Wound On My Finger by Soulmates Never Die
Soulmates Never Die // Wound On My Finger from Jennifer Morris on Vimeo.
Leeds’ Joshua Lewis, aka Soulmates Never Die, skilfully avoids the pitfalls of many a DIY, anti-folk musician. His music is knowing without being twee, passionate, not angsty. Wound on My Finger is taken from his debut EP on Cowsnail Records, Dance Contest Winner. He plays the Bull and Gate, Kentish Town tomorrow (Dec 20th).
19 Dec 2011
London agenda for Monday 19 December
1. Listen to songs about manic depression and nuclear holocaust survival by Gruff Rhys
2. Learn history by smelling it [Run Riot]
3. Hear traditional English music from the 12th–15th century at Yoolis [Don’t Panic]
4 See Terence Conran, artist Kate MccGwire and digital specialist Matt Pyke exhibit their favourite objects of desire at One Room, Three Global Names [Flavorpill]
5. Look at the lives and legacies of the Slave-owners of Bloomsbury [Ian Visits]
6. Buy books at the Willesden Bookshop [Tired of London]
19 Dec 2011
Dow Chemical backs down over Olympic sponsorship
Ted Jeory has been all over this:
The US corporate giant said it was agreeing to the “vision” of the 2012 Games by waiving its sponsorship rights to place its brand on a controversial fabric wrap for the stadium.
Hardly. At the corporate level, the “vision” of the 2012 Olympics is to peddle a romanticised ideal of sporting contest in order to make vast sums of money. The Dow Chemical sponsored wrap around the stadium was this vision realised in textile form. The new wrap will not bear Dow’s logo, but the sponsorship deal remains and the Olympic rings will adorn their marketing. The old wrap was tasteless, but essentially honest. The new wrap is an inoffensive lie. You can call that progress, if you must.
Trial by Jeory – Dow agrees to removing logos from Olympic wrap
19 Dec 2011
London agenda for Friday 16 December
1. Enjoy hula-hooping, rockabilly bands, swing dance classes and the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes’ usual combination of cheap booze, bowling and karaoke at Rock A Hula [Le Cool]
2. Visit a roller disco, a 5m high medieval street scene, an 80ft banqueting table piled with a whole wild boar, gourmet street food and a cutting edge exhibition at Once upon a wintertime [Run Riot]
3. Return To The Future featuring Art Department at the Print Room [Flavorpill]
4. Listen to a vinyl-only night in the heart of Brixton at Extra Classic [Don’t Panic]
5. Find out about the relationship between medieval English monarchs and wild beasts [Ian Visits]
6. Drink at the Coach & Horses [Tired of London]
And something for the weekend
7. Sat Spend the afternoon on an East London treasure hunt [Run Riot]
8. Sat View Bill Hicks: American with his brother Steve, then Skype with his family back in Texas, then eat some birthday cake at the Roxy [Roxy]
9.All Weekend Go look at the advent calendar of windows in Willsden Green [Londonist]
10. Sun Visit an alternative market of clothes, housewares, entertainments and live performances, all of which are delightfully eccentric the Secret Emporium Christmas Market [London Confidential]
16 Dec 2011
I Love You But I Hate You by Powersolo
Trash-rock Danish psychobilly, courtesy of The Railthin Brothers (they’re not kidding – check out the picture above), taken from their fifth album Buzz Human, out now on Crunchy Frog.
15 Dec 2011
After a year of beatings and austerity, what can we look forward to? More austerity and beatings
Santa vs Jesus from South Park
It’s easy to forget quite how extraordinary a year 2011 has been. At home and abroad, the past twelve months have seen remarkable levels of repression and resistance, violence and solidarity.
But perhaps the key lesson from 2011 is that governments are all broadly the same. The state is the entity that has the monopoly on violence. The degree to which they utilise that monopoly varies from country to country, but the events of the last twelve months have demonstrated that governments of every shade will use precisely as much violence as is necessary to maintain control.
Here, that violence is primarily structural. In the Conservative-Liberal UK, if you’re not white, upper middle class, able-bodied, cisgendered, and from the South East of England, you can expect your life outcomes (such as they can be measured) to be poorer. Austerity is the cover du jour for this structural violence – and, as the last few months have shown, the aggression is becoming progressively more acute.
