All Ears: Jon & The Spectacle ‘Times Like These’

I know, I know, I know. It’s been a while. Business as usual really.

So, I’ve got this friend, Oisin, he’s Irish. I met him years ago when I started working on warchildmusic.com. He was at the agency building the site. Lovely man, nothing was too much trouble. His energy, enthusiasm and passion for the project often kept me going.

Somehow, we discovered our paths had crossed in a previous life. He was the gobsmackingly good Mood Club. Turns out I commissioned an article on him for The Maker. Anyway, we’ve kept in touch over the years, the main result of which is I get his 21st century mixtape downloads.

Loads being the operative word.

There’s no excuse Oisin won’t use to knock out a mixtape. Xmas, Easter, summer, lost summer, March, St Patrick’s Day… the list goes on. Thing is, they never come one at a time. Xmas just gone, there were five. No, six. Over the years I’ve come to recognise that if Oisin puts the time in making these things, it is always, always, worth making time to listen. He has a pair of ears.

Mix Two from Xmas 2010 is my favourite this time out. What I love about Oisin is he doesn’t follow the flock. Tell me about Jon & The Spectacle I said. A week later I get an email from a Swedish PR.

To be honest, I’m none the wiser about Jon & The Spectacle. They are Swedish and they claim to be thrilling, exciting and spectacular not to mention produced by renowend Swedish indie guru Jari Haapalainen. Which is all true, all true. But that’s it.

I was idly listening to the Oisin mix when ‘Times Like These’ popped up. Fair stopped me in my tracks. They’re one of those bands who aren’t blisteringly original, bit no mind because what they serve up is grinning from ear to ear. It’s proper pop, like pop is supposed to be. Songs. Pure and simple. They just drip quality. There’s a bit of Babybird in there, perhaps a dash of I Am Kloot, some tunemongery of The Libertines? Whatever, it’s all lovely, lovely.

I don’t much, but what I do know is one of those Radio 1 lot will be playing this lot before 2011 is out.

More hear…
… there is the MS.
… and, erm, that’s it. You heard them here first, right?

It’s funny how things go sometimes. Not long ago we finally got around to extolling the virtues of the magnificent Space Raiders. Both their albums still get very regular outings at MNFB Towers, and we’d been meaning to say nice things here about them for an age.

So we did.

And then an email landed from Gary Space Raider. “Just fell across your very kind review,” it said. “I’m glad you liked the old stuff, thought I’d let you know we’re not dead.” Back back back then. Be still beating heart. They’ve set up their own label and “greenlights” is the first fruit. It’s been a while, seven years in fact, but as you’d expect, the wait has been worth every minute.

Do yourself a favour, BUY IT NOW.

I feel a ramble coming on, bear with me. Some music seems like it’s just yours, like the best-kept secret. Not probably what Space Raiders would want to hear seeing as I worked for both Melody Maker and NME. Their albums came everywhere with me and got a proper beating to anyone who’d listen. ‘Disko Doctor’ in particular soundtracked an entire summer, travelling with me from Ibiza to Reykjavik and half way across the States.

Live too they were corking. My favourite outing was probably one of the weirdest. There was a total solar eclipse in the UK in August 1999. It was the first one in mainland UK since 1927 and there wouldn’t be another one until 2090. Best viewed in the South-West, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to stand in a field and watch it get dark for a minute or two during the day.

Of course, the music industry saw it as some sort of cash cow opportunity and a raft of Eclipse festivals were hastily scheduled across the South-West. That summer tuned out to be the beginning of the end for The Maker, starting with a massive cost-cutting exercise. Our job involved a huge amount of travelling, which was usually paid for by the record labels. Festivals were a whole different ballgame. The title stumped up, travel, hotels, food, drink, the lot. Not cheap, but the lift in sales over the festival season more than paid for it all.

Thing was, The Maker was really on the slide. The festival season used to be quite straightforward. It began with Glastonbury in June and ended with Reading in August, with V and T in the middle. Simple. Then more and more festivals started appearing, which stretched the already limited budget. We could’ve really done without the Eclipse events. As I recall there were three main ones, and to save money on our coverage I had to use pool cars, no hotels, a common theme that summer.

As reviews editor I couldn’t ask my team to put with with that sort of nonsense, so I lead by example, more often than not hitting the road myself in an IPC Media Ford Escort. I covered serious miles that summer in a car. And slept in it on more than one occasion. The glamour eh?

As I recall, the Eclipse festival I covered was in Somerset, promoted by Harvey Goldsmith. The bill doesn’t immediately jump to mind, but I went was because a slew of Skint bands were there – Indian Ropeman, Lo-Fidelity Allstars and Space Raiders. The event was a total disaster, and calls to the Maker hacks at the other events confirmed the same story. Basically, the audience didn’t turn up, and as word spread bands began pulling out left right and centre.

Not the Skint boys though. Space Raiders played a blinder. The arseing around on stage was as magnificent as the tunes pouring off it. Light sabres, toy guns, all manner of weird and wonderful noise and light-making machines. Here was a band who understood how dull men making live dance music could be and did something about it. It was laughing out loud funny, and gob-smackingly brilliant. A rare treat.

Boy, are we glad they’re back.

More hear…
- There’s only one place you need to be. The new website. Do the right thing, buy the new single while you’re there.

All Ears: Sennen ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’

Sorry, can’t stop. Busy as a double busy thing, but this is too good to pass over.

