Love Music Hate Racism Carnival @ Victoria Park, 27/04/08

(Truly awe-inspiring cameraphone photography by me)

Mmmkay. Sunday was fun but overall the day was quite badly organised, and whoever thought it would be a good idea to encourage every act to badmouth the BNP at every possible oppurtunity was foolish. Obviously the BNP are stupid evil racist nazis, but I didn't need to be told that by twelve different people at 20 minute intervals. Some of the politics were also a bit wonky too, such as the festival's organiser saying the BNP should be banned as a party, which is obviously wrong. If the government just goes around banning political groups on the basis that their political beliefs are wrong, then how can this country be any better than Nazi Germany, Apartheid era South Africa or McCarthyist America? Anyway - rant over - I spent most of the day jamming out in the dance tent to a load of trance/grime/dubstep/bassline/garage and old nineties house music, breaking all the rules of 'Thou Shalt Always Kill' and dancing like an easily amaused moron but it was very fun. There were a lot of 'Gyals wiv Attitood' who I can only assume hadn't been to the kind of musical event that might be described as a 'gig' before, and some of them got very annoyed at people like me who wanted to jump around. There were more than a few times when it looked like someone who'd accidentally stepped on someone's toe was 'gonn get slapped' for 'disrespecting ma family' or something. But it was alright on the whole.



After a bit I made the mistake of thinking it might be a good idea to check out Hard-fi, seeing as I figured the people dancing there might be a bit tolerant of getting brushed against by accident, but after spending about 5 minutes saying 'excuse me' I was at the front and I realised nobody was dancing or was going to. There were several thousand people crammed in like sardines with their eyes on the stage and no intention of moving. Ever. Which, all in all is not their fault because Hard-fi really are the worst band in the world. Ever.

With reference to me saying it was badly organised, I asked a million stewards when Patrick Wolf was playing, and it turned out they hadn't even decided which stage he was playing on until about an hour before he took the stage. It took a lot of asking to find out when he was actually on, but when he finally took the stage he was really good. We arrived a bit early and saw the last ten minutes of Akala, and heard a few tracks from his new(ish) album, and one bit where he managed to rap a whole song a capella at a rate of about ten syllables per second. Which I thought was quite impressive. Back to Mr Wolf - it was quite a short set, starting with 'Accident & Emergency' and closing with the brilliant 'Magic Position'.



The show started off with Patrick wearing a black shirt and trousers combo but in the middle of one song he threw them off revealing some rather brilliant Union Jack pyjamas. It was quite an upbeat poppy set, with a full backing band and Mr Wolf dancing round the stage armed with a microphone only. Last time I saw Patrick Wolf, at the Underage Festival (also in Victoria Park), it was a more piano-based ballady show that eventually I left to go rock out to Boy Kill Boy instead, because I couldn't see anything or hear it that well. As Patrick introduced the track 'Vultures', a massive pit opened up behind me and the rest of the set became a big euphoric crowdsurfing pile-up, as opposed to a million teenage girls trying to get as close to Mr Wolf as possible. It ended with Patrick Wolf climbing all over the crowd barriers and flailing around Alice Glass-style, and it was really fun.

Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position
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And the fact that I heard this song about 20 times means I am actually starting to like it. Please don't hate me, I am already full of enough self-loathing as it is.

T2 Ft Jodie - Heartbroken
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HYPED

When i started this blog I was under the impression it was going to be a matter of minutes until the Hype Machine lovingly welcomed me. 11 months later, I Am In. The shameless whiney email paid off, and Zoya told me she'd added my blog (Thanks Zoya!). At least i think so, because at the moment i can't find it anywhere. But I think this might be because as of yet I haven't posted any mp3 links that aren't via zShare. Anyway to celebrate here is a really nice track by Late of the Pier. It's one of those songs that make you feel really alive. Not saccharine-sweet happy-clappy sugar-pop, not crying-in-the-corner emo-pop, it's just a really nice song. I'm not 100% sure what the significance of 'Fairy Lights' is, if it's been remixed by Fairy Lights or that's just the name of the mix by LOTP, but it's really wicked anyway.

Late of the Pier - Broken (Fairy Lights Mix)
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And the latest offering by Lillica Libertine is similarly brilliant. This is what I imagine the papparazzi were listening to when Diana's face got sprayed across the tunnel.

