Here's the essay that accompanies the Wasted On The Young photos in my book. It's a personal bit of writing about my relationship with dancing.
"Throwing my limbs and long hair around to indie soon drifted into a more serious dancing – shuffling around all night to drum machines and synths. My university flatmates took me to legendary London techno nightspot Club UK to help ease my first heartbreak. As I was rained on by relentless 4/4 beats I didn’t for one moment think about her, or even look longingly at another girl. I didn’t leave the dancefloor until 6am. In many ways I didn’t leave the dancefloor for the next two decades."
Read MoreAbsolutely fascinating guy, and producer of some of my favourite house music. We went for a curry and chatted for hours.
"Some producers are in it for the money – and you can hear it a mile off – while some want the buzz of seeing a dancefloor lose it to their track. There are those that do it as a badge of honour and others who want to be famous. Josh Wink, however, is an artist. While your parents might complain that house and techno is nothing more than a torturous racket, the acid king sees dance music as no different to literature, theatre or the visual arts."
Read MoreTogether The People festival asked me to write a piece about Brian Wilson for their brochure. I used it as an excuse to talk about the start of a friendship which was soundtracked by The Beach Boys.
“When he emerged from the decades of darkness, Brian Wilson returned to tour his magnum opus, ‘Pet Sounds’, a joyous experience for the band and audiences. And then something incredible happened. He kept touring, and he came to the UK to play ‘Smile’ for the first time ever since the sessions that drove him to the edge. Craig had flown in from Germany for the first ever performance of the album he’d spend months putting together and saw revered ‘Smile’ lyricist Van Dykes Park receive a standing ovation for taking his seat in the auditorium. That’s the level of love there was in the room.
I was there a few days later and as the band launched into ‘Surfer Girl’ I burst in to tears - not from the simple beauty of the song, but from the love projected at the stage, willing Brian on through what we all knew was a one of the most difficult things he’d ever attempt.”
Read MoreI interviewed writer/producer Emiliana Torrini about the making of Kylie’s stone cold pop classic ‘Slow’. Read a snippet here because it’s not out yet and you should go and buy the magazine when it is.
“Ask any serious minded Kylie fan and there’s a fair chance that they will tell you ‘Slow’ is one of their favourite songs by the Aussie pop star. Hell, you could even ask Kylie herself and she’d say the same thing, frequently announcing it her crowning glory. Twenty years after the song went to number one in Britain she’s still as keen as ever, telling Vogue that the song is a reference point for new album ‘Tension’. There’s certainly parallels between the ‘Body Language’ lead song and the smash first single from the new LP, ‘Padam Padam’, with Kylie meeting an object of lust in a club and having such a connection that causes heartbeats to come centre stage (“Skip a beat and move with my body” she purrs in ‘Slow’).”
Read MoreAre you looking for 4000 words about ABBA covering only the period during which they were split? I got you there, with this feature for Classic Pop’s ABBA special issue.
“Sure, ABBA sold a lot of records worldwide – there’s no denying that. In Australia the only bigger band has been The Beatles. Even as ABBA ebbed away, the band’s final five albums all still went to No.1 in the UK. They were popular, lots of people liked them. But a lot of people didn’t. Robert Christgau, the self-titled "Dean of American rock critics" declared in his review of Greatest Hits Vol. 2 that, “We have met the enemy and they are them.” He wasn’t alone. The classic Faber Book Of Pop, which collected the best music journalism over the years, fails to even mention them, despite devoting 350 pages to the 70s and 80s. Benny and Bjorn noticed, the latter telling the Guardian in 2002, “There aren't as many ABBA awards as you might imagine. For the main part of the group's lifespan, the critics despised us.”
With hindsight it’s perfectly obvious that they were going to split up, with or without the critics’ help. As a band ABBA had been at the coalface for a decade, a decent stint in pop terms. Additionally, sales were dwindling, and they admit now that they were musically behind the times. But as well as The Visitors containing stone cold classic One Of Us, ABBA also showed some optimism in their new greatest hits collection, The First Ten Years. However it turned out that a more accurate title might have been The Only Ten Years. It was over. Apparently forever.”
Read MoreKimya Dawson's gig knocked everyone who was there sideways. Even before she left the stage crying.
