Live & Local - some dates for the diary

It seems that I haven't written so much about musical things taking place in Frome lately, so it is time for an update on some future events. For another view of the town I recommend this blog highly - Frome With A View.
Here, however, are some musical happenings that I am really looking forward to:

• Acoustic+ returns after its customary summer recess on 28 September and this is with its 10th Anniversary edition that features all four of the acts that performed at the first! For more on that aspect see here. It is at the Cheese & Grain, as usual, but the ticket price is the £1 of the original (donations are much encouraged).
• Sunday 21 October - The first Frome Blues Festival, organised by Seahorse Productions that is behind the Frome Folk Festival (of which see below). This is also at the Cheese & Grain.
• Saturday 24 November - Sean Lakeman and Kathyrn Roberts. They were just amazing at Frome Folk Festival 2012 but this time are appearing at Rook Lane Chapel.
• Saturday/Sunday 17/18 February - Frome Folk Festival 2013, the second edition of this event. An announcement of the firsts acts and artists who will be appearing is coming very soon and tickets are already on sale both locally, from the Cheese and Grain Box Office, and also through well known on-line sellers; these latter tend, however, to add a booking fee. If you want, and of course only if you can sensibly do so, the cheapest way is almost always to pay in cash at the Cheese & Grain box office. It offers real-time on-line ticketing, so there is no waiting and wondering if and when they will turn up in the mail. There is no booking fee either, for cash purchases. On the other hand it is up to you not to misplace them!

Deer Shed Festival 3 - New Music 2012 - Part 23

You might have suspected that this was coming. Festivals for me are, as much as anything else, a chance to go and catch up with some new artists that either I have never heard live or sometimes that I have never even heard about. This first trio of acts all fall into the former category and they all featured on the Saturday. I present them simply in the order in which I saw them play:
First off, and indeed the first music artist to perform at Deer Shed 3 on the Saturday, was North Yorkshire's own Pip Mountjoy on the (Far from the) Lake Stage. The stage was thus re-named as it had finally been erected far from where it was originally intended to be, owing to the very wet conditions prevailing before the festival took place.

She accompanied herself on acoustic guitar and played most of the six tracks from her début EP 'Louisiana', which I have already mentioned here and also included a couple of very recently written new songs that were extremely promising, not least the one that she introduced with some obvious reluctance and embarrassment, yet to considerable acclaim thereafter. I had already bought the EP digitally but as it is now available hand-made, including the sewn CD sleeve and CD-R, I bought a real one for £4 and here it is. 

These are now also available on-line, also for £4 (p & p extra) from her website.

She is off travelling, something that features in many of her songs and may impact on the availability of the CD, but returns to the UK for a tour in October/November 2012. 

  

This next, who played on the main stage at 3.40pm, is a trio of sisters from Hertfordshire who perform under the title of 'The Staves'.

This, their three-track 'Mexico EP' from 2011 has already appeared in the side-bar of this blog but here they are live and acapella.

And in standard mode - this is Mexico from the aforementioned EP.

The Staves release their début album in autumn 2012, hence the new music category. 

The final act of today's trio is in fact the only one to have released an album so far. That is Leeds' five-piece Ellen and The Escapades and I have mentioned their 2012 début album 'All The Crooked Scenes'. In fact it is a great example of what I like to do...

I was idly listening to Amazing Radio a couple of months ago and, having no previous knowledge of the band at all, a track from it came on. I didn't even attempt to listen to any other tracks on it: I just ordered the album from the band's website, all the more so because I found that for little extra cost I could have it on gate-fold vinyl. It arrived very swiftly and it certainly didn't disappoint.

My next mission was to see this band live and Deer Shed Festival soon came to the rescue as Ellen & The Escapades headlined the Lake Stage on Saturday evening and here is something from that set.

Ellen Smith has a way with song-writing and a voice that matches it perfectly.

