TIM THORNTON

Excerpt no. 2 from Felix Romsey’s Afterparty

April 9th, 2017

Here’s the second excerpt from my crowdfunding novel. Hope you enjoy it. If you like what you’re reading, now’s the time to support the book, by pre-ordering/pledging via the link underneath. Thanks!

The first famous person I saw here was Ian Curtis. He wasn’t just the first famous person I saw here; he was the first person I saw who I’d previously known in any capacity whatsoever. Via some curious twist of fate, nobody that I’ve ever known personally has died. My parents are both still alive, as are my aunts, uncles, brother and all my friends. I wasn’t old enough to remember any of my grandparents, so I’ve never bothered to look them up. The only funeral I ever attended was my own, and whether I even went to that is open to metaphysical debate. I spent my whole life thinking I was so lucky that no one close to me had died, and now I spend much of my time thinking the precise opposite.

So, consequently, of all people: Ian Curtis.

It was the first time Felix invited me to the Afterparty; out of pity probably, for I was still moping around like a wounded donkey although I’d been here a good eighteen months. Felix said to come and hang out backstage, but I didn’t feel like socialising so I just showed up at 4pm when I knew Curtis was scheduled to play. He’d assembled quite a good little band for himself – Hole’s Kristen Pfaff on bass and the guy from Lush on drums – and as you can imagine there was a pretty big crowd even for an afternoon slot. But fuck, it was weird. So many weird things about it, I didn’t even know where or how to begin. I had about three panic attacks just getting into the site. We’re not supposed to get panic attacks, but of course I get them anyway. I’d stopped off at a Social on the way there and downed a whole bottle of wine to calm my nerves, but I was practically sober again by the time Curtis started. I got a brief grip on myself and managed to weave my way to the front, but then he came on – and I froze. I suppose I was expecting him to look like the dude who played him in the Anton Corbijn film, but, well, he didn’t. He didn’t even look like Ian Curtis. He looked like Ian Curtis after living in Los Angeles for ten years. Tanned, vivacious, prosperous, muscular… healthy. Albeit with a cigarette in his mouth. He sported that odd pentagonal guitar from the ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ video and greeted the audience with an exuberant ‘Good afternoon, zone T109!’ All wrong. Then they started to play, and when I realised it was ‘Dead Souls’ I just couldn’t handle it. I felt like I was going to be instantly sick, although as I’ve found out many times, there’s never anything to be sick with. I had to leave. I turned and started to push my way out again before he’d even started singing. And when he did, everyone around me – smiling, pretty, perfect young faces with their unfeasibly spotless indie uniforms – shouted out the lyrics with him (‘They keep calling me!’) as if he were playing a Bon Jovi song. I had a harder time getting out than in, but people were so enthralled by what they were watching that no one noticed the desperate, heavy-breathing twat trying to make a run for it. Halfway out I started yelling at people. ‘Why’s everyone so fucking cheerful?’ ‘This is so fucked up, does no one realise?’ ‘This is not a happy song! Why is everyone roaring it out like a football chant?’ – that kind of thing. At one point I was so deranged, I thought I saw Saff standing far away in another part of the crowd. I screamed out her name and then piled over to try and talk to her. When I got there of course it wasn’t her at all, just someone who looked vaguely sort of nothing like her whatsoever. I finally broke free from the mob, ran all the way back to my house and lay on my lounge floor crying for about a week.

But I got over it.

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MY THIRD NOVEL, CROWDFUNDING WITH UNBOUND NOW!

March 27th, 2017

I’m crowdfunding my third novel with UNBOUND right now! Felix Romsey’s Afterparty can be pledged for in digital or paperback formats on its very own webpage here.

See a video of me yapping about it BELOW.

Felix Romsey’s Afterparty is a rock festival with a big difference. Put it this way: this year’s lineup includes Elliott Smith, Minnie Riperton, Serge Gainsbourg, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Michael Hutchence and, making only his second live appearance since his death: John Lennon. It’s the Glastonbury of the Afterlife; the place where dearly departed music fans can let off steam to the sounds that soundtracked their lives, and where late rock stars can be rock stars again. Flamboyant, acerbic promoter Felix Romsey and his amiable assistant Adrian “Podge” Jones frantically ride the anticipation among the capacity crowd and a backstage area chockful of celebs; with the stakes this high, they’d be anxious even if everything were running smoothly.

But lately, things have most definitely NOT been running smoothly. The recently-arrived David Bowie has been snagged by a rival promoter, and Felix has reason to believe that a plot to oust him as the Afterlife’s preeminent rock impresario is afoot. And when headliner John Lennon, just as he’s drawing breath to sing his first note onstage, vanishes – no, I mean really vanishes – Felix and Podge have no choice but to find out who’s behind the sabotage, and to try and rescue their star attraction – and their festival’s reputation – before it’s too late. Early in their search they run into the inscrutable Jane Brown, who at first encounter seems little more than a Lennon superfan, but proves to be invaluable, introducing Felix and Podge to the chilling possibility that their quarry mightn’t be up here, but in fact, down there…

Felix Romsey’s Afterparty is a novel for anyone who’s ever heard the cliché “the great rock festival in the sky” and spent a few fleeting moments wondering what said celestial festival – and indeed, the reality it inhabits – might really be like.

Conversations can continue on Twitter @timwthornton
I’ve Been Detecting You

March 2nd, 2017

What do you do when you’re a quirky, post-punky guitar band who once upon a time sold out Alexandra Palace? What do you do when you’re the second most successful noughties indie band from Leeds, forever in the shadow of a strangely named mob who turned to the pop side after their singer became a TV star? What do you do when you were born into the age of MySpace and reasonably healthy CD sales, and now find yourself releasing a new record called Broken Glances into a world where attention spans are shorter than this very sentence and vinyl is sold as a lifestyle item in Tesco? What, oh Gods of British meat’n’potatoes indie rock, do you do when you’re The Pigeon Detectives?

Now, before we continue, I ought to admit I’d be lying if I said much of my time and brainpower had been spent pondering the travails of The Pigeon Detectives since Take Her Back dropped off the XFM playlist in 2007. It’s possible that when I last heard a note of their music, Twitter had only just been launched, Spotify was but a cyber-itch in some Swedish techie dude’s pants, and even Facebook was still something teenagers would occasionally be seen dead using. To be perfectly honest, I’d more or less assumed that TPD – if I may call them that – had probably jacked in detecting pigeons and started looking for something else, like maybe a day job. Turns out they’ve released three further albums, the fortunes of which I won’t dwell upon. Let’s all just pretend the last ten years haven’t happened and freshly examine the silver disc, sorry, I mean cluster of megabytes cannoning out of my knackered JVC speakers as I write. For what reasons, then, should you waste your precious bandwidth on The Pigeon Detectives? I counted at least seven. Let’s go:

1. They write real melodies. It’s one of my pet peeves that when most people observe “ooh, they’re so melodic” about such-and-such a band, what they really mean is “ooh, they harmonise really nicely with the chords”. Not so Matt Bowman and chums. Broken Glances is stuffed with proper, carefully constructed, independent melodies, and that can only mean one thing: earworms. My whole trip to Shoreditch and back just now was accompanied by the chorus to Lose Control, and the refrain of A Little Bit Alone squirmed around my head all morning until I had to play an entire side of an ELO album to purge it.