“But after a bad joke interlude, an acoustic rap song and a mock operatic number with dance moves (about eating farts) that her and her support act Pablo Das sing when they’re scared, things get serious.
Clearly feeling among friends, Kimya admits that just an hour ago she discovered that her friend Dennis Flemion of The Frogs had died. She also says how much she’s missing her daughter. Even at her best Kimya is so fragile that it seems like she’s already shattered and put herself together, frequently in the wrong order. But now we get her at her most vulnerable. The epic ‘Walk Like Thunder’ – about her friends dying – in the circumstances is heartbreaking, while even the comedic addiction song ‘The Beer’ is breathtaking in its brutal honesty.“
Read MoreAKDK make a lot of noise, but then the band is 100% drummers so what ya gonna do? This interview is from forever ago, before 6 Music fell in love with them.
“It was krautrock legend Damo Suzuki who made us realise that the two synth-playing drummers known as AK/DK were Brighton’s best live band. If you’re a music geek you’ll know that the Can singer travels around the world performing with a hometown band every time he stops. The Brighton promoter thought that Ed Chivers and G Sowerby would be a good match and hooked them up for a gig at the Green Door Store. Joined by a bass player, they played a tight, blistering set of complex, noisy, leftfield electro rhythms with an ebb and flow of the most delicately programmed dance music. Obviously there was a nod to 70s German music, but this was all new – exciting and challenging but accessible and danceable. We were completely breathless. Having Damo Suzuki there seemed like the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.”
Read MoreLoyal asked me to come on board to write all their press releases and biogs, and it’s been nice to get into their world for a little while. Here’s the biog.
“Making classic soul that passes the US test means that when Loyal need a sample they can make it themselves. But like everything they go the extra mile – like ‘Tower All Over’, a low slung filter disco classic that sounds as if the 90s decided to write some good songs over those amazing grooves they flinched.
“We spent ages making the sample for that,” Alex recalls. “We made something that sounds really old school and then pitched it down and sampled it ourselves. So it sounds like an authentic record being sampled or reused.”
They continue this idea of making things seem timeless and, well, a bit wonky and from a variety of different sources, by having vocalists sing over pitched up versions of the tracks only to pitch them back down again.
“The first meetings with record labels they all asked us, ‘So how many samples do we need to get cleared?’” says Laurence Allen, the trio’s words and melody expert. “But there are none. The gospel choir we use is made to sound like we picked up an old record in our dad’s collection and thought, ‘Oh let’s sample that!’ but is actually stuff we’ve written and recorded.” “
Read MoreThis is Foals first ever cover story. Even then Yannis was an intense guy. I knew I had to go in with good questions, even though they were just one single in at the time. It was obvious from the get go that they were special.
““We played a squat in Elephant & Castle – there’s a photo of it on our myspace – and this entire wall got hit through with a fire extinguisher,” Yannis remembers with a smile. “There was a whole wall and a doorway into the basement where we were playing when we started. By the time we finished our set there was just a beam and rumble, and ketamine and squat juice. That was pretty exciting.”
Foals might like to play with the walls literally removed between them and the audience but Yannis also likes these house parties – and inviting the fans on stage for proper gigs – as they remove the metaphorical barriers around the band, the way that the hardcore punks would. At the Camden Crawl 60 kids shared the stage with the group.
With all those complex layers of melody it’s a surprise that they could tolerate a nudge against their musicianship. Is that extreme musicality something they work at? Yannis says not – they never make things more complicated for the sake of it. But it’s a dangerous game to play, being talented at your instrument – just look what happened to prog rock.
“Dangerous? No,” he says sternly, “because we have a modicum of taste. There are some amazing prog records and there are some terrible fucking punk records. Predominately we like communicating with people.””
Read MoreWithin about five minutes of Bat For Lashes first single arriving on my desk I was on the phone to get her on the cover, her first. This was the final of three times I interviewed her - a Q&A but she was on good form.
“You’ve collaborated in your songwriting for the first time on ‘Laura’. Was that a difficult decision to make?
It was quite hard. I think I’ve always been quite snobbish about it in the past but I wanted to see what it was like to work with someone that would push me a little bit in a direction, and teach me something that I didn’t know already. I feel that it was really nice to be collaborating with Justin [Parker, who has also worked with Lana Del Rey]. I had a brief. I wanted to write a piano song that was harkening back to those old 70s ballads, with a middle eight and traditional structure. But I always like to put my own angle on it, so the dark subject matter or whatever came through. And together we navigated it and came up with something that still sounded very much like me. I think it turned out really well. I’m happy with that song.”
