King Charles - We Didn't Start The Fire

So with the UK election voting finished, here’s a brand new roughed up little gem mined by King Charles, who we featured a number of times on the blog last year, and finally caught live earlier this year. We Didn't Start The Fire was originally a top ten hit in the UK for Billy Joel back in 1989, but King Charles has updated the tune, keeping the melody and revamping the lyrics. So now instead of name checking Richard Nixon, children of thalidomide, Malcolm X and Dylan we get Obama, climate change, David Beckham and Laura Marling in a much more British take on the song. Ironically in the Billy Joel version of the song he sings “England’s got a new queen,” and in the King Charles video we see her again, just not quite as new looking as she once was.

“Labour government you’ve embarrassed us all,” King Charles sings, and a nation finishes voting. If you’re in the UK we hope you exercised your democratic right, if you didn't get locked out in a queue.

King Charles is playing a variety of gigs and festivals over the summer, where this reworked cover could get a pretty great reaction.

The Great Escape 2010 - Preview

Following on from our recent coverage of the 2010 Camden Crawl our attention now turns to the UK’s south coast and the Great Escape, another multi-venue, multi-gig, urban festival held in Brighton. The Great Escape is currently Breaking More Waves favourite event of this nature in the UK, for a number of reasons:

• The event is three days long, rather than one or two like other similar festivals, enabling you to catch an even greater number of artists, many of whom perform twice at different venues and times.

• There is a significant emphasis on new music. Even many of the headline acts are still in their relative infancy.

• It is excellent value for money, particularly if you buy an early-bird ticket several months in advance, which this year was a snip at thirty-five pounds plus the obligatory booking fee for three days of musical frolics.

• Besides the main gigs there’s a full programme of parties, conferences and fringe events, although some of these do require you to purchase the significantly more expensive delegates pass. (eighty pounds early bird or one hundred and fifty pounds now excluding booking fees)

• The timetable is all published on line well in advance, giving punters the opportunity plenty of time to plan in advance, although remember that many venues are small and so capacity may be reached early, so make sure that if there is someone you particularly want to see you get there early, particularly if they are a more well known or 'buzz' act playing a smaller venue.

• The event operates a text message service which gives updates on which venues are full plus updates on secret gigs that take place. In past years we've seen Ida Maria sing on the outside balcony of the Theatre Royal, Peggy Sue playing in a toy and model museum and We Are Scientists perform a blistering set on a flat roof outside Audio Bar with traffic racing by behind them, all by using the text alert service.

• There are a variety of ticket options including day tickets and Friday / Saturday 2 day tickets. Our experience is that traditionally Thursday is a little quieter than the other two days in terms of numbers of punters.

• It’s in Brighton, which means that besides the event itself you can spend time lazing on the beach (weather permitting); many of the venues being located on the seafront. There are also two great record shops (Resident and Rounder) that are worth a visit, a number of quirky specialist shops in the North Laines, and of course the pier for funfair fun combined with the Horatios venue which this year will see the likes of Cold Cave, Warpaint and Darwin Deez performing there. And if it's warm enough, and you’re drunk enough, after everything has finished for the night you can go skinnydipping to cool off ! Just make sure you can actually swim first though.

So once you’ve grabbed your wristband, which bands to see? With such a fantastic line up of new music it’s simply not going to be possible to catch everything. Below we recommend ten acts for your viewing and listening pleasure. We hope to catch at least some of these ourselves.

Click on the artists name to go to their Myspace page.

Kid Adrift

“If you took a big raft of overblown pompous rock and set it off through a computer, mashed in some dubstep beats, a layer of distortion and gave the whole thing a post-apocalyptic shove of electronica you would probably be lurking off the same shores as Kid Adrift,” we wrote back last August. Since then this Glaswegian boy wonder and his band have signed to Island records, recorded a Radio 1 session with Vic Galloway and had their song Red Green and Blue named as “Record of the Year 2009” by Record of the Day. A new EP is to follow this summer and Kid Adrift is currently recording an album. A must see.

Let’s Buy Happiness

A five piece from the North East of England, Let’s Buy Happiness have already created one of our favourite songs of the last twelve months with Works Better On Paper and have been signed up to play the John Peel Stage at this years Glastonbury Festival after they got through to the final round of the Glastonbury Emerging Talent competition. Fronted by the ethereal sounding Sarah Hall the band create beautiful dreamy indie guitar soundscapes that remind us of The Sundays and The Cocteau Twins. In February we suggested that “Let’s Buy Happiness are about to make you fall in love.” Go to the Great Escape, experience Let’s Buy Happiness and that statement may come true.