The band had been waiting for their breakfast so long, they were starting to sit on the table. (photo: Sonic PR)

2. Enemy Lines is the indie-stomp comeback single of your dreams. Don’t be fooled by the tranquil guitar intro. It soon builds into the kind of roaring anthem Steve Lamacq still has wet dreams about. Oh, and hats off to the guitarist for ripping the shit out of the arpeggio from Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants To Rule The World and making it his screaming, overdriven own.

3. The drummer is awesome. Yeah, yeah, I know… one drummer sniffing another drummer’s arse, and all that. But Jimmi Naylor (nice name, by the way) actually performs a function other than driving the beat along. Wolves, for example, was a – dare I say it – slightly plodding opener before the counter-intuitive beat started. He gives it some top-notch Bloc Party on Stay With Me, and stamps some credible reverse-authority on Falling In Love by staying out of the picture entirely, save for a few cymbal flourishes.

4. They wear influences on their sleeves. They’re clearly a band of music fans, and aren’t shy about showing it. But far from recycling the predictable Who and Small Faces moments they’re obviously capable of, their range extends to more recent, unexpected fayre, with lashings of electronica and post-rock. Sometimes I find myself behaving like a wine expert while listening: “Ahh… I’m getting flavours of Teleman… and maybe a hint of Daughter and… yes! The XX. What vineyard is this? Would this go well with bourguignon, sorry, I mean hotpot?”

5. They’re not afraid to experiment. While the album sounds admirably coherent, they’ve managed to stuff several different sonic ideas into each song, from the progged-out trippiness of Munro to the flanged-out noisiness of Postcards. This was evidently an album TPD had fun making, perhaps the better for not having the fear and pressure of hit-making dragging them down.

(Sonic PR)

6. There’s emotion in them there hills. For all their laddish exterior, the Pigeons aren’t averse to showing the cracks in their armour. A Little Bit Alone sees Matt Bowman coming on like a humble Ian Brown, with genuine yearning in his voice as he calls for the one he’s missing, while Falling In Love delivers a convincing slice of death-of-the-party gloom: “Go out every weekend,” Bowman croaks, “repeat all the things we did before and all the things we did the time before.” Know how you feel, buddy.

7. They haven’t completely forgotten where they came from. I don’t mean geographically – although to be frank I’m pretty certain they haven’t forgotten that either – but that they bubbled up from the happy, guitary, shouty indie rock constituency. True, there’s no Take Her Back on the record, but with the crunch of Sounding The Alarm and the Charlatans-esque lollop of Change My World (the record’s sole conventional indie track), they betray an honesty and a welcome lack of pretention that certain other noughties bands from Leeds might do well to heed. (Miaow! Did I say that out loud?)

So what do you do when you’re The Pigeon Detectives? Well, you don’t doggedly attempt to recapture past glories. You don’t ill-advisedly go for the corporate pop jugular. You certainly don’t phone it in, and you don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. But you do energetically strive for something new and something better, and, by the refreshing and engaging sound of Broken Glances, you do the only thing you can do: make a bunch of songs that you yourself most definitely want to listen to. It may not be the most startlingly original album released in 2017, but you’ll be hard pushed to find another indie rock record that so relentlessly believes in itself. Here’s hoping many people out there believe in it too.

Broken Glances is out now

Conversations can continue on Twitter @timwthornton
My letter to my MP, re: Article 50 bill

January 26th, 2017

Dear Diane

I write to urge you to oppose the Article 50 bill.

This bill is so basic and apologetic it may as well have been conceived on the back of a beer mat. It’s the latest in a series of witless actions from a Prime Minister whose only concern appears to be obsequiously appeasing Tory voters and the right-wing press. But I’m afraid she’s not the only politician putting personal power before the greater good.

In his new pro-Brexit stance, clearly Jeremy Corbyn is ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Labour politicians (and, I suspect, party members like myself) were pro-EU in the run up to the referendum and probably, whether privately or not, still very much harbour a wish that this crazy Brexit business would end. Corbyn – perhaps understandably – is petrified of losing votes in the industrial heartlands to UKIP. But I believe he has ceased to lead Labour as a party of opposition, which will cause him to haemorrhage far more votes than he would otherwise sustain.

The EU is not perfect and never has been. But what we’ve seen since June 23rd 2016 is utter madness, and has made Britain a global laughing stock, not to mention spurred dangerously right-wing political movements the world over. When thinking about Brexit, there are so many things to get angry about it makes my head spin, but I’ll pick one: the utter, indecent refusal of the government to guarantee the rights of EU citizens who have made Britain their home. Waiting for a reciprocal agreement from other EU countries is a nonsense. We’re the ones doing the leaving: we should lead the way, set the example for others to follow. In opposing the Article 50 bill, Labour could stop this insanity from progressing.

I have lived in Hackney since 2000 and have always voted Labour here. I hate to make a threat, but as you have always been, in my view, an honest and decent politician, I think it would be honest and decent for me to let you know: if Labour largely vote in favour of the Article 50 bill, I will certainly be voting for a different political party next time.

I appreciate the difficult position most Labour MPs are currently in, for all sorts of reasons. But sadly, I cannot stomach Jeremy Corbyn saying “we will not subvert the will of the British people” any longer. You and I both know that 37% of the electorate does not constitute “the British people”. We also know how many of these voters fell for exaggerations and outright, career-enhancing lies during the referendum campaign, and how many people would vote differently were they given the chance again.

Thank you for being a great MP; I trust you will continue to represent the needs and opinions of the Hackney North and Stoke Newington constituency, as you always have done.

Yours sincerely

Tim Thornton
Transporting Me Temporarily Into Another Life – My Albums Of 2016

December 21st, 2016

This time last year, I wrote in these very pages that my desire for music in 2016 was for “something that confuses the shit out of me while educating, entertaining and transporting me temporarily into another life, so that I remain incapable of even cooking my dinner.” Well, if there’s one thing that we’d have wanted during this strangest of years, it was to be magically teleported somewhere else, uncooked dinner or otherwise. I’ve tried to find a common thread in my Albums Of The Year list, and although a subtle one, it definitely seems to be each record’s ability to astrally project me into another galaxy while I listen, some more effectively than others. But each is raging proof that, whatever else may be disintegrating around us, music is still here for us, still has our back, can still deliver us from all – or perhaps most – ills. So here we go… in diplomatic alphabetical order…

Brodka – Clashes (Kayax/PIAS)

This album has soundtracked my world since I chanced upon it in June. There are so many good things to say about it, I barely know where to start. Monika Brodka is the sort of auteur who doesn’t come along too often: capable of moulding an entire creative universe for herself, where music, lyrics, pictures and videos are all part of the same wonderfully unified and deeply original force. Within this, she can do low-fi punk (My Name Is Youth), post-punk (Horses), pre-apocalyptic tension (Can’t Wait For War), gothic oddities (Holy Holes, Funeral), latino folk (Santa Muerte), even off-kilter bubblegum pop (Up In The Hill), all of which manages to call to mind long, lonely drives across the haunting and slightly foreboding landscapes of the artist’s home, Poland. I have a funny feeling that, come 2018, there will be rather a lot more people listening to Brodka.

