Since exploding onto the scene last year with debut single ‘Follow’ and playing to packed out crowds at several Dalston locales, success looks to have come relatively easily to East London four-piece Telegram.
A series of voracious performances during a recent residency at the Shacklewell Arms saw Matt Saunders’ sonorous vocals set against flanged swirls of guitar and chugging cement mixer beats – leaving behind it a trail of critical acclaim.
The band’s story is the most extreme application of music’s DIY culture. Without a record deal they’ve so far made festival appearances in Japan, the setting for their latest video Regatta, and at Spain’s Benicassim, as well bagging a spot at Field Day in Victoria Park last June.
“On the strength of ‘Follow’ our booking agent had a lot to work with and at the time we were supporting Temples and Palma Violets, so the promoters in Japan took us on,” says bassist Oli Paget-Moon.
Self-releasing ‘Follow’, the run of 500 seven inch singles was quickly snapped up and are now changing hands for inflated sums on the internet.
Currently in the process of drawn out negotiations with labels, the band has so far relished guiding their own destiny and retaining complete control of what they do.
“The thing that I like about doing it all ourselves is that we’re way more in tune with the whole process. With massive bands, they’ve never even seen a merch stand because everybody else does it for them,” says drummer Jordan Cook.
However, the band has reached a bottleneck. While industry chiefs negotiate the band’s future, their hotly anticipated debut LP lays dormant. Not that this bothers them as they keep ticking over, gigging up and down the country. One recent gig apparently saw a Midlands venue proprietor “shirtless and stage diving” while the band played to a sold out crowd.
See Telegram play live at the Lexington, 96–98 Pentonville Road, N1 9JB on 28 December @telegramband
Second youth: Thurston Moore on Stoke Newington Church Street. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The summer of 1981 was long and cruel: average temperatures in New York City pushed 30°C and the air was a sticky wet. The United States had entered recession and unemployment had almost doubled since the previous winter. The new president, Ronald Reagan, wouldn’t be proclaiming “morning in America” for another three years – this was what seemed like the endless night before that morning (which, for many, still didn’t amount to much when it arrived).
Just half a decade earlier, New York City had been so close to bankruptcy that police cars had been mobilised to serve papers on the banks. It’s hard to believe that the Bowery, now lined with luxury apartments, was once a litter-strewn pocket of petty – and not so petty – crime. (The state’s annual murder rate was well over 1,500.) In some ways, it was closer to the New York of Travis Bickle or even Snake Plissken than that of Lena Dunham and Girls.
But one night that summer, outside the Stillwende club in the Tribeca neighbourhood of lower Manhattan, a pair of guitar players in their early twenties whooped into the air in what a friend later remembered as an exhibition of “spontaneous exuberance”. Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo had just run out of the venue after playing one of their first shows as Sonic Youth, a performance in which Moore had, at some point, swapped his guitar for a snare drum (which he bashed) and Ranaldo had wielded a power drill attached to a microphone.
When Hüsker Dü released their album New Day Rising in 1985, the title’s grand announcement only underscored what music fans had known for years – in rock, at least, something exciting, something other, something else had arrived.
Sonic Youth was at the centre of that exciting-other-else. Consisting of Moore, Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Moore’s ex-wife Kim Gordon, the band fused the experimentation of New York’s No Wave and post-punk scenes with sugar-coated pop and rock, while adopting the unfussy, cerebral attitude of the city’s burgeoning art community. Albums such as Daydream Nation (1988) laid out the template that Pavement, Sebadoh and countless other bands would develop in their own ways, in increasingly divergent directions.
And their influence was such that it extended beyond their music – when Moore and Gordon announced their decision to separate in 2011, Salon ran a vaguely embarrassing article (by a stranger to them both) that began with the sentence: “I didn’t react well to the news that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, king and queen of the indie rock scene, were getting divorced after 27 years of marriage.” Despite never having crossed over to the mainstream in the way that, say, Nirvana or the Smashing Pumpkins did, they’d gone from being music icons to being icons, period.
When I meet Moore at Homa on Stoke Newington Church Street, he is curiously bashful and self-effacing, as if still settling into success after decades as an established artist. He is 56 years old but seems ageless: boyish, polite and engaged in his craft with a teen’s thirst for discovery. He’s also the first to puncture his own reputation as an icon of any kind. After our introductions (we chat about movies), he tells me he was initially “a little afraid” of working with his new bassist, Debbie Googe, best known as a member of My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream.
