The News Review:
- The politics of pop music
- 10 top new finds at SXSW
- No skinny jeans for Young Knives
- Moby: Back with a bang and time for a replay
The politics of pop music
Guardian – Mar 22, 2008
Worst of all his piece seemed to imply that the simpering pro-Iraq-voting Hazel Blears represents some form of ideological counterweight to David Cameron. Martin Daulby New Mills Derbyshire John Harris and Paul Weller are kidding themselves. Punk had political overtones but it was not party political. In the first place it was a reaction against the cultural desert of Labourism not Thatcherism. We all remember that Weller was taken in by Margaret Thatcher that Chelsea’s song The Right to Work was a protest against the closed shop and that when Denis Healey wanted to explain Tory economic policy in terms everyone could understand he called it “punk monetarism”. Only later and rather embarrasingly did too many 70s rebels shuffle into the Red Wedge tent to rock for Kinnock. Morrissey of course kept on flirting with far-right imagery – putting him rather to the right of David Cameron if it were possible to translate music into politics… If they had drifted and found their political calling later in life then their youthful dalliance with anti-Thatchist music might be believable. But they were born blue stayed blue and will die blue. They’ve worked out the favoured music of floating voters of a certain age group researched a few lines to sound convincing and presented their take. Warren Brown Ilkley West Yorkshire John Harris makes the strange claim: “There isn’t much in the way of pro-Tory popular music. ” Pop music is part of a multibillion-pound entertainment industry. At best it offers stylised political posturing and marketed rebellion for teenagers. It may come as a surprise to Harris but some of us who grew up in the 80s and consider ourselves to be on the left never listened to the Smiths and the Jam and care even less about them now.
10 top new finds at SXSW
Denver Post – Mar 22, 2008
” It’s not as interesting. Bands don’t get signed out of Austin anymore. It’s too big and unmanageable… Musicians come in from all over the world as do fans and the energy charging through the streets is unique. Here are 10 of my favorite bands from this year’s festival keeping it on the fresh side. Sure X’s West Coast punk rock is still furious and tremendous and Clipse tore the house down with its hotly produced Virginia Beach hip-hop anthems but SXSW is all about unearthing the new. And so in the name of discovery here are some of this year’s hottest bands. Did the Flaming Lips invent freak-pop as a quirky subversive subgenre? No but they are certainly the poster children of the movement.
No skinny jeans for Young Knives
Telegraph.co.uk – Mar 22, 2008
With his bespectacled younger brother and bassist House of Lords (Thomas to his family) and lifelong friend Oliver Askew on drums he is a yelping ball of English wit and self-deprecation like a strange cross between Adam Ant and Mark Corrigan from Channel 4′s Peep Show. With a look that could be described as Gilbert and George plus one the tweed-clad Young Knives stand out against the skinny jeans and straggly hair of their peers. “We get called posh because of what we wear but it’s really the bands that are dressed like tramps that are privately educated” says Dartnall. “We may look smart but it has all come from charity shops. “The band who are all over 30 have played together since 1991 (taking a short break to go to separate universities in the late Nineties) when Henry met Oliver in technology class in Ashby-de-la-Zouch the Midlands rural market town where the three grew up… ” What followed was the thankless year-on-year slog of self-financed gigs. The work finally paid off in 2004 when they signed to Transgressive Records. While their debut comprised punk songs about the mundanity of British nine-to-five life peppered with flamboyant falsetto their new album Superabundance is a much fuller-sounding record. It encompasses the pastoral psychedelia of groups such as Pentangle and Fairport Convention the guitar pop of mid-Nineties Blur as well vast pop-scapes reminiscent of Arcade Fire as on the string-laden future single Turn Tail. Significantly too the band have commissioned a video for each song five made by themselves which have been assembled in the form of a DVD along with the album. “When it was suggested we put a DVD out we thought it would be fun to make videos for the songs. We had seen too many of those DVDs that feature ‘The Making of the Album’ or crazy antics on tour.
Moby: Back with a bang and time for a replay
Daily Mail – Mar 22, 2008
"Rigid ideologies became very seductive to me" saysMoby (or Richard as he was then). "Fundamentalists are people who can't handle the worldbeing messy. Vegans Jihadists the Christian Right Straight Edgepunks? they all just want certainty and a code to live by. "At 19 I became a hardcore atheist punk rocker. A yearlater I was a devout Christian dance music fan. "Completely different codes but the important thing wassticking to them. If you're a fundamentalist you don'thave to figure out a single thing for yourself.