Ghost Bees

Twins Romi and Sari Lightman are two Canadian Twins who are Ghost Bees. Like an alt.folk version of Joanna Newsom, their unsettling ghostly songs are formed out of glockenspiel, viola, acoustic guitars and antique mandolins. With girlish creepily beautiful voices their songs cover tales of past great empires and Greek mythology.

Egyptian Hip Hop

So loud is the buzz surrounding Egyptian Hip Hop that we are sure that a wasps nest is just around the corner. It all started when the Manchester four piece released their debut single Rad Pitt last year and it hasn’t really stopped since. There seems to be so much talk about Egyptian Hip Hop and yet very few people are pinning their colours to the mast to fully define the bands sound. Much of this is because it is too early to do so, with only a handful of demos and songs available and the four members of the band only being in their mid to late teens. So for the record we say that the bands style is loose, occasionally groovy indie. But the only real way to find out if Egyptian Hip Hop can live up to the hype is to go see them yourself and form your own opinion.

EGYPTIAN HIP HOP // Wild Human Child from theartof agency on Vimeo.

King Charles

With his knotted bee-hive, near death experiences and psychedelic folk riffs King Charles really is like nothing else. Expect pagan chanting, romping guitars and songs about Polar Bears and Crocodiles. King Charles has also stated that he’s going to get married by the end of the year, although he has yet to find the right girl, so if any ladies fancy becoming a queen, here’s your chance. His song Love Lust is soppy, philosophical and stupidly brilliant.

Esben and the Witch

Along with the many national and international bands on the bill of the Great Escape there are also a significant number of local acts playing, and Brighton’s own Esben and the Witch are without doubt one of the best. Fresh off a tour with The Big Pink the group will be bringing their spectral transcendentally disturbed tunes and dark yet beautiful tales to the Great Escape. A three piece formed out of Rachel Davies (vocals), Daniel Copeman (electronics, guitars) and Thomas Fisher (guitars, keyboards) the band are known to decorate their stage with porcelain owls, Victorian lamposts, skulls and minimal lighting. Reminiscent of the edgier experimental side of Portishead, or Bat For Lashes they share a kindred spirit with bands such as The XX in terms of the darkness of their sound.

Unicorn Kid

One of our Ones To Watch for 2010. The bleepy, 8 bit madness of Unicorn Kid has been a sound that Breaking More Waves has been celebrating since summer of 2009. For those who think his sound deserves arrest by the music police, well sorry but those very same music police are actually raving behind the bike sheds to the likes of Dream Catcher and Animal City; manic, frantic, bassy, games console dance tunes. He's also knocked out big remixes for Gorillaz and The Pet Shop Boys. Quite possibly the music of the future.

Stornoway

Another band we listed as one of our Ones To Watch for 2010, Stornoway are due to release their debut album Beachcomber's Windowsill at the end of this month. Our recent review called it “Quite simply an album of near perfect songs,” and in terms of live performance their humble intelligence charms and delights every time. Catch I Saw You Blink, Zorbing, The End Of The Movie and The Coldharbour Road as the bands status continues to grow.

Active Child

“It’s as if Bon Iver left his acoustic guitar in his log cabin and created a new wave electronic suite of chamber-like beauty that lays somewhere between the sonic architecture of Ultravox’s Vienna and OMD’s Jean of Arc (Maid of Orleans),” is how we described the music of Active Child last year. We wouldn’t go back on that statement at all. Beautifully cool electronic pop symphonies with new-wave synth-drums and pads, heavenly vocals and bags of class are coming to Brighton this May courtesy of one Pat Grossi who is Active Child.

Marina and the Diamonds

Marina and the Diamonds may be a rather obvious choice, but the reason is that this is probably your last chance to see Marina in a relatively small venue before she steps up the game later this year, returning to Brighton on November the 15th to play the Corn Exchange. By now you’ll probably be familiar with Hollywood, I Am Not A Robot and other tracks from her debut album. What you may not be familiar with if you haven’t seen her live yet is her theatrical stage presence combined with an underlying vulnerability that endears.

If you haven't got your ticket yet and want to come you can buy them by clicking here. We'll be bringing a day by day review of the event the week after it finishes, and if you sign up to our Twitter you'll also find us tweeting our way around the event.

Camden Crawl 2010 - Review Day 2

As the indie kids of London wake themselves from bleary hangovers Breaking More Waves is already back on the Camden Crawl 2010 for day 2. Treana Morris is the first of two acts that we catch at the start of a showcase put together by Andy Ross (the man who signed Blur) at the Spread Eagle pub. Blessed with a powerfully clear soul soothing voice and passionate acoustic guitar playing, the warm applause she receives from the small crowd is entirely warranted. Looking a little like Quentin Tarantino, singer songwriter John Drake adds a touch of big voiced masculine stadium rock to his acoustic platter, his singing reminiscent of Bono and Kelly Jones.