Car Seat Headrest – Teens of Denial (Matador)

Fucking YES… American indie-rock finds its fire again. Listening to the Car Seat Headrest album reminds me of the first time I heard Weezer, or Beck, or even Elliott Smith, but with none of the latter’s occasional tendency to self-aggrandise, nor the former’s brattishness, and with a sense of humour that the medius has largely abandoned. A thumping, noisy but languid treat, replete with some absolutely ace songwriting. But the drummer needs to tighten his snare, it sounds like a frigging box of marbles (that’s probably the whole point).

Douglas Dare – Aforger (Erased Tapes)

Chords and melody. The two enigmatic ingredients to the basic music of a song. I always find it amazing when music writers through the years rattle on about songs being “melodic” when they’re actually nothing of the kind. When a songwriter manages actual, true melody, it reaches out to grab you by the emotional goolies like nothing else. Douglas Dare is one such songwriter. That he then fuses these melodies to the most inventive, exploratory of lyrics is enough in itself to seal the deal, but – rather like getting yet another large Christmas present when you’ve already been given ten – you also have Fabian Prynn’s visionary beats and production to contend with. Aforger is everything I wanted Whelm‘s follow-up to be: harder, bolder, more adventurous and eclectic, but with Douglas’s voice soaring above the whole thing like it never soared before, telling poetic tales of doomed romances and personal dramas in places far and near. If you need an antidote to all the festive pap and miguided optimism this holiday season, get yourself a copy of Aforger, stick on some decent headphones, and dive into Douglas Dare’s cathedralic infinity pool.

Douglas Dare’s Aforger. The vinyl comes with a free mirror on the back of the sleeve.

Field Music – Commontime (Memphis Industries)

Ah, the Brewis brothers. Imagine being a creative partnership with your sibling. I can’t. But there’ve been many of them in rock over the years. I suppose what you get with a brother or sister is a cutting-through-the-bullshit directness which allows you to be as endlessly creative as possible. The best moments on this album – The Noisy Days Are Over, Disappointed, I’m Glad, Same Name – display this unfettered drive better than practically anything else I’ve heard this year. I guess Field Music’s insularity might also be responsible for the record being just a tad too long, but generally it’s a fresh, funky barrage of itchy tunes, as if someone’s imprisoned Steely Dan in a Sunderland warehouse for a few weeks with only the occasional Pot Noodle for refreshment.

Future Of The Left – The Peace & Truce Of Future Of The Left (Prescriptions)

Sometimes, I don’t want nice music. I don’t want pretty harmonies, carefully crafted middle-eights, universally positive themery and endlessly heartfelt balladry. I want a grimy, twisted, ear-splittingly grungy racket with barbed lyrics screamed at me by a man who looks like he’d make a decent assassin unless you served him a well-made cup of tea. I want lurching, lumbering “hit singles” called things like Back When I Was Brilliant, scratchy blasts of sarcasm called things like Proper Music and In Grass Parade, and Young-Knives-esque middle class psychodramas called things like Miner’s Gruel. For those special moments, thank goodness we have Future Of The Left.

Anna Meredith – Varmints (Moshi Moshi)

I know very little of the background to Varmints, but there’s a made-up story which pops into my mind whenever I listen to this madcap fairground ride of a record. Hardcore classical composing wunderkind Anna Meredith is hanging out in a café somewhere, and on comes an Everything Everything record, or a Dutch Uncles record, or even a Foals record. She knocks back her coffee, thinks, “Your know what? I can out-math these slackers,” pops into a nearby studio and a year later emerges with Varmints under her arm. Am I anywhere near the truth? Who knows. All I know is that Varmints is forty-seven of the most entertaining minutes you will spend this year, sounding not unlike a jam session between John Adams and Vince Clarke after dropping a tab of acid each.

Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool (XL)

In the name of not being totally predictable, I really tried to not include this one. Really I did. But hell, it’s like trying to not include William Shakespeare in a roundup of the best late-sixteenth century English playwrights. Incredibly, I still occasionally encounter Radiohead fans – usually the old-school Bends/OK Computer mob who tuned out when Amnesiac didn’t turn out to be the “normal” yang to Kid A‘s leftfield ying – who haven’t yet heard A Moon Shaped Pool. So at the risk of oversimplification: this is a very good Radiohead album. Good like No Surprises is good, like Fake Plastic Trees is good, like Talk Show Host is good, even like Ripcord is good. But also, good like Nude is good, and like The Gloamingis good. Right, I think I’ve exhausted that particular motif long enough. Look: it’s good, all right?

She Drew The Gun – Memories Of The Future (Skeleton Key)

Of all the global problems we face as 2016 draws to its awkward, shuffling close, one stands taller in my mind than most: not enough people know about She Drew The Gun. That sounds like one of my dumber jokes, but I’m actually serious. Because SDTG’s singer, Louisa Roach, writes songs like If You Could See, a warning from an inhabitant of a particularly screwed-up future world, telling us to basically sort our shit out or global destruction and general nastiness will quickly ensue. She writes songs like Poem, a misleadingly mellow bile chant about the increasingly yawning rich/poor divide. I could go on. Essentially, if Apple were to invent some new device to upload Roach’s lyrics into every greedy fuckwit’s brain the planet over (the iRoach, perhaps?) things might get a little better. Oh, and the music’s pretty damn rocking too. Hats off to a particularly unique talent, and lest we forget, hats off to The Coral for discovering it.

Memories Of The Future. My index finger visible through the hole.

Sinoptik – Interplanet Overdrive (none – someone sign ‘em up!)

Stoner rock from another world. Well, it might as well be; Sinoptik hail from eastern Ukraine, where the first world problems of British bands vanish into a civil war bomb crater. Somehow, this epitome of the power trio manage to play headline-standard rock shows without so much as an LED by way of stage production, and somehow, they’ve made one of the most inventive albums I’ve heard in a while. Like Teleman, their strengths lie both in a hunger for moving sounds forward, but also with a reverence for the past: Hail tips its hat to both Zeppelin and the folky end of grunge, while Crop Circles sounds a bit like the Chemical Brothers covering a movement from Pink Floyd’s Echoes. And as musical visionaries worth keeping an eye on go, singer/guitarist/keyboardist Dima Sinoptik is up there with Brodka in his all-encompassing full bodysuit of pure talent.

Interplanet Overdrive. Not available physically, so here’s what it looks like trapped inside my computer.

Teleman – Brilliant Sanity (Moshi Moshi)

What with Future Of The Left’s masterful Back When I Was Brilliant, “brilliant” is shaping up to be my Word Of The Year where music is concerned. And there is indeed something brilliantly sane about Teleman. On the face of it, their journey from the meat’n’potatoes of former band Pete & The Pirates to the jolly krautrock of Düsseldorf is a logical, sane, even predictable one. But what lifts them above everyone else – and where the sane turns inwards, if you will – is their evident and deep love for 1970s pop. Glory Hallelujah sounds like Tangerine Dream covering an ELO song (or maybe the other way round). Superglue has a certain 10cc-ish charm to it, while also suggesting the band have been listening to McCartney II, which is never a bad thing. The whole album pops with earworms and quirky grooves, with singer Thomas Sanders engagingly guiding us through the restless aural terrain in a tone suggesting what David Gedge might have sounded like as a teenage choirboy.

