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LabelLove - Raising Money For Labels & Artists Affected by the PIAS Fire.
For the last few days the UK has been gripped by riots up and down the country. Thousands of people have been affected, and several small businesses may have to shut up shop for good - and all because of some opportunistic looters smashing up anything in their path.
The only silver lining we've seen in the news over the last few days are the communities who've come together to put an end to the chaos, and take back control of their streets. Whether it's the Turkish community in Dalston, the Sikh's in Southall or the Twitter community descending on affected areas, brushes in hand, intent on cleaning up the damage caused by the riots.
Two people that are particularly close to ABoF's heart are Dan Salter (Echoes And Dust) and Hannah Morgan (Rumour Cubes), who, early in the hours of Tuesday morning, started a Twitter campaign that quickly went viral. They're the people behind the LabelLove - a PIAS Benefit.
First of all, if you could explain what the PIAS benefit is in aid of?
One of the many unfortunate consequences of the recent rioting is that the Sony distribution centre in Enfield got burnt down. This is an annoying inconvenience for a company the size of Sony but the ramifications for the independent music industry are massive as the warehouse also stored most of the physical product for PIAS, the UK's largest distributor for Indie labels.
Whilst a company like Sony can take the hit and wait for the insurance cheque to come in for smaller companies that work on much finer margins the loss of almost all of their physical stock is going to cause potentially terminal cash-flow problems. Our idea was to organise an event or series of events to raise both money and awareness of what is a serious threat to our little corner of the industry.
Do you know anyone who's been personally affected by the warehouse fire?
We know of several of the labels that we regularly deal with through Echoes & Dust who have been affected and since the idea for what we're doing went somewhat viral on Twitter yesterday quite a number more have got in touch with us. Some of the stories are heartbreaking, people having pretty much lost their whole livelihoods in one act of mindless violence.
How close were you to some of the riots?
We were far too close for comfort on Monday night. I live on the edge of Hackney & Stoke Newington so the violence on the Pembury Estate was less the half a mile away at one point.
In your opinion, what's the best way to stop this from happening again?
Jeez, that's a tough one & if I knew the answer to that I'd be one up on the government! I guess go back to the Thatcher era and stop the start of 30 years of social separation, exclusion of the poor and rampant consumerism would be the ideal but it's a bit late for that now.
How can people help you with the benefit?
We're still figuring out what to do next at the moment. If we're honest we're a little overwhelmed at the volume of the response we got to yesterday's appeal. We've had literally hundreds of offers of skills and support. Everyone from international music superstars to a 14 girl from Hackney have got in touch to offer their services, it's been amazing. If people want to volunteer then the best thing is to drop us a mail at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with details of how they want to get involved, this also applies to artists who want to get involved. Anybody!
When can we expect the first benefit gig?
Obviously, we want to strike while the issue is at the forefront of people's minds so hopefully the first event will be in the next couple of weeks. We've also had a number of people put forward their already existing events to be PIAS benefits so we'll be publishing the details HERE over the next few days. Watch that space for details.
If you would like to get involved or contribute in any way please drop Dan & Hannah an email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
REVIEW: Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard, featuring Esperi
Dave Mahoney, our ABoF intern extraordinaire, was on hand to help out at Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard's show on Tuesday. Never ones to pass up a golden opportunity, we made sure he was suitably kitted out with a camera in one hand, and notepad in the other, so he could write a cracking review of the evening's festivities:
Hot and sticky summer Tuesdays are not normally the best time to get Londoners out to a show, but the pull of Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard is obviously too much and by the time Esperi takes the stage, the Lexington is already looking pretty busy.
Main man Chris Lee-Marr immediately taunts the slowly melting crowd by telling them opening track "Lone Wolf" is about "snow". The heat is soon forgotten though as Esperi captivate everyone with their one of a kind show. At heart this is a solo singer songwriter project, although explorations into electronica, and even dark ambient, make this so much more. Never has the phrase multi-instrumentalist been more apt as Chris confidently handles, at my count, 17 different instruments, ranging from an everyday bass guitar to children's toys from the 1980s used for rhythmic effect. Tracks such as "Hearts Part 2" would be impossible to pull off without the aid of a repeater, so never has a piece of equipment felt like an essential part of the performance. Chris, the violinist and cellist who join him tonight, and their electronic bandmate create sounds and emotions line ups double their size would struggle to emulate.
When Jeffrey Lewis hits the stage, the Lexington is so packed that the "wonderful" air conditioning we were praising earlier is suddenly felt by no-one. His set generally tends to fall into two categories: firstly the upbeat New York punk. Alas the heat saps all energy out of the crowd, so no-one really gets dancing, which means the energy Jeffrey and the band try their best to create doesn't carry through to the second type of song, the relaxed, introspective anti-folk. That doesn't mean that this is a bad performance. In fact, it is just the opposite. Jeff, his brother Jack on bass and drummer Dave Beauchamp are hella fun, and to lesser artists the crowd would have been completely lost to the elements, but when strings are broken and Jeff keeps things going seamlessly during repair works with gangster raps about murdering mosquitoes, you know you're in the presence of someone very comfortable in front of a crowd, no matter how awkward his public persona would have you believe he is.