They’re called Sennen, hail from the Isle of Wight, moved to the Fine City of Norwich to study and kind of stayed put. So they’re a Norwich band, see, not an Isle of Wight band. Lots of interest, their new album, ‘Age Of Denial’ (their third) came out in April and has a great cover. Look. Lots of interest… NME, The Word, Kerrang, etc. All good, all good, oh… and a track from aforementioned album, ‘SOS’ was plucked somewhere, somehow to feature in the new series of ‘True Blood’.

Yup. Here, well up there at the top, the little orange button bit, we have their cover of New Order’s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’. You can tell a lot about a band by the cut of their cover version. This says many good things about Sennen.

More hear…
- Yes, yes, there’s an MS and proper website.
- They’re signed to a rather good label called Hungry Audio, whose site is very much worth a rummage.
- Download all their stuff right now from the very fine 7Digital.
- Read about the ‘True Blood’ thingy.

All Ears: Space Raiders ‘Glam Raid’

Hailing from the musical hotbed of Middlesborough, named after a bag of crisps and signed to Fatboy Slim’s Skint label, Space Raider are, hands down, one our our favourite bands of the Nineties.

Their storming ‘(I Need The) Disko Doktor’ single entirely soundtracked one especially messy trip to Ibiza, while there were a firm favourite live, leaving us nothing short of gobsmacked at the high level of arsing around on display. Clearly very drunk, there was lots of dancing and waving of toy guns and light sabres as they unleashed their irresistible big beat beauties. Most entertaining.

It’s a shame there’s hardly a whisper about them as the wisps of time waft onwards. But that’s kind of the point of us being here. We’d like to be thought like a musical stick that pokes you in the direction of lost lovelies like Space Raiders.

We first stumbled across them while do the single reviews for The Maker, a most enjoyable job as we always enlisted the help of a guest reviewer. One of my favourites was the lovely Mary-Ann Hobbs, who just froths musical enthusiasm. Normally, we’d turn up with a pile of singles and work our way through them with the guest. Rather fantastically, Mary-Ann turned up with her own pile, in which was this, the Space Raiders’ debut.

We were both mad about it, so I guess it must have been single of the week… if it wasn’t they were robbed. We came away with Mary-Ann’s copy, swapping it for something or other. Can’t quite recall. And in a beautiful moment of something or other, we now have a new site where you can buy the actual records we write about right here. Yup. Think of it like a music redistribution service. More details below.

More hear
- You can buy this very record, a white label promo previous owned by Mary-Ann Hobbs, from our sister site, ripingvinyl.co.uk.
- Or if you prefer, pick up their debut long one, ‘Don’t Be Daft’ from 65p from Amazon Marketplace. While you’re there might as well get the follow up ‘Hot Cakes’ seeing as it’s being knocked out for 1p.
- Oh, and can we find a single picture of them/ No we can’t. If anyone’s got one, knock it this way. They really did deserve better.

All Ears: The Loyal Few ‘Adventures’

We’re back then.

Sorry for the radio silence. It’s been a bit hectic round here. You can marvel at what we’ve been up to at our sister site, rippingvinyl.co.uk. See, we’ve built a little shop to sell curios, promos, vinyl and the like. Figure if we can make a bit buying and selling it’s one less proper job we have to do, which means more of this.

The other string to our busy bow is running a music journalism course. It’s been going well and we’ve got a day-long extravaganza lined up for June.

The thinking is the music press is broken. It’s too top heavy, with too little being published from local scenes. Where have all the ‘zine writers gone? Where do local bands get the big up? Writing about music isn’t rocket science (no, that’s rockets and stuff), but people tend to make a bit of a fist of it. So I run a little course to show people the ropes and hopefully kick-start something locally. Next job is a little site for music coming out of Norwich, UK.

Oh, it’s nice to be back. Not had a ramble like this for a while. My favourite part of the course is the session on interviewing, where the students get to quiz a real band. Finding a suitable one was a piece of cake.

First time I met The Loyal Few, I watched them walk up the road for their stint as guinea pigs. Sounds daft, but you just know from looking if a band has got it or not. Half a job done if you look like a band. Other half is sounding like it. And do they sound like it? Yup.

They do breezy pop music, packed tight with sunshine and dripping in melody. Garage pop they’d called it if asked. The one thing the world has plenty of room for is bands like The Loyal Few. No pretence, no agenda other than getting up there and doing enjoyment with bells on. No point in getting all chin-strokey, it is what is, does what it does and does it rather brilliantly.

The nice thing about sitting here, ears flapping, is you often hear music that isn’t a polished diamond. Often bands we stumble show flashes of what they could be. We like that, we like hearing one corking track that just pins us to a wall. With The Loyal Few it is very much the finished article.

Listen to the two EPs (available for free from their website) and you’ll hear the difference, the progression. The remarkable thing is that they were recorded six months apart. Here’s a band set to full stream ahead, and working up quite a head of steam in the process by all accounts.

Next step, a wider audience, which could well come on the back of a third EP. Not heard it yet, but can’t wait. If the difference is as huge as it was between the first two EPS, well… Don’t all rush at once. Form an orderly queue please.

More hear…
- Before we forget, the corking photo above was taken by Clare Mills.
- A visit to the MS is time well spent.
- Trundle along to the proper website where you can download both EPs for free.