And there you have it. Thanks for reading my words this year, have a walloping good Christmas and Happy New Year and see you on the other side. Thanks as ever to the Huffpost team and all at Fink HQ. x

Conversations can continue on Twitter @timwthornton
Polish Post-Punk, Estonian Electro And Czechpop: One Night In Budapest

December 7th, 2016

In 1994, the rock band dEUS released Suds & Soda, a debut single suggesting a drunken fantasy jam between the Beastie Boys and The Pogues after a Faith No More concert. But the all-powerful British music press barely noticed the actual sound of the record. One could picture the journos sniggering over one of their marathon liquid lunches: “Hoo-ha-haa! Have you heard? There’s a new band called dEUS… and they’re… pffft!!… from Belgium.”

It was moronic: the notion that a crunchy contemporary rock band coming from mainland Europe was somehow laughable, just as the idea of a global smash hit single from South Korea seemed before 2012. But laugh they did, fuelled by the constant spectre of Eurovision and the surfeit of slightly questionable 1980s acts like Baltimora, Europe and Modern Talking. Not that it harmed dEUS, who were, and are, awesome; as were the torrent of other ace continental acts that followed, to the point where it’s now as common to hear a band on the radio hailing from the other side of the Eurotunnel as from this.

Or is it? Europe’s a bloody big place, and with pop music, all European countries are equal but some are more equal than others. The torrent slows to a trickle the further east you go; much as the arrival of dEUS inspired chortles in the 90s, any band from beyond Berlin has to fight through an – if you will – iron curtain of humour before they’re taken seriously in Britain. Don’t believe me? Conduct an experiment. Tell a friend you’re seeing “a Ukranian rock band” tonight. I guarantee one of these reactions. A puzzled expression, accompanied by “reeeally?” An amused suggestion they’ll be using an electric balalaika. A full-on gale of laughter. A tight smile and a clipped, “Oh, how interesting,” with the clear implication that your evening’s entertainment will be crap.

In the movie version of this article, cut to a shot of me in a vibey rock club in Budapest, pint of Hungarian beer in hand, watching a Ukranian rock band. A three-piece Ukrainian rock band called Sinoptik, who are busily proving they are not crap. Far from it. In fact they’re a gloriously unfettered and ethereal barrage of rock’n’roll noise, with the searing melodies, nail-biting dynamics and surprises to match. I’m among a crowd of a hundred, but singer/guitarist Dmitriy performs like he’s headlining Glastonbury.

Dmitriy from Sinoptik. Pic by fnyrzkny

Sinoptik are here, as am I, for the very first Budapest Showcase Hub (BUSH), a conference and music festival with the rallying cry of “looking at the Eastern European music scene from a brand new perspective”. And perspective, when considering a band like Sinoptik, is what you need. They drove from Ukraine, presenting visas at the EU border which took months and a bank account of savings to procure. They recently transferred their HQ to Ukraine’s capital Kiev, after their hometown Donetsk was engulfed by civil war. The struggles of a band in London these are not. And yet here they are, mopping the floor with any rock act I’ve encountered this decade.

You see, the Eastern European music scene is getting its shit together, with the various promoters, labels and bands joining forces to export their own music to their western neighbours. And it’s a no-brainer: in 2016, there’s no reason why the next big acts can’t come from Prague, Belgrade or Vilnius. The talent’s certainly there. One of BUSH’s headliners is Brodka, a singer-songwriter from Warsaw of staggering confidence and vision, her latest record Clashes sounding like the possible result of a post-punk band being locked in a cathedral for the night. A big hit at home, it has yet to make much of a dent abroad, Brodka herself eyeing the challenges ahead with knowing humour: “I’m ready to build my audience album by album, but it’s difficult to break the market when you’re Polish. Let’s face it, it’s not like being from Iceland where every band has an instant ‘high-quality’ tag thanks to Björk.”

Brodka. Pic by fnyrzkny

People mention Iceland a lot here. It’s not hard to see why. When I ask IAMYANK, a distinctive electronic artist from Budapest itself, where he would choose to work if not here, he replies “Iceland” without hesitation. “It’s a resilent, off-the-beaten track place which happens to make beautiful music. They’ve built a brand… if a group said they’re from Iceland, you’d check it out. The same isn’t true for Hungary.”

One senses that people here are waiting to see who’ll hit big first, hoping others can follow in the slipstream. Tony Duckworth, from indie umbrella label PIAS, says, “there is a good chance that, by 2021, we will have internationally successful performers from the region.” Who will finally do it? Brodka? Tommy Cash, the arse-percussionist (no, really) rapper from Estonia? Or someone else, like Cash’s rather more savoury compatriots, the electro-rock three-piece I Wear* Experiment? Having enjoyed their single Patience – a blast of catchy, of-the-moment Nordic pop – I meet the Tallinners before their headline set at BUSH. They’re energetic, friendly and bursting with passion for what they do, but with a refreshingly global ambition. “We’re touring in South Korea,” enthuses guitar/synth man Hando Jaksi. “And Japan, and China. Our music’s popular in those places, and if people want to hear you play, I really feel you should get out there.” Live, I Wear* Experiment’s self-assuredness is unavoidable, vocalist/keyboardist Johanna Eenma whipping up the crowd at the Kuplung club like they’re down the road at Budapest’s epic Sziget festival. Stage right, drummer Mikk Simson smacks his kit with a positivity that verges on the maniacal.

Johanna from I Wear* Experiment. Pic by Sinco

Slightly mad levels of positivity are present throughout the festival, in fact. Mid-evening, I catch Ghost Of You, a frenetic quartet from Brno, Czech Republic, who combine a Madchester-ish swagger with the urgency (and instrument swapping tendency) of The Coral. At one of the conference’s many symposiums, I witness an impassioned speech from Fruzsina Szép, a Budapest local but currently festival director of Lollapalooza Berlin. Halfway through the talk, it would be fair to say she goes off on one, calling on the audience to celebrate the diversity of talent from the region, insisting we think as one nation, rather than lots of smaller ones. It’s an inspiring, emotional oration, which I’m not ashamed to admit causes me to make a complete arse of myself and break into spontaneous applause. But is it naïve, or do others feel the same? Turns out: they do. Daniel Somló, BUSH organiser (and also, conveniently, IAMYANK’s drummer), strikes much the same note.

“That’s what this festival’s about… the realisation that we’re not separate, but one country with 140 million people… the same problems, the same thinking. We should help each other.” Virgo Sillamaa, director of Music Estonia, takes the point further. “If we’d open up and integrate – and we already are – it might shift the axis away from the traditional Anglo-American canon.” But he’s quick to point out the Catch-22. “The internet has opened new ways, but also an unprecedented number of contenders.” Alex Bruford, director at London’s ATC Live agency, agrees. “The standards are high, because everyone’s at it. The industry is now more open-minded to listen to a band from Hungary, or wherever. But once they do listen: the music has to be exceptional.”

