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Love Is Cruel backstage x

🐢.

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x

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But you're not Judy Garland Oh, just like me, you've never really had a home of your own And I'm not Tony Hancock, baby Until the dawn we'll stone the crows

The Libertines - You're My Waterloo

A song written by Pete Doherty for band mate Carl Barât

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Alright I’ve finally sort of recovered and will get on to uploading a few videos, if you’ve got any wishes about videos you’d want just hit me up, cause I’ll just upload pieces cause tumblr will fight me if I try to upload the full songs :)

Anyways first of here are just some things that I had to write down and believe you might enjoy (in no particular order) :

- He had fucking Hal Hal in his pre show setlist like the monkeys

- either Tom or Miles used an Arctic monkeys music storage crate and the second we spotted it it got turned around -> so while no one truly believed that Alex would show up there were just a few things that against all odds suddenly seemed to point towards it

- Miles’ walk off song was ‘my way’ with an amazing sing along from the audience and then a curtain descended over the stage and then the Leadmill DJ for the club party took over and started the set of with ‘from the ritz to the rubble’ you can imagine the absolute mayhem that erupted (not only at the song but because for a second again most waited for that curtain to open back up and reveal Miles&Alex on stage)

-Miles completely forgot to take of his ‘the world is yours ring��� before coming on stage so right after the first song the took it of and placed it on the keyboard with Ben then stepping in to hand it to James (with a bit of confusion from both of them)

-didn’t manage to film that bit but after One man band he held his guitar overhead and then fucking curtseyed

-an older security guard shared some stories of a young Cookie frequenting the Leadmill as a young Lad with his fake ID

-one of my highlights was just how Miles basically didn’t stop smiling once during the entire gig you could just see how much he loved it

-another highlight was after blame it on the summertime Miles had a tiny problem with his pedals and while him, Ben and James tried to fix we started the uhuhuhu from the chorus back up and at first Miles looked utterly confused before breaking out into the sweetest smile and encouraging us to keep going

-when he came out afterwards (after like 2 hours) he profusely thanked us for waiting and for coming to the gig and making it an unforgettable one

-the fucking BBC were there to interview us

-the green room was on the upper floor and had a little curtain in front of the window facing the pit and like 10 minutes before stage time Miles peeked out gave a tiny wave and disappeared again when the screaming got too loud

-at like 12pm Nathan popped out and chatted a bit with us while waiting for his Popeyes delivery

-there obviously is a back entrance for artists (which at least Katie used) but Miles after already seeing us queuing outside intentionally and willingly used the front door two more times and chatted a bit with us and was a good sport bout taking pictures and signing stuff

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Alright here’s the video of that moment from after blame it on the summertime cause it might be my favourite from this concert

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And here a few subpar pics (but I always prefer to film and just snap some while doing that)

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award for best headline about miles' gig at the leadmill goes to:

absolutely immaculate placement of the word flamboyant. 😭😭😭

forreal though. it's a nice little write-up. you can read it here.

this is my favorite part.

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i can’t say anything. just. oh.

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People keep wondering whether Alex will join Miles for his final Leadmill gig... And yeah, I would absolutely sell my soul for a TLSP reunion (preferably with better vibes than the 2018 one). It does seem like the most likely opportunity for it to happen, but who knows. Alex rarely goes for the obvious choice, and it could be too much pressure already.

But Miles has had a lot of great collabs, and check this out. As a "Dealer" enthusiast, I immediately calculated that Lana Del Rey happens to have a free day in her UK tour schedule on the 27th between her Glasgow and Liverpool shows. It's probably even less likely, but still theoretically possible to get a Dealer live debut as a duet. If she were to ever perform it, I suspect that Lana would rather join Miles on his gig than mess up her carefully staged and choreographed stadium show.

Yeah, this is still very unlikely. A girl can dream, right?

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I loved the NME interview parts where Miles talks about his experience working with Dan Auerbach.

It often feels as if Miles has had to constantly fight for his chances when it comes to his solo career. But Dan really said "I want you!", gave it his all, and it became such a special thing. I can already feel that this is gonna be an amazing album.

Source: NME

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Miles’s artist bio including snippets of interview from Easy Eye Sound:

So we’re getting a cover, most songs were recorded as live and whilst performing every night last winter, Miles was rehearsing his new songs in every second in between. What a man 💖

When Miles Kane walked into Easy Eye Sound for the first time in June 2024, he found two acoustic guitars and two notepads waiting at the Nashville studio's kitchen table. The British singer-songwriter was an established artist in the UK with five Top 20 albums of pocket-dynamite pop and psychedelic groove as well as two U.K. Number One LPs as half of The Last Shadow Puppets with Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner. But Kane was rolling new dice here, a songwriting session with someone he had never met before: Easy Eye Sound founder and The Black Keys singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach.

Kane was "a fan boy," he admits. "I love the Keys. And I love Dan's solo albums," citing songs like "The Prowl" on 2009's Keep It Hid and "King Of A One-Horse Town" on 2017's Waiting On A Song. Auerbach says he only knew Kane "was 'the man' over in England, buddies with Alex." Yet Kane and Auerbach immediately bonded over mutual obsessions: power-chord pioneer Link Wray; the deep-cut corners of American soul and '60s British-pop history; the rippled frenzy of tremolo guitar, triggered with a Bigsby whammy bar. By the end of their first day together, the two strangers had written three perfect knockouts, joined at the table by Pat McLaughlin, a Nashville composer-producer invited by Auerbach.

