ATP Festival curated by Matt Groening – Day 3

Matt Groening introducing Daniel Johnston as his favourite songwriter

Matt Groening introducing Daniel Johnston as his "favourite songwriter"

Sunday dawns and Jim becomes my hero twice in ten minutes by making me a fried egg sandwich and telling me he once saw Spike Milligan in a pub in Manchester. Simon rather coyly reveals his affection for Spear of Destiny and I resolve to play the excellent “Do You Believe in the Westworld” on the radio for him, only to forget later and feel like a dick for doing so.

We race to the Centre Stage to see Boredoms again, just to reassure ourselves that we weren’t victim to some kind of mass hallucination yesterday and they are once again, amazing. We then decamp to Reds, the smallest of the Butlins venues to see Viv Albertine’s Limerice who are excellent. Continue reading →

ATP Festival curated by Matt Groening – Day 2

Saturday begins with two hours of 70’s kids cartoon Hong Kong Phooey on the excellent ATP TV channel provided for the weekend. Refreshed by the antics of the titular kung fu practicing canine, we venture forth into the unknown. [I ventured forth a little earlier than the others and caught Hello Saferide, in Reds. I was rather impressed by her Swedish knack of finding a good tune, and sentimental lyrics. Ed]

Hello Saferide - melodic and romantic

Hello Saferide - melodic romanticism

Between the four of us (me, Albert, Simon and Jim) we can conjure up little previous knowledge of Boredoms despite the fact that they appear to have been going since about 1942 and have released about half a million records. The notes about them printed in the frankly beautiful programmes (coming with 4 different covers featuring Matt Groening penned caricatures of Iggy, Joanna Newsome, Daniel Johnston and someone we didn’t recognise [either She & Him or Lightning Dust, the jury is still out – ed]) weren’t much help either. In this we simply read a breathless treatise about Boredoms being Japanese, having a penchant for using lots of drummers, and being a bit ace.

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The BCB Sessions – 19th May 2010

Archie Bronson Outfit – Shark’s Tooth
Tweak Bird – A Sun
The Sunshine Underground – Spell It Out
Dum Dum Girls – Bhang Bhang
Angus & Julia Stone – I’m Not Yours
Bonobo – 1009
Pastor Mbhobho – Ayobaness
Fenech Soler – Stop and Stare
The Acorn – Restoration
Middleman – It’s Not Over Yet
Kiara Elles –
CocoRosie – Lemonade
Erland and the Carnival – You don’t have to be lonely
MGMT – Flash Delerium
Angus & Julia Stone – Big Jet Plane

Playlist – 15th May 2010 featuring Papa Jon’s concise history of Reggae music!

My first post on the BCB blog… please accept my sincere apologies! Remeber, you can listen back to this show at www.theothersideradio.com. And it’s a good’un, so you should!

I’ve got High Pressure main man Jon in the studio with me tonight, and he knows what’s what when it comes to roots and reggae… I’ve employed him for the evening to teach us a few things we might not know about the history of Reggae – from the 60’s to the present day. It’s an education, so listen back and learn…

01. Wobble n Dubb – Kokoro’s Actroid [Unreleased]
02. The Herbaliser – The Lost Suitcase [Ninja Tune]

Papa Jon’s Concise History of Reggae Music!

Prince Busta – Enjoy Yourself
Keith and Ken – I Won’t Let You Go
Duke Reid – Burial
Justin Hines and the Dominoes – Save A Bread
Phyllis Dillon – Perfidia
Toots & The Maytals – Night and Day
The Mad Lads- Ten to One
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Soul Rebel (Prod. Lee Scratch Perry)
Jacob Miller – Baby I love You So (Prod. Augustus Pablo)
King Tubby – King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
Richy Macdonald – Realise
Horace Andy – Money Money
Horace Andy – Money Money (Jah Stitch Remix)
Dennis Emmanuel Brown – Bubblin’ Fountain
The Congos – Fisherman
Johnny Osbourne – Icecream Love
Wayne Smith – Under My Sleng Teng
Buju Banton & Tenor Saw – Ring The Alarm Quick
Garnett Silk – Kingly Character
Inspirational Sound ft. Bongo Chilli – Minaron

ATP Festival curated by Matt Groening – Day 1

The first thing that hits you when you walk in to the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival is the contrast between the ultra mainstream surroundings of Butlins and the heartening array of freaks who attend. This is demonstrated in microcosm within 5 minutes by a painfully thin young Japanese man wearing a surgical mask and lime green leggings draping himself with impressive languor against a wall featuring a poster for “The Peter Andre Weekend” – three nights at Butlins and a concert featuring the impressively pectoralled housewives’ favourite for a mere £98.

Broadcast

Broadcast - noise, or music?

We will return to bare chested doyens of entertainment in a moment, but our first foray was to see Broadcast, a male/female duo beloved of the hip and the trying-to-be, who amble shyly onto the stage and proceed to stand at two elevated box like contraptions and wrestle out half an hour’s worth of whirrs, drones and howls whist having experimental films “broadcast” (did you see what I did there? ) on top of them. The result is very much an ATP archetype: challenging, startling and beautiful at the same time. The effect is only diluted mid-way through the set when they resort to boring old actual songs. That’s not noise, that’s just music.

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Another chance to hear our Gareth Davies – Jones special on Going North from Nashville, 10-11pm Monday 24th May

Featuring an interview with accomplished Irish singer songwriter Gareth Davies – Jones, lots of his beautiful music & contributions from others, including Brian Houston & Bob Dylan ! If you’re not familiar with Gareth’s music, a great chance to find out what you’re missing – if you are don’t miss this one !

The Blowin Weekly Extra – Through

Blowin 9-10pm Sunday 16th May 2010

More tunes than time…

Blowin can now be heard online or downloaded at blowin.podomatic.com
Listen LIVE on Sunday evening – www.bcbradio.co.uk/bcb.m3u

BCB 106.6 FM in West Yorkshire, www.bcbradio.co.uk everywhere else…

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This week I have mainly been…  trying Google’s Chrome.
Firefox was getting a bit creaky, Chrome seems faster and handles my 37 tabbed pages of breakfast reading well.
I like Firefox’s multiple download manager though.

Go Through

Go Through

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Africa Oyé
returns to Sefton Park, Liverpool, Saturday 19 & Sunday 20 June
12:30pm-9:30pm both days – Free

Including Michael Rose from Black Uhuru with his live band, the Gangbe Brass Band from Benin, and Youssou N’Dour’s protégé Carlou D from Senegal. www.africaoye.com

Pre-festival Party – Wailing Souls, Saturday 22 May, The Picket Venue, Liverpool L1 0BW £10 advance £15 on door. www.africaoye.com/tandt/wailingsouls.htm

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Spotify knows you still listen to Limp Bizkit and now so does everyone else.

Snooping on each other is common ground nowadays, blessed as we are with the ability to know what our friends/siblings/that weird guy from primary school are all doing every minute of everyday thanks to Facebook. Now Spotify has opened up the realm of snooping to epic and potentially humiliating proportions with its new ‘social’ feature, purpose built to let us pass judgement on our friend’s music tastes. Jonathan from Spotify optimistically tells us its designed to allow users to share music between each other. Pah. It’s much more about being able to discover that that friend you have, who purports to listen only to neurofunk, darkcore and nitzhonot (which for those of you that don’t know, is a crossover between Goa trance and uplifting trance that emerged during the mid-late 1990s in Israel*) quite clearly thinks the new album of Lady Gaga remixes is pretty great.

Spotify

*I didn’t make this up, it has its own wikipedia page