Mumford & Sons - Live, The Captain’s Rest Glasgow, Tuesday 8th July 2008

When I lived in Glasgow, back between 1994 and 1999, the Captain’s Rest was a shitty-looking Rangers pub with the sort of forbidding exterior and clientele that meant I never stepped inside once in the four years I lived virtually next door to the place. It’s all been spruced up now, although the exterior [...]

Yoshimi!

No, nothing to do with The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi! is bedroom electronica from a lovely chap in the Netherlands called Niek who sent me some stuff a month or so ago.  He first contacted me some time last year actually, and I wasn’t particularly keen on what he’d done so I told him so and [...]

Kid Canaveral - Live, Henry’s Cellar Bar Edinburgh, Friday 20th June 2008

Ah Kid Canveral, one of the very few successful purveyors of spiky indie pop in a city so devoted to its agit-folk that you’d think there was something in the water. Their last single Smash Hits is a slice of bouncy indie pop so perfect it could more or less define the genre.
I fact, [...]

Song, by Toad Records Launch Party

Gosh, that was fun. Exhausting, nerve-wracking and monumental hangover-inducing, but it was certainly fun.
The Meridian is a small place, so it filled up pretty quickly (which was an enormous relief). Then again, that was the precise reason I chose that particular pub - I’m not daft! Morgan - the man who is [...]

The Felice Brothers - Live, the Ram’s Head Tavern, Annapolis, Maryland, June 9, 2008

[Campfires & Battlefields has been such a constant support to this website, what with his sarcastic sniping and everything, and and I never thanked him properly for filling in so kindly while I was away. So thanks, pal, it really is much appreciated. And here, seeing as he introduced me to the Felice [...]

The Young Republic - Live, Cabaret Voltaire Edinburgh, Sunday 25th May 2008

It’s been a great year for The Young Republic.  They’ve gone from three years of constant gigging through their university years, to being signed to a small but fairly upwardly mobile record label in End of the Road Records, to a well-received debut release, to touring across the States and the UK.
But despite the shiny [...]