Lovebox Festival 2010

The setting sun oozed amber light and cast a burnt orange tint over thousands of faces in the crowds, pints of pear cider spilled from paper cups and sun-kissed festival-goers’ dancing feet were covered in dust. This was the scene in the bustling East end last weekend when Lovebox 2010 took over Victoria Park, offering 50,000 musos respite from the sticky city heat of the Underground.

Following in Glastonbury’s fluky footsteps, Lovebox was spared rain – though lack of foresight and preparation left many a pale shoulder slightly pinker on departure. Despite the bombardment of in your face corporate sponsorship – Lovebox continues to live up to its 2008 award of ‘Best Medium Sized Festival’ as voted by the UK Festival Awards. Started in 2003 by Groove Armada as a one-day festival, it has since expanded in size and this year it added a third day to its bill.

Roxy Music, Grace Jones and Dizzee Rascal graced the main stage throughout the weekend, wooing the crowds. But rather than racing for a hot seat in the headliner crowd, many opted for the smaller stages and tents. The Rizla Arena bounced into life with the Trojan Sound system and revellers skanked along to a lively afternoon set. North-London band Man Like Me put on one of their famed quirky performances in The Cat Flap tent and had an audience spilling out through the seams. The NYC Downlow – a replica New York City tenement block – had a queue stretching from the door out into the festival for the duration.

Two drag queens clad in spandex danced around in a mock hotel bedroom – part of the set – serenading the crowd with their comical lyrics whilst fake moustaches were being issued below them at the ‘Porn Kiosk’. They call themselves ‘the world’s first travelling homo disco’ and offer a dark sweatbox with disco, soul, funk and dance sets.

Lovebox offers a perfect escape from the hustle and bustle of the city – a weekend of eclectic music and alfresco dancing. But you can hop on the tube home afterwards – saving you the hassle of blindly navigating your way back to your tent…

Professor Green

This article was written by Luke Bainbridge, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 18th July 2010 00.05 Europe/London

Hackney’s Professor – or Stephen Manderson to his gran, who raised him – first appeared on Mike Skinner’s The Beats label, when his guest spot on the remix of “When You Wasn’t Famous” gained him the tag “British Eminem”. He secured a breakthrough with “I Need You Tonight”, which reached No 3 in April. Alive Till I’m Dead is similarly commercial, not least current single “Just Be Good to Green” with Lily Allen, but despite the obvious samples, Green’s inventive rhymes and neat line in self-deprecation – he’s usually chasing the girl, rather than vice versa – shine through.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Chris Singleton and the Distractions Photo: © Pal Hansen

With one album behind him and another planned, you’d have thought Stoke Newington-based, Dublin-born singer-songwriter Chris Singleton was on the road to success. However, in order to be able to record his second album, Lady Gasoline, Chris had to overcome a rare ear condition – hyperacusis, which is often described as an allergy to sound.

“I thought that I wouldn’t be able to make music any more”, Chris recalls. When recording the first album he noticed a sensation that he describes as similar to “when you get out of a swimming pool and experience blockage of the ears”. As time went by the problems increased, which made the making of the album extremely hard and frustrating.

Hyperacusis makes a person overly sensitive to sound, so that everyday things such as a trip on the Tube or bus become near to impossible as the sound levels are too loud and therefore too painful. While severe hyperacusis is rare, milder forms of the condition are known to affect musicians. This is because of overexposure to certain sound frequencies. As many as 86 per cent of patients also suffer from tinnitus – a ringing of the ears that is caused by the same exposure to sound.

After seeing a number of specialists who couldn’t find anything wrong and trying different methods, Chris was finally able to get the right treatment which helped him get out of a “very difficult time” and back into the studio to record his second album, which he describes as being “a compendium of different styles” and inspired by classic British rock like David Bowie, The Beatles and Mark Boland.

Chris’s first album Twisted City – “compiled as a journey through London” – got good reviews, making him well received in both the UK and his native Ireland, as well as landing him a distribution deal with Universal. Whilst Twisted City was a one man accomplishment, with Chris producing, playing the instruments and setting up his own record label to release the album, Lady Gasoline has been made in collaboration with friends and fellow musicians The Distractions, who in the past have worked with well-known artists like The Killers and Razorlight.

