It’s not often these two friends get to sit in a studio together and nerd out on new tunes, musical history and more, so you should get stuck into the latest Henry Rollins KCRW radio show with guest Ian Mackaye.
It’s two hours long filled with fantastic tunes and of course, great banter from two of the OG 80s hardcore hero’s.
Playlist:
01: Booker T. & The MG’S — “Green Onions” (Stax Revue Live At The 5/4 Ballroom)
02: Vile Cherubs — “Man With A Photograph” (The Man Who Has No Eats No Sweats)
03: Q And Not U — “Kiss Distinctly” (No Kill No Beep Beep)
04: Lungfish — “Wailing Like Dragons” (Feral Hymns)
05: Radio Birdman — “New Race” (Radios Appear)
06: Black Eyes – “Drums” (Cough)
07: Follow Fashion Monkeys – “Managerie” (Unreleased Session)
08: Slant 6 — “Double Edged Knife” (Soda Pop*Rip Off)
09: Stooges Brass Band — “Where You From” (It’s About Time)
10: Eddy Current Suppression Ring — “She’s Dancing Away” (So Many Things)
11: The Ramsey Lewis Trio — “Hang On Sloopy” (Hang On Ramsey!)
12: Led Zeppelin — “The Song Remains The Same”
13: Happy Go Licky – “Twist And Shout” (Happy Go Licky Will Play)
14: Medications — “The Perfect Target” (5 Songs)
15: SPRCSS — “Ours Is Expanding Light” (Unreleased)
16: Funkadelic — “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow”
17: The Nurses — “D.Y.F.” (Single)
18: Nation Of Ulyses — “SS Exploder” (Plays Pretty For Baby)
19: Red C — “Pressure’s On” (Unreleased demo)
20: Rocket From The Crypt — “Pressure’s On” (All Systems Go)
Here’s a remix or mash up that we never thought we would ever hear. Death Grips have taken the Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ to the cleaners and came back with a dirty take on Liam Howlett’s legendary work. Some will like, others will choke on it. You decide.
Hertfordshire’s Enter Shikari have recently released their new song ‘The Paddington Frisk’. The song is a mere 1 minute and 23 seconds long and comes with a packed punch.
Frontman Rou Reynolds said that the new single is a part of a trilogy, and that they’re currently unsure on what will happen to the other two songs that the band recently recorded alongside The Paddington Frisk. The track is co-produced by the band and Dan Weller, who also produced A Flash Flood Of Colour.
Enter Shikari are currently on a mammoth tour alongside Hacktivist. Get some.
APRIL
Wed 10th – Weston Supermare – Grand Pier
Fri 12th – Swansea – Brangwyn Hall (Sold Out)
Sat 13th – Ebbw Vale – Leisure Centre
Mon 15th – New Brighton – Floral Pavilion (Sold Out)
Tue 16th – Kilmarnock – Grand Hall
Wed 17th – Inverness – Iron Works
Thur 18th – Aberdeen – Garage (Sold Out)
Sun 21st – Galashiels – Volunteer Hall
Mon 22nd – Lincoln – Engine Shed
Tue 23rd – Scarborough – Spa. Grand Hall (upgraded from Ocean Rooms)
Wed 24th – Scunthorpe – Baths Hall
Fri 26th – Hatfield – Forum (Sold Out)
Sat 27th – Northampton – Roadmender (Sold Out)
Sun 28th – Peterborough – Cresset (Sold Out)
Tue 30th – Belfast – Mandela Hall
MAY
Wed 1st – Derry – Nerve Centre
Thur 2nd – Cork – Pavilion
Fri 3rd – Dublin – Academy
Sat 4th – Liverpool – Academy (Liverpool Sound City)
Sun 5th – Coventry – Kasbah (Sold Out)
Desert stoners Queens Of The Stone Age have released a new song today that will feature on their upcoming album ‘…Like Clockwork‘ which is set to be released June 4th on Matador Records.
New track ‘My God Is The Sun‘ is a straight up banger. No disappointment here, especially when Dave Grohl’s venomous drum steez is featured too. It’s the only way they could have returned. The overall result is another journey into the dark and dusty road that QOTSA are most famous for ruling. Why ruin history by taking a wrong turn elsewhere? It’s where they left off and it’s absolutely rocking.
The full length that is coming is said to have guest appearances from drummers Grohl, Joey Castillo and Jon Theodore plus the likes of Sir Elton John (barf), Mark Lanegan, Nick Oliveri (thankfully), Trent Reznor, Jake Shears, James Lavelle and Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys. Let’s hope that more of the same has been recorded to tape.
Look out for them at this year’s Download Festival at Donington Park. Turn this right up and get hyped on what’s coming next.
