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Platform 3
Ed Wong – cycling enthusiast and patron of the arts
Filed under bands …
Sheldonian preview.
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Even stubby holder and tea cup
I went to the Green Man festival on the weekend and snapped this at the café which was adjacent to the Far Out stage. You can just see the remnants of some cider in the stubby holder.
Another Stornoway video
Zorbing again. This time made by the Telegraph on top of a campervan at Glastonbury
Edit – The ‘graph seems to have removed that vid, so instead here is a vid shot at The Crows nest in Glastonbury, the following year.
Zorbing: Stornoway’s debut single video
I’ve bigged up (big upped?) my friends Stornoway a few times on this site, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
They have been steadily improving through gigging tirelessly and are now up to the point that Michael Hann of The Guardian said, “they immediately became Our New Favourite Band“. They are certainly one of my favourite bands. This glowing assessment was echoed by Hann’s colleague, Paul Lester in this article.
They are now on the verge of releasing their debut single called Zorbing, that you will be able to purchase on iTunes from 15 June 8 June. The video for which has just been posted on Youtube…
They are playing at various festivals this summer, most notably the legendary Glastonbury Festival. It’s turning into a big summer for Stornoway! Chapeaux!
For more info, check out their MySpace page.
PS – I’m excited to announce that there will be some Stornoway action at my Oxford wedding celebration in December!!
Best ofs for 2008
I’m way too busy/lazy/apathetic to do any type of comprehensive, ordered list with links to sounds, such as Mason does over at prop.ca…
So I’m just going to generally reprise the format from my Best albums and gig of 2007 list…although I have done a better job of identifying the albums I got in 2008 that I enjoyed. The truth is, I didn’t buy that many albums from 2008, preferring to listen to the music I have, listening to stuff on last.fm or pinching Kate’s music…as well as restocking my collection with stuff I have on cassette and vinyl (currently in boxes in Melbourne). Anyway, in no particular order (I’m also aware that I might include a couple of 2007 albums in my list)…
- Robert Forster – The Evangelist
- Nick Cave ATBS – Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
- Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue
- Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
- Sigur Rós – Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust
- Destroyer – Trouble in Dreams
- Eileen Rose – At Our Tables
- Juliana Hatfield – How Walk Away
- Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
- Immaculate Machine – Fables
- Sons and Daughters – This Gift
- Even – Even
- Wintersleep – Welcome to the Night Sky
- Land of Talk – Applause Cheer Boo Hiss
- Stornoway – On the Rocks EP
- Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
- Ross McLennan – Sympathy for the New World
- Glasvegas – Glasvegas
Here are some artists that I enjoyed seeing live during 2008:
- Stornoway
- Liddington
- Laura Veirs
- The Epstein
- Ben Walker
- Jont
- Vampire Weekend
- Little Fish
- Okkervil River
- The Lemonheads
- Sons and Daughters
- Juliana Hatfield
- Even
- The Canadian banjo bloke that Mason took me to see in Toronto
- Family Machine
- Wintersleep
- Broken Social Scene
- Calexico
- Woodpigeon (briefly)
- Camera Obscura
- Ian McLagan
- Neil Halstead
- The Minnikins
- The Marmadukes
- Jali Fili Cisshoko
- Luke Smith
- Robert Forster
- Nitin Sawhney
- Romeo Stodart
- Russ Henderson
The gigs I enjoyed the most (for different reasons). Broken Social Scene at Carling Academy Oxford, Robert Forster upstairs at the Cardiac at the Academy, Even at the 12 Bar in London and Juliana Hatfield at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.
Later!!
Edit (17/5/-09) – I just returned from Wood Festival, where I saw Blind Pilot and purchased their CD 3 Rounds and a Sound, which was released in 2008. It’s absolutely sensational.
Carl Newman covers The Go-Betweens
I could just hug Carl Newman from The New Pornographers for this cover of Love Goes On. You can see him performing it live at a show in Brooklyn in the Youtube vid below. A recorded version is available as a digital download/b-side if you pre-order his new album Get Guilty.(Edit – Only if you live in the US or Canada, unfortunately!)
Here ‘s a free Newman track from the album below via his website..