The main theme of the new album is relationships and all the emotions that come with them. The title track serves as a thread binding it all together: “she’s a sort of super-muse – she walks all over the record, leaving her boot prints on every track,” says Chris.

Lady Gasoline was released on IRL records on Monday 28 June.

Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler live at the Hackney Empire to promote new album The Suburbs. Photograph: Gaelle Beri/Retna

This article was written by Alexis Petridis, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 8th July 2010 02.45 Europe/London

There’s something striking about the behaviour of Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler at the show to launch the band’s third album, The Suburbs. Between songs, he jokes with the crowd: “Well, I still think England have a pretty good shot at this World Cup”, he smirks to a chorus of boos.

He unexpectedly ends a song called We Used To Wait crowd-surfing, still clutching his microphone stand. He’s relaxed and confident, which makes for a marked contrast with how he looked at the final gigs in support of Neon Bible, the album that catapulted the Montreal band to the cusp of international, stadium-packing success. The bigger the album and the accompanying shows got, the more Butler looked like a man who’d discovered his appeal against a parking ticket had been turned down.

Then again, on the evidence of the songs the band play from The Suburbs tonight, Butler has every reason to be relaxed and confident: they sound amazing, a genuine progression from Neon Bible. Released to good reviews, that album began attracting a kind of retrospective criticism, principally that it lacked the charm of their debut album Funeral. That applied the band’s apocalyptic sturm and drang approach to songs about childhood memories, amping youthful vignettes into the stuff of epic legend. Neon Bible, on the other hand, just offered a bunch of apocalyptic-sounding songs about the imminent apocalypse, and the world is hardly lacking in stadium rock bands making a big old bombastic racket about the environment and war and reality TV.

There’s no denying the power of their old material: Intervention provokes an earnest singalong, while you’d have to be catatonic not to be moved as Neighbourhood (Power Out) segues into Rebellion (Lies). Equally, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that the songs from The Suburbs achieve the same cumulative mass-euphoria effect, via a weirder, more nuanced, less obviously bombastic route: one track is fittingly titled Rococo, but Butler performs it with such blunt ferocity that virtually every string on his acoustic guitar is broken.

Decorated with layers of feedback, Empty Room sounds thrillingly chaotic, but, as the closing Month Of May thunders along, it seems in constant danger of slipping its mooring entirely and descending into noise.

But it doesn’t. The band encore with the hits: Neighbourhood (Tunnels), Keep The Car Running, Wake Up. The audience understandably go bananas, as does Florence Welch, who dances up in the balcony with the cheering abandon of a committed fan. Understandably, Butler and the rest of the Arcade Fire leave the stage wreathed in smiles.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Django Bates Photo: © Nick White 2010

The BBC’s Jez Nelson introduced Anglo-Danish pianist Django Bates’ trio at the Vortex as one the most eagerly anticipated gigs of the year. This outing was the first in a UK series playing material from his newly released Belovèd Bird album- a homage to the legendary bop saxophonist Charlie Parker. Bates was joined by two young Scandinavian musicians: Peter Bruun on drums and Petter Eldh on bass.

They opened with a focussed rendition of Parker’s Moose the Mooche, with Eldh’s cycling figure mirroring Bate’s left hand bass line. From this grounding the pianist released flurries of notes gradually developing into progressively wide-ranging solos. Throughout the next few pieces- the second his own, the third Parker’s Billie’s Bounce- Bates continued this, seeking to release the tension accrued by such static bass figure repetition with releases of delicate notes building into ever prestidigious cacophonies. Bates is a compelling improviser and- much like in his compositions- is never afraid to move well beyond jazz clichés or even the idiom itself. Such spontaneity was reinforced by his assertion- after the third piece, whilst describing the format of the gig- that “a life planned is a life endured”. In typical Bates style however, after a statement that might invoke the wildest heights of group improvisation, the trio then moved into the pianist’s own melancholic Sadness All the Way Down, a beautifully slow, uncluttered piece with the emphasis well on space.

