Author: danocdj

IDER

This is the first taster from a North London duo who are also flatmates. Megan & Lily say the track is about falling out of love. There’s a really nice chilled vibe to this uncomplicated tune. Hit play on ‘Sorry’:

FENNE LILY

Here’s a beautiful singer songwriter from Bristol. She plays The Great Escape Festival in Brighton this month, with other festival dates in the UK this summer. Listen to this delicate little gem of a track ‘Top To Toe’:

Lucy Camp

When someone samples Burial, it’s natural to be nervous. Lucy Camp has smashed this tho. The American who’s inspired by beats and rhymes has also just released her debut EP ‘Talk Down’. Impressive flow on ‘Sixteen’:

Ten Tonnes

Ten Tonnes is the work of a mysterious Brighton youngster. So mysterious i’m not even sure that fact is right. There’s something vocally that reminds me of Luke Pritchard from the Kooks, but Ten Tonnes still manages to pull off his own thing. Check out ‘Lucy’ from the singer songwriter’s debut EP now:

https://soundcloud.com/ten-tonnes/lucy

Slovenlie

This young lady from Peckham, South London, has managed to produce something very Berlin without even crossing the Channel.  The track ‘Disaster’ has driving drums with a haunting vocal and a nice 90s piano breakdown…and it’s all self produced. An exciting new act to keep an eye on.

Silences

This is a Northern Irish 5 piece. Their ‘Luna’ EP is out now. I’ve fallen in love with ‘There’s A Wolf’. It’s dynamic – switching from this beautiful soft acoustic song, into heavy rock guitars and back again. Take a listen.

This week, #indieamnesty captured social media and set off a giant nostalgia bomb for people all over the globe. It was a confessional of noughties behaviours. The golden era for indie.

The Strokes are often cited as the beginning of this particular moment in time. A skinny jean, converse clad generation (later to be replaced by the winkle picker). Britpop had come to an end. Dance music’s star was also rising.

Indie at that time was somewhat dirty to me. Sticky dancefloors in not nice venues. Greasy hair and second hand leather jackets. But there was still a touch of glamour to it. Or maybe romance is more apt. Still, GLAMOROUS INDIE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL ANYONE?

My time in these wonder years was mostly spent between Yorkshire and London. Although Manchester, Dundee and even Hebden Bridge feature in my hangover filled memory of indie nights across the UK.

Particular highlights would have to include:

House parties in Hull after Club Yo-Yo with The Paddingtons. At the time they were knocking around with The Libertines. These house parties were more like giant squat parties where homes were transformed into something akin to The Crystal Maze. I always remember thinking that it was utterly bizarre that some of the most creative house parties I was going to anywhere in the world were in Hull. HULL.

If you were in East London, you could walk Bethnal Green Road anytime of the day and night to find out if Pete Doherty or Carl Barat were doing “something”. Mostly I’d walk around just seeing who I could spot(Kele from Bloc Party was my regular)White Heat was THE NIGHT. Well it was “the cool” night anyway. Trash and Young Turks were also doing interesting stuff. And as #indieamnesty revealed Alex Zane and/or Noel Fielding would be up in Camden “stealing your girlfriend.”

There was a cracking, almost fisty cuffs, moment with The Pigeon Detectives over shoes and beauticians in Leeds. And something similar with The View.

I also remember spending the day interviewing a little known Northern band called Parva. WHOOOOO? Well, they’d later agree they needed a rebrand while supping pints in their local. To the Kaiser Chiefs natch.

And where were you when I played Arctic Monkeys for the first time on Viking FM? A little known band from Sheffield who, and I quote from local radio programmers at the time, “sound a bit shit…”

Good times. Filled with Strongbow, Red Stripe and lots of Aftershock.

Some saw #indieamnesty as a platform to confess guilty pleasures and secrets from more than a decade ago. But here’s the thing. I still spend time playing DJ sets all over the country and in certain parts of the world where ‘indie’ is still part of people’s lives. There’s no guilt for 500 people singing their hearts out to ‘Mr Brightside’ or jumping up and down to The Kaiser Chiefs. It’s people having fun to the music they still love. It reminds me how much I enjoyed those years, because I still see people finding pleasure in the music 10-15 years later. So it’s clearly not over.

In a music business sense, it lives on in a different way. Catfish and The 1975 are two of the biggest “indie” acts in the world right now. I don’t know if they’d call themselves that. But they certainly sit in it’s family tree. Waiting to spawn the next generation of bands who can fire us up, and make us want to go and see them in a dingy pub or club.

I just hope this next tier of indie rockstars aren’t sat around in Topman trilbys. The noughties can keep the hats.