Video of Even in London
I’ve had this on Youtube for a while but not on here…so here it is, a video I took at Blow Up at the Metro Club, London, May 8 2008. The song is Weather King, from the 1995 album, Less is More
Let me tell you about Even
I would like to recommend the music of my friends from Melbourne, Even
Back in the day, I was co-founder of a printed fanzine known as Blast! Magazine. I answered some type of ad that I saw somewhere on the campus of the University of Melbourne, my alma mater and thus I became the music contributing editor and general jack of all trades for this publication.
I learnt a lot by putting out five editions of this fanzine in the couple of years of its existence, including design layout “skills”, image manipulation, marketing and promotion, article and review writing…amongst others. In a way, I wouldn’t be where I am now without Blast!
At this time of my life, I spent a lot of time hanging out with and going to see musical artists of the Australian (and New Zealand) independent variety such as Snout (I was their de facto tour manager once…to Adelaide!!), You Am I, The Fauves, The Steinbacks, Rail and Even. I had a reasonably firm ambition to be involved in the live/recorded music industry in some way.
Therefore one of the activities that enjoyed the most while working on Blast! was writing articles about bands, reviews of their recorded output and organising launch parties/fundraising gigs that involved some of the bands that I wrote about in the pages of the zine.
Even were introduced to my by my friend Greg, a sometime member of the aforementioned Snout. It’s a bit hazy but I think it was at a Student Union night. The photo below is of Ash Naylor, singer and guitarist of Even, taken when I interviewed him at the Black Cat Café, Melbourne the afternoon of the launch gig of their first EP In Stereo at the sadly now defunct Punters Club.
In 2002, Even played some shows in the UK as well as recording some songs that ended up on their Free Kicks album. Ash, Wally and Matt were nocturnally recording tracks in London, going to gigs and generally carousing as far as I can tell.
One of the shows was at the Bullingdon Arms in Oxford. They jumped in a van for the 100km trip up the M40 and arrived in Oxford a little bit fatigued. Luckily for them, I was in tour manager mode for the evening because the time for their set was rapidly approaching but the band were nowhere to be found. I went looking for them and found the trio in their van behind the Tesco supermarket on the Cowley Rd, fast asleep.
How rock is that!?
More after the jump…
Patronizing the musical arts with an iPod Touch
Went down to the Gardeners Arms on Thursday night to patronize the arts. The acts playing at this low-key, semi-acoustic musical evening in the back room were Ben, Stornoway and Jont Whittington (the custodian of the whole Unlit acoustic evening). What happens is Jont roams around, putting on shows in the living rooms (or in the this case, the back room of a pub) of people who sign up on the Web. Read about it at the BBC Radio 2 site.
I had my mobile phone and my iPod Touch at the ready. You can see one a couple of the photos I took in this post. During the performances, as I sat on the bar billiards table a the side of the room, I made some notes using the new Notes application for the Touch.
I admit, I was a little peeved to have to pay £12.99 to download Apple’s January update…but I gotta say the notes app is very good. When I got home, I emailed the note to myself and you can see the results here:
Jon T. Slightly earnest but still not bad really.
Ben is Folds-esque sometimes. The Dressing Up song is fun. So is the
Living Legend one. Self aware.The new Stornoway stuff sounds good. Actually, I can’t even begin to
put into words how good I think they are in general.The Jont Peace song is a bit Manu Chao in its cadence at the start. His CD is
called Supernatural. Also reminds me of Jason Anderson at Freuds a
while back…complete with audience participation.Very high standard, low key night with an appreciative audience of
about fifty people.Sent from my iPod Touch
I’m getting pretty good at typing with the Touch’s keyboard.
I never wanted an iPod before the Touch came out. It is living up to its promise. Music is ironically one of the things I use the least…wifi rocks, multitouch rocks, Safari is nice, video on boring train journeys a boon. Mail looks promising…Contacts and iCal are pretty good too. I could live without the Weather and Youtube apps…as for the Stocks app…meh.
I really am becoming quite Mac-ified these days…my Touch and my Macbook at home and also a newly acquired Macbook at work as well. Back in the OS 7-9 days, I used Macs quite a bit at university on the newspaper and also the defunct fanzine that I helped to run. Later, I used a Mac with my left hand and a Windows machine with my right for (differing) work purposes but had a bit of a hiatus from Mac computing for several years, since leaving Australia.
Anyhow, musn’t forget to get a ticket for Stornoway’s next gig at the Jacqueline du Pre Music Room on the 26th with the rather good The Epstein , North Sea Radio Orchestra and Stuti Mehta.