Read MoreI got to train with Brighton’s roller derby team. Not many men can say that, and that’s why I love being a journalist.
““I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s gone to their first game and hasn’t said, ‘It was amazing but I didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on,’” admits Hairy Fairy.
Basically it goes something like this. There’s a jammer on each team that has to lap the pack of blockers. It’s the pack’s job to help their own jammer while slowing down the opposing jammer, as for every opposing blocker the jammers pass they get a point. So far, so simple, but the packs can’t be split by more than ten feet, which makes roller derby extremely tactile. The two minute jams are rarely a race and players have to be very aware of what’s going on to not pick up penalties. There are 40 pages of rules to abide by.
“You learn to skate, you learn to skate together, you learn to fall, a lot, and then hit each other,” explains Rose Bleed. “And then finally when you put it all together then you have to learn how to play.””
Read MoreSea Power are Brighton legends. I put them on the cover three times and this was the final time, while they were still called British Sea Power, I interviewed them for their brilliant ‘Machineries Of Joy’.
“The whole album has a lightness that’s certainly a change of pace from the hour long ‘Valhalla Dancehall’. Yan says that he felt like some of their previous songs seemed like the band were “telling people off”. He reckons that things are confusing enough at the moment, that people need a break.
“When we started I felt like the world was kind of getting better, almost like a progression,” he laughs, like a man who has to otherwise he’ll cry. “But it seems like it’s all gone round in a big circle and it’s probably worse than it’s ever been now. So I felt like it would be nice if the record left you feeling better about yourself or about your life. It’s quite challenging for me to do that.””
Read MoreMartin Rossiter is a world class interviewee - clever, witty, charming. From years as the frontman of Gene, he absolutely knows what makes a good interview, and helps you get it.
“Sales might not come close to the million records sold by Gene but critics adore the LP. The Guardian called it, “an unlikely but often brilliant comeback,” while in The Times Stewart Lee announced that we’d “lost a 20th century indie band to gain a 21st century solo artist.” Martin must be delighted, especially to see it appear in so many best of 2012 round ups.
“I am,” he says warmly, now out of his frozen cover shoot make-up. “Back in the 90s Gene were never press darlings. I lie – we were for about two weeks. It was curious because our first record came out within a week of Oasis’ first single. It was a zeitgeist shifting moment and we found ourselves on the wrong boat. So to have the amount of critical acclaim that I’ve now had is astonishing. For a few weeks I imagined I was Adele, which I’ve subsequently proved not to be.””
Read MoreI had a great night out with Mo Wax’s James Lavelle in Romania. I know he’s got a bit of a, er, reputation, but we got on like a house on fire. This report is from DJmag.
“But the experience hasn’t been all plain sailing. Waiting for James to turn up in the less than glamorous Bucharest airport earlier in the day, he’s easy to spot, decked head to foot in Bathing Ape clothing and Futura scribbles. He’s also weighted down with a brace of the coolest record bags available. He smiles his way through a Fabric-fueled hangover, but it isn’t long before the lack of sleep helps shift his mood. There’s been a mix up, and Lavelle isn’t in the least bit happy. His favourite mixer isn’t at the club as planned, and instead he’ll have to make do with his most hated bit of equipment. For someone who claims to be ‘not much of a DJ, no Sasha’ it seems a bit much as angry phone calls are made.
Somewhere around the UNKLE album Lavelle started to get a regular kicking from the press. His ‘overblown’ longplayer ‘Psyence Fiction’ – featuring mates like Massive Attack’s 3D, Badly Drawn Boy and Thom Yorke – dared to go beyond the underground hip hop clubs where he was worshiped. The media had spent the last few years asking Lavelle what they should tell their readers was cool (“Star Wars figures? Great. Futura graffiti? OK!”), but now they’d changed their minds. The Mo Wax boss was getting too big for his boots, they said, he was arrogant and needed taking down a peg or two.”
