Harbinger Sound When I was a kid, Key Markets’ car park was the venue for all sorts of dark dealings and (as AC/DC would put it) . If there was a story going round school that someone had been stabbed, overdosed on smack (which was a hot topic in the classrooms and corridors due to that Zammo off Grange Hill) or been arrested for sniffing glue, it was […]
Justin Farrington
164 posts
MVD Gabriel Carrer‘s In The House Of Flies is an ’80s movie, made in the second decade of the twenty-first century designed around a trope from the first which became a cliché and eventually a sub-genre all of its own, though it does a bloody good job of avoiding cliché and in the process returns the trope to its ingenious origins. Remember Saw? The first one, I mean. […]
The Jazz Café, London 30 May 2015 A couple of years ago I had the very great pleasure of interviewing New Model Army‘s angry yet affable front man Justin Sullivan for this esteemed organ (matron!), and we got to talking about venue sizes. “All of us”, said he, “when we go to see our favourite bands, we want to see them in the old Marquee, or in some […]
London 28 May 2015 Tucked away in the heart of London’s St Pancras is St Pancras Old Church, one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in the country, and in whose grounds is buried Mary Wollstonecraft. Grounds that were at one point dug up by a young Thomas Hardy (the novelist, not the one out of Mad Max: Fury Road; that would just be weird) while working […]
London 15 May 2015 Friday night at The Roundhouse, and the faithful are gathered for what promises to be a night of epic heaviness — four bands culminating with the mighty Electric Wizard are set to compete for our hearts, minds and ultimately, souls. However, due to a rubbish London Transport experience, I arrive when the first of them, Moss, are already half-way through their set.
London 2 April 2015 A spectre is haunting Camden, and that spectre is the spectre of Spectre, Laibach‘s most recent and sublimely poppy album. On the face of it, you’d think Laibach’s “foregrounding the totalitarianism inherent in pop music” schtick would have worn thin really fast, like a one-joke Damien Hirst piece that blows your head off at first and then gives you no real reason to go […]
1 April 2015 The word “Hoxton” to me is like the word “Mordor” to hobbits — a terrifying place whence flows all the evil plaguing London. So tonight I’m deep in the heart of enemy territory to see Bo Ningen, and you know what? It ain’t that bad. There are very few shovelbeards on show here, and while part of me fears that this may just be because […]
The Shacklewell Arms, London 25 February 2015 Called in at the last minute to cover a band of whom I’ve never heard but am assured I’ll like, I’m downstairs at The Shacklewell Arms, its cave-like stage, especially the part where the drummer has an actual alcove instead of a riser, proving to be the perfect location in which to take in the oddly-named Seven That Spells, purveyors of, […]
Heaven, London 15 February 2015 So tonight CarterTutti bid a fond farewell to their iteration as Chris & Cosey, and as expected the place is rammed to the rafters, as nobody wants to miss the end of this particular era. Prior to the gig my Facebook feed was a constant stream of updates telling me that one person or another on my friends list was going, and judging […]
Formlessness Press Remember the ’90s? Well, I only vaguely do. But ignore all that Britpop/Cool Britannia shit, as nationally embarrassing in the cold light of day as Diana’s funeral, and think in a more esoteric direction. Think of Coil‘s classic album Love’s Secret Domain, and the fucked-up techno they were doing back then. Do you remember? Protection certainly do, being a synth duo one half of which has […]
London 30 January 2015 The day didn’t start well. A blocked drain, forgetting the keys to work and having to go back and fetch them and then a slip on rainy plastic, a mid-air semi-cartwheel (“semi-cartwheeled headfirst in the rain,” as Edward Ka-Spel would say) into the side of a skip and a resultant injury resembling nothing so much as the remnants of a failed scalping all combined […]
Freaks R Us See, I managed to miss The Pop Group, though this is kind of forgiveable given that I would have been like eight years old or something at the time. Slightly less forgiveable is the fact that I managed to continue missing them for the next thirty years. Which is weird, because not only was I a big fan of bands who had been influenced by […]
London 14 November 2014 The Cesarians and The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing together at last! Finally London’s finest purveyors of punked-up big band music are sharing a stage with its premier gang of Victorian anarchists, and it’s a wonder it’s never happened before. Also a wonder that it’s happening at all, Men frontman Andy Heintz having only recently been given the all-clear for throat […]
London 8 November 2014 It’s almost as if they planned it. It’s pissing it down. Absolutely fucking pissing it down. Exactly the sort of weather that makes you want drone doom. Which is just as well, because doom legend Stephen O’Malley‘s playing tonight, and he’s supporting doom jazz maestros Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. The line of bedraggled amplifier worshippers stretches back from the church almost to […]
Neurot Yob are a band I’ve been kind of meaning to check out for years, after reading about them in a metal mag years ago, so when this dropped into my lap it was — well, not quite a dream come true, but at least the fulfilment of a vague longing. It was also a relief to find that they don’t sound anything like Keith Allen (that’s a […]
4AD It’s been a good year for well-placed teasers and stealth advertising. Last week Mark Frost and David Lynch announced the return of Twin Peaks with simultaneous “That gum you like is going to come back in style” tweets, and everyone of course clocked it instantly. But the king of them all in 2014 was when Southern Lord just put out an image of the word “SCOTT O)))”. […]
Misery Guts Music OK, quick history lesson. A hundred years and a couple of months ago, someone shot Franz Ferdinand (not the band) and the whole world descended into madness (also not the band). What followed was essentially a human meat grinder, millions of young lives fed into one end and coming out the other as the sausages of empire. Such extremity of experience gave birth to some […]
Corsica Studios, London 23 September 2014 So we’re back again for round two — the second night in a row at London‘s tiny but perfectly-formed Corsica Studios, this time to see space-rock reprobates White Hills and One Unique Signal. And there will be volume. Oh yes, there will be volume. Lots and lots of lovely, lovely volume (say this in the voice of Neil Kinnock‘s Spitting Image puppet […]