Following this there was a return to brasher, louder dynamics with Bates releasing frenzied lines over the top of the rhythm section. It was at this stage that something hinted at the outset became fully apparent: the balance was slightly awry for such agile music. Bruun’s drums- mic’ed seemingly to emphasise his impressive cymbal work- lacked any low end, whilst Eldh’s double bass boomed so much it eclipsed all bass drum hits. This hole in the midrange frequencies rendered the rhythm section too turgid when the bass was active and too light and ungrounded when the drums took the fore. Together this meant that Bates kept leaving them for dust with his solos.

The way he suddenly exploded into these- together with the way they were unabashedly nonconformist– conjured the idea of a jack-in-a-box, with a mass of pent up energy suddenly released by an individual with fixed eyes and an inane grin happily flaunting his eccentricity. This image was not hindered by Bates’ multicoloured fez. Such periodical springing to life outside the rhythm section’s turgor left Bates somewhat exposed however, and it was also not hard to imagine him waving about on a spring, unsupported by sonic ballast. It was indeed interesting to see Bates in the context a trio. In his usual big band outings there is more dense orchestration and texture for him to hide behind; here he was comparatively naked. But this made him no less compelling, and whatever heights were reached in the first half of the set, proved to be a valid portent for the second.

Any initial deficiencies in the balance were soon made up for by the band really playing in sympathy.  Pieces began gradually being distilled into progressively tight codas, and interplay in the between solos was born out with more confidence. This culminated in a scintillating section with drums, bass and piano all degenerating into an incredibly tight (and heavy) almost free-noise unison, then flipping back to down-the-line playing, then back to the noise, and so forth until a syncopated and perfectly synchronised conclusion. As in the first set, Bates then inverted the dynamics, choosing to sing a simple plangent descending line into a microphone, once again emphasising space over matter. Then a repeating figure high on the bass heralded more hell-for-leather improvising leaving the feeling that no stone was being left unturned. Finally following riotous applause, came an encore with a number by old Bates foil Iain Bellamy.

Overall, this gig was a rare opportunity to see Django perform in the context of a smaller band. In the second half at least, the two musicians he chose to accompany him proved they were easily up to the task, despite any misgivings over the balance.  The BBC’s Jazz on 3 will be played highlights from the gig on Monday 26 April. Tune in. Also, check the Vortex’s lineup over coming months for other ingenious musicians.

Future dates:

Thursday 5 August 2010
Django Bates Beloved Bird
Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club
47 Frith Street
Westminster, London W1D 4HT
Box office 020 7439 0747

Friday 6 August 2010
Django Bates Beloved Bird
Snape Prom
Snape Maltings Concert Hall
Aldeburgh
Suffolk
BOX OFFICE Tel. 01728 687110

Flautist Rosanna Ter-berg Photo © Clare Bennett

In less than three weeks, charismatic young flautist Rosanna Ter-Berg, 22, from Hackney has won three prestigious British music competitions.

Rosanna is currently in her first year of the Masters in Performance programme at Trinity College of Music, studying with Professor of Flute Anna Noakes.

Rosanna chose Trinity to study with Noakes and her teaching has inspired Rosanna’s performances.

Born and bred in Hackney, Rosanna went to Camden School for Girls before gaining a first class degree in Music from Leeds University.

She also studied for a year at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg – one of France’s leading Music Schools -  through the European Union’s Erasmus programme.

In her final year at Leeds University, Rosanna raised over £3,000 for the children’s charity Childreach International and then climbed to the Mount Everest base camp in June 2009.

Wissam Boustany, chairman of the British Flute Society, describes Rosanna as having “an arresting presence on stage.”

The judges of the ESO Young Soloist Prize highlighted Rosanna’s onstage energy and have invited her to be the featured soloist at their Summer Concert on 20 June 2010 at St Saviour’s Church, Eastbourne.

Trinity professor of Flute Anna Noakes said, “Rosanna is talented, courageous, charismatic and unmissable.  By winning three competitions in a row she has demonstrated all round versatility.

