Isabel Sörling of Soil Collectors, playing at Match and Fuse Festival this month
15–16 October,Hackney Wonderland@ Oval Space, The Laundry, London Fields Brewery, Sebright Arms, The Pickle Factory
Five venues play host to a line-up of established bands such as Mystery Jets and We Are Scientists as well as up-and-coming acts like singer Sonia Stein and NGod.
21–23 October –Stoke Newington Music Festival @ various venues including Mascara Bar, St Pauls Church West Hackney, The Waiting Room, Haunt, Stereo92, The Lion, The Lacy Nook, Green Room Café, The Haberdashery
Three-day multi-venue event across Stoke Newington will see DJ sets and live music from the likes of Thurston Moore, Sterling Roswell, Pink Cigar and The Pacers
One of the nation’s best loved comic creations Super Hans from Peepshow (aka Australian comic Matt King) takes to the decks for his debut London DJ set.
Organisers boast this will be a “knees up like no other”, bringing together musicians from 14 European countries. Highlights include Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and the Native American/Scandinavian pop improvisers the Soil Collectors.
29 October – Mirrors festival @ St John at Hackney, Moth Club, Oslo, Round Chapel
Eyes will be on the Mercury Prize-nominated Bat for Lashes, who is set to headline this one-day indoor festival. Also on the line-up are Allah-Las, Bill Ryder Jones and the curiously-named garage punk six-piece Diarrhea Planet.
There aren’t too many acts out there that can say they brought punk to Ethiopia. That is, however, one of the more colourful entries in Dutch group The Ex’s pretty darn colourful CV.
But just because you bring it, doesn’t mean anyone actually wants it. “No one had ever heard of punk; they’d heard of hip hop and jazz, but none of them knew our type of music,” recalls guitarist Andy Moor, originally of these shores. “They found it quite amusing – there was a lot of laughing.”
In the interests of balance, it is worth pointing out that punk is something of a misnomer. Sure, The Ex started out in 1979 (of course), fitting in nicely with the likes of Gang of Four, The Slits and Birthday Party.
But when Moor joined in early 1990s, bringing with him a love of African and Eastern European music, the band were set on a more experimental course. Moor identifies meeting and collaborating with American cellist Tom Cora as a real turning point, and soon The Ex found themselves invited to play at jazz festivals.
“The Ex grew out of the punk scene, but mutated into its own thing. It’s hard to define, but we don’t have to!” (Attempts by others range from anarcho-punk to ethno-punk to jazz punk.)
Many collaborations have followed, some with popular acts – the likes of Sonic Youth and Tortoise – others with less well-known jazz artists (depending on who you ask) such as Han Bennink or current collaborator, saxophonist Ken Vandermark.
It is these collaborations, Moor explains, in combination with the band’s own (untrained) spontaneity that drives their musical direction. “We don’t want to have a jam with every musician in the world; we’ll just hear a sound that appeals to us. They don’t even have to be great players.”
His favourite joint project is the work the band did with legendary Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya. “It was his idea – he saw us playing after we’d invited him to Amsterdam to play with the Instant Composers’ Pool (ICP). He came to us after, and said, ‘I want The Ex to be my band.’ We started rehearsing with him – none of us could speak Amharic, he couldn’t speak English, so we just communicated with hand signals, music, smiling, laughing. Somehow it worked – we were playing his pieces, songs he’s been playing for 40 years. That was my favourite maybe because it was so unlikely.”
One of the reasons The Ex can enjoy such musical freedom is their refusal to get involved with the trappings of the music industry – they have never had anything to do with a label or any type of management (now that’s pretty punk).
“I think the music industry has nothing to do with music. There’s great music that comes out of it, but the shit you have to deal with … we decided we’ll do it ourselves.”
It’s a fairly gruelling approach, Moor admits, which means they have to tour to live, and one which also means, he admits, they aren’t as well known as they might be (except, apparently, in France).
This might be read also as a political gesture as well as an artistic one – and indeed, the guitarist happily admits The Ex are a political band: “You sing about love, you sing about football, or you sing about your beliefs – we get frustrated, we see lot of shit happening around us – we manage to release a lot of that anger, but there’s also positive energy too. Ultimately, it’s a celebration of music – we want to make music we’ve never heard before, and music that we love. It’s simple.”
The Ex perform at Oslo, Hackney Central on 19 August 2015
“If you just do whatever you’re doing, there is no box to be in.” – Craig David
“The past is a concept. Whenever you experience anything, it’s right now. When we were talking five minutes ago, it’s now. The future is now.” If Craig David used to insist on 9pm dates with “cinnamon queens”, today that is unlikely. These days he wears his philosophy on his sleeve with a watch that simply reads “now”. But while the former golden boy of UK garage is living for today – his fans just want to rewind.
At the turn of the millennium David’s honeyed vocals and catchy lyrics, coating two-step beats with pop sheen, sent the 19-year-old soaring up the charts. When his first album Born To Do It “dropped”, as he calls it, I headed straight to Woolworths for a copy (complete with a B-side disc of him talking to himself). I learnt the words to the whole album, carefully balancing the CD on the spindle of my Sony Discman.
But even by 2002 interest had already waned. “It’s what they call the rise and fall,” he lamented on his second album Slicker Than Your Average, which sold around half as many copies as his debut smash. He next became the victim of a cruel but oddly enduring character on Leigh Francis’ sketch show Bo Selecta which had his trademark facial hair and, inexplicably, a Scottish accent and a pet bird Kes – the kestrel from Ken Loach’s film. It was a swift descent.
