discussion over the current state of the industrial (and wider) scene. In many other scenes – or indeed in “mainstream” popular music, there is an air of nostalgia as record labels struggling with new sales, are relying heavily on reissues of the old, particularly on […]
Lesley Rankine’s career in music now spans a few decades, and more than a few styles. She first came to prominence in the vicious, no-wave influenced punkish-rock of Silverfish, a fixture of the Camden scene in the early 90s and unusual in their strident politics and just how confrontational they were. The band toured with […]
I’m struggling to think of a single band in “our thing” that has had as much mainstream coverage – as in appearing in the news, not just in the music press – as Laibach did last year when their show in North Korea was announced.