“She has found her identity as a flautist, producing performances of electrifying tension and passion that enthral audiences.”

Rosanna said, “Since moving back to Hackney in September 2009, everything has fallen into place for me. These are the first competitions I have ever entered.

“Winning against many of Britain’s leading young musicians in such prestigious competitions gives me the confidence to pursue my aspirations in solo, orchestral, and chamber music.”

The three competitions that Rosanna won are:

7 February: Eastbourne Symphony Orchestra Young Soloist Competition (ESO) – 1st Prize
17 February: British Flute Society, Young Artist Award – Joint Winner
24 February: Harold Clarke Woodwind Competition – 1st Prize

Paloma Faith is remembering growing up in Hackney, before it became London’s trendiest borough.

“I used to go to a club in Dalston when I was about 13 or 14. It was called Labrynth, on Dalston Lane – that big building that had loads of people squatting in it. This rave used to go on for 24 hours. It was supposed to be strictly over 18s but we all had fake ID – it was mad!”

The words tumble out in a childlike drawl, spiked with a north London accent that could only have come from around these parts.

Though Faith is only 24, her many talents have taken her far from these local roots. Parts in big budget films St Trinian’s and The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus have secured her reputation as an actress to be reckoned with, and she confesses to enjoying being directed and the process of ‘becoming someone else’.

By contrast, Faith has striven for self-control over her musical output, complementing soulful vocals with outlandish and decadent performances that ooze confidence.

Her unique style, combined with vampish good-looks and an understated intelligence, have seen her porcelain face appearing everywhere – from fashion spreads in Vogue to music videos on MTV – in recent months.

But the roots of her love of performance run much deeper. She’s the first to admit that it was her formative years in Hackney that helped her develop into the multi-talented artist she is today.

Born to an English schoolteacher mother and a Spanish father in Stoke Newington, Faith grew up as the only child in a single parent family (her father left when she was two years old).

Deeply imaginative yet surrounded by adults, she learned early on to express her opinions. Her mother also encouraged her to start dancing at an early age.

“I started ballet classes in Dalston at the age of four. Class was just behind McDonalds and my mum used to get me a Happy Meal afterwards,” she remembers.

Faith went to a Hackney primary and Islington Green schools, which were, by her own admission ‘quite rough’. “When you go to the schools that I went to, you have to build a level of confidence. You have to hold your own. I did it in a way that wasn’t confrontational or whatever, but meant that I was left alone.”

One gets the sense that Faith has never had trouble standing apart from her peers. She was stylistically chameleonic as a teenager, jumping on every trend before finally settling on the mix of 1950s fashion – cinched waists, darkly painted lips and waved hair – and burlesque glamour that she sports today.

Her striking appearance might not seem amiss in modern-day Hackney, with its many flourishing creative communities, but Faith is keen to point out that she was here long before all that started.

“I was brought up here, unlike many of these kids who claim to come from Hackney, but actually come from the countryside. Do you sense the slight bitterness in my voice?” she laughs.

She once told a journalist that when her mother bought their family home they were working class, but that regeneration means the same area is now considered middle class. “My mum sort of likes it because she’s says [Stoke Newington] is nice and quiet now and there’s no crime,” she explains. “But I don’t really like going back – it’s quite yuppyish.”

The grittier streets of Dalston appeal to Faith these days, just as they do to fellow Hackney popstars Lightspeed Champion, Jack Penate and The Big Pink. “Dalston is my favourite bit [of Hackney]. When I’ve saved up enough money to buy a flat, I’ll definitely buy it there.”

With Faith’s rise and rise to popular acclaim in both film and music assured, it can’t be long before Hackney welcomes her back.

Paloma Faith’s latest single, ‘Upside Down’, was released on 14 March through Epic records. She embarks on her Spring headline tour with a show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 29 March.

Uncle Sam’s Jazz and Blues band at The Haggerston, Kingsland Road

Listen here:

Every Sunday night for some 14 years, Uncle Sam’s Jazz and Blues band has been playing at 438 Kingsland Road.