The examples are everywhere. Just a few days ago the government cut payments to disabled children by 50 per cent, leaving each child more than £1,300 worse off every year. In the North East, unemployment increased by 8.8 per cent in the three months to October. If you’re a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy, you will be hauled up in front of ATOS, a private company charged with getting people back into work. If you live in council accommodation, you will soon lose your secure tenancy. If you’re squatting in one of the country’s 720,000 empty homes, you’ll soon find yourself in jail. If you’re the director of a FTSE 100 company you’ve seen your pay increase by 50 per cent.
This is not a coincidence. Much of the rhetoric in opposition to austerity focuses on vulnerable groups being “hit disproportionately hard”, as if this is some statistical anomaly; an unforeseen consequence of an otherwise sound economic strategy. In reality, though, these are the intended outcomes of an ideologically driven tactic of divide and rule, of personalisation and privatisation ad absurdum. The Conservative-Liberal project is not compassionate, no matter what Call Me Dave’s folksy PR says. No, it is shot through with the malice of the hyper-privileged teenager, so coddled and so immature that they believe it to be their right to kick those who don’t look like them, or come from the same background as them, or move in the same social circles as them. These teenagers are running the country now, and it’s terrifying.
Of course, structural violence is not the only manifestation of this tendency. One need only look at the extraordinary brutality with which any form of public assembly has been met in the last twelve months for evidence of the thrill with which Theresa May and the rest have embraced their new powers. Witness the police dogs now present at virtually every demonstration, or the increasingly profligate use of tasers, or the police murder of a young black man in Tottenham – a murder about which the Met and the IPCC subsequently lied, and for which it is unlikely that anyone will be brought to justice.
The world is changing at an historic rate, and the thick clouds of crisis loom larger now. It’s not just about the economy any more. It’s about how we want to live on a day-to-day basis, about our contract with the people who govern us, about our ability to resist encroachments on our meagre rights. Next year will be about protecting those rights – but it should also be about a broader recharacterisation of our relationship with the state, a remodelling of our systems of governance, and the wholesale destruction of the political class. Not much to ask.
15 Dec 2011
London agenda for Thursday 15 December
1. Listen to Emmy the Great and Tim Wheeler, for free, at Rough Trade East [Le Cool]
2. The kids at Line Of Best Fit have a showcase tonight [Run Riot]
3. Listen to Matthew De Abaitua, editor-at-large of The Idler and camping fanatic discuss camping [Flavorpill]
4. Fly through the air with the greatest of ease in Deptford [Don’t Panic]
5. Walk around Shoreditch with historic maps [Ian Visits]
6. Celebrate Christmas at the Royal Albert Hall [Tired of London]
15 Dec 2011
The Ladykillers
Five creepy criminals versus a batty old lady. It hardly seems fair. They never stood a chance.
The classic 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers stars Alec Guinness and Herbert Lom at their villainous best (along with Peter Sellers in his early chubby phase). It has seeped into the British cultural consciousness and fermented into a satirical fairy tale for the ages. The odd story, dreamt one night by writer William Rose, has a simple premise: Five bank robbers, disguised as a quintet of practicing musicians, have holed up in the lodging house of daft landlady Mrs Wilberforce. But unlike most moralistic crime capers in which the bad guys receive a comeuppance via their evil natures, in The Ladykillers they are struck down by their sense of compassion. Or at least squeamishness about killing sweet little old ladies.
Peter Capaldi is the mastermind Professor Marcus, a leering, crook-faced gargoyle with an unplaceable accent, flapping about like a bat in knitwear. A Nosferatu in Dr. Who’s scarf. James Fleet as the cowardly but frilly Major Courtney, Stephen Wight as the pill-popping spiv Harry Robinson, Ben Miller as dastardly foreigner and gerontophobe Louis Harvey and Clive Rowe as the mountainous One Round, wallowing in his own thickness; All the performers were excellent, and obviously Marcia Warren is great as the adorably innocent harbinger of death. But the set is the equal to them all, a full member of the cast. Lurching angles (the actors seemed to stumble sometimes, still disoriented despite rehearsals by the subtly psychotic cottage) and sputtering lighting bear the burden of maintaining the sense of evil the film somehow conveyed despite its humour. That noir atmosphere can’t be sustained in a live production as goofy as this one. Drama’s loss is comedy’s gain. Which it needn’t have been, and that’s a shame, but the result is still a brilliant piece of entertainment.
Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, has loosely reworked the story, keeping the rough shape but with more silliness, whimsy and sight gags. In fact, the play works best when he completely abandons the rigour of the film in favour of his own mad obsessions. Not that the play is sloppy. The madness is tightly choreographed, with sleight of hand and magic tricks employed to create comedic surprises he would normally have counted on editing to produce. But while the resulting show is fairly slick it also manages to seem shambolic, wonky and extremely low-tech in a way that only increases its charm. When other shows in the West End and Broadway are battling Hollywood with huge casts wearing animals on their heads, elaborate laser shows, terrifying web-slinging accidents and stages that can transform into giant robots, The Ladykillers has stagehands hiding inside the furniture awkwardly pushing stuff about using sticks or maybe magnets. Instead of an enormous budget this show makes do with cleverness and a child-like sense of fun.
The biggest difference between the two versions of The Ladykillers is the world outside the theatre. In 1955 it was a given that these bank robbers must be punished for their misdeeds. In 2011, however, Prof. Marcus defends their actions by pointing out that all the money they have stolen is insured, and asks “What is the difference between robbing a bank… and founding one?” The play’s modern relevance had me thinking- why shouldn’t these criminals be allowed, this time, to live happily ever after? When bankers are thieves and everybody else is treated like lowlifes who deserve to be fleeced, then surely these villains are the heroes and Mrs. Wilberforce- dear, naive, upstanding Mrs. Wilberforce- is a tool of the devil. I kind of wanted the show to end at the halfway point, with the crooks absconding with their loot to the Turks and Caicos. But then, I’ve spent my life scheming ways for Charlie Croker to reel back the Swiss gold.
The Ladykillers at the Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, 0207 492 1548, gielgud.official-theatre.co.uk Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square stations
14 Dec 2011
Headcage by Matthew Dear
DJ, producer, label lynch-pin and confirmed workaholic Matthew Dear has a new EP out on January 17th. Download the title track below. The Headcage EP will be available via Ghostly International.
14 Dec 2011
Punk brewery just as sexist and homophobic as the industry they rail against
The independent Scottish brewery Brewdog invited Snipe along with a few dozen other London food writers to a tasting and a creepy rant last night.
The location was the new Brewdog Camden pub, where founders James Watt and Martin Dickie planned to treat the assembled with a tasting of their beers and entertain us with the story of their four-year existence. That’s when it got creepy.
Watt encouraged us to talk to our beer, yes, out loud, to encourage it to ‘open up.’ He then gestured to one of the female servers and said that this is what he would do if he wanted her to ‘open up.’ Weird – but easily brushed away as a poor choice of words. He’s speaking off the cuff, with a beer in his hand, and presumably meant that he wanted the server to feel comfortable and share her thoughts.
Then Watt told us of he and Dickie’s experience at some young entrepreneur’s award interview. This ‘feminist,’ he complained, was upset at the portrayal of women in their marketing material, including the fetishisation of lesbians. Watt did not use the word fetishisation.
A feminist quizzed us on the appropriateness of calling a beer ‘Trashy Blonde’ and using the word ‘lesbian’ in some of our promotional material. To which Martin responded;
‘I have nothing against lesbians at all, in fact I have some DVDs at home of just lesbians’. It went down like a lead balloon and we did not win this award.
I don’t recall if that’s the exact quote or not – but close enough, it’s a cut and paste from the Brewdog blog.
Here’s the kind of marketing material that dirty feminist was speaking of:
“A titillating, neurotic, peroxide, punk of a pale ale. Combining attitude, style, substance and a little bit of low self esteem for good measure; what would your mother say?
You really should just leave it alone…
…but you just can’t get the compulsive malt body and gorgeous dirty blonde colour out of your head. The seductive lure of the sassy passion fruit hop proves too much to resist. All that is even before we get onto the fact that there are no additives preservatives, pasteurization or strings attached.
All wrapped up with the customary BrewDog bite and imaginative twist. This trashy blonde is going to get you into a lot of trouble.”
(From A FemALE View)
And it wasn’t a one off, this we’re-a-couple-of-losers-who-made-good schtick is a regular part of the show. They’ve told the same anecdote over and over to other audiences.
In the end, Brewdog’s ‘Beer for Punks’ is mere branding, as manufactured as their mid-90s David Carson aesthetic.
Beer school for girls: because we like our blondes trashy, not dumb
Update As we filed out, Tim ‘Masterchef’ Anderson appeared in the doorway, handing out pizza. Surreal.
14 Dec 2011
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- Summer Camp: Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
- The five spookiest abandoned London hospitals
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- Only 16 commuters touch in to Emirates Air Line, figures reveal
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- Number of people using Thames cable car plunges
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- Diary of the shy Londoner
- London has chosen its mayor, but why can’t it choose its own media?
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