  

You could just possibly compare her to Amy Macdonald at her very best but, more than anything else, it makes me think that backed up by such an amazing band she both writes and sings songs that are the modern equivalent of Lowry paintings but never quite so modern as to alienate those who know the originals.

That is an astonishing achievement.

Deer Shed Festival 3 - one week on

This is incredibly hard to write and not for the reasons that over the last five years and some I have become used to. I've even gotten somewhat inured to the fact that I write as a Briton (if never a great one) to a potential audience of millions. All that was put in to perspective yesterday - with the opening of the 30th Modern Olympiad in London. We, as host Nation, were never planning to upstage the sheer scale of the equivalent event at Beijing 2008, nor did we ever think that we might try to do so in budget, scale or pale imitation.
Britain just had to do it the only way it knows, which is what defines us - a wonderful mix of contradictory things that everyone but almost nobody - myself included - really properly understands and a certain penchant for comedy and self-deprecation.
It involved a lot of music, both old and new, but none of that from Deer Shed Festival 3 that I'm planning to mention now. It does however prompt me to mention that for every well known artist featured yesterday there are plenty more who aspire to gain our attention and are worthy of doing so. Aspiring athletes do not start at the Olympic Games, just as aspiring musicians do not headline Glastonbury, but they are there at the smaller festivals and local venues every week of every year. One thing that has made changes for them, and it was featured by the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee at yesterday's event, is the internet. Without it I might not yet have even heard about these artists that I saw performing live at Deer Shed Festival 3: Think about what that really means.

As it always was, it only needs a little sunshine to get us in a party mood but a bar also helps too. Without the internet I would not be writing this and you, wherever you might be, would not be reading it. Yet, for all that, the reason that almost six-thousand of us were gathered there at all was for the entertainment - modern music,  live and strictly non-digital primarily, but also that most human of desires that is like-minded comradeship.

The sun first made an appearance on Friday evening when Belfast five-piece Cashier No. 9 were playing on the main stage.

I have seen this band live before, at Truck Festival 2011, and I was impressed then. I still am and they appear again at EOTR 2012, as part of the 15th anniversary of Bella Union Records on the Friday.

The very first act to play at Deer Shed Festival 3 was Leeds' Moody Gowns on the tented 'In The Dock Stage'. Not exactly the least abrasive of welcomes, perhaps...

...on the other hand a worthy welcome to the orthogonal world that is a good festival.

End of the Road Festival 2012

Before I comment further on my trip to North Yorkshire for Deer Shed Festival 3 last weekend here is a little shout-out for the next festival that I shall be attending (unless that is I add another in the intervening five weeks). I mention it because tickets are fast running out, indeed those in some categories already have done so.

I'll comment on my desires, and the possible conflicts between them, soon.

  

This does not even mention the unmentionable - the secret performances for which EOTR is rightly famous and those of you who were at NDH 2012 might also have discovered.

Deer Shed Festival 3 - The future is the young.

If the title of the post is true, and I believe it to be so, then for all the changes in the music industry things don't look too bad for the future of live, acoustic music. Gary Stewart and his supremely adaptable band on the (Far from the) Lake Stage, Saturday lunchtime.

  

The adults, in all probability, were enjoying it even more.

New Music 2012 - Part 22 - The Haunted Man

Before starting on the music that I saw and heard live at Deer Shed Festival 3 this past weekend it is time to mention this; the third album from the artist whose first, Fur and Gold, was the inadvertent genesis of this particular blog!

Tracks:

1. Lilies
2. All Your Gold
3. Horses of the Sun
4. Oh Yeah
5. Laura
6. Winter Fields
7. The Haunted Man
8. Marilyn
9. A Wall
10. Rest Your Head
11. Deep Sea Diver

The Haunted Man is released early-autumn (October 15 in the UK) and it will be available on vinyl. After Two Suns, which she shared with her alter ego Pearl, I wonder what it will reveal. Natasha Khan has been an influence on more new artists since her 2006 début album than she may care to admit. That is one thing that I learned this weekend.
I'm just wondering when someone will first ask me to comment on the 'best albums of 2012'. It hasn't happened yet...
I have, for my part, a few in mind already.