Ghost Of You. Pic by Sinco

How do the region’s undiscovered musicians feel, though? Is all you really need that age-old ingredient: being good?

“You do need more than that,” shrugs IAMYANK. “Things are going well for us here, but there are only so many times we can play Budapest.” Some countries are, I suspect, better at the whole music industry thing than others? “Of course,” nods Daniel Somló. “We’re trying to play in Poland. It has 40 million people; Hungary has 10 million. You can’t compare them. Also, Poland is close to Berlin, and they use that closeness really well. There’s even a government plan to bring Polish bands to Berlin, and vice versa. Also, there are many Polish people in England; whenever they go back home, they bring fresh culture with them.”

Magdelena Jensen, CEO of Chimes Agency in Warsaw, is cautiously positive about her country’s merits in this field. “The key is building confidence in what we do. Performers from Poland sometimes have a bit of a complex which holds them back, plus the industry occasionally suffers from an unhealthy negative competitiveness. But thanks to travel opportunities, conferences and the sharing of experiences, this is changing rapidly.”

Listening to Brodka’s tantalising album, or feeling the primal blast of Sinoptik‘s live show, I’m wondering – perhaps impatiently – why all this change takes so damn long? BUSH’s official hashtag is #newkidsfromthebloc, but it’s a long time since the bloc; are they really new kids?

“We’re talking about the creation of a whole sector,” explains Virgo Sillamaa. “An entire music industry ecosystem… more than just developing a talented artist.”

IAMYANK Live Band. Pic by Sinco

Late evening, as the last chords of IAMYANK’s atmospheric set die out, I drain my pint and wander off into the Budapest night, with many earworms squirming around my slightly drunken brain. It’s a typical musician’s tendency to want everything to happen immediately, but to use a couple of old clichés, these bands and musicians just need to keep the faith, think positively, carry on banging out the tunes. Or, as I Wear* Experiment put it rather more eloquently, “beautiful patience, flow into my soul.” Here endeth the lesson.

*The asterisk is actually part of their name. I don’t know what it means.

DECEMBER 2016

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Books Still Rock

November 26th, 2016

Forgive me if this sounds a bit pathetic, but it takes a lot for a book to hold my attention these days. Like everyone, I’m frantic from seven ‘til eleven, and even if I do manage to catch a few minutes of downtime, sitting in a chair to read instantly makes me feel like a home counties housewife with a Mills & Boon novel. Even my traditional “guilt free” times for reading – in bed, on public transport, on the loo – are constantly threatened by that constantly threatening scourge of modern concentration: the smartphone. In order to compete with the latest cat video, Daily Mash article or even a rubbishy Buzzfeed list – not to mention my scintillating Twitter feed – that book in question has to be seriously good.

In fact, to struggle through a tome of any magnitude, I need the same feeling when I look at the book as the one I get from spying the last beer in the fridge, or the last piece of chocolate or slice of cheescake… “ooh, come on, I could have just a littlemore of that, couldn’t I?” I usually leave books I’m reading in my hallway, and if I don’t get tempted for a moment as I pass, to steal a cheeky half-minute to read a couple of paragraphs when I’m really supposed to be doing something else, there’s probably no point in bothering. Conversely, if I look at a book, sigh, and say to myself, “uh, well… I suppose I’d better crack on with that, hadn’t I…” – sorry, but off to the charity shop that book goes.

So it’s with particular pleasure that I can tell you about three absolute slam-dunk top-hole bangers of books that I’ve been lucky enough to consecutively read over the last few months. Each of them had me stopping every few pages – not to check Facebook or see if anyone had replied to my latest Guardian comment – but to gaze at the cover and marvel at how marvellous the book was, which is something I’ve been doing with all great books since I was about six years old. All three of them are labours of love, and are, in their own way, works of art, lovingly crafted and imaginatively published. And only two of them are about music. And here they are:

1. Sick On You – Andrew Matheson

You’ve read a hundred “bands trying to make it” books, but none of them is like this one. Two reasons. One is that it focuses on a rarely visited corner of British music: pre-punk, and I’m not talking about pub rock, I’m referring to the immediately post-sixties crop of anti-prog, glam-sceptic, anger-ridden, attitude-laden, year-zero noiseniks. The British New York Dolls, then. The Hollywood Brats, the group in question for whom our spiky narrator was the lead vocalist, were the classic also-rans, navigating their way past a bewildering list of stars both current (Cliff Richard, Keith Moon) and eventual (Queen) with Forrest Gump-like prescience, but zero success of their own. But it’s the second element that really lifts the book above all the other failed-careerographies you might encounter, and it is, simply, Matheson’s hilarious turn of phrase. Any examples I present will probably look a bit pants out of context but here’s a few: so boring is a house party thrown by the aforementioned Queen, we’re told that “for the first couple of minutes we think we’ve got the wrong house and instead have stumbled into a retirement party for a particularly dull Ecclesiastical Studies professor.” Describing an angry mafia-connected manager, Matheson doesn’t write “he looks a bit cross” but “the scientific instrument has yet to be invented that could measure the lack of mirth in his arrangement of stretched lips and gritted teeth.” My kind of writer. The book is stuffed with hysterical anecdotes – like all good music books, almost none of them are about the music itself – and I could be here all day trying to single the best out, but the tale of Matheson and bandmate breaking into a neighbouring disused shop to stop a perpetually ringing telephone is among the funniest I’ve heard all decade.

Sick On You. Crazy clothes, crazy book.

2. Good Night And Good Riddance – David Cavanagh

If I told you this book was an exhaustive description of 250 episodes of John Peel’s radio show spanning 35 years, you could be forgiven for thinking it sounded a bit speccy and earnest and solely of interest to hardcore Peel enthusiasts, but I can sure you it is nothing of the kind. Canavagh’s peculiar genius is that he’s woven Peel’s life events, the headline news stories of the day, the ups and downs of BBC Radio 1 and the music played on Peel’s show so deftly together that the whole thing reads like a riveting social drama. Will Peel eventually triumph over the fickle radio programmers? Will the various pop stars he’s helped make household names forget all about him? When will he be conquered by punk? Midway through the 90s when he’s asked to sit in for Jakki Brambles on her incredibly mainstream lunchtime slot, he’s lambasted by the listeners via fax (thank God Twitter didn’t exist) and snubbed by the regular daytime DJs (a particularly awkward encounter with Gary Davies). More so than any of the biographies about the man, we get to know Peel… really, really know him… his modesties, his wit, his weaknesses, his tastes, what it takes to (finally) make him angry. It’s nail-biting stuff, and a must for anyone wondering how we ended up with something as great as BBC Radio 6 Music, which often feels like one long John Peel show.

Good Night and Good Riddance. How rude.