All three songs are now on Sunlight In The Shadows – Kane's turning-point debut for the Easy Eye Sound label, produced by Auerbach and the hottest roots-and-raveup party you've had on your Victrola in many moons. "Sunlight In The Shadows" is the language of the Delta with a midnight-city tension.

"Everyone was like, 'Wow, there's a feeling here,'" Kane raves at a supersonic clip. He recalls "humming this surf-guitar riff" at one point as he and Auerbach were "both hitting an invisible whammy bar on our acoustics. I was like, 'God, this guy is like me. He gets it!'"

To Auerbach, Kane was "larger than life," a rock & roll zealot with mod-avenger cool. "I felt like I'm hanging out with a rock star," Auerbach says, laughing. "I wanted to make a record as raw and in your face as he is. But sexy too, with depth. I wanted to give Miles his Scott Walker moment," referring to the shadows and majesty on that singer's fabled '60s solo albums. "I didn't want to ignore that. It's a big part of who Miles is."

The result is an album that evokes the atomic transcendence of British-beat bands like The Who, The Move and The Action, the way they turned the lessons and inspirations on their favorite Atlantic and Chess singles into original guitar-and-vocal fire. "Dan and I love all that," Kane exclaims, "mixing T. Rex, Motown and The Easybeats. When we were chatting and sharing references, we were so similar in taste it was frightening."

Sunlight In The Shadows is also alive with the sound of the instant friendship born in that kitchen. Kane and Auerbach wrote the album's eleven original songs with contributions from McLaughlin, Daniel Tashian and The Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney. Auerbach sings backing vocals and plays on every track, part of the record's guitar army with Easy Eye regular Tom Bukovac, guitarist Nick Bockrath of Cage The Elephant and Barrie Cadogan from British garage futurists Little Barrie.

"Never enough guitars," Auerbach cracks. "We had a whole mess of guitar players doing the most simple, interlocking parts, like a locomotive slowly getting going." Malcolm Catto – "A monster U.K. guy, one of the greatest beat drummers alive right now" – kept it all on the rails. The recording sessions which followed six months after that songwriting explosion took only three days. Kane, Auerbach and the band cut nearly everything in live takes, usually in the first or second pass – Kane's vocals included. "Before going into the sessions," Kane says, "I was touring the U.K.. I would sing these songs every day, between shows, so when we were doing them with the band, I wasn't thinking, 'What's the melody or lyric here?' Recording the album was like fight night," he notes. "But what you do in fight camp is just as important."

Sunlight In The Shadows was recorded so quickly that, with studio time left over on the final day, Auerbach suggested doing a cover: "Slow Death," a 1972 nugget by the Flamin' Groovies, slowing it down a hair and pumping up the swagger as if New Orleans funk master Allen Toussaint had produced it for Slade. Kane didn't know the song. Even so, "An hour later," he says brightly, "we laid it down."

"I don't know what it was," Auerbach says. "Miles and I got in the studio and it just made sense, right from the very jump." He points out that when Kane took a copy of Sunlight In The Shadows back to Britain after the sessions, "The first thing he did was play it for his mom, because he was so excited about it. That's the ultimate, man."

"All roads, over 20 years, have led here," Kane says of Sunlight In The Shadows. Born in The Wirral, across the River Mersey from Liverpool, he was 18 when he joined his first band, The Little Flames in 2004, touring with Arctic Monkeys and The Coral (whose founding members include Kane's cousins James and Ian Skelly). Kane stepped forward in his next band, becoming the singer, lead guitarist and main writer of The Rascals. Another tour with Arctic Monkeys led to Kane and Turner working on song ideas backstage, then at a studio in France where they made The Last Shadow Puppets' 2008 debut, The Age of the Understatement, in two weeks.

Kane says that "when me and Alex were doing the first Puppets album, we'd go to each other's mum's house, sit in the bedroom and there'd be acoustics and notepads. The way it was set up in that kitchen, at Easy Eye, it took me back to that place, how it all started."

Auerbach made sure the guitars were up to the challenge, The explosive break in the middle of "Blue Skies" – a bolt of vicious string-bending and feedback harmonics – is played by Bukovac, a longtime running buddy of Auerbach and The Black Keys, originally from Cleveland. "I had that one opening on that song," Auerbach explains. "I was like, 'Tom, I need you. Come represent for Ohio.' That solo is all Northeast Ohio."

"This record was incredible to make," Auerbach declares, "from start to finish. I felt like I gained a life-long friend in Miles. And that doesn't always happen. When it does, it's amazing. This is an artist who could potentially make records forever."

But Sunlight In The Shadows is an album cut live in the studio to be performed live on stage. "I want to go out there and show everyone how good this record is,” Miles exclaims.” Because it really is.”

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mileskane The Leadmill takes its final bow, and I'm honoured to play it out.

Come and join me and the band on 27th June for The Last Gig at The Leadmill...and the start of a new chapter for yours truly.

Tickets on sale this Friday 6th June at 10am BST.

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🖤🤍 happy birthday to everything you’ve come to expect 01/04/16 🤍🖤

(aka the album with one of the most impressively homoerotic music video collections of all time)

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alex + his hand’s favourite spot on miles’s ribs

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dealer (acoustic) - miles kane @ papillon southampton, 04 december 2024

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Confession: I keep hearing the lyric as "He used to be my girl". It cannot be unheard now. No one can convince me they are actually singing "she" on the album version.

Don’t ask why, but I’m CONVINCED that used to be my girl has strong bisexual undertones

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Arctic Monkeys at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, 19/09/2023. (Photos by Evan Yu)