To see her upcoming live set at Bestival 2012, Isle of Wight, UK see here:
http://www.youtube.com/bestivaltv

17:25 BST (UST +1)

New Music 2012 - Part 21 - Record Store Day 2012

One blog that I always follow is Too Much Music (is a good thing). 
Here's an item, a Record Store Day 2012 limited edition 7", that we came to discuss only very recently: It is, basically, Alex Turner's lyrical sensibilities filtered through Caitlin Rose's astonishing avidity for making cover versions her own.

Round 2: over to you Alex.

New Music 2012 - Part 20 - Difficult to resist?

Amazing live in the UK last summer.  She Keeps Bees.  Released July 17, 2012 in the US.

'Blue Moon' is a cover version to be filed alongside such veteran songs as 'Ghost Woman Blues' (1928), as re-recorded by Low Anthem on the 2011 album 'Smart Flesh'. Written a little before (1933-4?) it was first recorded in 1935 and, as it happens, is also the unofficial anthem of the supporters of both Crewe Alexandra and Manchester City Association Football clubs. The exact lyric may not be strictly followed but then even the original lyric had at least four re-writes before it first aired as a bona fide single in its own right!

It has been covered many times down the decades, including that by Elvis Presley on his eponymous début album in 1956, something that without doubt contributed to its early adoption into the canon of 'American songs' although both Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were English. It appeared in snippets in the film 'Grease' and again in Glee (season 1) and in many other films, performed by a myriad of artists, in the meanwhile. It was originally written for the purpose of film accompaniment but went through three sets of lyrics before it was actually used in a film release. Both Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart have been known to perform live cover versions of it.

It is, therefore, a true song-survivor.

New Music 2012 - Part 19 - Across the Pond, again.

There has been plenty of coverage concerning the quantity of UK music making it into the higher reaches of the Billboard charts of late: Just don't imagine otherwise --- we are well able to do partisan self-congratulation too.
Here are two that are nothing of the kind, yet also a reflection on trans-Atlantic trends in music that I particularly like at the moment. This first is an album from 2011 which, although you will hardly find it all over radio in the UK, is well liked by those whose taste in music extends to this genre. Without any doubt they are far more numerous than they were not so very long ago and quite unashamedly I count myself amongst them. If you read my meanderings you would likely have realized this some while back.
In general subject matter, although I left specifics obscure, it was the basis of a post entitled 'If you want to torture yourself, beautifully...' that I wrote in May.  Neither am I going to recant words I have written concerning my love of vinyl even at the risk of suffering discrimination as the result of being an insufferable audiophile.
This is a combination of both 'sins'. It is serious, yet witty and varied, and so well done that it has impact for all the right reasons. In all probability you could absolutely detest every song on it; it is that consistent. The truth is, I just don't care.

  RCA 88691-96876-1 (the US 12" 'Record Store Day 2012' gate-fold vinyl LP release).
  

This next is an even more recent release; Los Angeles' trio-of-sisters Haim with their bud Dash Hutton on percussion. This has seen some play on BBC Radio 1 in the UK and it is dusty, slightly-careworn pop. In some ways, however, it also puts me in mind of me of the output by LA's Warpaint. 

Good stuff then. It's a 10" vinyl EP available directly via the band's label for its physical release. http://nationalanthem.bigcartel.com/product/haim-forever-ep-10-vinyl.
  

Updated: July 9, 2012 (22:55 BST or, if you prefer, UTC+1):

It was available until earlier this evening but all 300 vinyl copies have now been sold. The label says that 'a few more' might become available. Hold your breath.

Remember MySpace?

Well it does still exist. Don't forget, in the heat of the moment, that things on the internet do not stay the same for long. Here, derived from a slightly earlier and specific comment today, are my initial thoughts on that:

After the FB debacles concerning firstly the default e-mail address changes to @facebook.com, then the huge fuss surrounding the issue of posts by artists and 'Pay-to-Promote', I would hope that it has now learned some lessons ex vox populi.
  
You, and other artists whom I want to hear all posts from, are now added to a list that ensures that I do. I also changed my profile e-mail address back to that which I had selected.  FB solely depends on us for its success and, much more recently, its stock-market value too. Facebook could go bust tomorrow for all I care. In such a circumstance I'd be way more concerned about the plight of its employees than that of its shareholders.
We as mere users and willing, if hopefully discriminating, advertising magnets would be back on-line somewhere else within a week or so. We already have other options should we choose to exercise them.
  
I fully accept that, as a business, it must pay its way but that does not excuse it from the need to explain its policy and ethics in advance and in a way that is transparent and simply understood by its many, diverse users. This has been its Achilles' heel for some time, and the problem does not seem to be reaching any kind of swift resolution. 

This evening... vinyl only.

Once upon a time radio stations relied on pre-release vinyl. This is one such 7", from 1973, that presaged the release of the album 'Vagabond Of The Western World' (SKL 5170) that was not, as it turned out, destined to rock the world.

Given a couple more years things were to change dramatically in terms of the band; both its core dynamic and the public's appetite for such music. 
The two tracks on the other face of this are 'Gonna Creep Up On You' and 'Little Girl In Bloom'.
As things are going tonight is not going to get beyond 7" singles that I know/or had forgotten that I have. This is a song that, in all probability, you haven't heard for some time...
  

The original release of it  - VER 1 (1981) - sounds so very dated now, I think.

New Music 2012 - Part 18 - Audio Fiction - Worlds Apart

New York's Audio Fiction, which I have mentioned before in relation to their 2009 self-titled album, has just announced the completion of its successor 'Worlds Apart'. It will be released "sometime this summer".  I have no more specific date but here is the artwork for it:

This one was almost entirely funded using Kickstarter: Yet another nail in the coffin of the majors... and I don't think for a moment that the band will mind me saying that.
I'm currently listening to the album 'Audio Fiction' (2008) but I've heard some of the demos from 'Worlds Apart' and, well, I just can't wait to hear it all as it is finally intended to be.

No Direction Home 2012 - Slow Club

This post is a 'special' - it is for Addi, co-writer of the blog Listologies.
He mentioned his liking for UK-based Slow Club. Charles and Rebecca are originally from Rotherham. Here they are, just a dozen miles from there, live on the main stage at the first No Direction Home Festival a fortnight ago today.

It's not the first time I have seen them. They were awesome.
  

And the sun was shining too - they are that good!

No Direction Home 2012 - acoustic days

It is true that I have already mentioned a few of my, more or less, acoustic highlights of NDH 2012. The truth is that they were many and varied and so here a few more. Some hailed from very distant lands, others rather less so, but all of them were very good.
Now where am I to supposed start? Not least because it also includes both the stages that I have not even mentioned yet. Now where should I start with this, too?
Let's go with Urusen, who performed on the Boathouse Stage at 8:30pm on Saturday evening. We will come to the fourth stage later.
This is only two of the members of Urusen...

You know me - I complain when I'm too far away to take the picture that I want and now I'm too close! In fact I'm perched on the front corner of one of their bass speakers for a reason that just escapes me now because that is how festivals are.

This next one is two of the others but Urusen is a five-piece. There is also the drummer whom I never really saw at all...
It is a lovely stage but it has one problem. That is, and for entirely plausible reasons due to its approach access and lake-side location, it has a strictly limited capacity that has to be monitored and that was an issue at times. On the other hand it was certainly a popular stage!
  

That is not to say that the Electric Dustbowl Stage was short on acoustic action. Far from it in fact and here, on it Saturday lunch time, is 'Tiny Ruins' a two-piece from Auckland, New Zealand. She was accompanied by beautifully appropriate but very importantly never-overbearing double bass and backing vocals.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

It was magical... This is Hollie Fullbrook of 'Tiny Ruins'.

No Direction Home 2012 - electric nights

The slightly curiously named, but very likeable, Electric Dustbowl Stage was in late evening/past midnight the home to acts of an electric and/or electronic bent. Friday's two included a band very high on my 'to see-hear list' and another that was one of my highlights of EOTR 2011.
That first act is Veronica Falls and they certainly didn't disappoint:

They also played three new tracks that are not on the début album that was only released on Bella Union last year. That bodes well for their second LP I'd like to think.

The second, and the revelation to me at End of The Road last September, is Austra from Canada.

  

Electric Dustbowl head-liners on early Saturday (well actually just into Sunday morning at the start) were The Pyramids. Sharing two members with Archie Bronson Outfit you might care to label them a more raw, more rock version of the same. To be honest it is a little bit more complex than that.
It is pretty heavy and very much written and performed off the cuff, or at least that is the impression it seeks and for the great part succeeds in creating. For those, at least those with the inability of me, the lighting made photography challenging to say the least. This was the best I could manage.

It did, however, evoke the pyramid theme better than I was able to capture.

    

The following evening, although it started a little earlier it being the final evening, the music was quite possibly even more of a challenge. From California, and with a particular and uncompromising technicolor version of rock-punk, hails Mikal Cronin and his band.

And that's enough to blow any folk/country/acoustic cobwebs away.

No Direction Home 2012 - into the unknown

A festival should not be judged on headline acts. It would be a poor way to spend three days were it to involve enduring many hours of tedium in the hope and expectation of ninety minutes of heaven at the end of each. A good festival has strength in depth and, quite possibly, it is the so-called 'lower orders' that serve to define the truly good ones.
Well No Direction Home didn't fail on the former count by any means but, where it triumphed in spades is in the most important aspect of all. That it was a continuous source of angst to decide which act to see at all times everyday...
OK, so all three acts opening the Lake Stage were great.

Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog --- on the Lake Stage, in the pouring rain, Friday lunch-time.

  
I have already mentioned 'Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog', but neither Brighton-based (except when decamped to Lewes!) 'Laish' on Saturday and 'Trembling Bells' on Sunday suffered by comparison.
  
This next pair of pictures are of 'Laish', performing as opening act on the Lake Stage on Saturday. Well, given the second one, you can see exactly what time it is.

   

By Sunday you might have been coming rather concerned about the prospects for 'Trembling Bells'. Well, should that have been the case, you need not have worried one bit.

Even without Will 'Bonny Prince Billy' Oldham, Lavinia Blackwall and her cohort was more than effective in carrying off the tracks from that collaboration as well as all the other albums.

No Direction Home 2012 - introduction

This is the very first picture I took and in some ways it served well to set the scene...

Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog on the Lake Stage early on Friday afternoon.
    

You might have thought the weather awful; you might easily have underestimated 'No Direction Home'. Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog sung all but one song of their set in Welsh but to dismiss that as novelty, or worse, would have been an almost unimaginably huge mistake. No Direction Home is about surprises...

New and old songs - a mixed case of folk - Part 4

Two new releases; one by an artist already well known whom I saw live a few months ago at Frome Folk Festival and the other the début release by an artist of whom I only heard about for the first time a couple of days ago.
  
It is barely a year ago that Bella Hardy released her third album Songs Lost and Stolen and now she returns with another LP.

The Dark Peak and The White is a collection of songs, some traditional others her own original compositions. The arrangement is uniformly simple throughout, highlighting her singing and fiddle-playing on a record produced by the prolific and multi-talented Kris Drever who appeared as an artist on some of the tracks on Songs Lost and Stolen.  If you are new to Bella Hardy's music then this is no bad place to start, but be sure to also give the earlier albums a listen. In particularly the middle section, especially tracks 5 -10, on that album. No real wonder then that she won a 2011 BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for 'Best Original Song' and if 'The Herring Girl' is timeless, and it is, so is 'Jenny Wren' and neither are set in the Peak District for they are both about itinerants looking for opportunities in places previously unknown to them.
  
The second involves a trip some eighty-miles north as the raven flies along the Pennines, the spine of England, for Pip Mountjoy hails from near Richmond in the Yorkshire Dales.
On this release she is to be found cutting loose from her locale; the EP is Louisiana. The songs are all her own compositions but the acoustic theme, on guitar in this case, is rather striking while the songs in several cases evince a wish to explore new places but they are tempered by her concerns about things that might accompany that endeavour.

I'm not going to say much about this other than to suggest you give it a listen, then buy it. One to watch, definitely, she has only fairly recently turned eighteen. If you are going to Deer Shed Festival 3 in July (20 - 22) then she is performing there.
  
That in fact also, if accidentally (largely because it reminded me to check the updated artist list for DSF 2012 and found it was rather desirable), solved a conundrum that has been bothering me for months: if I were to add a third (logically July) festival between No Direction Home and End of the Road, then what should it be?  I have toyed with various ideas for July 2012: Latitude, the re-born Truck Festival and Priddy Folk Festival but none have really made me want to commit so far. It is hard to say why... they just didn't quite do enough to make me do so.
In the end it is none of these that did.  I've just bought my ticket so instead I'll be heading north once again in July, to Baldersby Park near Thirsk in North Yorkshire, for Deer Shed Festival 3.  I was, I must say, very tempted last year but it was the same weekend as Truck Festival and also the one immediately after Latitude (to which I was already going), so the distances involved in such a short time put me off and I went to Truck 2012 instead. Those particular considerations just don't apply this year and, to be honest, I can't wait. I like small festivals with awesome acts.

If you want to torture yourself, beautifully...

It's not that hard actually. Nor, I think, is it an especially dangerous ambition even if it is also a slightly wicked one. There is simply so much new music to be found and so much of it is legal, free and might possibly benefit the artists if some attention were paid to it. Buying it would of course be far better and, in many cases, it is very reasonable.
On the other hand you can never do it all yourself - there is quite simply far too much to listen to, let alone think and then write about. So we can all forget that right now. On the other hand writing something, about any of it, is all for the good. That is at least possibly achievable and if anyone is reading and likely some are, or better still commenting, then the oxygen of publicity will do no harm. I could believe that almost nobody does that but, on the other hand, I have many reasons to believe that this is not actually true.
If you want to torture yourself horribly then that is probably best done by denying what you actually like and, equally catastrophic, pretending to like what you really don't.  I'd say that it is certainly not the way to go. Not agreeing with others about more specific things, however, is a completely different matter and the boundaries may or may not always turn out to be quite as distinct as either party might have believed. Long may it remain so.

New Music 2012 - Part 17 - Joanne Shaw Taylor - Almost Always Never

It is almost unthinkable. 

Announced only today, tickets not yet on sale, is this tour around the UK from US-based, but originally from Wednesbury in the West Midlands, electric-blues phenomenon Joanne Shaw Taylor. What is more it is also in support of her third album 'Almost Always Never' released in the UK by Ruf Records on 17, September 2012 (almost certainly). This is the track listing:
  

ALMOST ALWAYS NEVER
• Soul Station
• Beautifully Broken
• You Should Stay, I Should Go
• Piece of the Sky
• Army of One
• Jealousy
• Almost Always Never
• Tied and Bound
• A Hand In Love
• Standing To Fall
• Maybe Tomorrow
• Lose Myself To Loving You
  
Note added May 22, 2012:
Tickets for the tour go on sale Friday May 25, 2012.  For an earlier comment on this topic see here.

Note added May 23, 2012:
Now think about this; how good this could be in a venue that has a capacity of 400 standing - about 60% of the capacity of the Cheese and Grain here in Frome?
That venue is Tavistock Wharf  and pre-sale tickets are available now.