3. The Good Immigrant – edited by Nikesh Shukla

Awesome though the above two books are, they didn’t quite provide the rollercoaster of highs and lows I’ve felt while reading this quintessentially 2016 document. Nikesh Shukla has been rightly hammering the promo for this book so it’s possible you’ve heard about it already, but let me add my own loud applause to the project: a collection of 21 essays, stories, articles and reflections by 21 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic writers, exploring themselves, their families, their experiences, and how they perceive the attitudes towards them in the UK, both in the earlier parts of their lives and right now. Again, there might be people reading this who think that sounds, y’know, a bit worthy and unexciting, but largely due to the sheer sky-high quality of the writing, it most certainly is not. It’s a compelling and fascinating ride, often highly amusing, often heartbreaking, causing me to do no small amount of self-examination about my own views and social reflexes. Although I am probably the epitome of what my Dad used to refer to as a “bog-standard Brit”, I consider myself to be as open-minded, equal-opportunties-conscious and culturally respectful as people get (I live in Hackney, for God’s sake), but even I encountered descriptions of several bits of thinking or behaviour within the book that made me think: “Shit! I do that.” Wei Ming Kam’s article about challenging stereotypes, for example, made me ashamed of my passive assumptions that “model minority” East Asians are all “quiet and hardworking”. It had never occurred to me that, although the “third largest ethnic grouping in the UK”, it could be An Event when an East Asian is seen on British television, as Vera Chok’s essay suggests. The book is heaving with great stories and episodes that make you leap up and down with with rage or laughter, often both: Riz Ahmed’s brilliant tale of his acting auditions influencing the hassle he receives at airports, and vice versa; Varaidzo’s savagely witty “A Guide To Being Black”; Coco Khan’s charming, sad account of seduction and of local, casual racism; Daniel York Loh’s hilarious recollections of watching the mysterious masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki on telly as a kid; and Nikesh Shukla’s own story of language misuse and abuse. J. K. Rowling has called the book “important and timely” and as usual I agree with everything she says; especially in this hatred-laden year, I wish I could upload the book straight into each British human’s brain and then give everyone a day off to think about it. In the absence of this magical ability, I urge you to buy it. Today.

The Good Immigrant. Way cool book, way cool cover.

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Composing Movie Scores 2: Melvyn Goes To Hollywood

November 26th, 2016

Often contrary to what your head’s telling you, it feels good to participate in something that seems, at the time, to be a leap of faith. The music world is full of such uncertain nuggets. Remixes and production jobs you never know will be approved. Gigs in strange places with hilariously convoluted logistics. Collaborations with orchestras that might, right up until you walk into the concert hall, turn out to be some elaborate practical joke. And spending a couple of years writing and recording music for a short film from under which the financial carpet has been pulled two or three times, but which ends up being completed via that seventh wonder of the altruistic digital age: crowdfunding.

Yes, it’s true. The Five Wives And Lives Of Melvyn Pfferberg, the 17-minute comic epic to which I have added my Britpop-meets-Klezmer noises, has been filmed, post-produced and, finally, unleashed upon an unsuspecting global gaggle of film festival curators. Director, producer and general auteur nouvelle Damian Samuels must have done something right because LA Shorts Festival, that jewel in the Downtown LA cultural crown, has enveloped our movie into its enlightened bosom and will host Melvyn’s world premiere on Sept 6. At times like this, I like to muse upon precisely which bits of our creation a hopefully-packed theater of LA hipsters will enjoy the most.

Will it be down-on-his-luck Melvyn weeping as he tramps through a park full of romantic couples taking a stroll? Will it be the unveiling of the “Cupidatron” – a futuristic helmet showing your future with anyone you shake hands with? Will it be the perfectly-timed performance by Smallville‘s Callum Blue as the dating night emcee? Will it be Melvyn’s grand entrance, watched by gaping speed-dating colleagues including a cameo from Basement Jaxx’s Felix Buxton? Will it be Melvyn’s slushy picnic in the pretty company of TV’s Brooke D’Orsay? Will it be the scene where Melvyn has a romp with a somewhat more enormously proportioned lover on a bed strewn with pizzas and tortilla chips? Will it be the bit where he’s manacled to an S&M wheel, or confined to crutches by a clumsy girlfriend? Verily, this is a short movie that packs in as many comic highlights as an entire season of Extras, but without the crap bits.

I’m no expert at writing film music. That’s it; there’s no “but” following that statement. I haven’t a clue. All I knew was that I could write and arrange some crazy mashups and record it with my production partner-in-crime Max Gilkes, and then slap it on the film, hoping that my years appreciating the work of Marvin Hamlisch, Elmer Bernstein and Hans Zimmer had done a tiny bit of good. To be fair, it took a few attempts. Several times Max and I had to return to the old drawing board, reminding ourselves that we were making a film soundtrack and not a cool indie record. At last we got the formula right, the man Samuels gave us the green light, and our sound designer – longtime Monty Python collaborator and general legend André Jacquemin – added the tunes to the action. Phew – it worked. only one question remained… a question that has bugged John Barry and David Arnold on many an occasion… who the buggering heck are we gonna get to sing the theme song?

Damian Samuels and I sat down with a vat of coffee and, if memory serves, drew up a massive list of people. All my names were either highly credible (i.e. unknown) or meat’n’potatoes indie rock and therefore utterly inappropriate. Samuels’ suggestions were all as camp as Butlins and therefore thoroughly outlandish and unattainable. After a while we got out a marker pen and turned the list into a preposterously proportioned Venn diagram with – once we’d finished – only one name lurking in the crossover section, and that name was the Spice Girls’ Melanie C. “Leave it with me,” smiled Damian, and we parted, me thinking, “yeah… right,” and him thinking, well, Christ knows what, really, but some sort of celebrity magic must have happened because a couple of weeks later we were sitting in the control room of Basement Jaxx’s North London recording studio, with Mel C herself on the other side of the glass.

Pop-star dissenters can shelve all their nonsense: Melanie was absolutely bloody wonderful. She showed up, watched the film, had a cup of tea and then nailed it. The song went from sounding like a Blur C-side to a power-pop classic within, well, two minutes 20 seconds. Damian, producer Max and myself went straight to the pub and dumbfoundedly reflected on the musical conjuring trick that had just occurred. It’s only a small part of the film, but as Damian put it, the whole thing has rocketed to another level as a result. What was I saying at the start of this blog about leaps of faith? It works both ways: when major players such as Melanie C, or Callum Blue, or Brooke D’Orsay, or André Jacquemin, or the Oscar-winning post-production houses Milk and The Mill, take a chance on a project such as ours, the momentum ratchets up a couple of amazing gears and the art that results acquires a fresh urgency and elevated quality: everyone wins.

We hope for many more festivals but if you’re going to be in Los Angeles on Sept 6, take a trip down to LA Live and have a look at our movie, I guarantee you’re gonna laugh your pants off…

The Fives Wives And Lives Of Melvyn Pfferberg will premiere at the LA Shorts Film Festival on Sept 6 at 9.55pm, at LA Live (Downtown).