Lillica Libertine - Britney Spears
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Oh and don't be tempted to try to put these two wicked acts together. No offence to Lillica libertine, but his remix of Bathroom Gurgle is waaaay below the standard he's usually at.

Eurovision.

Tomorrow night. It feels very strange to actually care about who wins. Tellier all the way.

Sébastien Tellier - Divine (Danger Remix) (zShare | YouSendIt)

From what I read in Kruger magazine, Sébastien Tellier's next album may or may not be about mental illness. Buy 'Sexuality'.

Danger for French Eurovision '09?

Scenesters, Sneakers, Hipsters, Blogs

(image credit: karina shah)

Blood Red Shoes released their debut album on monday. I'm about ten blog years behind with this, but it's well good. I was reading in the enemy and the reviewer was saying how the guitars were full of 'raw sexual energy' or something - I'm not too sure if the guitars are all that 'sexual', but there's some really good tracks and what I really like about it is the way it's got a whole range of emotions, including all the more negative ones, they are properly shouting and it's got loud aggressive guitars - but it's still about a thousand miles from the border to emo territory. Playing the whole album, some of the songs are a little bit same-y but I think you can forgive that when the songs are as good as they are, and on their own each track can stand up as a decent bit of rock and roll. There aren't any cringingly awful tracks, unlike say 'Good Time' or 'Numbers', on Crystal Castles and These New Puritans' debut albums.



And now onto SebastiAn, king of whoosh noises and glitchy violin masterpieces. Four new tracks have surfaced all at roughly the same time, on the Motor EP are Motor, Momy and Army; all quite nice and relatively standard Ed Banger industro-techno that we've come to expect from SebastiAn. And soon to be released on Ed Banger Records 3 is Dog, the most insane change in direction since Marilyn Manson recorded that folk-pop album in 2004. It's got unintelligible Metallica-style vocals and heavy metal guitars. It probably was put together electronically, and still sort of fits the style of a HGHLY BLGGBL BNGR, but if you close your eyes you can almost see Jimi Hendrix's corpse jamming it out. Judging by the 'minimix medley' put out by Feadz, Ed Rec 3 is gonna be pretty amazing. Some of the stuff on Ed Rec 2 got boring very quickly, such as Limousine by Vicarious Bliss (which, if I ever hear again, will probably lead me to kill someone). And 'Robot Oeuf' by Uffie may be the best thing she has ever done.



Oh and be jealous - look who rolled up to Rough Trade and bought the t-shirt. Oh yes, I did. The fact I am semi-terrified of wearing it out for fear of ruining it I am counting as irrelevant. Seriously though, So-Me is possibly the best graphic artist of the 21st century. I'm not saying he has superhuman photo-realistic drawing skills, and I'm sure most of his work is photo-traced, but he has brilliant taste. And he's better than Kate Moross anyway.



This year's Underage Festival: The line-up is not that impressive if I'm honest. It will still be fun but I'm not buying the souvenir t-shirt this year. zShare time!

Blood Red Shoes - This Is Not For You zShare
SebastiAn - Dog zShare

Love Music Hate Racism Carnival

On Sunday 27th April the 30th anniversary of the 1978 'Carnival Against the Nazis' is being celebrated by another open-air concert in Victoria Park, organised by the everyone's favourite music-related anti-racist charity, Love Music Hate Racism. It's going to be fun. The full line-up can be viewed here, but rather than bore you with a massive list of acts you and I have neither heard of nor would particularly like, I will tell you now that Patrick Wolf, Babyshambles, Bishi and the Roll Deep Crew are all performing live, and as well as that there's going to be loads of speakers including Tony Benn. Try to ignore the fact that Hard-fi are playing, I think the best option would be to just pretend you haven't noticed.

Also, I think I may have forgotten to mention entry is entirely free!

Patrick Wolf's set is going to be particularly interesting, seeing as he'll hopefully be playing some entirely new and unreleased tracks from his upcoming fourth album. A new demo surfaced on his myspace a while ago (it's now been removed) but luckily the ever-brilliant Saam at Keep Hope Inside managed to speedily rip it and put it up for download. Read the full post for some in-depth discussion.


DOWNLOAD: Patrick Wolf - Wargames (Demo) (Yourfilehost)

So, unless you've got something better to do in three sundays' time, or maybe you're a racist, why not roll up to Victoria Park?