Read MoreI interviewed Metronomy before they broke through with the flawless The English Riviera. I ought to work in A&R really. The photos were by Tom Beard. As good as these pics were, I sacked him and he went on to direct pop videos for FKA Twigs, so maybe I’m not a pop culture Nostradamus after all.
“If it all sounds a bit ramshackle, like Cliff Richard’s “Let’s do the show right here!” that’s probably cos it is. There was no money to do “anything proper” so Joseph Mount enlisted his cousin Oscar and former bandmate in The Customers, Gabriel and tried to make as much of a show as they could, with as little finance.
“We were trying to do it so it’s not your average electronic thing and so that we could enjoy it ourselves,” Joe explains. “Oscar, who plays keyboards, happens to be the best dancer in Brighton, so he was employed as a keyboard player and choreographer.” Joe admits that people either find it really enjoyable or absolutely hate it, to the point that they can’t bare to watch it. Which, he says, is fair enough. The community’s reaction on Youtube to a typical performance, for example, of Are Mum’s Mates (keywords: Metronomy, Halloween) says it all.
“Can someone stop them?” exclaims Jumpinjp “Please stop them. It’s cunts like this that give dance a bad name!””
Read MoreVice liked this article so much they invited Brighton Source to be part of the Vice Blog Network. I turned them down because one day Brighton Source will be bigger than Vice and Vice will be part of the Source Blog Network.
“A simple piece of 90s filter disco, ‘Club Soda’ is rather more refreshing than the gritty, jacking stuff usually found on Bangalter’s ‘Tracks On Da Rocks’ 12”s. A sliver of an old disco guitar riff is pitched right down to a very ‘now’ 120bpm for a sexy minimal groove. Warm and euphoric, it should find favour with anyone that liked ‘Get Lucky’. Like most of the stuff on Bangalter’s peerless Roulé imprint, this is firmly made for club play but is sexy and melodic enough to groove around your bedroom to.”
Read MoreIt’s not always musicians, sometimes I interview real people. Caroline Lucas is super real.
“Can normal folk even get the government to listen to us?
It’s really important for people to think that their voices can be heard and that their voices matter. One of the biggest myths that governments put out is that individuals are powerless, and that’s a very effective myth. The very first step is believing that you can make a difference.
What are the main ways people can make themselves heard? Does the old ‘writing to your MP’ actually work?
Don’t underestimate writing to MPs, even if you think your MP already agrees with you it is quite handy to be able to have the evidence that you’re speaking on behalf of a large constituency. There are all kinds of other ways, particularly through social media. We’ve seen the rise of 38degrees.org.uk or Avaaz.org – different ways of bringing communities of interest together around particular issues. They’ve been incredibly powerful.”
Read MoreI got super excited about Traams - they were amazing live and the first album was all I hoped it would be. This was their first cover story.
“What makes the band so special is that they take a garagey style of punk and inject it with both pop and krautrock. At its best it’s incredibly powerful, as on their debut album’s closing track, ‘Klaus’. Kicking off with a riff like Weezer’s ‘Hash Pipe’, disorientating vocals give way to Stu’s jabbing guitars and a rhythm section that’s happy to sit on the same throbbing groove for seven minutes and make you never want it
to stop.
Onstage it’s a powerhouse of a tune, allowing Stu to punch melodies out of his guitar while the crowd stay entranced by Leigh’s rolling bassline and Adam’s Neu!-like drums. If there’s a better live track played in Brighton this year we’ve yet to hear it.
“I think we always wanted our sound to feel like it was constantly moving,” explains Stu. “It was always about pushing it forwards.”
“I remember in the early days Stu saying he wanted to make it really pulsey, like dance music,” Adam says.”
Read MoreThe Wytches are one of the funnest bands I’ve ever interviewed. Opinionated and outrageous, even though one third of them was almost too hungover to speak.
“From there, talk turns to a night in Lincoln that started with Gianni having sex with a girl in a lift and ended with one of their mates pissing in a hoover and throwing it out of the window. That hardly fits with the dour, moody band that everyone seems to want to paint them as. Hardly an interview goes by without the phrase “We hate…” popping up, and while they’re happy to lay into anything that doesn’t impress them, The Wytches are far from the angry young men that people want to portray them as.
“The music does get pretty intense,” admits the likable Gianni, “but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re a band at the end of the day and it’s supposed to be a laugh. We do have a laugh most of the time.””
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