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Miscellaneous - May 2007

  by Admin

published: 10 / 5 / 2007



Miscellaneous - May 2007

intro

Hello and welcome to the May edition of the Pennyblackmusic Magazine. The small independent music venue is rooted these days on very shaky grounds. Last June the Venue, the best and longest-running small club

Hello and welcome to the May edition of the Pennyblackmusic Magazine. The small independent music venue is rooted these days on very shaky grounds. Last June the Venue, the best and longest-running small club in my home city of Edinburgh, was closed down. Located directly behind Waverley rail station, and two minutes walk from Princes Street, it was situated on prime land, which its owners decided to sell off so that it and the rest of the building in which it had the ground floor and basement could be converted into flats, offices and an upmarket delicatessen. In a musical odyssey which extended back near 20 years I saw acts such as the Willard Grant Conspiracy, Richmond Fontaine, the Bathers, the Godfathers, Cinerama, Bikini Atoll and the Damned there and, like much of the Edinburgh gig-going populace, some who might have been at the same shows, and others at different ones, several of the most memorable concerts of my life. Nearly a year on from then the renovation work seems to be going slowly. The building contractors have done nothing to the outside. If one stands on South Bridge on the other side of the station, and looks down across its glass roof one can see from a quarter of a mile away the Venue’s large black door, and the words ‘RIP : THE BEST’ which someone daubed in green paint across it on its last night. It was the best. And with only two other regular small music venues left in Edinburgh, for all its reputation as a Festival city, it will for several generations of Scottish concert-goers probably always will be. In the time since then I have heard of other similar venues in the likes of Manchester and Newcastle being closed or threatened with closure in similar circumstances Now it is the turn of the Spitz in London, which has been given notice to quit by its landlords Ballymore Properties its current site in Old Spitalfields Market in the East End by the end of September. The Spitz has been the host for all nine of our Pennyblackmusic Bands Nights to date, and will also be for our tenth on Sunday September 9th for which we will be announcing details shortly. Now in its twelfth year it has an established an internationally recognised reputation both as London’s leading independent non-mainstream music venue and a gallery that specializes in socially aware photo journalism. It has always been prepared to support and take risks for the alternative rock scene, whether in allowing, as long as we pay its reasonable hall hire, websites such as our own to put on gigs with some of the acts that we have been pushing hard through our pages ; small labels to show off their roster, or bands to launch their albums there. Perhaps because the Spitz has allowed us to offer something different, we have found that we have usually broken even whenever we have put on our Bands Nights. Normally we have made enough to pay the bands some sort of small fee for their trouble. Sometimes we have sold out and only once, on a scorching hot night in July and in which we admittingly didn’t get together the right bill, have we made a loss. By all accounts a lot of other websites, labels and bands have met with the Spitz's help and support with a similar wave of success there. The Spitalfields Market like a lot of the East End has been through a lot of gentrification in recent years. We ran our first Bands Night in January 2003, and, as someone who lives 400 miles away, and comes to Spitalfields maybe once or twice a year and usually for a Pennyblackmusic Night, I have been conscious every time in the four and half years that I have been visiting there since then of vast changes. While four years ago Spitalfields had a sort of shabby elegance and charm, big business has moved in. A lot of the small, cheap food outlets and market stalls have gone to be replaced by expensive restaurants, the usual predictable chains and boutiques in which in an especially sour taste of irony tourists can buy prints and framed photos with depictions of the way Spitalfields was. The Spitz its seems is the latest fallen victim to this. With a thousand and one similar places in the area and and across London, Ballymore has decided to go for the fast buck and to convert the premises into yet another gastro (or is that gastric ?) pub. So much for culture, or for providing a choice ! With other such long-standing London venues as the Hammersmith Palais, the Astoria and the Electric Ballroom all also closing and threatened with closure, and other independent venues across Britain axed or facing the axe, music fans are facing a very real crisis in which if they are not careful then the bulk of places in which they will be seeing live music in the years to come are in the ghastly beer-sponsored chains that are already starting to slowly dominate the musical landscape. There is a campaign to Save the Spitz which can be found on-line at http://www.spitz.co.uk/save_the_spitz.htm, and which has already amassed, at the time I am writing this, 8400 signatures If you haven’t signed up already, please could I ask