Yet founding member and guitarist Alan Weekes describes their performances at The Haggerston pub, previously named Uncle Sam’s, as “Hackney’s best kept secret”, as they still retain a local, close-knit feel.

It’s an impressive spectacle not only because of the band’s performances and impromptu guests musicians – often from all over the globe – but also due to the enthusiastic crowd which keeps the band playing with each solo instrumental getting rapturous applause.

Alan recalls how the band started: “I met Brian [Edwards, tenor saxophone] about 25 years ago. Our original drummer was Clifford Jarvis, who passed away in ‘99. He was a Blue Note recording artist and moved from the US to London in the 80’s.

“Now we have Shane Forbes on drums, who won young jazz musician of the year 2009. Ben Hazleton is on bass and composes some of the songs we do.”

I am told by Alan that musicians from Japan, Mexico, Italy – everywhere, have joined in at their residency night.

In the last year alone, Uncle Sam’s have been joined by Grammy winner Joe Lovano, Esperanza Spalding, double bass player and singer who performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in December, and Beyoncé’s backing band.

I asked Brian Edwards, saxophone player for the band Uncle Sam’s, why he thought playing in Hackney and the residency at the pub has worked for so long, “I think it’s a lot to do with Alan, he has been playing in the area so long.

“It wasn’t always this busy when we first started playing, maybe because it wasn’t as safe an area. We used to play in a basement place called Lotti’s and I heard there were a couple of shoot-outs there. But now Hackney is really becoming a hip kind of place, you know.”

If you have yet to see Uncle Sam’s perform, January will be an interesting time to visit as they will be recording a live album during their sessions at the pub every Sunday night from 8pm.

Alan explained, “The idea is to keep the tradition going and promote the relationship with the pub”.

Tower of Dad

Local band Tower of Dad will be playing a festive fundraiser for Lauriston Primary School on Saturday 12 December at the Royal Inn on the Park.

The event has been billed as an unmissable Christmas extravanganza. Singer Tanya Fitzgerald said,  “Please come along and have a great night of music and dancing, and support a great local cause – Lauriston Primary School.”

Amongst the band’s influences she cites the Elvis Costello, The Clash, and Blondie: “We play late 70s and early 80s, but the less expected tunes.”

Commenting on their hopes for raising cash as well as the roof, Tanya said, “We’re hoping that people will dig deep and donate the suggested £10 or over and above.”

The main man keeping the whole thing together is Euan Hill aka ‘Cheech Miller’ (of the eponymous shop) who, as a top sound engineer, has toured with the likes of the Patti Smith, Fun Lovin’ Criminals and Black Grape.

Tower of Dad  (made of six dads, one son of a dad, one non-dad man, and a mum) came together in August 2008 for a charity variety night staged at the Hackney Empire by a local business woman.

Since then, there have been numerous appearances at various fetes and community events through the summer  The band will be joined by fabulous ukelele band Uke Attack!! Uke Attack!! and The Victoria Park Players with their Christmas Revue.

The Tower of Dad Christmas Extravaganza is on Saturday 12 December at the Royal Inn on the Park, 111 Lauriston Road E9 7HJ – doors open 7.30pm.

Information is available from the following Victoria Park Village shops: Cheech Miller, Sublime and  Victoria Park Books.

Dalston Superstore's daytime fare

It’s true there’s been a lot of press around Dalston’s claims for Shoreditch’s fallen crown, and anyone returning to the area after a long hiatus will notice the striking shift in demographic on the Kingsland Road, particularly around midnight on a weekend.

This change has primarily been brought about by the Dalston Superstore – counter to expectations for a new bar operated on a shoestring, in the middle of a recession.

Matt Tucker and Dan Beaumont opened Dalston Superstore, their first business venture together, on the Kingsland Road in early May, sandwiched between a Turkish café and a bookie’s.

The success of the Superstore lies in Dan and Matt’s savvy eye for spotting a scene to be tapped, as they’ve done before with established clubnights Disco Bloodbath and Trailer Trash respectively.