Bear’s Den returned with a surprise live show last night. The new line-up sailed through tracks from the next album before rounding the night off with first LP favourite ‘Agape’. Just before finishing, the band’s Andrew Davie smiled and said, “We’ve been genuinely shitting our pants about this! Thank you so much, this has been an amazing night for us.” Any shitting of pants would have been a waste of decent underwear, as the crowd at the Notting Hill Arts Club smiled, swayed and sang their way through the band’s hour on stage. In January, Joey from BD, decided to leave and do his own thing. A talented musician/multi-instrumentalist like him is hard to replace, but they’ve recruited a few new faces that have them sounding at the top of their game. ‘Red Earth’ & ‘Auld Wives’ already have the markings of huge hits. And both tracks feel like a progression in terms of sound. While ‘Broken Parable’ and ‘Love Can’t Stand Alone’ are lovely little nods back to the band we all fell in love with.

Set List

Red Earth

Dew On The Vine

Greenwoods

Broken Parable

Love Can’t Stand Alone

Emeralds

Napoleon

Fortress

Auld Wives

Agape

Bear’s Den have announced the new album ‘Red Earth & Pouring Rain’ will be released on July 22^nd. European tour dates for October and November 2016 have also been confirmed. Tickets are on sale from Thursday April 7^th.

Over last few months, I’ve been accused of “stealing” tweets. 3 times in fact. And so I thought I’d write some thoughts on that. I haven’t replied to the accusations. I haven’t defended myself. I’m not guilty. I didn’t do it Guv’!

This year, Amy Schumer’s  been accused of “stealing” material. That was then revised to doing very, very similar material. Then there are the popstars accusing one another of stealing “creative copyright” on a monthly basis. And friends/colleagues I’ve known for the best part of 20 years in radio and TV constantly bickering and bitching about their ideas being stolen by another in the industry. Ideas robbed here and there. My favourite is when their idea that’s been “stolen” is just a re-badging (by them) of something someone did 20 years ago.

Jokes. Comedy. Content. Features. Ideas. Words. They all come from our brain.

They need a starting point. And that’s the same place for many of us. It’s an event. A person. An observation. A story. A nugget of information. We then take that and run with it. However, there are only so many tangents, so many turns, before thinking leads us to the same place. The connected world we now live in is beginning to reveal these things. Before socials, if you had a funny joke, there were very few ways of telling the world unless you were the famous person up on stage, or on TV, getting to say it to an audience. Now you just smash it out in a few characters for everybody to see.

I’m not naïve enough to think people don’t steal material. Or plagiarise. I’m sure it happens. A lot. But I do think there is an oversensitivity, and an arrogance amongst some, that it would be impossible for somebody else to have come up with similar content/ideas/material.

The progress in communications we have made in the last 20 years was unimaginable to most of us two decades ago. Through the internet and globalisation, we’re closer to one another than we have ever been. And it’s revealed a lot. This isn’t even just about our brains. How often do we now hear stories, or see pictures of people meeting their doppelgånger?! Physically we’re not even that special, or different. You could be as far away from home as you like, and bump into someone who has the same face as you. If you don’t believe me read Reddit. Or Metro, they love posting a doppelgånger story.

How difficult is it to see patterns in what people find funny these days? Or what people like hearing about. Not very.  Believe me I’m constantly bombarded with stats about what works and what doesn’t. We’re operating in such a closed circle of potential material that people enjoy and want. We’re all exposed to the same inspiration. We’re all on the same social media sites, all watching the same TV shows and all consuming the same news channels. We are all consuming life as one. Consciously, or sub conciously our brains are recording the same tapes.

All of this goes against the grain of how unique we have been told we are. How special our mums told us we are. And in DNA they are right. But I’m starting to think that’s about where it ends.

To give up and say things like “there are no new ideas” or “what’s the point then?’ would be the biggest waste. Or to sit and worry you’ve come up with a similar idea to someone else would be pointless. It’s time wasted while we could crafting and creating the next joke or the next feature. Or just writing the next few words.

Our brains might be all recording the same tapes, but it’s our job and our duty, to put our own spin on them and deliver them back to the world.  Even if someone else is doing the same thing.

Lany

Lany are an LA based 3 piece. Familiar to some already i’m sure, but this is the one that could move them into consciousness of many. They’ve already got a support slot on the Ellie Goulding tour here in the UK this month, followed by North America in April/May.

 

Laurel

Southhampton has delivered us this incredible voice in the form of Laurel. After a few EPs she’s posted this deep track which is haunting, beautiful and captivating all at once. Big fan of ‘Life Worth Living’.

James TW

I don’t know much about James TW, but a few friends told me to check out some videos of him from SXSW. Sounds like this singer songwriter from London got a lot of people excited in Austin this year. Check out ‘When You Love Someone’ for a little taster: