Stag & Dag-her

a most un-excellent snap of the excellent Phenomenal Handclap Band

Ah, what a weekend: surfeit of sunshine, dancing and music and a not a whole lot of sleep.

Stag & Dagger was in London on Friday night and I suppose it's the unofficial kick off for the summer festival season. And a brilliant kick off it was. I'd dutifully printed off the schedule and highlighted the bands I wanted to see - much to the amusement of all my friends - and rocked up to meet everyone for a quick drink before heading over to swap my billet for a bracelet.

After hearing horror stories of queueing for hours last year, I was a taken completely aback to find that at 9pm there was not a single soul in the queue and I skipped right up, got my wrist band and made my way back to my friends. This happy coincidence was consistent with the rest of my S&D experience. The whole evening was incredibly well organised - we didn't queue once, bands started on time - and perhaps in part because of such good event management, the crowds were awesome - lively but well behaved.

We blagged our way into a packed out Hoxton Bar and Grill to check out the much-lauded Phenomenal Handclap Band. Well...so what if the BBC hates them, my friend Keith saw them live a few weeks ago and hasn't shut up about their act. True to his word, PHB absolutely threw it down/rocked it out/did every other musical cliche in the books. They were excellent. Everyone had the biggest smile on their face and we danced like idiots for their entire set. 

Check out my two favourite songs here:

Then we headed over to Hearn Street Car Park cause I insisted we see Dopplereffekt. Thankfully, my friends are great and didn't give me too much shit when they turned out to be super lame. Yawn inducing and pretentious and boring and blah. 

 Dopplereffekt

We snuck across the street for a quick bass-fueled boogie before rocking back up to Hearn Street for Casper C (good times) and Simian Mobile Disco (amazing). SMB absolutely brought the house down. The whole place was just going crazy: dancing, dancing, dancing. The best kind of night out is when you're still dancing when the sun comes up. Love it. The thing about something like Stag & Dagger is that there are so many venues and so many bands - there's no way you're going to make it to even a fraction of the gigs. So you hedge your bets and hope for the best. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't. Thankfully we hit the jackpot. Bring on the summer. I'm ready to dance.

the mechanical bride

When I got back from Krakow I had just finished reading the Curtis White book I've already gone on about in a previous post.  He mentioned a few books a number of times, so much so that I wondered if it wasn't some kind of subliminal advertising. If that was indeed the case it appears to have worked, for I ordered the complete poetry and prose writings of Wallace Stevens, Viktor Shlovski's Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, and Herbert Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride as soon as I got home.  Wallace Stevens arrived first, but I haven't had a look through it yet, and McLuhan's sinister looking book arrived in the office this morning. I can't wait to take a closer look, especially after reading the preface waiting in line to get my morning coffee. Now here's a chap who isn't afraid to pull a few punches! Check out the first paragraph: 

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.

Ouch. Love it. Will report back once I've finished reading it.

Until then, I leave you with a gorgeous little track. I'm a big fan of Foals (and not afraid to say so!). They're coming out with a new album in May and have released a sneak peak of their new single, Spanish Sahara. I'm not super keen on the official version, but the Mount Kimbie Remix is aural bliss.

music is my hot, hot

So far this year, I've seen: John Gardiner conduct the Concerto di Capodanno at the Fenice in Venice >> Bombay Bicycle Club >> The Hot Rats >> Fools Gold >> Think About Life >> Trash Kit >> tUne YarDs >> Spank Rock >> A-trak >> Theophilus London >> Ninjasonik >> Young Athletes League >> A Rake's Progress >> Visions of Trees >> Detatchments >> Is Tropical >> Fanfarlo.

Probably a few I've forgotton...

And it's not even the end of February!

Whoop whoop!

our true intent

Despite the fact that I have way too much work to do, I hopped across the road to Pure Groove (thankfully, I only live round the corner) tonight for a screening of the newish ATP (All Tomorrow's Parties or the uninitiated) documentary. I didn't think I'd be that crazy for it as it's just a bunch of random clips from a music festival. I know of the festival, obviously, but I've never been so I didn't know if I'd connect with the film or if it would only really work for those who've been to ATP. Thankfully, it was a fabulous film - it succeeded in completely pumping me up about the experience and as soon as I got home I started looking for tickets.

The doc is composed of basically three different types of clips: footage from holiday camps in the 50s and 60s (the festival is held in an out-of-season holiday camps), band performances, and random happenings around the festival. The music is amazing, with so many good bands making brief cameos: Les Savy Fav / Mogwai / Gossip / Octopus Project / GZA / The Dirty Three / Battles / Portishead / Daniel Johnston / Nick CAve / Seasick Steve. Apart from the performances, the best bits of the film were the random clips of spontaneous jam sessions breaking out in a room or on the beach or in the street, people falling down and just being generally ridiculous - a picture of this super chilled out atmosphere emerges where it seems like everyone attending is REALLY into their music.

Bit of a shame that the trailer doesn't give more away - you can't really get a sense of how good the docu is, but I suppose you get a sense of the fun.

If you're in London, you can check it out on the 4th of December at Bocking Street Warehouse.

goosebumps