Wu-Tang Clan have just announced that they will be playing the O2 Brixton Academy on July 26th as a part of the 20th anniversary of their debut album Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), which is in November. Being advertised as “The World’s biggest hip-hop group celebrate their 20th anniversary”, this will be a show that you do not want to miss.
Edit: Manchester’s O2 Apollo has now been announced too on July 25th. Tickets are on sale from today, priced at £39.99 each from here.
At the back end of 2012 Baby Godzilla released a video for the storming track Powerboat Disaster that went round the web at mach 10 leaving aural destruction to those who tuned in. Nottingham is their place of residence, a UK city that has serious hardcore history and an area that is renown for its constant frustration amongst youth culture. Their personal time bomb is set to explode in the metal scene year so we decided to get the lowdown from screaming front man Matt ‘Butch’ Reynolds on just how long it will take until they take the back doors off the UK and beyond.
This one’s obvious but how come you chose the name Baby Godzilla?
It was actually something that our ex-guitarist’s Dad thought of, it was a band name that he wanted to use in the 80s and never got to, we thought it was pretty cool and we’re shit at naming stuff ourselves. It certainly matches the ferocity of what we do, untameable and immovable. That’s pretty cheesy right?
Cheese on an 11 for sure. So, Powerboat Disaster made a big impact last year, how many weird stares from the locals came with shooting that video?
We had what seemed like the whole village come out to see what was going on, the hardest part became not controlling the 8 foot high wall of fire but keeping them all behind the camera. We’d set up a take and have to stop right away, turning expecting to see a couple of local kids that had strayed into the shot but instead finding a couple of fully grown adults having a kick-about behind us.
It looks like you are playing in an allotment, that right?
It was filmed in the overgrown grounds of a pub in a very small village in Chesterfield called Poolsbrook. We asked the landlady “can we make a 8 x 20 feet wall of fire around the back of your pub?” she smiled and said “yes” and proceeded to point out things that she would like us to torch. Maybe she had a screw loose, I don’t really know, but I made a snap decision that I like the way the people of Poolsbrook work.
Are you all Nottingham based?
Yes, we all live within 5 minutes of each other, it makes it easy to get together and share ideas.
The hardcore scene in Notts has always been really strong. Have you grown up around releases from legendary acts such as Bob Tilton, Heresy, Concrete Sox, Hard to Swallow, Iron Monkey etc or are you too young to remember such awesome bands in the local area?
All familiar names, I’d be in danger of sacrilege if I were to deny Nottingham’s strong roots in hardcore music, especially with the bands listed and Earache Records HQ being right on our doorstep. But I’d be lying if I said I grew up around those awesome releases, we’re all a bit too young really, I was busy listening to Metallica as a kid.
What’s the local scene there like at the moment and who is pulling the strings?
There’s quite a lot of cool stuff going on here at the moment. There’s a recording studio just on the edge of town called JT Soar and they’ve just opened their live room as an underground gig venue. They put on lots of brilliant bands from all around the world and let you bring in your own beer so there’s a huge sense of community about the place. There’s also a grass roots promotions company called ‘I’m Not From London’. They’re headed by one very tenacious and ridiculously hard working man called Will Robinson; I’m not quite sure how he does it. They helped us a lot in the early days, we owe quite a bit to Will, he’s pretty much rebuilt Nottingham’s scene single handed. To see ‘I’m Not From London’ now going from strength to strength is great. Band-wise we share a practice space with a new band called Def Bridges that I predict you’ll be hearing lots more of towards the end of the year, they’re noisy, shouty and bassy. I’m also quite fond of a band called Grey Hairs, they’ve got a really cool garage rock vibe but they mix it up with raw punk, they’re great live.
So, the’ Oche’ EP is out there, what plans do you have for releases this year and have you started recording process yet?
We’ve been writing solidly all this year so far, the original plan was to release an album towards the end of 2013, but now we’ve decided to put out an EP to bridge the gap and whet people appetites for the big debut album. The EP is going to be very thrashy and trashy judging on what we’ve been putting down of late. We just received a final master back of the first single from it and it nearly ripped open our speakers! Needless to say it carries on from where OCHE left off, it’s going to be fucking loud.
We’ll be putting out the first single with a video in a couple of weeks.
Leaving Notts in flames. Photo by Carla Mundy
Are there any albums out there you have heard recently that soundwise carry the ingredients needed to make your debut the ultimate listen?
‘IDEAS’ by Hawk Eyes is pretty much a perfect album, the way it is put together is just brilliant, the songs kick ass and it sounds absolutely huge. We listen to that a lot on the way to gigs. Other than that you can pretty much guarantee some Refused or Nirvana will get stuck on which always gets me fired up. At this very second I’m listening to …’And Justice For All’, I’ve got the bass turned right up so it sounds right. It’s getting me through a very incessant hangover.
So what about producers? If you had the choice to pick a producer to work with on your album, who would you pick and why?