The setlist features new staples from latest album 'Em Are I such as "Objectified", but is made off the cuff, occasionally taking audience feedback into account to ensure that everyone hears what they want to hear, but Lewis really comes into his own when he talks comics. Completely unlike anyone else touring today, he hilariously narrates his comic illustrations, treating London to his hand drawn versions of the Pocohontas story and Jeff Buckley's Mojo Pin, and finally finds himself where he deserves, with the audience eating out of his hand.
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Blogger Of The Week: A New Band A Day
Welcome to the third edition of ABoF's Blog Of The Week! This week, we talked to Joe Sparrow over at A New Band A Day, a Manchester based blog devoted to finding up and coming bands and artists that you wouldn't necessarily find on other sites. They've been a great help to us over the years due to their open minded approach to new music, and have provided some of our less established acts with a great platform to showcase their material.
Tell us about A New Band A Day.
ANBAD is how I spend my time in between sleeping and doing crummy day jobs. It stretches the concept of 'one a day' a bit, in that I post about a new band every working day.
How do you actually find a new band a day - is it a hard task?
It involves plenty of time sifting out the bad bands - the ratio of bad to good is at least 10:1. But I love new bands, new sounds and new songs, so it's not a burden.
There are so many music blogs nowadays, how do you keep the blog fresh and different?
You can't really think too much about that. I've realised over three years that blog readers are hugely discriminating, and so you may as well run/shape a blog exactly as you please, because it will attract/repel readers on precisely those merits. Keeping standards high is a different matter - but just as important.
You're based in Manchester. What's the scene like up there?
It's finally shaken off the Madchester/Factory/Hacienda tag, and now there are a glut of very young, very carefree new bands. Look at the ones who have broken through recently - Everything Everything, Wu Lyf, etc - and you can see how creative and obtuse they are.
Some bloggers are cynical towards PRs sending them music and mailouts about their roster, what's your stance on this?
I get pissed off with PR email when the PR has clearly never read my blog and sends inappropriate bands, or is very obviously sending a faux-chummy "Hey there, how about this wonderful weather?"-type blather.
I appreciate that online PR is pretty tough work, but keeping it simple and straightforward would cut down on the number of times I hammer the delete button. That said: all the PRs I know are lovely people who are nuts about music, so I can't complain too much...
We have to ask... which ABoF artists do you quite like the sound of?
I'm a sucker for any band with punctuation in their name. A genuinely stupid quirk, but it meant that I took to The Son(s) instantly. Lovely tunes.
Finally, for those looking to start a music blog, do you have any advice?
Just do it, and worry about everything else later. Also: if you make a promise in the blog's title that you'll blog every day, without fail - it will take over your life...
ABoF Interview Jeffrey Lewis
We here at ABoF have been very busy over the last few weeks making sure everything's absoluteley perfect for Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard's upcoming sell-out show at The Lexington this Tuesday, 2nd August.
With the gig just around the corner, we thought it was well past time to sit down with the man himself and ask him some of the questions that have been floating around the office.
Besides the Lexington show, do you have any plans while you're in London?
As usual not much time in London, just passing thru... We play Sheffield the night before and Oxford the night after, in fact in ten years of touring I can probably count our days off on one hand. Okay, maybe two hands, but it's very rare that we're not playing every day on a tour, we fly in form New York City and immediately hop in a car or a train to go to where ever our first gig is, plug in and play, and it's like that up until the last date of tour, when we sometimes go to the airport at 2 am after the show and wait for a 6 am flight home. Our philosophy as an indie band has always been that it's a job - going on tour is time to go to work! It's a great job and we love it, but it's not a vacation. Usually.
What prompted you to record an album exclusively covering Crass songs?
The first three Crass albums are total classics, and some of the best songs of the 20th Century, I thought it was a shame that only people who are into hardcore punk would ever have the chance to appreciate those songs, I figured they would still be great songs even if played in different styles and made accessible and understandable to a new audience.
What are you listening to at the moment?
Today in Germany, from my computer, I have listened to The Grateful Dead ("Live Dead"), Sonic Youth ("Goo"), Herman Dune ("Strange Moosic"), and Amon Duul ("Paradieswärts Düül ").
Any amusing tour stories you'd like to share?