“I’d known Deb through the years, from when Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine would play together. We never really talked very much – it was mostly ‘hi, bye’,” Moore says. “I’d just seen one of [My Bloody Valentine’s] first reunion gigs in Brixton and I remember distinctly being impressed by Deb’s stage presence. She was really moving the engine of the band. I was just, like, ‘That’s really good.’ I didn’t think in my mind, ‘I want that.’”
When James Sedwards, his new guitar player and a friend of Googe’s, suggested a collaboration, Moore felt: “Maybe it’s too strong for me right now, because we’re just trying to get something together. Maybe my thing is not enough work – or on a level she’s used to, playing larger venues. I thought, ‘Are you willing to play small venues in the middle of England in front of 50 people?’” Such anxieties evaporated when Googe and Moore finally met to talk things over. “She was completely charming. And when we started playing gigs, I knew right away that it was such a great choice.”
Thurston Moore’s new band (from left): Debbie Googe, Steve Shelly, Thurston Moore and James Sedwards. Photograph: Phil Sharp
I tell Moore I’m surprised that he feels nervous – almost star-struck – in the company of musicians whom most would consider his peers. Does he feel intimidated by them? “Yes, certainly,” he says, without hesitation, and veers off into an anecdote about a talk John Lydon recently gave at Rough Trade East near Brick Lane as part of a book tour. “I just met Johnny Rotten for one second,” he enthuses, awed by his brush with British punk’s original agent provocateur. “He has an extremely low threshold for bullshit. He’s also a humanist – he’s very interested in humanity and people’s personal worlds being sacred to them. He’s kind of a demonised celebrity for the most part – but he’s gracious to people and still retains a lot of the pain that brought him to that personality . . . he had a fucked up childhood.”
Moore says his own upbringing was “benign”. The son of a university lecturer, he was raised as a Catholic in the suburbs of Bethel, Connecticut, and gravitated to New York for no reason other than to explore its music. “When I moved there, I was all of 18, 19 years old and New York was primarily a demographic that was older than I was – you know, the Ramones and Patti Smith were all in their mid- to late twenties. So I felt very young. I knew there were other young people moving to the city who were responding to what they were hearing coming from the CBGBs/Max’s kind of world and most of those people were hard-bitten, runaway artists and poets, like Lydia Lunch.”
Coming from a life of relative comfort, Moore initially felt out of place. “My interest in what was going on was really much more personal. I was a loner. I wasn’t part of that instant community of the denizens of No Wave, living in squalor,” he says. “I kept to myself so I was able to study what was going on around me. But I was fascinated by the lineage of New York, from the Warhol Sixties to the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church – certainly William Burroughs coming back to the city after living in London for so long. All these people were in the neighbourhood and I could see them physically.”
It seems a world away from Stoke Newington, where he has been living since last year – an increasingly upper-middle-class neighbourhood whose name has become a byword for young parents shopping for quinoa at Whole Foods. But he says that London reminds him of his life in the early 80s, as it’s “still a little rough”. New York has been “glazed over with money, but it doesn’t have the sheen of money here.”
I ask why he chose Stokey. “Oh, because Eva lived here – the woman I’m in love with.” He says this with a disarming certainty. Moore then tells me how this personal decision soon brought about professional serendipities. “She was living on Stoke Newington High Street in a flat she was renting that musicians have used through the years as a famous little hovel. That’s how I met James [Sedwards]. She was, like, ‘There’s this incredible guitar player who lives downstairs and he’s incredibly sweet and polite and plays guitar like I’ve never heard before.’ I met him in the common kitchen. He made me some tea and we sat down and started talking about records, records, records, records. And he was a Sonic Youth enthusiast. In fact, I’d met him in 1991 – he’d snuck backstage at Reading when we played there with Nirvana and Iggy and the Ramones. He was a 15-year-old lad and his friends and him said hello to me. I had a vague recollection of this happening, actually. So all these years later, I met this person and started playing music with him.”
But Stoke Newington had other associations, too – he used to stay here in the 80s at the crash pad of Richard Boon, the former manager of the Buzzcocks and a Rough Trade employee who now works at the local library. Since that time, the area has undergone “incredible change” – he speaks wistfully of how improv nights were once held at the old Vortex club, which occupied the site now taken by Nando’s. I say that London writes over itself quickly and he agrees, but adds: “It also reveals itself really personally to everybody who lives here.” When we finish up our drinks and start walking towards our homes, I see Moore wave at an acquaintance, get excited by a table of Matchbox cars at the Hackney Flea Market and chat with a furniture seller about a shelf. He seems very much at home.