I’d be very interested to see what working with Steve Albini would be like. Mainly because his whole ethos towards recording a band is very similar to ours, everything should be tracked together live. If we weren’t all together in the same room tracking live I don’t think a recording would really capture what we do. On top of that we all need to look at each when we record otherwise it would sound like a bag of spanners.
I also would really love to work with Eskil Lovstrom and Pelle Henricsson, they made ‘Shape of Punk to Come’, it’s one of my favourite albums of all time. Our buddies James Cleaver Quintet just got back from recording their second album with them, I really excited to see what they’ve come up with!
Your live shows have been lauded. How will you find the middle ground between the energy created live on tape?
Lots of space in our live room! And stuff to climb on in there too would be good. Although I’m not sure we ought to recreate what we do live to the letter on tape, we barely hit a note live. It would probably end up just being Paul Shelley playing the bass with the occasional broken guitar making an awful squeal. Pretty unpleasant!
If there was one story from that came from playing live that is still discussed as a ‘moment’, what is that and where from?
One thing that comes to mind is a gig we played at Hackney Trash Bar. The sound guy was really not into it. We played the first song and I couldn’t find my mic afterwards, so I used Paul’s. After the second song another mic went missing. At that point we realised the sound guy was just taking away all the mics one by one after each song, it was quite rude. Then he turned off the p.a. altogether. Had he just asked us to stop we would have, but he just went about it in a really antagonising way so we just kept going. we had a megaphone out on tour with us so me and Jonny took to shouting in people faces through that and We just relied on the guitar amps making noise from the stage. Generally we have a pretty good relationship with sound engineers though, we always reassure before we play that if anything gets broken it will be something of ours (drums, guitars, bones) not theirs.
Try and explain the blackout one gets from the first note of a live show. It’s one of the most surreal experiences of being in a band but can it be explained well by Baby Godzilla?
That’s a toughie because I really have no idea. From the first note all bets are off really. I literally switch off and don’t come to until we switch the amps to standby at the end of the set. I’ve come back to reality to Paul telling me that I managed to twat some guy with my guitar before, not good. My space awareness has gotten loads better though.
What is one of the most mental things to ever happen at one of your shows?
I have a bit of a habit of climbing things that are way too high. We played some festivals over in Poland and I ended up swinging from the rafters that were 20ft up. It’s okay though, I was wearing a helmet. Some guy in the crowd had passed me an old style Polish Army helmet! Brilliant country!
How does your lyrical content come together?
I tend to write lyrics way ahead of songs actually being put together. I’ll write pages and pages of prose, I have notebooks full of absolute drivel. When we piece together a song I tend to fish through it all and pick out something on a topic that makes sense and edit the words to fit the song. It’s quite a nice way of working, it steers you away from relying on recycled clichés in your lyrics.
Lyrically, is there one particular track that you can discuss that means something so personally that you believe to be an ‘anthem’ in your locker?
However much we’d all love it, I don’t think we’ll ever be considered an anthems band, more a band that our parents say “you’ve got such lovely voices, why have you got to do all of that shouting nonsense? I can’t tell what you’re saying!” There is however a 16/17 minute long opus that we’ve written that’s intended to close the album. The whole thing is a 3-part concept based on an unwritten trilogy from my favourite author B. S. Johnson. He wrote the first book of a Trilogy just before he died called “See the Old Lady Decently”. The whole trilogy was titled so that each book’s title would make grammatical sense as a statement alone but when all together the titles would form a complete sentence. The unwritten books were going to be called “Buried Although” and “Amongst Those Left Are You”. The song itself has a lot of political themes that share an agenda similar to that of Johnson’s
There’s also a lyric in one of the new songs that repeats over and over that I love, “You’re all whores and I’m Jack the Ripper” I absolutely love some of the lyrics for our new material. As a body of work it’s definitely my favourite that I’ve written to date.
It’s definitely the year of longer tracks so far. If there was a phrase from OCHE that has meaning more than any other, what would it be ?
We have a song on OCHE called Dave Lankester, the lyrics to that are from a really nasty angry letter that I intended to send to an ex-girlfriend. I didn’t send the letter and it’s probably a good thing but there’s a lot of emotion in the song. The lyrics are hand written in the inner sleeve to the OCHE mini-album too. I was definitely a little drunk when I composed that letter.
Matt hangs out with the crowd. Photo: Carla Mundy.
When the album drops, will you be inviting the likes of Elton John to appear on it as a guest like Queens of the Stoneage?
Probably not too be honest, although if Queens wanted to guest themselves then that would be fine. We’ll probably get a couple of pals to do little guest vocal bits and pieces, there’s a track on OCHE called Thotty that has our friend from Captain Dangerous Miles, playing violin on and Ali Powers from Hot Japanese Girl guesting on vocals. So we’re definitely not strangers to having guest appearances.
