Like a true child of the mid-Nineties, I grew up discovering music on MTV. Gone were the days of stumbling upon and shuffling through boxes of your parent’s records, growing up on Jimi Hendrix and The Doors to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, just like your parents may tell you how they fell in love […]
With permission, I’ve started reading a “cover” of a Steve Roggenbuck piece called My Ebay Buyers Rating is Through the Roof – I’ve done this a couple of times now, and I’ve noticed that my first mention of Roggenbuck usually gets some positive response in the room from at least a handful of people. So […]
Birmingham has been a notoriously hard city to book shows in for a long time, and venues seem to be one of the main sticking points, so we have compiled a list of usable Birmingham venues. While there are a lot of venues, there aren’t any DIY spaces or any venues well known for putting on […]
Last March I finally bought Fugazi’s Instrument, the soundtrack to the film documenting the band throughout the late eighties to the nineties, made by Jem Cohen. The album features many demos for tracks released elsewhere, and is mostly comprised of instrumentals, with only a couple of tracks having any vocal content, and yet for me his […]
Blackbird Raum are an acoustic anarcho-punk band from Santa Cruz, California. Liverpool is a portside city in the North West of England. Both are dead good. Towards the end of May I was travelling around with Ash and Dan, and we had a pretty fun sounding show booked in Liverpool with Blackbird Raum. We were […]
Ska-punk legends Jaya the Cat once sang “don’t wanna make this life seem glamorous ‘cos it’s not, working shit jobs just to play rock.” Now you may think that is the kind of nihilistic sentiment you would expect from this crusty outfit, but do they have a point? What exactly has your favourite DIY band […]
With 2000 Trees festival looming ever closer, aside from stocking up on sun cream and saving up our money for as many Pieminister’s as feasibly possible, we’ve been indulging our eardrums in some of the bands we’re really excited to hear. If you haven’t got a ticket yet then make sure you do. 2000 Trees […]
It’s somewhere between 2001 and 2002, and my brother Dom and I are sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room of my parent’s house, eyes fixed on a 12” box TV resting on a coffee table that sits crammed against the wall by the door that goes through to the kitchen. “Shit,” Dom exclaims […]
The Replacements are the greatest band that (n)ever was. Chaotic, self destructive, trashy, beautiful, heartbroken and completely brilliant. The only thing that stopped them from being the biggest band in the world was their own compulsions. This is the band who, when playing hardcore shows in their home state of Minneapolis would refuse to play […]
I’m forever living in the past, in a nostalgia fuelled world where I’ve decided recently to re-read the Harry Potter books and on Wednesday I’m going to see Goldfinger, and I am constantly playing the Tony Hawk video games that made me discover the band in the first place. Does anyone have that stupid app […]