you to do so ? It will take approximately one minute of your time. Even if you have never been to the Spitz, could I also ask you to do so ? The next time, as I have already found out to my cost, along with a lot of Edinburgh-music fans, it could be a venue in your town or city. Our headline interview this month is with the National, one of the most acclaimed acts of the indie scene whose fourth album, ‘Boxer’, is due out at the end of May on Beggar’s Banquet. Ben Howarth chats to guitarist Aaron Dessner about the band’s development and history andwhy the new album is a step up for them In our other lead interviews this month, in the first part of an extensive three part interview, one-time Damned leader and guitarist Brian James talks about his early career, including a spell with the infamous London SS, and his time with the legendary 70's punks. Aaron Brown meanwhile chats to former Misfits guitarist and Undead front man Bobby Steele, while Anthony Dhanendran attends a press conference for Grinderman, the new band of Nick Cave and Dirty Three and Bad Seeds violinist Warren Ellis. There are other interviews too with One Little Indian signing Rose Kemp ; Jason Ringeneberg, the former front man with Jason and the Scorchers ; singer-songwriters Kelley Stoltz and William Drake ; up-and-coming London guitar band and former Rough Trade signing Ray ; Seattle-based indie pop group the Math and Physics Club, and gospel and blues-influenced songwriter TD Lind. In our profles section, in her first interview for Pennyblackmusic, Sarah Maybank talks to Sean Price from the Fortuna Pop label about its recent 10th anniversary and what he sees as its 10 most significant releases. Elsewhere in the profiles section Jon Rogers spends a day listening to some of the most unlistenable albums of all time. Malcolm Carter looks at last year’s BBC ‘Radio Ballads’ folk series, which has just been released on GOTT Records on six CDs. Dominic Simpson attends an exhibition of cover art for Domino Records in London, and Jamie Rowland profiles Listen With Sarah, the project of experimental musician Sarah Nelson, who has an album and an EP out consecutively on Cherryade Records. In our live section we have reviews of the latest All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, the Arctic Monkeys, the Wedding Present, the Sword and Clutch, Joan as Policewoman, Explosions in the Sky, Bob Dylan, an evening dedicated to the music of Nico which featured the Butterflies of Love and Le Volume Courbe, Viarosa, Books, Brett Anderson, Dr Dog, XBXRB, These Arms Are Snakes and iLikETRAiNS. In our features section, in the first part of a three part series on 70’s British punk, Adam Wood looks at the sociological factors which spearheaded the movement. Ben Howarth looks at the demise of cassettes and CD singles in the latest in his Condemned to Rock ‘n’ Roll column. In our Soundtrack of Our Lives column, in which our writers meanwhile look at the personal effect of music on them, Paul Raven tells about how the Feeder single ‘High’ provided him with comfort and support at an especially bad time. There are Photoscapes as well of Juliette and the Licks, This Et Al, Enter Shikari and 36 Crazyfists. Our Re : View this month, in which writers examine albums from the past,is about early 1990’s Creation band the Teenage Filmstars’ 1992 psychedelic album 'Lift off Mit Der Teenage Filmstars ‘, while our Website of the Month is Rock Shots, the site of Pennyblackmusic photographer, Katie Anderson. We have a new writer this month, Cyrus Pearce. Cyrus Pearce is a Somerset-based music fan and used to write along with Jon Rogers for the Bath University student newspaper. He has contributed the Teenage Filmstars Re : View. Thank you to Cyrus. Thank you as well to Aaron Brown, Andrew Carver, Daniel Cressey, Anthony Dhanendran, Dixie Ernill, Tommy Gunnarsson, Andrew Hare, Ben Howarth, Adrian Huggins, Sarah Johnson, Geraint Jones, Jonjo McNeill, Sarah Maybank, Neil Palmer, Paul Raven,Jon Rogers, Jamie Rowland, Mark Rowland, Maarten Schiethart, Dominic Simpson, Olga Sladeckova, Anthony Strutt, Helen Tipping, Andy Vincent Denzil Watson and Adam Wood, all of whom have contributed articles and reviews to either this edition or the mid-month April reviews up-date. Thank you as well to our regular photographers Anna Gudaniec for the This Et Al Photoscape and to Katie Anderson for the Juliette and the Licks, Enter Shikari and 36 Crazyfists Photoscapes and for the photos that accompany the Sword and Clutch review. Special thanks as well to Richard Banks for all his support at Pennyblackmusic HQ. We will be back in May with another mid-month albums and singles reviews up-date, and then in May with a full up-date. We hope to be running interviews then with Green On Red, Nina Nastasia and Jim White, Tim Buckley guitarist Lee Underwood, the Young Gods, the Akron/Family, Original Silence, the Scientists, the Birds of Wales, Karma Deva and top author Mike Gayle. There will also be the second part of our interview with Brian James. There will be more from the Profile slot. We will also have another Re : View and Website of the Month and more features, live reviews and album and single reviews. Thank you as always for reading. John Clarkson Magazine Editor www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk www.pennyblackmusic.com




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