The Best Dayby Thurston Moore is out now on Matador Records
Faking it to make it: Lucy Bundy is Fake Bush. Photograph courtesy of Lucy Bundy
It was the cultural event of the year; sold out in no time, zealously anticipated and, in the end, almost unanimously praised.
But for Lucy Bundy, seeing Kate Bush in concert must have been a strange experience, irrespective of the dancers in lifejackets wielding axes, or giant paper aeroplanes.
For as tribute act Fake Bush, Bundy is more used to being on the receiving end of fans’ adulation.
Bundy has been performing as Fake Bush for the past 15 years, and will this month be bringing her act to the Winterville festival in Victoria Park.
How does one choose such a career? “It had very undignified beginnings,” Bundy explains. “It was just a drunken accident with a karaoke machine. I discovered I sounded just like her and from there it grew organically, doing small community festivals and private party bookings.”
While they can funny, tribute acts are no longer a joke. It takes more than a white jump suit and stick on sideburns to be Elvis. The Oasis tribute band No Way Sis scored a top 20 hit, and Australian ABBA tribute act Bjorn Again has spawned multiple groups touring under the same name.
“There’s an act I really like called Princeless, who are of course a Prince tribute band. They are incredibly skilled, the guy who plays Prince is incredibly witty, and his take is that basically if you can really do it, if you can hit the notes like Prince can or Kate Bush can, then it’s hard for people to criticise.”
Bundy calls Fake Bush “an affectionate comic salute” rather than tribute act, choosing to go down the route of improvised banter in between songs and tongue-in-cheek humour rather than being overly serious.
As a case in point, the Winterville gig will be her last one for the immediate future as she’s about to go on maternity leave. The pregnancy has made her rue the decision she made to give up wearing catsuits and leotards.
“I thought ‘ok, now Kate’s getting older and so am I, I’m not going to wear any more cat suits and I gave them all away’. But now I’ve got a huge pregnancy bump I’m wishing I’d kept one because it would have been hilarious to have a huge brilliant bump poking out of this fitted leotard.”
Bundy has never met Kate Bush, the closest she has come being a message on Facebook. “She wrote: ‘Great page Fake Bush, I love it.’ It was like a blessing from the Pope.”
As well as being Fake Bush, Bundy sings in a trio and is an actor and visual artist. Even so, I half hoped her Kate Bush act might spill into our conversation. As it happens, Bundy knows where to draw the line between work and reality.
“I don’t think there are many actors who are method actors these days,” she says, swatting aside my suggestion. “And besides, Kate’s a real down-to-earth star. If I were trying to replicate a Kate-like existence for the method tribute artist it would be just cups of tea and chocolate biscuits.”
Fake Bush is performing at Winterville, Victoria Park on 13 December www.winterville.co.uk
Field Day headliner: Caribou. Photograph: Thomas Neukum
Some of the main acts for Field Day have been announced, with Ride and Caribou headlining and punk legend Patti Smith also confirmed for the weekend festival, which will be held in Victoria Park on 6–7 June next year.
Patti Smith, the 63-year-old ‘godmother of punk’, shot to fame with her 1975 debut album Horses, which she plans to perform in full on the main stage on the Sunday to mark 40 years since its release.
Smith will be joined by Ride, the cult shoegaze act who will be returning after a 20 year hiatus to headline Field Day Sunday, while electronic maestro Caribou, fresh from releasing the critically acclaimed album Our Love, is to headline the main stage on the Saturday night.
The ninth edition of Field Day sees a festival debut for composer and avant-garde violinist Owen Pallet, a return for ambient Brooklyn four-piece DIIV, while Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanile will be appearing with his side project Ducktails.
World music, as ever, will form a significant part of the line-up, with Ethiopian keyboardist Hailu Mergia set to be one of the highlights. Meanwhile, Russian techno DJ Nina Kraviz will be headlining the Bugged Out tent with her signature blend of acid infused house and techno.
There will be ample respite from the music at the Village Mentality area on the Village Green, including side stalls inspired by country pastimes fete games such as sack racing, tug of war, tea bag tossing, a winkle-picking competition and, for the brave/foolhardy, a return of 2014’s nettle-eating competition.
Sly and the Family Stone, Buddy Holly and The Crickets – the idea of lead artist and backing band is age old. But the hierarchy implicit in the naming convention is arguably at odds with the romantic ideal of people getting together to create music worth more than the sum of their individual talents.
