Funny Girl by pacificUV
Originally hailing from Athens, Georgia, pacificUV’s sound is one very much enthral to distinctly European influences – the blippy pace of Kraut Rock, the inherent melodic warmth of early 80s British synth-pop (especially on today’s MPFree). The duo’s debut album was described by Rolling Stone as a ‘masterpiece’; new album Weekends, released January 31st, looks set to garner similar accolades. Exciting stuff.
24 Jan 2012
London agenda for Tuesday 24 January
1. Be very, very sad listening to Swedish sister act First Aid Kit [Le Cool]
2. Step back to a time before supermarkets and industrialisation at Théâtre Tête de Pioche [Run Riot]
3. Visit the Old Queen’s head for the amazing Athena Andreadis [Don’t Panic]
4. As ever, Time Out has their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. So, today’s it’s Lana del Ray (Even after this.) [Time Out]
5. Find out how some tiny rock in the North Atlantic took over the world. At least for a while. [Ian Visits]
6. Browse the Caird Library [Tired of London]
24 Jan 2012
Vote small, and vote often if you really want to make a difference this election
MayorWatch have an excellent post from Damian Hockney, the former UKIP mayoral candidate with the trendy artworld mashup name.
His main message (and here I paraphrase with some freedom): You dim-witted voters need to wise up to the alternative vote and stop wasting your first preferences on the frontrunners.
In Damian’s own words:
“…it seems that people often still vote for someone who is not their first choice because they can’t quite believe that the second vote is anything other than some sort of vague gesture of preference…It is as if no-one quite believes that your alternative vote counts, or that it has some downgraded junk status. Aaaaargh.”
He makes a series of excellent points about the way voters could use support for smaller parties to reshape political debate, while still ensuring someone vaguely competent gets in. I commend you dullards to read, absorb, and act on his words come May.
Damian Hockney at MayorWatch – Go figure – voters need to use the Mayor electoral system imaginatively
23 Jan 2012
Interview: Kathleen Edwards
The process of writing an album can be a cathartic and therapeutic experience. The problem is, once those emotions are committed to tape, exorcised if you like, one then has to spend the next year talking about them to irritating music journalists. One such irritant, i.e. me, is currently debating this unfortunate conundrum with Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards.
‘Albums, all albums I suppose, are snapshots of a few years of a life’ she says. ‘I’ve had some joyous experiences but also some really painful ones. I’ve experienced redemption, felt elated, renewed…I feel like a new person. It’s hard to then go back and dissect those feelings’.
We’re discussing Edwards’ new album Voyageur, her fourth and the follow-up to 2008’s acclaimed, Polaris Prize nominated, Asking for Flowers. It appears, after repeated listens, to be an album of transition. Relationships, old and failed, new and liberating, are alluded to. One gets the feeling Edwards has started something of a second life recently. Excitement, albeit with a hint of nerves, peppers her speech when she talks about it.
‘It’s my best work, the music I love’ she says. ‘It’s lived up to my expectations. After the last record I felt I’d fallen into a certain pattern of songwriting. With Voyageur I feel I’ve accomplished something different’.
Accomplishing something different involved sharing writing duties for the first time, primarily with John Roderick of The Long Winters. Edwards spent several weeks demoing songs with Roderick in Seattle, a process she found ‘pretty scary…pretty uncomfortable’, at least at first. ‘Playing these half-finished songs to somebody when you don’t even know if they’re any good…ultimately I’m not much of a co-writer. I don’t want it to turn into a session of parliament you know? But I wanted a different end-place, a different end result’.
That leap of faith appears to have paid off. Voyageur has been garnering rave reviews pretty much across the board. It features a host of collaborators including Norah Jones, Stornoway and Francis and the Lights. The legendary Linda Rondstadt was even muted at one point, ‘but it didn’t work out…she would have been amazing’, sighs Edwards.
In a recent interview, Edwards’ current beau and Voyageur co-producer Justin Vernon of Bon Iver expressed his desire to see her step out of the boxes into which she’s been placed. ‘The whole Canadian Americana thing…I have no control over labels’ she says. ‘I wanted to make a record about who I am as an artist. I’m starting rehearsals with my band tomorrow then we’ll be playing these songs for the next six months. I can’t really think about anything else’.
Voyageur is out now on Rounder Records
23 Jan 2012
Here's what the kids are into now: coffee bars
Über-Londoner Peter Watts at The Great Wen has found an amazing collection of the old Rank Organisation film series, Look at Life, that takes the viewer into such underground scenes as highrise living, private members’ clubs, and, above, the coffee bar, circa 1959. Click here for the collection.
23 Jan 2012
Lana Del Rey's musical influences are pretty impressive
Pop culture’s “person people are interested in” of the moment, Lana Del Rey, tells BBC 6 Music which musicians have inspired her. It’s an impressive collection.
23 Jan 2012
London agenda for Monday 23 January
1. Get Pulled Apart By Horses at Rough Trade East [Le Cool]
2. Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! Hear authors Mark Haddon and Michael Rosen discuss why reading is good [Run Riot]
3. Discuss the doc Shooting vs. Shooting with director Nikos Megrelis [Don’t Panic]
4. Listen to the heady mix of improvised music, comedy and social insight of Reggie Watts [Time Out]
5. Ponder why those post-Commies in Russia never get rich [Ian Visits]
6. Eat at the Garden Café [Tired of London]
23 Jan 2012
Rip it up and start again: Let's have a proper debate on London transport fares
Gather round, everybody. We’ve found Boris Johnson’s weakest spot. But we should be having a proper talk about fares, instead of moaning about 5p on a bus ticket. How about tearing up the zones map instead?
