Eastleigh Festival of Music 2011

It's one of my favorite weekends of the year. We're really lucky that Eastleigh lays on a music festival. I know it's not Glastonbury or anything but it's nice to be able to hear live music within a few minutes walk from our home. It's been a bit different this year as the main acts have been indoors in The Point. The sound quality's been alot better but I must admit I miss the outdoor atmosphere (and the beer tent!). Sadly, the attendance hasn't been massive - I find it amazing that more people don't come out to support this - c'mon folks of Eastleigh! Live music! On your doorstep!

Here's a few of the bands we've seen this year:

Flight Brigade



First up on the Friday evening, Flight Brigade are a Hampshire band. If you look up the Facebook page, the second track in the player, "When The Water Whispers", was the one that really stood out for me with its haunting violin arpeggio.

Dry the River



Harder edge to this London band (although the bassist is from Southampton ... never mind). Apparently they were suffering a bit from an after party the night before with Plan B but they still delivered with plenty of energy. I thought I could hear alot of Editors in there, which is no bad thing.


Stornoway with The North Sea Radio Orchestra



This was a lovely set but also educational, with beautifully crafted indie-folk interspersed with anecdotes about bizarre extreme sports like chessboxing and zorbing. Really lucky to see this as it's one of only two gigs supported by The North Sea Radio Orchestra, which for me just took the music to another level. There's a wit and melancholy to the vocals which made me think of Belle and Sebastian.

Ellen and the Escapades



The Saturday night kicked off with local band Doyle and the Fourfathers (who included a song about the age of austerity that gave libraries a mention!). They were followed by Ellen and the Escapades who delivered an acoustic set as their drummer couldn't be with them. Amazing vocals - Ellen has a great country voice. We their EP at the end because we wanted to hear what they sound like with drums and have to say it was well worth it.

The Travelling Band



It must have felt a bit weird for The Travelling band. A few weeks ago playing to thousands of people at Glastonbury and this week playing to at The Point to about a hundred people. But they gave a good performance. Again, it's a real shame the numbers aren't better - especially when you consider all the work that goes into organizing it and that all of the bands give it their all. I had a bit of a moment during this set when they did an acoustic arrangement of the Roses' Waterfall - which they dedicated to the ghost of Ian Brown :-)

The Leisure Society



The last act of the Saturday were The Leisure Society. The guy next to me had come all the way from Bedfordshire to see them and I don't think he was disappointed. You can just about see a lovely hollow bodied Gretsch in this picture (complete with Bigsby vibrato). One of my favourite guitars and you could hear the clean, crisp sound coming through.

At the end of the set the band came into the audience to do an encore. Which was lovely and just goes to show what a good opportunity this festival is - yes it's small but it gives you a chance to get close to the music that you don't get anywhere else. It's tough times and I guess councils all over are going to be cutting arts and culture - I really hope Eastleigh survives!

Eastleigh Music Festival - Folk night

This is one of my favourite weekends of the year. We're really lucky to have a music festival just a short walk into town - and the line-up seems to get better every year. The Friday night is normally folk and the Saturday more indie/ rock/ pop.

The line up this year for the folk night started off with a local band - Bemis - here they are on MySpace http://www.myspace.com/bemisuk

Apparently the two guitarists met at a party in Portsmouth 3 years ago and the rest as they say is history. I know this because some random bloke next to us turned to me to inform me of this detail and others (like the professions of the band members). Why he did this, I have no idea. I guess even small local bands are entitled to fanboys.

Next up was Jim Moray http://www.myspace.com/jimmoray. More traditional music - and he obviously does alot of research into finding early recordings and the history of the music. Really interesting stuff and good that these things live on and the stories are still told.

Lau was my favourite act http://www.myspace.com/laumusic. There's more of an experimental edge to them - the sound varies from really frenetic to ambient (check out Lau – Horizontigo - a. Horizontigo. b. Alright in the Held apparently a song about a fear of the flat lands of the fens!). I was really impressed by the musicianship and the way that they use their instruments really creatively to get such a range of sounds. They didn't play it last night but I'm also a big fan of their cover of Dear Prudence Lau – Dear Prudence, ordinarily I don't like Beatles covers (as you don't mess with perfection) but this is a great cover of one of my favourite songs...

At the top of the bill was Cara Dillon - again great musicianship and a stunning voice. There was obviously a big following in the crowd and they didn't disappoint but the highlight for me was the originality of Lau. Can't wait to get back over there this afternoon for some local bands followed by Badly Drawn Boy, Field Music, Peggy Sue and Haunted Stereo tonight :-)

Ian Brown - Godlike Sellout

<rant>It seems the same artist who wrote Illegal Attacks in protest of the military-industrial complex in Iraq is not against advertising Adidas shoes - or suppressing the voice of those who think this is a bit of a sellout.