This time they’ve been the first to take action over Dalston’s lack of bar space for its burgeoning creative scene and the gay intelligentsia moving up from Shoreditch in an effort to escape highstreet hipster bars and expensive over-styled boozeries.

Since then, word of the Superstore has spread from a single Facebook event page, all the way to the pages of Grazia.

“We both grew up around the explosion of Shoreditch,” says Dan, “and we saw that area grow and become an interesting exciting creative hub, with lots of interesting places where you could count on meeting interesting people. But we’ve seen that area decline into quite a homogenous, mass market, binge drinking area that a lot of our friends don’t go to anymore.”

This decline got them thinking about accommodating those that had been displaced: both wanted to be involved in a venue that brought back to life that interesting creative scene, and so 18 months ago they started looking for a venue.

“We found that lots of different circles of friends had gravitated to Dalston. We’d been looking for venues for a long time, and when we found this place everything just seemed to click; it’s an interesting time to be around here,” says Dan.

Despite being a catalyst for the hype, Dan and Matt are also aware that a couple of months of being namedropped is not enough to make the Superstore last.

“It’s easy to get caught up in the press,” says Matt. “One minute it’s the hottest place to go, and the next year it’s not, so we’ve tried to distance ourselves a little bit from all this and concentrate on what we’re doing. We’re quite confident what we do is individual and different enough, and yet if anything the area is going to continue to get busier over the next few years.”

The venue they found now has an overall capacity of just 200, open from 11 or 12 until 2am, but previous to this had been derelict for two years – the basement was infested with rats, and the inside was barely a shell of a building. This however, meant that they could start from scratch.

“The whole project has been on a shoestring,” says Matt. “But this means we’ve had to be a lot more creative. Something we feel is missing from other places is the responsibility to the local community to be somewhere lots of different people can use in lots of different ways. We both liked the idea of the bar being the kind of, the hub, or focal point of a specific community.

“One of the things we wanted to do was to bring a European sensibility to the venue. In places like Berlin, a space functions as an art space, as a café, as a bar – but you don’t really get that so much in London – everything is pigeon-holed.

“That’s not something that we wanted to happen, so it’s a gallery with art launches every month, a café in the day, as well as being a bar and clubspace, and there’s no reason all those things can’t coexist.”

Their predominantly Turkish neighbours have been friendly and supportive of the venture, as it has increased footfall and overspill has built business for nearby late night venues and restaurants.

“We keep things local as much as possible,” says Dan.  “We employ people from Hackney, and all the artists we exhibit live in Hackney, with the space curated by local artist Alex Noble. At the end of the day, everyone’s much better off having something like this than just a derelict space.”

The Superstore caters primarily towards the alternative gay community, specifically,  those who feel bored, alienated, or patronised by much of the gay scene in London.

“We both have backgrounds being involved in the London gay community, through Disco Bloodbath and Trailer Trash, but we felt that there was a need for something like us in the area,” says Dan.

“We wanted to be a gay bar, but we also want to offer good quality drinks and interesting music, without any patronising bubblegum pop or nauseating funky house. We’re not a gay bar in the traditional sense and we have a very mixed clientele, but our main target audience is the local gay community.

“Although there’s a general perception that we’re out of the woods in terms of homophobia and hate crime, sometimes the facts don’t really bear that out, especially in Hackney. There have been quite a lot of high profile incidents recently – the stabbing around the George and Dragon (on Hackney Road) for example, and a couple of others.

“So as well as wanting to run a gay venue, we also wanted to offer the local gay community a safe place that was predominantly theirs.”

As yet though, the project is still evolving, albeit successfully enough for the clientele to be spilling onto the street come Friday night.

Matt says that the space will continue to be a work in progress, but that he likes this, as it’s meant that as the space is used, it can grow with its clientele.

“We’ve seen how people use the space,” says Dan, “and the idea is to keep on tweaking it. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point of finishing it, because there’s always going to be more to do, but I think we owe it to our customers to constantly make an effort with the space for them. We were fortunate to have a lot of goodwill when we opened. But now our part of the bargain is to carry on making it better and better.”

For event information, head to Dalston Superstore’s Facebook page.