East London vocalist and guitar player Charlie Boyer decided that with his group Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs, internal democracy was the way to go. Now called The Voyeurs, the band has recently released Rhubarb Rhubarb, the follow up to their debut album Clarietta.
“It kind of made sense really, we all agreed that’s what we should do because it reflects what we’re doing,” says Boyer. “It’s not me and a band now.”
Instead of the back-of-a-napkin approach employed on their debut disc, The Voyeurs have been able to spend a month in their East London studio with producer Oli Bayston – as opposed to the week they spent recording their debut.
And with each member of the band involved in the composition process, the 10 tracks of Rhubarb Rhubarb boast increased depth and a revolutionised sound.
“Things take longer now we have to fight and argue, prove our points and try and make it as good as everyone thinks it should be,” says Boyer. “We’ve got very good at arguing with each other, trying to carve out what the best possible thing is between us.”
Instantly recognisable is the involvement of keyboard player Ross Kristian, although now gone is the distorted organ that characterised their first release. On ‘Say You Love Me (And Choke)’ The Voyeurs prove democracy hasn’t blunted the group’s dynamism. The group’s trademark bouncy disposition segues into a synth-led chaotic coda, giving the song the feeling of being trapped in a lysergic snow globe.
Foot-stomping is never far from the fore, such as on opener ‘Train to Minsk’, which begins with slap-back delayed drums bequeathed from early seventies glam, and features an utterly infectious hook.
Kitchen-sink style observations are the order of the day thematically. As Ray Davies of The Kinks framed life on the ‘village green’, Boyer’s inspiration emanates from ideas of the domestic, sourced from the commonplace hubbub of everyday life but nevertheless “dark, cold, true stories”.
The idea that a more even-handed approach to music-making leads only to compromise is blown apart by The Voyeurs, who have organically become a unit, shattering their original mould with a success that’s measured in the delight of their latest offering.
Rhubarb Rhubarb is released on 10 November on Heavenly Records and The Voyeurs perform live at Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Sreet, EC2A 3DT on 19 November www.facebook.com/TheVoyeursOfficial
Is Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ sexist, sexy or both? Does ‘Push It’ by Salt ‘N’ Pepa go a dance step too far? And when it comes to dancing to a catchy song, should principles be left at the door of the club?
This month DJs D’Afro and Pepi Pechuga will be addressing such questions with the latest installment of YesNoDisco at Netil House.
The night, entitled Sexy V Sexist, will see party-goers vote whether tunes are empowering or leave a stale taste as the DJs play two sets of ‘sexy’ and ‘sexist’ songs.
“We had this dilemma about whether we should dance to ‘Blurred Lines’ when we hear it,” says Amy Smith, who DJs as Pepi Pechuga.
“We don’t want to be preachy and say you shouldn’t dance to these things because they are really catchy songs but it’s where do you draw the line?”
Smith and her DJing partner Lilia Prier Tisdall (DJ D’Afro) held the first YesNoDisco in September, using the Scottish Referendum as their theme. While the debate raged on television and social media, scores of people thrashed out independence to East 17 ́s ‘Stay Another Day’ and ‘Independent Woman’ by Beyonce.
“The referendum one was really emotional but we feel just as passionate with this one because
it was the first idea we had when we thought about doing discos where people have to make decisions,” says Smith.
Smith, by day a journalist and playworker, lives in a house of full of DJs so music is almost a constant companion. “We’ll be making food and music will be on and it’ll catch you. Suddenly you’ll be singing along to these words that you’d never say in any other situation.”
The night taps into current concerns about the representation of gender in music and music videos, though Smith hesitates to use the word ‘feminist’.
“We were going to call it ‘Feminism is a Dutty Word’ (a reference to Sean Paul) but were worried it might come across a bit preachy and militant. But without using the word ‘feminist’ we’re definitely coming from a feminist stance.”
Ping pong paddles with ‘sexy’ and ‘sexist’ written on either side will allow the public to come to a decision, and there are even plans to adorn the walls with bunting made from y-fronts bearing names of songs.
As the DJs prepare to do battle, here is a preview of what they have in store.
