A progressive analysis of politics and the arts.
by Tom McGhie
Three o’clock in the morning. You’re lying in a sleeping bag under a workbench in a dark room surrounded by tools and sawdust with a ragged blanket warding off the elements that pour in through the window which doesn’t properly close. The nighttime gale weaves its way into the building, embraces your exposed limbs and extremities and you shudder your brain back into the realm of sleep.
by Chris Jarvis
2016 will be the year of the Tut. After a crowdfunding campaign that achieved double its original target, The Tuts are set to release their debut album – Update Your Brain – in September. The all-woman three piece from Hayes have nurtured a loyal and growing fan base in their first few years, with tours alongside UK veterans Kate Nash, The Selecter and Sonic Boom Six helping to build a wide creoss-genre appeal.Continue Reading
by Chris Jarvis
For anyone of my generation who group up in the Midlands with a taste for alternative music, Johnny Doom is something of an icon. Tuning into Kerrang Radio (when it was still broadcast on FM), it was the dulcet tones of this Brummie legend that would really excite, much more so than even the anarchic Tim Shaw or the esoteric Nick Margerisson. Unsurprisingly, he has won accolades for his wry radio conversations, being named Brummie of the Year in 2008.
But Johnny has a long history within music outside of his radio work. Becoming active initially in the late 1980s in the influential Crust Punk band Doom, Johnny went on to form the less acclaimed, but equally important Police Bastard, who fuse a raw and brutal aggression with thrash metal riffs and hardcore compositions. Encapsulated within that sound is an anti-authoritarian politics which is evident even from the band’s name. Because of this, we decided to talk to Johnny Doom about his politics and the role it plays in his music as part of our series Music That Matters.
On 9th and 10th October, the Royal Festival Hall played host to the premier of ‘The Hollow of the Hand’ – a collaboration between musician PJ Harvey and photographer-filmographer Seamus Murphy. It was essentially a book launch, but it will also be a project that includes a film to be released next year. It’s a relatively new breed of art, with politics at its heart, where reportage and art combine to create a particular type of documentary where the genre is combined with artistic photography/videography, poetry, and music.
The project saw Harvey and Murphy travel to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington DC. Murphy stated that they went to these countries without any agenda, without a particular message they wished to convey. It appeared Murphy enjoyed going down the road less travelled, and cited a chicken coop in Kosovo as an example of the kinds of places he liked to visit, and was glad Harvey felt the same way.Continue Reading
To start with, Oslo in Hackney is a great gig venue. One message I got from my MA in Creative Entrepreneurship was that food is very important — I agreed — and downstairs in this venue is a restaurant, where you can get your pre-gig meal. I went for a burger and chips, and my friend had a much healthier mushroom medley. Upstairs is a black-box room, complete with a small stage, bar area, and disco ball.
Support came first from O Karmina, which surprised me; I hadn’t expected to hear my name. The singer-pianist thanked us for listening throughout her set, heavily implying she wasn’t used to an attentive crowd. She had us hooked from her first syllable, and we were completely captivated the whole way through. Plus, I’m a sucker for a loop-pedal, her voice overlapping like a choral shoreline.
by Mike Vinti
Debate has been raging in the US over issues of cultural appropriation in hip-hop and popular music, particularly with regard to the roles of white artists in a traditionally black genre. This debate is a vital one and has highlighted many of the inequalities present between black and white musicians, actors, and other cultural figures. British culture faces its own issues around appropriation and representation, not just of race but of class. The relationship between class and culture in the UK has always been a complex one. From tales of working class hardship by the likes of Charles Dickens and Alan Bennett, to the idolisation of that landed gentry life by the likes of Mumford and Sons and the plague of imitation artists that followed their break into the mainstream, class undercuts British culture as much as it does day to day life.
In the past decade or so however, the evolutions in music and culture driven by the working class have been side-lined in favour of sanitised replicas, stripped of any comment or reflection on the socioeconomic factors that bore them.
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