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The Top Five Unlikeliest Bands to Reform

July 19th, 2016

Rock band reunions, eh? Tricky blighters. It’s a subtle, elusive ingredient which separates a blatantly cash-grabbing, lacklustre reformation from a genuinely creative, energised, let’s-play-this-shit-like-it-was-supposed-to-sound-the-first-time enterprise. But everyone’s at it. In the last fifteen years they’ve all been falling to the temptation like… tempted fally things. Ride, The Stone Roses, The Police, Pixies, Guns N’ Roses (sort of)… and, of course, the hands-down winners of the land-speed reunion world record, LCD Soundsystem, who announced comeback shows approximately 48 hours after the last flightcase was hauled out of Madison Square Garden. There’s only one thing wrong with bands getting back together, and it’s bands announcing they’re splitting up, with much fanfare, in the first place.

All this casts fascinating light on the few major pop acts who’ve never been overwhelmed by the desire to jump back onto the rock’n’roll roundabout. Why are they resisting the enormous big fat cheques (surely) being waved at them almost perpetually by the world’s promoters? And who is the least likely to ever budge from their zero-tolerance standpoint? Let’s not forget, The Stone Roses’ John Squire even went as far as a Newsnight appearance to insist he would “absolutely most definitely not” rejoin the band; two years later there was a photo of him with his arm round Ian Brown, wearing a grin which said nothing as much “mortgage sorted”. So, here I present the top five bands who’ve never reformed (but who still could), in my own personal reverse order of unlikeliness.

5. WHAM!

On the face of it, this one is a total no-brainer. George Michael’s solo career not exactly troubling the world’s stadiums much these days, he calls up his old chum, they lose a bit of weight, grab a few session musos, rehearse all nine hundred number ones they had between 1982 and 1986 with some funky dancers and ultra-kitsch stage decor, book one enormo-tour with stockbroker-friendly ticket prices… and mop up the cash. There is one problem with this otherwise seamless plan, and his name is Andrew Ridgeley. I’m not talking about his absence of youthful hair or even his ever-questionable musical abilities (neither of those things having stopped Right Said Fred, after all), more that he enjoys a happily retired existence in Cornwall where he surfs, goes to the pub, lives in a manor house and occasionally gives the fit one from Bananarama a seeing to. Who in their right minds would want to leave all that for a bloody rock tour, of all things?

4. THE SMITHS

“Only number four?” I hear you cry. And yes: 10 years ago The Smiths would have been number one with a meat-free bullet, the famous court battle with drummer Mike Joyce and Morrissey’s basic stubbornness (not to mention Johnny Marr’s hectic solo and collaboration schedule) putting well and truly paid to any slight glimmer of hope for Smiths fans the cosmos over. But lately… I dunno. Something about Morrissey’s sheer bloody-mindedness in recent years makes me think he might suddenly do it, just to be controversial. It is without a doubt the very last thing people would expect of him, and his canyon-wide perverse streak might relish that. In fact, that’s a challenge. Do it, Mozzer. I dare you.

3. TALKING HEADS

Awkward one, Talking Heads. Superficially, they firmly dwell in the same “three members might, one definitely wouldn’t” town as The Smiths, David Byrne having repeatedly muttered things like “I don’t need the money badly enough” and “Musically, we’re miles apart”. As you can imagine, this hasn’t gone down massively well with the other Heads, with good ol’ spiky Tina Weymouth describing her silver-haired former-frontman as “a man incapable of returning friendship”. Miaow! But as I’m sure he will be thrilled to know, I’ve thought of a way for the relentlessly forward-thinking, art-obsessed Byrne to lift the band out of the stalemate: do the whole thing as an elaborate piece of performance art. If PJ Harvey can do it with the recording of an album, why can’t Talking Heads do it with a whole comeback tour? Hold initial meetings with agents in a glass box or even a theatre with a one-way mirror, and sell tickets to it. Display planning emails with promoters and tour managers on giant public-access messageboards. Record phone conversations about merchandise and rider requests and put them on Soundcloud. Hold rehearsals with invited audiences, have a webcam in the tour bus and the dressing rooms… open up the whole damn thing for the world to see, and then ask art critics to write huge arty tomes on the subject. Harrison, Weymouth and Frantz could finally bank that whopping cheque, and Byrne could relax in the knowledge that he’s maintaining his fiercely guarded originality. Huh, Dave? Like the idea? Do you? …. please?

2. ABBA

The craving for ABBA getting back together is so intense that it only takes the four of them humming a few bars of one of their album tracks in a restaurant somewhere for the world’s media to utterly cream themselves at the imminent possibility of a giant arena tour. Which is laughable really, not only for the desperate unlikelihood of it, but mainly because they were never much good at playing arenas in the first place. Even Björn himself cited one of the main reasons for not reforming as “all the stress of disappointing people night after night”. So, it’ll never happen. And yet: I can’t help thinking that it could happen, if only the four of them would stop thinking of it as this… big thing, if you’ll forgive the technical language. It really doesn’t have to be night after night in the world’s stadia, with all the huge arrangements, silly costumes, massive stage sets, super, indeed, troupers that would entail. What about a few stripped-down evenings at the Royal Festival Hall, Sydney Opera House, some posh theatre in Stockholm, the Carnegie in New York – that kind of thing? Jools-Holland style? (Without Jools Holland, of course.) Call it something low-key like A Low-Key Stripped-Down Evening With ABBA And Some Music And Stuff. Yes, it would sell out in half a nanosecond, but maybe they could film it, stream it live, have a laugh, be a bit more lighthearted about it. And it doesn’t have to be all full-tempo Gimme Gimme Gimme/Voulez-Vous disco o’clock. Play some introspective tracks, some ballads, perhaps some B-sides. Okay, maybe not the B-sides. But wouldn’t that just be awesome? Come on Agnetha, you know you want to…

1. THE JAM

Having remained resolute for many years, Sting apparently woke up one morning and – apropos very little at all – thought to himself, “Gotta call the boys.” Out of nowhere The Police’s globe-swaddling and small-country’s-GDP-earning 2007 reunion tour was born. The same moment of clarity could, in theory, happen to Paul Weller. The two men have similarities: massive post-punk career, massive slightly-jazzy solo career, slightly over-earnest interview manner, annoyingly youthful appearance. Where they differ is the passion with which they’ve denied any impulse to reform. The most vehement Sting ever seemed to get on the topic was to say, “if I ever reform The Police, I should be certified insane,” before adjusting his tantric yoga position and knocking back his fizzing glass of vintage champagne. Paul Weller, on the other hand, was asked the big “R” question during a recent Jam documentary. “Absolutely, categorically, fucking no,” he barked, with a look on his face like a Woking mugger about to pinch your iPhone. I’d say that was fairly conclusive. Other two blokes in The Jam: I’m sorry.

Follow Tim Thornton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/timwthornton
Tired of the EU Referendum? Here’s Some Music

June 16th, 2016

Enjoying the EU Referendum so far? Finding it full of scintillating, balanced, educational debate and reasoned argument, free from personal politics and ulterior motives? No, me neither. All things considered, I thought we might as well listen to some music. Hearing a few decent tunes never fails to calm me down, keep me sane, reassure me that – in the words of The Killers – everything will be all right.

