Brainlove Festival 2011: Bear Driver
1. Hello! We’re really happy you’re playing Brainlove Festival. Could you introduce yourself?
Yup, we’re Bear Driver. Ol and Harry play guitar and sing, Cassie sings too, Jon plays bass, Rich hits drums and Joseph is very tall and has keyboards.
2. Tell us a bit about the song you’ve given us.
This is a brand new demo of a song we added to the set for sxsw earlier this year. We’ve been giving away a series of free downloads since January and this is the latest – it’s called Colours Run.
Bear Driver – Colours Run by snipelondon
3. Do you have a favourite festival performance? Both from a festival you’ve played, and a show by another artist…
Favourite that we’ve played… We played Reading & Leeds when we’d just started out so that was awesome, although I think our set at SXSW this year was my favourite to date.
Favourite that we’ve seen… Yo La Tengo at End Of The Road last year was amazing. Raised the bar by a long way.
4. How about a few words for curious readers wondering what to expect from your performance at BRNLV Festival this year?
Well we there’s 6 of us so we’ll be squeezed onto the stage and be bumping into each other a lot, Harry will probably fall off altogether as he usually does sooner or later. But I’m not going to guarantee that – you’ll just have to wait and see. We love playing shows, hopefully that comes across!
Brainlove Festival is on May 28th at Brixton Windmill. Get your tickets for here.
14 May 2011
14 May 2011
Brainlove Festival 2011
28 May Brixton Windmill | 22 Blenheim Gardens SW2 5BZ tickets
The annual Brainlove Festival at Brixton Windmill is a selection box of weird and wonderful music from all corners of the underground, this year with Snipe as a media partner. The headliners are impassioned Scottish three-piece Meursault; from Manchester come the psychedelic guitar swirls of Patterns. From Leeds come indie-pop quartet Bear Driver and Brainlove Records’ breakthrough artist Napoleon IIIrd, who’ll play his entire Christiania album with a full band and live visuals by Broken Pixel. Norwich lo-fi star Mat Riviere will play a special set with cellist Oliver Barrett, and Pagan Wanderer Lu will preview what’s to come on his next album for the first time. Special guests are Bastardgeist from Chicago, and Kreatiivmootor & Multiphonic Rodent, who come all the way from Estonia to show off their wildly creative works. And there’s much more besides… an unmissable day for the sonically curious.
13 May 2011
Diary: Toby Bull, Tender Age Records
Drop/Dead’s Flicker has entered and stayed very much within my field of vision this past month. It throws up, firstly, the immense popular potential of a sometimes difficult genre – Footwork – but also holds at its core what has been at the heart of March for me: tension. This ambient swathe and a euphoric female vocal are cleaved (apart/together) by that steady, if unnervingly rapid kick while I check whether Beat Connection got to SXSW all right and tick ‘P4 Ex. 3a & 3b’ off*. I’ll be more specific. I recently started a night called The Happiest Place on Earth, run a label called Tender Age and am also finishing my A Levels.
These are the tensions that have made up this year and more specifically, March. Having said that, March has been an easy month for music – it has in fact been respite rather than work. With killer records already on the way from both Beat Connection & D/R/U/G/S, I’ve been able to sit back and watch their relative scourges throughout the Internet. This focus on the current roster hasn’t even led to a blockage of new music either. Thanks to a multitude of people I’ve heard the Doom Disco of Night Angles, the aforementioned Drop/Dead and met anew Oxford’s Solid Gold Dragons.
School’s worked out less well. On 10th March I got something less than a great result on results day. Three days of recovery— Hercules & Love Affair on the same night – and there was the rest of March to look to. On the 26th TUC crash down into London to protest against cuts throughout the public sector; on the 27th D/R/U/G/S are playing a show at The Lock Tavern with support from Becoming Du Prince (otherwise known as Halls).
I think March has been a vista. February’s unbalanced tensions – wasted all weekend and overworking during the week – have somehow led to a month where test pressings and books have balanced out. But I think that means I’m highly strung and that means that something’s likely to snap so maybe I…I test its strength until April, weight it down to fuck until June – just like the thousands of other kids doing the same– and then listen to Talk Talk until April 5th 2012.
*Shouldn’t forget that letter either.