So, when you get huge and become millionaires, what will be your first extravagant musical purchase?
Probably gear that works and a Dodge Charger with blacked out windows so we can ignore our gazillions of fans.
Look out for Baby Godzilla on your travels on tour with the Wildhearts in April and beyond. All can be found on their Facebook Page.
March:
Fri 29th March: Santiagos Leeds
April:
Thu 04 Apr – w/ The Wildhearts, O2 ABC Glasgow
Fri 05 Apr – w/ The Wildhearts, Manchester Academy Manchester
Sat 06 Apr – w/ Rock City Nottingham, UK
Sun 07 Apr – w/ The Wildhearts, Wulfrun Hall Wolverhampton
May
Fri 10 May w/ Eureka Machines The Adelphi / New Adelphi Hull
Slam Dunk Festival have announced 13 more bands who will be playing the 3 date festival around the UK this May. With headliners All Time Low, Four Year Strong and Deaf Havana already announced to play the festival, the festival will now host the likes of
Kids In Glass Houses, Bury Tomorrow, Cancer Bats, Heights, Heart In Hand, Tonight Alive, Heroes For Hire, House VS Hurricane, The American Scene, Gnarwolves, Blitz Kids, Captain Chunk! and [spunge]
Slam Dunk Festival dates:
25th May – Leeds University
26 May – The Forum, Hatfield
27th May – Civic, Wolverhampton
For ticket information visit www.slamdunkmusic.com.
Welcome to The Men‘s first promo video for their latest single “I Saw Her Face“. It’s an old school affair and does a cracking job of introducing you to the new sound they have rolled out on their latest album.
the album is called ‘New Moon’ and we managed to pick it up at their live show this week so expect a review soon. Oh, and before you click play, don’t expect anything like what’s on ‘Leave Home’, this lot are like Ween and on the move soundwise like nobody else out there right now.
The Men / Parquet Courts
The Relentless Garage, London
March 19th
New York quartet Parquet Courts are creating quite a healthy little buzz for themselves at the moment and it’s not hard to see why. They were the ‘band everyone was talking about’ at SXSW this year and tonight they face a crammed to capacity Garage as they swagger out onstage to confront a London crowd eager to see what all the fuss is about. And they take it calmly in their stride. Parquet Courts are effortlessly cool, brooding with a Velvet Underground menace, a spiky Mark E Smith snarl and wailing Pavement-esque out of tune guitars, they are minimal, jagged and have some excellent songs hidden amongst the noise and snarl. You’re going to be hearing a lot from this band this year.
Whilst Parquet Courts are rigid and tight, The Men couldn’t be set further apart. The Men are lose, raw, wild, explosive and all over the fucking place. In short, The Men are utterly life-affirming and incredibly exciting to watch. Live, like their recorded output, they swerve wildly from and between abrasive noise punk, Neil Young country-tinged rock, wild psychedelia, melodic grunge and everything in between. The Men pay no heed to rules. This is music flowing freely for a multitude of influences. They’re like the 13th Floor Elevators meets Spacemen 3 meets The Wipers meets Mudhoney meets Neil Young meets Black Flag and it sounds so good it makes you want to hold your breath and detonate. The Men are utterly thrilling. Grab the first chance you get to see them live.
The 80s hardcore scene in the US has been done to death but still keeps giving in 2013. A new A5 book and exhibition featuring 50 7″ covers from classic releases in that era will be showcased in London at The Vinyl Factory’s gallery in Chelsea from 11 April – 4 May.
Titled American Hardcore, 1978-1990 the book limited to only 300 (signed and numbered) comes with a fold-out A1 print and exclusive 7″ vinyl pressing of a Black Flag interview from 1981 and is printed using a Risograph machine. This is a special print process akin to screen printing, and perfectly reflects the DIY aesthetic of the artwork.
The book that is available to pre-order for £50 also has an extended Q&A with author and UK punk collector Toby Mott and US punk collector and curator Bryan Ray Turcotte discussing the importance of the scene that spread like wildfire and paved the way for many touring bands generations after.
The collection of 50 seven-inch singles will be for sale as a framed artwork from the gallery. Put this in your diary today and we will bring you a gallery feature on this when it opens.
It’s not often these two friends get to sit in a studio together and nerd out on new tunes, musical history and more, so you should get stuck into the latest Henry Rollins KCRW radio show with guest Ian Mackaye. 
Welcome to The Men‘s first promo video for their latest single “I Saw Her Face“. It’s an old school affair and does a cracking job of introducing you to the new sound they have rolled out on their latest album. 
The 80s hardcore scene in the US has been done to death but still keeps giving in 2013. A new A5 book and exhibition featuring 50 7″ covers from classic releases in that era will be showcased in London at The Vinyl Factory’s gallery in Chelsea from 11 April – 4 May.