So I made a playlist. Each tune on the playlist is from a different EU country. Why? Am I trying to send a subliminal message of togetherness and cultural enrichment? Well: subtract the word “subliminal” and you’re pretty much there. However – as a sort of disclaimer – I have no idea what any of the artists on the playlist think about the EU. Perhaps they hate it. Perhaps they love it. Perhaps, like any sensible human, they think it’s flawed but generally a force for good. Who knows? The only thing I would suggest is: in the UK at least, people find it very hard to view the EU with a sense of pride. They look at our gross financial contribution with relentless focus on what we get in return, rather than the genuine cultural, economic and peaceful achievements across the whole continent that our net contributions have assisted. There are bands on this list from all parts of Europe, from countries with wildly differing recent histories, but the one thing all these countries have in common is the vibrancy and vitality of their music scenes – and they’re getting better all the time. I like knowing that our nations are connected in this way. I like going into arts centres in Cornwall, Manchester, Bilbao, Budapest and Gdansk and seeing the same flag on the plaque in the foyer. It’s not everyone’s priority, but it’s one of mine. Anyway, enough… Just listen to the music…

We kick off with the sounds of Monikino Kino, a Czech/Slovakian duo. I love this – it’s soft but nicely spooky. Next we head to sunny Poland with Brodka, who holds the unlikely honour of having given me the whole playlist idea in the first place. I don’t mean she called me up and said, “Hey, dude, what about a playlist?” – but that I felt inspired after first hearing her spellbinding album, Clashes. Check it out, it’s a peach. In fact (contravening all playlist laws) she gets two tracks… and yes: My Name Is Youth is supposed to end like that…

Monikino Kino. Don’t mess with them.

Fink have met Strasbourg’s The Walk a couple of times over the years; it’s nice to hear their time-signature-challenging rock kicking ass on a full album. We’ve also encountered and played a show with Luxembourg’s Monophona, a cool Massive-Attack-esque trio who make great use of their varied strengths and Claudine’s unique voice. I’m not quite sure why Barcelona’s Böira have called a song Glasgowbut I’m picturing some weekender in the city’s West End, a hungover morning followed by another afternoon of hectic partying. The singer’s clearly too damaged to even open his mouth on this one. Oh, wait, they’re an instrumental band. Anyway, it’s a mighty rocking sound, like a slightly more commercial Explosions In The Sky. I wonder if writers compare all instrumental bands to Explosions In The Sky? It must be a bit like saying all a cappella groups sound like The Flying Pickets. Anyway, I digress.

HERE’S THE PLAYLIST

To Holland, and Drive Like Maria, who trick you with a mellow intro and then rock your pants off, unlike Budapest’s iamyank who does a nice line in Boards Of Canada-ish soundscapes set to some perky beats. Yes, I’ve included a British band on the list – the consistently amazing Daughter – partly because, hey, Britain’s still in the EU at the time of writing, and partly because they’re one of the more internationally-flavoured kids on the UK block. Fossa is my favourite track on their recent album Not To Disappear; just for a laugh, try tapping along to the early part of the song but then keep going when the beat changes. If it doesn’t spin you out, you clearly have a very special brain.

My old friend Jannik gave me about a hundred suggestions for a Danish band but I ended up going with his very first suggestion Baby In Vain, a scaldingly hot female rock trio who are apparently all about 12. Compete with that, Savages. And so to Italy, where we find the wonderfully named Nothing For Breakfast. There’s a Fink joke in there somewhere. At the risk of pissing off a large number of Italian people: decent homegrown indie rock isn’t massively easy to come by in Italy. I don’t mean there isn’t any, I just mean it’s not obviously hanging from the trees or served free with a glass of wine in a bar. So the passionate, dynamic Peaceful Corner is a like blast of dirty indie-rock air on a beautiful Tuscan hillside. Yep, I’m going straight to metaphor-Hades for that one.

Nothing For Breakfast. Nice wallpaper, lads.

We played a show once with Austria’s Schmieds Puls and they were a tough act to follow, as well as being jolly nice people. Great to see that Mira and the band are ripping it up over there; their sound is so precise and engaging. Sonically, it couldn’t be further away from Blahalouisiana, from neighbouring Hungary (which gets two bands because I couldn’t make up my mind). I have a soft spot for this song, as Blahalouisiana seem to be aping 80s pop-rock without trying too hard. Great chorus too. Another sharp contrast next: Germany’s Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, recommended to me by our friend Jan who’s always giving us the most insanely varied stuff to enjoy. This is deep… it soothes my soul, man…

Once you’ve been soothed, here come Stockholm’s Sudakistan to promptly unsoothe you. There’s something incredibly exciting about their sound: like a dream-cross between Ty Segall, Ozomatli and Chuck Mosely-era Faith No More. Love it. Of all the bands here, these are the guys I’d most like to see live. Luckily, I’ve already seen Finland’s Teksti-TV 666 live, and it was an overwhelmingly guitarist-laden experience: five of the fuckers. I still love the story of our singer Fin jokingly suggesting that they should perhaps get a sixth guitarist, and one of the band seriously replying, “We have five… that is enough.”

A quick hike through Poland for another Brodka track, then to Latvia for the epicMežaparks by Shipsea, who I suppose is the Latvian James Blake. I wonder if he’s bored of people calling him the Latvian James Blake? Perhaps I should call him the Latvian East India Youth instead? Or maybe the Latvian C. Duncan? Perhaps he’s just the Latvian Shipsea. Ahhh. Got there in the end.

Shipsea, having a think about something.

I was also incapable of deciding on just one Spanish band so we’ve also got the beautiful Dare by Lucia Scansetti, with the slightly weak excuse that Böira are actually from Catalonia. Anyway, Scansetti’s track is so chilled and sweet, I couldn’t resist. Chilled is one thing you couldn’t say about Bazooka, the self-described “psychedelic punk rock juggernaut” from Athens. I can’t improve on that description really, other than to say that it’s nice to hear a drum riff. You hear that? Drum riff. Drummers can write riffs too, you know. Then for our penultimate track we head to Portugal for the stripped vibes of Márcia. I’m loving this: it’s kind of like Portishead’sSour Times without the scuzzy bits.

Bazooka. Greek mountain in the background.

Finally, and appropriately, we return to every Eurosceptic’s favourite punchbag: Belgium. I fucking love Belgium, for all the usual reasons, and I fucking loveSoulwax, who are the band behind the “fictional” group The Shitz, created for the film soundtrack to Belgica. Being a Soulwax fan is often a deeply frustrating experience – they’ve only made three proper Soulwax albums in twenty years, for God’s sake – but when they do produce new stuff it never disappoints. How Longboasts their usual tension and one of their trademark carnivorous scaling chorus riffs. And as they’re the composers of (no exaggeration) one of my top ten favourite rock songs of all time (Too Many DJs) I can forgive them pretty much anything.

So there you have it. I didn’t quite do all 28 EU countries as I initially wanted to, but hopefully there’ll be something here to nourish your poor decision-addled brain as June 23 approaches. I don’t need to tell you that I’ll be voting a very firm Remain, but hey, I’ve done it anyway… what did you expect?

Big thanks to everyone who helped me choose these tracks x

HERE’S THE PLAYLIST AGAIN

Follow Tim Thornton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/timwthornton