LIVE: CATE LE BON – 08/03/2010

– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – Meeting your heroes can be a truly terrible experience or one of the happiest moments of your life. When we meet our heroes we do not expect to be disappointed, so when they turn out to be a big fat lecherous let down it can be quite a blow […]
– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – Though they hail from the beaches of blighty, with their cowboy hats, deep throat drawls and bare existentialist lyrics you could be forgiven for thinking The Miserable Rich had ridden up outside Trof on horseback directly from the dusty plains of the American wild west. The Deaf Institute is […]

LIVE: THE MISERABLE RICH – 07/03/2010

LIVE: THE XX – 06/03/2010

– ACADEMY 2, MANCHESTER – South West London trio, The XX, formed a few years back while at the prestigious Elliott School, and with wrap sheet including Hot Chip, Burial and Four Tet, I know where I wish I’d spent my teenage years. After getting signed to Young Turks Records, they dropped the self-titled début […]
– THE RUBY LOUNGE, MANCHESTER – It’s fairly safe to say that Alan McGee knows a thing or two about music. Love him or loathe him, he has been the British Indie Music Scene’s leading impresario for some time now, despite disappearing off the radar slightly in recent years. His new club night at The […]

LIVE: Paper Spaceman – 06/03/2010

LIVE: THE LOUNGS / ONIONS – 06/03/2010

– FUEL CAFE, MANCHESTER – Tonight is a night for celebration; this, after all, is not just the anniversary of the popular, delightfully unpretentious Cloud Sounds Presents, it is also the launch party of The Loungs new album, a chance to see what the Onions have been hiding away for, and début performance of The […]
– SOUND CONTROL, MANCHESTER – It’s a shame to see a long-standing music store close in Manchester, but what better to replace it with than a music venue? And what’s more, it has kept the original name. Sound Control is perfectly placed in a lively part of South Manchester between the trendy Northern Quarter and […]

LIVE: CYRIL SNEAR AND GALLOPS – 05/03/2010

LIVE: THE HORNBLOWER BROTHERS – 05/03/2010

– ISLINGTON MILL, SALFORD – It was a normal weekday evening back in November of last year. I’d returned home from work and was listening to Marc Riley’s show on BBC 6 Music. As always there were some great tunes played as is expected, but on this particular night I was stood at the kitchen […]
– DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – It’s great to see The Deaf Institute almost full to capacity. Most are probably here to listen to the song with lots of numbers in it, but there’s much more to The Phenomenal Handclap Band than their Tings Tings-style smash hit. It’s worth mentioning the support band to put things […]

LIVE: THE PHENOMENAL HANDCLAP BAND – 03/03/2010

LIVE: GROOVE ARMADA – 02/03/2010

– THE RITZ BALLROOM, MANCHESTER – When it was rumoured that Groove Armada’s latest album, Black Light, was a homage to the 80s, I feared the worst. As one of Thatcher’s children, born in 1975, I hated the 80s and I’m finding it pretty hard to stomach all this nostalgia, especially from bands that I […]
– THE DEAF INSTITUTE, MANCHESTER – 2009 was a good year for California based act, Girls. The tragic story of main man Christopher Owens’ upbringing in a cult, and his subsequent change of fortune when he was taken under the wing of a rich benefactor and moved to San Francisco where he formed Girls in […]

LIVE: GIRLS – 02/03/2010