Sexist playlist
NERD – ‘Lap Dance’
Pussycat Dolls – ‘Dontcha’
Major Lazar – ‘Bubble Butt’
Robin Thicke – ‘Blurred Lines’
The Crystals – ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’
Destiny’s Child – ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’
Aerosmith – ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’
Jack Jones – Wives and Lovers
Destiny’s Child – Soldier
Space – Female of the Species
Lady Gaga – Do What You Want
James Brown – Man’s World
Ludacris – Move Bitch
Sisqo – Thong Song
Pink – Stupid Girls
Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up
Sexy playlist
Air – ‘Sexy Boy’
Katy Perry – ‘Roar’
2Pac – ‘Keep Your Head Up’
LL Cool J – ‘Doin’ It’ Goldfrapp – ‘Ooh La La’
White Stripes – ‘Ball and Biscuit’
Salt-N-Pepa – ‘Push It’
Janelle Monae feat. Erykah Badu – ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’
Tweet – ‘Oops (Oh My)’ R Kelly – ‘Bump ‘n’ Grind’
Marvin Gaye – ‘Let’s Get It On’
Justin Timberlake – ‘My Love’ Mario – ‘Let me Love you’
LMFAO – ‘Sexy and I know it’
John Legend – ‘All of Me’
D’banj – ‘Fall in Love’
YesNoDisco: Sexy V Sexist 7 November, Platform Bar Netil House, 1–7 Westgate Street, E8 3RL www.yesnodisco.tumblr.com
Soused: Scott Walker and Sunn O))). Photograph: Phil Laslett
A new album by Scott Walker is an event in itself. The erstwhile pop crooner turned avant-gardist is noted for taking 11 years between albums. When free tickets were offered to a listening event to hear his new album Soused, the organisers were overwhelmed by demand. After a comparatively dizzying two-year turnaround, the new record is a collaboration with veteran drone makers Sunn O))), a pairing which has had the muso message boards salivating uncontrollably.
St John at Hackney Church is no stranger to religious fervour. It’s a church. Tonight its congregation is there to worship a different idol. A neon stack of £80,000 hi-fi equipment provided by McIntosh Labs has been set up to play the 49-minute record to them. The crowd’s tones are noticeably hushed from the outset.
It’s no surprise that the album begins with a surprise: a great swell of bright church organ, immediately confounding the expectation of the sludgy drones of Sunn O))), though these follow, impossibly dark and smouldering. A baroque painting of drones, odd percussion with bells and whips, whistles, and brutal guitar noises, through which Walker’s pained baritone soars and dips, by turns roaring and aching, even pleading. Especially in this hallowed space, the record feels like a dark prayer to no God.
A comic distraction from the reverie comes half way through. A woman lumbering up to the altar, gyrating intensely with the music, removes three layers and a bag, and commences what I can only describe as dancing. There’s always one, isn’t there? At length two staff members try to move her off. She sinks and goes limp, and they can’t drag her body. It’s hopeless and hilarious.
The crowd suddenly takes her side: “Let her dance!” A few minutes later the music becomes more static. She sits a while, and departs. With this episode of the absurd interrupting, but arising directly out of, the deep spell of concentration and seriousness, tonight’s listening event shares the reflexive quality that the Quietus noted in both Scott Walker and in Sunn O))) “what makes their music feel sublime can also make it seem ridiculous.”
Soused is sublime, ridiculously sublime, sublimely ridiculous. It is very much a Scott Walker album, but with more drones and no orchestra. Less scary than his ballet music, but more danceable.
Review of Scott Walker + Sunn O))) Soused listening event St John at Hackney Church on Tuesday 14 October
Stoke Newington and jazz have a long affiliation, with the Vortex Jazz Bar once located there on Church Street. But though that venue has moved up the road, there are still plenty of jazz aficionados in the vicinity.
Alison Rayner ranks among their number. A bassist and composer, Rayner has played in numerous groups including the Electric Landladies and the Guest Stars since moving to the area in 1986. Her jazz night Blow the Fuse, which she runs with guitarist and friend Deirdre Cartwright, recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.
But after a career spanning 35 years, there are still some things Rayner is yet to do – which she is now putting to rights. This month she releases her first album of original compositions, August, played by her own group the Alison Rayner Quintet (ARQ).
“I think it was something to do with advancing age,” she answers, when I ask her what triggered the album. “As you get older you lose people along the way and I’m patently aware I don’t want to have not done things that I’ve wanted to do.”
As well as playing bass, Rayner has always written for the groups she was in. There is, she tells me, a difference writing for a group that’s not your own.
“When your piece is used in another person’s group it’s about their take on it. Even though it’s your writing it’s about them. And I thought it’d be lovely to be able to record things the way I wanted. Because it’s my own group there’s a lot of autonomy and more control – which is nice.”
August, named after the lead song about a particular August experience years ago, was recorded live at the new Vortex on Gillett Square.