I was curious enough, on seeing a post on Ian Brown's "godlike genius" fanpage on Facebook of him with Noel Gallagher to watch the clip. It was 7+ minutes of Ian and Noel  extolling the virtues of Adidas shoes and how they're closely linked with coolness and the whole Manchester thing. Really cheesy stuff.

Worse, was the string of comments e.g.  "You boys are my idols. I'm an aspiring writer and when i make it i'm writing a film about our home city and life in the late 80s-early 90s. I'll be knocking on both your doors for bits of the soundtrack." er, O-big pause-K.

Worse still, was that after I posted my view on this to the thread (it was a one word post - "sell-outs") the post was deleted and it now seems that I'm not able to comment on posts any more (see - no comment link).



It seems not only is Ian Brown not as anti-capitalist as his lyrics make out he's also anti-free speech.

The music has died a little bit tonight.</rant>

Never give up

What a fantastic weekend. Friday night was the Charlatans' gig at Southampton Guildhall. Early signs weren't promising as the venue was only about 2/3rds full. Weird that Ian Brown recently packed it out and yet, on Friday, there was plenty of standing room left and loads of the seating was empty. To the Charlatans credit though they never gave up and despite the low turn out I'd say the atmosphere was the best I've seen at Southampton. There was a good mix of songs going right back to tracks off of Some Friendly which helped to get the crowd going. Apart from that they were just tight. I've never been a big fan of the sound at the guildhall but they seemed to get the best out of it (it's a bit like a massive concrete shoe box shape so you normally get weird echos and reverberations). This is the third time I've seen the Charlatans and they just seem to get better and better. They've come full circle and are really keyboard driven again. "Weirdo" was great and (I'm guessing) not an easy song to pull off live BUT, that was the one that took me from having a really good time to the next level. I was still smiling today when I thought about it...

That and the football. Yep - probably the most important footballing moment in my life on Saturday when Pompey won the FA Cup. In fact, this was such a big one that I don't think it's really sunk in yet. Am I dissapointed that I didn't go to the game, or even the homecoming? Well no, not really. I'm over the moon and this was one of the few games that I've seen recently that had the power to give me butterflies before the game but football hasn't been that big a part of my life for years now - it's had to make way for other things as, to follow football properly takes a big investment of time. It would be hypocritical for me to jump on the bandwagon now but, that said, I can remember being crushed in 1992. That was when football really meant something to me. The hopes invested in that cup run and the belief that because we were the underdogs we had a divine right to victory were unbelievable. I can really feel for those Cardiff fans (and to be fair their team gave them alot to be proud of). Ok, so 2008 was our time just as 1992 it belonged to Liverpool so there's a certain justice to that but I doubt many Cardiff fans see it that way. What was really great was that this game made me feel like I did when I was 14 again, just for a bit. Being in the Premiership is great but in most of the games I don't see the sort of passion or commitment that I remember from when I was a kid... Maybe that's as much about growing up as it is about football getting more commercial. Because the FA Cup throws teams like Cardiff into the mix (you don't get many glory hunters turning up to support Cardiff) it's still got a sort of magically quality - like if you hope hard enough it'll happen. It did for us - just took 16 years. I guess the moral is never give up!

Nude

Radiohead's latest attack on the music indistry is to provide the source files or "stems" to their latest single "nude". I love the way that Radiohead are on top of the Web 2.0 thing and are working with it rather than trying to bury their heads in the sand. If the music industry goes open source and, perhaps more importantly, relaxes a bit in their pointless battle for control in the form of DRM, then I think there is a real potential for Web 2.0 to allow people to engage with music on a new level. Not in a passive, supplier-consumer relationship but in a more interactive and creative way. From a marketing perspective Radiohead really seem to "get" it. In Rainbows got massive coverage because it was touted as a "free" download - you were able to pay £0 to download the album (which I have to admit I did). However - the marketing worked on me - even though, in the words of Robert Palmer: I like to think that I'm immune to the stuff. Where was I? And more importantly, why am I quoting Robert Palmer? This has to be a new low. Oh yeah, marketing. What the album download did was to create a mailing list which has now been used to promote this latest venture. So, I've just found myself signing up to iTunes and forking out for these source files. Anyone who wrote off In Rainbows as a crazy stunt may be right but I've got a feeling it will come to be recognized as sort of evolutionary. It's not revolutionary because at the end of the day they are still making money off it but it is being done in a different way.

Anyway - that's all very interesting but I'm actually less interested in Radiohead's marketing strategy and more interested in this as way back into music. I've struggled with music software in the past and never really cracked it but - having got over the initial hack to get these stems from iTunes into Audacity I think this is going to be a less painless way to learn a bit about the software...