Oh, there's tons of tour stories of course, and it's been ten years of touring without really keeping a tour diary so I forget a lot of stuff. Okay, quick story, this crazy lady in Florida housed us when we had no place to sleep after a show. We had no place else to go, so we were happy to not be sleeping in our car, and we stay with people all the time and usually it's great, but this one woman really was very creepy. We followed her home into this weird desolate house in a swampy area. Things started basically fine as usual, we just all piled into the living room and got ready to lie down on a couch or floor and go to sleep but it got weird quickly when she sat us down to watch some stupid sex comedy movie and kept rewinding explicit scenes to make us re-watch them, which made us all uncomfortable - she kept screeching "did you see THAT?!? Isn't that GREAT!? You HAVE to see that again!! Watch, watch!!" We were totally bored and just wanting to sleep, and after a bit we were starting to think she was an insane pervert. Then she kept telling us we all had to skinny dip in her pool in back, which also made us uncomfortable, and we had to keep telling her we were tired and we didn't want to take our clothes off and swim with her. Then what really put us in a paranoid mood was that we kept thinking we heard screaming from the swamp behind her house! Probably some kind of bird or Florida animal, but it TOTALLY sounded like a person screaming and being murdered, over and over out in the swamp, and it just added to the feeling of impending doom. We were pretty sure she was going to kill us all in our sleep or something. Of course nothing happened and we just woke up and took off early in the morning. And 99% of the time we stay with people and it's awesome. Like this punk squatter floating house-boat we slept in two nights ago in Hamburg, but that's another story.
What do you bring to the stage during a performance?
Guitar, casio keyboard, art to show, comic books and CDs to sell after the show.
What, for you, was the defining moment that made you realise you wanted to be a musician?
I have never really wanted to be a musician, I've never felt like a musician, and I have to real plans to ever become a musician. I write songs and I make sounds but I'm not much of a musician.
Where do you draw inspiration for your music and comics?
Anywhere I can get it, I'm desperate.
What comics are you reading at the moment, and besides yourself, who would you recommend?
David Heatley ("My Brain Is Hanging Upside-Down"), Jon Lewis ("True Swamp"), and I'm re-reading all the Rick Veitch issues of "Swamp Thing" from the 80s that I haven't read in a long time, great stuff. Veitch took over writing/drawing Swamp Thing after Alan Moore, and he did a really great job.
You've got five minutes until the world is hit by a meteorite. What do you spend your last 5 minutes doing?
If it was something I could tell you I wouldn't have to wait till the end of the world to do it!
What are your plans for the rest of 2011?
We have a tour of China in August, and a tour of South Korea, then I'm doing a TV filming thing with my artwork in Philadelphia for a few days in early September... then my new album comes out on Rough Trade in October and we'll be touring Spain and the UK and the USA for a few weeks for the album-release time period in October and November. Not sure what's happening after that.
For more info about Jeffrey Lewis, check out his official site.
Blog of the Week: Hidden Currents
Our second Blog of the Week has to go to the wonderful Hidden Currents. They are a real all-inclusive blog that considers any new music, news and debate as long as there's a passion to write about it. Instead of being reviews focussed, the guys at Hidden Currents have turned their attention to more industry based news, something which not a lot of blogs are doing at the moment.
Hidden Currents in their own words:
Hidden Currents is a new blog dedicated to exploring the use of imagination and invention in the new musical landscape.
Focusing on bands, musicians, labels or anyone else who are doing something different, doing something new, in order to make themselves heard against an increasingly noisy background.
How did you guys come together to create Hiddent Currents?
Hannah and I met at Unconvention in February. One of the chief topics on discussion on the day was around how artists can stand out in an increasingly crowded musical landscape but Ito cured toys no one was really blogging about it, so the seeds of the idea that became Hidden Currents was planted.
There are lots of music blogs out there, how d'you intend to have Hidden Currents stick out from the rest?
We're hoping that the content itself will help distinguish the site. Yes, it is kind of a music blog but unlike most we're not writing about albums, live performances etc but about the promotional, marketing & innovation side of the industry which no one else seems to be doing. Also we're focusing on bands themselves that are doing something different, not just today's 'buzz' bands.
Who are your favourite music bloggers out there at the moment?
We're big fans of Amanda Penlington who writes for a number of sites, she's a great intelligent writer. Also, A Negative Narrative is a blog we're really keen on, they are doing something really unique over there. Honourable mentions have to go to The 405 and GoldFlakePaint as good examples of people going about things in the 'right' way.
Many proclaim "the music industry is dead" - what do you say to that, do you agree?
Without wanting to be rude, we feel calling the music industry 'dead' is utter bollocks! The industry as was commonly perceived; majors picking up, using and abusing artists, may be in decline but underneath that their is still a vibrant ecosystem of bands and venues. The onus now has shifted to the bands and artists themselves to be innovative and do things to make them stand out from the rest, hence us starting Hidden Currents.
Are there any bands or musicians you're fans of whom you've found on music blogs like yourselves?
Pretty much all of the bands we're fans of we've found either on blogs or through Twitter. Her Name Is Calla, Alright The Captain, To Bury A Ghost and Black International are all bands we probably would never have come across in the pre-Internet days but are all awesome and deserve to be heard by a wider audience.
The obligatory ABoF related question... which of artists are your favourites?
We're big fans of a lot of the ABof bands. Ex Libras, Architects of Grace, Esperi and
What are your plans for Hidden Currents' future?
We're still at a pretty early stage with Hidden Currents, the site's only been running for a couple of months, so plans for the future are still embryonic. We just want to carry on publishing interesting pieces that give readers an insight in to some of the more innovative artists currently around and see what happens. We are looking for more people to contribute and more artists to cover, so if anyone wants to contribute or have something they think we should cover, they shouldn't hesitate to get in touch.