Craig David left London for Miami, moved into a hotel and got into bodybuilding. An episode of Cribs revealed life-sized photographs of scantily-clad women, white sofas, impressive audiovisual equipment and a thing for fast cars. Everyone moved on. Yet teenage kicks…so hard to beat.
I jumped at the chance to do a ‘phoner’ with the beanie-toting star of my adolescence.
Guestlist ratio
He was in London for the tour of his DJ show TS5 in which he aims to “bridge the gap” between live performance, DJing and MCing.
Named after the number of his apartment-cum-hotel penthouse, TS5 is modelled on his own “pre-drinks” house parties. These are carefully orchestrated affairs where the man himself “holds it down” on the decks, there are drinks on tap, before everyone goes “out out” (they call it that in Miami too).
Getting the “sexy vibe” is an exact science so David enforces a rigorous 70:30 female to male ratio on the guestlist. “If you overload it with guys, and the girl ratio is lower, in my experience, girls feel intimidated by that,” he explains. “Guys get really confident and try and hit on everyone and the ratio is all off.”
Curiosity piqued, I head down to Hackney’s very own Oslo for the gig, where I find myself surrounded by other sheepish looking folk in their mid-twenties, but no drinks on tap.
There is a reasonably sexy ratio of 60:40, the “vibe” is millennium chic and girls in white TS5 trucker hats hand out leaflets for the next gig. This being Hackney, I am initially concerned everyone is here to parody their younger, less cool selves. But I’m wrong. “You’ve got to love Craig”, two people tell me outside. “He’s the English Drake”.
Upstairs David exaggeratedly presses buttons and drags faders, his biceps bulging under his oversized white T-shirt. After an underwhelming opening song he gently brings in ‘Fill Me In’ and the crowd goes wild. Girls at the front flap white A4 sheets of paper with his name written on in biro, and there is much grinding.
But even the most diehard fan would be forced to admit he is simply not the best DJ, and his soft-as-butter voice just sounds plain weird when warbling over aggressive house bangers.
Thinking is the box
I ask about the transition from singersongwriter to DJ. “It’s crazy to think the cycle has come full circle”, he says. “DJing is what I started off doing. When the first album blew up, I put that on the side burner. I just do what ever I want to do, there’s no boundaries.
We’ve taken the box, and removed all the lines from it. It’s all open now.” I manage to anchor a memory of this ‘box’ in David’s sea of axioms.
Along with 75 thousand others I am an avid follower of his Instagram account, a luxury flick book of Miami sunsets (#blessed), workout selfies (#eatcleantraindirty) and tautologies set against a backdrop of his own face.
One of my favourites (genuinely), I tell him, is a picture of a cosmic night sky with a white square and “thinking is the box” written inside it…
I can hear him nodding down the phone: “You got it. It is the box. If you just do whatever you’re doing, there is no box to be in, but as soon as you say ‘there’s the box and I’m trying to think outside of it’, you’re saying the box is there.”
David comes across as intensely and at times robotically upbeat. I ask about his Instagram, where his posts often receive mixed responses, and how he manages to stay so positive in the face of jokes at his expense. “It’s transient”, he says. “It’s not to be taken seriously.
The beauty of Instagram and Twitter is there is a follow and an unfollow button.”
His puppyish optimism is likable and there is definitely a sense of humour under his earnest theories. I ask him if his rumoured new studio album has now been put on the “side burner.” He acknowledges the dig: “We’re taking the burner off. There’s no side burner, back burner, up burner, Bunsen burner. All the burners are out. We’re making the record.”
Craig David Presents TS5 has announced a second date at Shapes in Hackney on 16 October 2015. For tickets see ts5.com/shapes
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.
New films are to receive “trial by fire” at a festival opening this month at Oslo inspired by the famous amateur nights at New York’s Apollo Theater.
The Sir Charlie Darwin Film Festival invites all-comers to submit their films, and has promised to screen all full-length features.
But whether the films are shown in their entirety is down to audience members, who are encouraged to vocalise their views and give the films the thumbs up or down.
Frustrated filmmaker Eric Schachter conceived of the idea after becoming fed up at an industry he felt is not an “open door”, and where getting ahead is a question of money and contacts.
“I knew it wasn’t a fair game we were playing,” he explains. “So I decided to establish a festival where there was an audience response and films basically got awarded or accorded attention simply from an audience.”
Schachter cites Amateur Night at the Apollo, the New York singing competition that spawned the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and the Jackson 5 among others, as his inspiration.
“In the early days of the Apollo all and sundry came along and the criticism was savage. It was trial by fire, and though I’m not expecting anything that savage, it is the principle by which I’ve established the festival.”
Schachter, who has spent much of his life living in Canada, has made three feature films of his own. But any plans to show them at the festival will have to take a back seat due to the sheer volume of submissions already received.
“I actually don’t have a life now,” he jokes. “I’m just preparing for a festival!”
The hunt for a charismatic compere to host proceedings is ongoing, although judging by our conversation the outgoing Schachter is himself a suitable candidate.
“I’d have to blunder myself through three nights before I found my feet,” he says, batting off my suggestion.
For now, the only other concern is whether audiences will have the stomach to jeer and make judgements aloud about the films.
“The British have an extraordinary capacity for forbearance and not thinking they deserve more than they’re given,” says Schachter delicately. “So somehow we’re going to have to break down that sort of patience. It’s a lovely quality –but it doesn’t make for the Apollo!”