20 Jan 2012
Rent is too damn high, regardless of how Snipe tries to spin it
Earlier this week Dave Hill wrote in the Guardian about Lucy Glennon, a Londoner who may lose her home as a result of Conservative-Liberal cuts to housing benefit.
The 26-year old, who suffers from a genetic disease that causes her near-constant pain, lives in a two-bedroom flat near the Euston Road. The location makes it relatively easy for her to get to St Thomas’s Hospital, which provides specialist care for the illness from which she suffers. She needs the second bedroom for her carer, who visits twice a day and who stays overnight when Glennon’s illness is at its most acute.
Glennon stands to lose £60 of her £350 a week housing benefit, thanks to the new cap that will be introduced in March. She is also likely to lose the mobility component of her Disability Living Allowance – despite the fact that she has difficulty walking. Her illness makes full-time work impossible; she can’t leave the house alone.
On Monday, Snipe’s Metropolis editor Mike Pollitt duly expressed the socially necessary minimum amount of concern for Glennon, before agreeing with the government’s decision that she should be kicked out of her home.
Pollitt said he didn’t disagree with Hill’s suggestion that the loss of a chronically ill individual’s home was “a hard price to pay” – before going on to say, “nor do I agree that the government should be using £350 per week, £18,200 per year, of public money to house someone.” The price is a tough one, then, but it is one that Pollitt is perfectly willing for Glennon to bear.
He is right, of course, on one count: £18,200 is too much for anyone to pay to rent a two-bedroom flat off the Euston Road. The capital is in the midst of a rent crisis; a crisis that will become one of the primary factors shaping the lives of Londoners in the coming years. Affordable housing in the private rented sector is virtually impossible to come by. It will be a thing of the past in council housing, too, once local authorities begin charging 80 per cent of the market rate.
Yes, £18,200 is too much. But the logic that says it is people like Glennon who should foot the bill, people with specific needs but without the ability to pay to have them met, is no logic at all. It is classic ‘whatabboutery’. “Yes,” the argument goes, “I know it’s bad that those with the least should suffer the most. But what about that rent! That’s more than I earn in a year!”
Pollitt is right: we should be talking about rent. Prices are rising, tenants’ rights are being eroded, and landlords are becoming ever more brazen in their exploitation. We need strict rent controls, a complete rebalancing of the tenant-landlord relationship, and a city-wide programme of conversion to turn London’s empty buildings into decent, affordable accommodation.
Pollitt is looking at the wrong side of the equation. He should be calling on the government to restrict landlords’ ability to set prices that high, not cheering the misery of thousands of Londoners who will be forced out of their homes. By focusing on the amount Glennon ‘costs’ the public purse, he provides cover for a government that intends for the economic and social burden to be shouldered by those who are least equipped to bear it.
20 Jan 2012
Olympic heat proves too much for cancelled Big Chill
These guys will just have to watch the modern pentathlon instead this year
Convinced he was suffering from a terminal disease in series 1 of Peep Show, Jez (Robert Webb) records a last will and testament in which he approves his own posthumous appearances at numerous festivals except the Big Chill, which he once attended and, well, apparently didn’t think it up to much.
That was 9 years ago; Jez survived, and with an eighth and ninth series of the sitcom already commissioned it seems Peep Show will be with us for a few years yet. The future of the Big Chill however, is less certain. Melvin Benn, the managing director of parent-company Festival Republic, announced yesterday that the Big Chill will not take place in 2012, citing the weekender’s clash with the Olympics and consequent lack of artist availability and confirmations as reasons.
There’s reason to be a little bit suspicious with Benn’s explanation. For a start it’s hardly as if the London Olympics have come as a bolt from the blue, the city was confirmed as host back in 2005.
Likewise implying that sufficient acts are not available first week in August because of the Olympics seems unlikely. It’s difficult to imagine last year’s headliners Kanye West, the Chemical Brothers and their ilk downing tools throughout this summer because they want to watch the dressage or Greco-Roman wrestling finals. One would suspect that an over-saturated festival market and general shortage of disposable income also had something to do with it.
That said however, it is possible that the sheer scale and sense of occasion of the Olympics will be to the detriment of other events and businesses in the city and elsewhere.
Before New Year Andrew Lloyd Webber caused something of a stir in the arts world when he declared – with a melodrama reminiscent of some of his greatest hits – that the Olympics will cause “a bloodbath of a summer”, resulting in “nobody going to the theatre at all”.
Lloyd Webber’s predictions haven’t been accepted as Gospel, but a consensus seems to be building that despite the official protestations to the contrary, the economic salvation the Olympics promised may not turn out to be all things to all men.
Writing this I can imagine Jeremy berating me with another line from Peep Show: “Why do you have to bring worry and doubt into everything? You’re like some kind of mad evangelist for anxiety!” Perhaps though this is one subject the mad evangelists will be proved right on.
the Big Chill – Cancellation announement
Photo – somnambience on Flickr under Creative Commons
20 Jan 2012
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- Diary of the shy Londoner
- Nice Interactive timeline lets you follow Londoners' historic fight against racism
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
- Random Interview: Eileen Conn, co-ordinator of Peckham Vision
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
- Nice map of London's fruit trees shows you where to pick free food
- Could red kites be London's next big nature success story?
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- Silencing the Brick Lane curry touts could be fatal for the city's self-esteem
© 2009-2026 Snipe London.