“We recorded a gig and I decided that I would keep the place for the next day so we could record a couple more takes of each piece. It works out with about half the album from the gig and the rest recorded the next day. It kept us in the same place and it meant that we had the same sound.”
Rayner grew up in Bromley, and started to get into music in the mid-sixties, when she discovered the Beatles, the Kinks, American soul and R&B, and started learning the guitar. It was in the 1970s that she switched to bass guitar, then in the mid-90s she bought the double bass she uses now.
“I didn’t really start listening tojazz until I started playing bass guitar,” she recalls. “It was the mid-seventies when there were these jazz rock groups like Weather Report. I got drawn into that and as a lot of those players had been listening to earlier jazz, I sort of went backwards from there.
“As for the double bass, there are moments when I ask myself why I chose such a big instrument, but I do love it.”
Having recorded their debut in an abandoned church beside Italy’s Romagna Hills, Stiv Cantarelli and the Silent Strangers have decamped alongside East London’s most revered expanse of water to give us their second offering, Banks Of The Lea.
It seems that on their journey to Hackney Wick’s Gizzard Studio, the Florence-based four-piece has taken a detour through the 1970s New York club scene via Mississippi before arriving in East London to produce these 10 whisky-fuelled tracks that innovatively weave together punk and blues.
Cantarelli’s vocal delivery evokes a sense of early Stooges as he scrawls “Take me up where the lights are flashing” over sandpaper guitars on ‘Jason Hit The City’. The track then breaks off into a Roxy Music atonal sax break, with lyrics about strutting down Wardour Street in a pair of Cuban heels.
“I’ve got no time for compassion,” Cantarelli’s slack-jawed Jagger-esque yawn dictates on ‘Arrogance Blues’, leaving no question from where the band draws its inspiration, while ‘Soul Seller’ arrives in a storm of sleazy slide guitar and wild interspersions of attitude, aptly showcasing the band’s amalgamation of styles.
These styles range beyond American punk rock, with the band particularly drawing on Britpop. As the chords of opener ‘The Streets’ ring out, you could easily be listening to a sneering bootleg ripped from a live show performed over a decade ago.
Great moments see poetic backing vocals hang in the space of the raw-sounding, analogue production, headed up by Stoke Newington’s Peter Bennett (founder of Monkey Island, The Dublo and Morning Bride), which extenuate the record’s twilight themes of insecurity and self-loathing.
Wearing its influences on its sleeve, Banks of the Lea is a record that is no more than the sum of its parts, but nevertheless one in which authenticity can’t be questioned, from a band that will no doubt continue to roam, framing their output within the locations they find themselves.
The Oxjam festival will be returning this month to Dalston and Shoreditch with a programme of established as well as up-and-coming artists who are set to perform in some of East London’s favourite venues.
The Oxjam Dalston Takeover is to be held on the weekend of 11–12 October, with forty artists participating across six venues.
Birthdays, Dalston Roof Park, Total Refreshment Centre, Shacklewell Arms, Power Lunches and The Nest are all involved, with headlining acts such as Landshapes, My Panda Shall Fly and We Have Band (DJ Set). Later on, Jane Fitz will be taking revellers into the early hours at Total Refreshment Centre with a selection of underground house.
Meanwhile Oxjam Shoreditch Takeover will be hosting its annual party on Sunday 19 October. Shutterbug off Rivington Street will be hosting Shoreditch’s only open house party, hosted by electronic music maestros DJ Tayo and Ben Gomori.
With its recording studios having accommodated the likes of Radiohead, Strongroom Bar is a good fit for new and established guitar-based talent, headlined by new-wave pop rockers The Fuse. One of the quirkiest venues taking part is Paper Dress Vintage on Curtain Road, where singer-songwriter XSARA will be playing a set tinged with jazz and blues influences. Joining her will be rising star Josh Savage.
Great Eastern Street’s The Old Blue Last will be presenting an array of musical talent including Brighton group The Arts Club, former Basement Jaxx vocalist’s outfit Them and Us, poetic political commentary from Kieran Leonard and the punk rock outfit Katalina Kicks.
For a dose of hip-hop, rap and R&B, Bedroom Bar on Rivington Street is the place, with a line-up of Vaitea, Tinyman and Alim Kamara, while Trapeze on Great Eastern Street will play host to an ambient, acid house and deep house extravaganza.
Tickets for both the Dalston and Shoreditch Oxjam Takeover can be bought online at WeGotTickets, Resident Advisor or the Oxjam website, with all proceeds from wristband and ticket sales going to Oxfam.