13 May 2011
Tom Jenkins talks to the wave pictures on the eve of their UK tour
David Tattershall has jitters. Is it to do with the impending royal nuptials? “I can’t stand the royal family actually,” he says, “not that I wish them any ill of course”. Perhaps it’s the lengthy cross-country drive he and his band The Wave Pictures have just completed, en route to their first ever gig on the Emerald Isle at Galway’s Roisin Dubh, or the fact that as we talk Tattershall is overlooking a beer can infested canal opposite tonight’s venue. Whatever: within the nerves, the excitable, slightly quivering timbre of his voice suggests a man whose creative juices are flowing; a man who’s ready, with his two closest companions, for this two month jaunt around the UK, converting audiences to his cause.
13 May 2011
New Band: The Sandwitches
The San Francisco garage scene is one of the most fecund in music right now, with bands such as The Fresh & Onlys and Sonny & The Sunsets helping to put the city on the map as a creative hub. The jewel in the crown of this collective (sorry, Royal wedding media saturation has taken its toll) are the unclassifiable, utterly charming and criminally overlooked all-female trio The Sandwitches.
The band formed back in 2008 when Grace Cooper and Heidi Alexander, then paying their dues singing back-up with the afore-mentioned Fresh & Onlys, bonded over their mutual strange tastes in music. They roped in friend Roxy Brodeur and quickly set to work on their brilliant 2009 debut LP How To Make Ambient Sadcake, a genre-hopping blend of lo-fi garage rock, goth-tinged Americana and folk. The equally captivating Duck Duck Goose! EP followed in 2010, and marked a shift towards a more countrified, bluesy sound, a direction they have continued in with their recently released 2nd album Mrs. Jones’ Cookies. A career highlight for the trio, the record abounds with quirky riffs, off-kilter melodies and cryptically beautiful lyrics. Central to the band’s appeal however are the stunning voices of Cooper and Alexander, weaving and intertwining perfectly to create bewitching, spine-tingling harmonies unlike anything else you’re likely to hear all year.
Key tracks to check out from Mrs. Jones’ are: ‘Summer Of Love’, ‘Joe Says’ and ‘My Heart Did Swell’. But that just ain’t enough Sandwitches: you’ll be hungry for more.
13 May 2011
The light and the dark of David Thomas Broughton
One day back in 2005, David Thomas Broughton went down to Wrangthorn Church in Leeds, set up his equipment, and recorded some music. “I had had these songs already, so I had an idea of what I was going to do,” he recalls. “The engineer just pressed record, I played, and then he pressed stop. The only thing we did after that was change some of the levels of the different microphones, which were situated at different positions around the hall. No overdubs.”
13 May 2011
Random Interview: Vic - Market Trader, Deptford Market
Deptford Market on a Saturday morning is a thriving bastion of old-timey market chaos. The air is full of shouting, arguing, laughing and confusion as people pick through piles of strange china ornaments, odd shoes and every conceivable electrical appliance that has been surpassed by modern invention since electricity began. It is untainted by trendy craft stalls and free from overpriced tourist tat, instead it is full of pure and glorious junk. Junk that it is exciting and rewarding to search through; books, odd paintings, records, furniture, TVs, clothes, old newspapers, hats and the slightly depressing china set your mum had when you were five. Approaching market trader Vic, I admit to being a bit nervous, but soon found a softness behind her hardy exterior.
13 May 2011
I’m a young male who is interested in birds—what’s wrong with me?
Something strange is happening to me, and I’m a little bit scared.
It all started a couple of weeks ago as I walked with a friend along Regent’s Canal. The scene was thick with portents, as in a dream. A strong wind from a clear blue sky, dead cherry blossom decaying beneath our feet. The empty carcass of a Number 8 bus on Roman Rd, taken out of service before the end of its route. I should have guessed that a part of me was about to die.
Then it happened.
13 May 2011
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape
Joan Miró, ‘The Tilled Field’, 1923/4 – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York ©Successio Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011
Tate Modern, Bankside, Southwark/London Bridge, SE1 9TG
In his first major retrospective in the UK for over 50 years, The Ladder of Escape brilliantly captures not only the genius and beguiling abstract works of Joan Miró but expertly explores the artist’s ceaseless dedication and progression. Filled with wavering lines, personalised calligraphy and intricate symbolism, his vivid canvases and daring brush strokes are irresistibly captivating and even though blockbuster exhibitions are often hollow events, this is an experience you won’t want to miss. Until 11 September. www.tate.org.uk/modern
13 May 2011
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- Diary of the shy Londoner
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- Could red kites be London's next big nature success story?
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
- The five spookiest abandoned London hospitals
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
- Random Interview: Eileen Conn, co-ordinator of Peckham Vision
- Silencing the Brick Lane curry touts could be fatal for the city's self-esteem
- London has chosen its mayor, but why can’t it choose its own media?
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