robertcooke-blog

[robertcooke-blog]

Intermission.

I sort of got out of the habit of posting things on here. Then the main place I worked for, The Fly, shut down and took its website with it. So now loads of the links on here are broken. Not quite sure what to do about that.

Things will be back to normal soon enough, meaning this Tumblr will return to being a comprehensive feed/filing cabinet for my work as a music journalist.

In the meantime, bear with me. Thanks.

[robertcooke-blog]

“Making music comes very naturally”, says Nicolas Jaar, before correcting himself: “Making good music definitely does not come naturally. Making medium-to-terrible music comes very naturally.”

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Turns out that being in a band and holding down a bog-standard shop job is easier than you might think… "I’ll tell you what’s really weird, is how accommodating people are.When I told my boss I wanted to go on tour’, she was just like, ‘Brilliant! Follow your dream!’”

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Icona Pop were always setting us up for disappointment. '€˜I Love It;€™, their breakthrough single, is just too brilliant, isn'€™t it? A manic, maddening, mercilessly infectious piece of trashy teenage pop, casually dressed up electro-punk clothing to lure you into its stupid, sweaty grip. It'€™s completely ridiculous, entirely meaningless, and one of the best pop songs of the century.

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You could write a book about Sky Larkin and, frankly, they deserve nothing less. This is a band who, for the last eight years, have been galvanising guitar-based pop songs into cerebral chapters of enticingly enigmatic prose. It's not just the beautifully loose, poetic imagery Katie Harkin compiles into her lyrics - it'€™s the way her teasing melodies and ever-so-slightly unusual chords stack on top of each other, like stanzas on a page that form into a perfectly constructed, neatly defined whole. When Harkin plays guitar, she becomes the poet laureate of punk rock.

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David Byrne is lying down behind Annie Clark, pretending to be asleep. He stirs occasionally to sing the “I… I… I…” bit in ‘Cheerleader’ – a track from Clark’s last St Vincent album – but the rest of the time he appears out for the count, surrounded in slumberland by the eight-piece ‘Love This Giant’ brass band. He’s awoken by the performers parping the beat to ‘Lazy’, delivering the vocals from his seminal X-Press 2 collaboration like a comical preacher-man, complete with headset mic to leave his hands shuffling at his sides.

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Colin Newman poses an interesting question when we ask him how his band fit in to this year’s Beacons Festival bill – 'Does anybody fit in?' is the Wire frontman’s response, and we’re not sure how to answer.

There’ll be more to come from Newman and guitarist Matthew Simms, both in the course of this review and in an interview DiS conducted at Heslaker Farm. For now we’ll stick with the question – does anybody fit in at Beacons?

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When MONEY frontman Jamie Lee hears that we’ve just spotted Mark E Smith, hot pursuit is his instant response. However, our hunt through Manchester’s choicest pubs soon takes an awkward turn.

Jamie takes us to a pub he’s barred from. The barmaid isn’t happy, but he doesn’t budge when she calls him a “twat”, nor when she’s dragging him by his shirt towards the door. Only when she’s calling 999 does he finally shift.

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They'€™re all at it -€“ Bloc Party, Editors and now Franz Ferdinand. First they led the mid-noughties post-punk revival, then they made their third albums on keyboards with mixed results, then they fell back in love with guitars.

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There are lots of proud parents in Sheffield town centre.

It’s graduation week at one of the city’s universities, so going to meet Drenge to talk about their ferocious debut album requires making our way through an obstacle course of caps, gowns, too-high heels, borrowed suits and retina-frazzling camera flashes.

Aged 21, Eoin Loveless might have been joining them, with his 20-year-old brother Rory not far behind. But fortunately, neither is facing the tedium of the graduate employment market because, in what’s seemed like a matter of months they’ve become one of the most exhilarating rock duos around and achieved the privileged status of being Castleton’s second most famous residents.

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When our parents'€™ generation have passed and we'€™re the grown-ups of the world, we won'€™t have Dad-rock any more. What we will have though is Dad-indie, and it will have started with this Noah And The Whale album.

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The point of music festivals is to see music, right? No one likes the guy who sits on a deckchair in his Reni hat drinking tinnies all day, only rousing himself around 9pm to go and watch the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or some terrible Kasabian tribute band. Surely it’s more in the spirit of the thing to agonise over inky A4 print-outs of clashfinders for days in advance, working out where you’ll be at every half-hour slot between noon and midnight in the hope of squeezing as many hotly-tipped or critically acclaimed notes of music into your earholes as physically possible? After all, whether you’re paying fifteen quid or £202.50 (+ booking fee) you want to get your money’s worth out of your weekend of live entertainment.

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If there are two things you can be sure of when you visit Manchester, it’s these: it’ll be raining, and you’re not going to see a veteran post-punk icon walking through the city centre. I should have realized it was going to be an unusual afternoon when I was standing outside the Night & Day Café in the scorching heat and Mark E Smith walked past.

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When LCD Soundsystem finished playing their epic four-hour final show in April 2011, every member of the band will have had to ask themselves a question: “Okay, so what now?” For drummer Pat Mahoney, the answer is Museum Of Love, the new project he has started with Dennis McNany.

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We ranted on about the politics of Tramlines last time. Now we can get to the important stuff - namely, that you could see Alessi’s Ark, Best Friends, Brown Brogues, The Crookes, Department M, Cheatahs , Deaf Club, Dutch Uncles, Sam Forrest, Friends, Grass House, I Like Trains, The Jim Jones Revue, Lanterns On The Lake, Let’s Buy Happiness, Menace Beach, Misty’s Big Adventure, Money, Only Real, Patterns, Paws, Pins, Public Service Broadcasting, Rolo Tomassi, Sky Larkin, Slow Club, Superfood, Summer Camp, Sweet Baboo, Tall Ships, Teleman, Theme Park , Veronica Falls, Weirds, Wet Nuns, Wolf Alice, 2.54 and more, for fifteen quid.

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Long Division just hit the sweet spot of UK festivals. Its third year finds it big enough to pull together a seriously impressive bill, while still remaining small enough to retain its character, independence and charm. Its DIY spirit pulls you from one extreme from the other, so you’ll start your day in a Victorian opera house, dying with laughter at Robin Ince’s impeccable impression of fellow comic Stewart Lee, only to find yourself stuffed inside a sweaty pub with Leeds hardcore loons Blacklisters an hour later.

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If you want to have a nice time talking to John Lydon, ask him about music, then sit back and listen. Music, after all, is what he's striven to make for the last four decades. And he's still doing it, it would seem, against all odds. It's also the thing that's missing from most of what you'll read about Lydon who (let's face it) whether he means to or not, has a habit of hitting the headlines for things other than what he does in the studio and onstage.