From the Spread Eagle a short trip down Parkway and up Camden High Street finds the Camden Crawl stretching out from the pubs and onto the street where a new ‘Redbull Bedroom Jam’ outdoor arena has been created next to the offices of MTV. Complete with outdoor bars, food stalls and portaloos, this is as close to a typical summer outdoor festival in a field as Camden can create, albeit with tarmac, parking restriction signs and bitterly cold weather. The chill doesn’t stop a big crowd turning out for Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip who are brilliantly entertaining, funny and damn good at what they do. In less skilled hands the delivery of raps with subject matter such as teenage pregnancy could come across as patronizing to a young crowd, but Pip has the wit and intelligence to deliver the words deftly. From the joyous motivational groove of Get Better to the tumbling bleepy beats and commandments of Thou Shalt Always Kill, social awareness and humour are present with every line he drops. Creating his own mini election by getting three kids in the crowd to put on Clegg / Cameron / Brown masks and perfroming a dance off (Clegg wins - to which Pip responds, what did we expect, this is such a liberal festival) he warms hearts and cold bodies; one of the performances of the day.

Things don’t look so good for significantly hyped three piece Is Tropical. Considering the nippy temperatures outside the band seem to have picked a highly inappropriate name. They also fare less well with crowd numbers than Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip. A complete lack of stage presence doesn’t help justify their worth either - the scarves they wear as masks seeming to be a defence mechanism for their shyness rather than some elaborate art statement. Yet in the instrumental Seasick Mutiny they have a quirky gem - like a bonkers cartoon Hot Chip going lo-fi with indie guitars and retro one finger keyboard bleeps. More like that and they could be on to something.

Upstairs at the Lock Tavern it’s rammed to the door, if anyone wanted to leave they probably couldn’t - so packed in are the bodies, necks craning for a view. It’s the The Molotovs who benefit from this sardine like venue, their well crafted indie song-smithery being highly accomplished. Floppy fringes, vests and an occasional falsetto reminiscent of Wild Beasts combine with adept musicianship to suggest that maybe The Moltovs should have been playing a somewhat bigger room.

The Electric Ballroom hosts the 20 strong all female choir / novelty / collective that is Gaggle. Dressed in an assortment of ribbons and odd headdresses they’re like an all female Polyphonic Spree with doomy beats and fierce questioning vocals. They include a cover of Marina and the Diamonds Mowgli’s Road and another song that has a chant of “I like cigarettes,” followed by a response of “But I like nicotine patches more.” Gaggle are bizarre, warped and strangely entertaining. More orthodox is Lightspeed Champion who plays immediately after Gaggle. With a set that covers both old and new material there’s maybe a little bit too much musical virtuoso guitar work than blistering melodies, but overall his melancholic pop workouts are reasonably likeable and go down well with the masses that have arrived to see him. And was that a member of We Are Scientists on the stage? It was indeed.

Fighting past the drunken indie masses littering the Camden streets, just round the corner from the Electric Ballroom, the Underworld plays host to US rock band Surfer Blood who play their first London shows at this event to another busy room. Power riffs combine with more danceable rhythmic jangly sounds to create a strong set. Swim is a bona-fide punch the air anthem in the making, and any band who features a keyboard player with huge afro hair gets our vote.

The last stop of the evening is at the Rock bar where the lo-fi slacker indie sounds of Yuck drench the venue in effects laden reverb, distortion and effects that recall a time when indie didn’t mean the day-glo soundtrack to a Skins episode, but the fuzziness of bands such as Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and Pavement. The Wall is particularly effervescent, full of simple grunge-like energetic guitar riffs and whining repeated vocals, the four piece delivering on the building buzz about them. And if the keyboard player from Surfer Blood has good hair then the drummer from Yuck has improbably brilliant head foliage - it's like a volcanic electrified mushroom cloud. Their songs are a gloriously noisy racket, which makes for a dirty and scuzzily noble finish to the 2010 Camden Crawl.

Camden Crawl 2010 - Review Day 1

The multi-gig, multi-venue two day extravaganza that is Camden Crawl 2010 is a chance for the less hardy festival goer to indulge themselves in a plethora of new and established acts in the bad smelling bars, clubs, pubs, toilet-venues and concert halls of indie-tastic Camden, yet still get a good nights sleep in their own soft bed at the end of the night. The 2010 line up saw many punters attracted by big names such as the Sugababes, Calvin Harris and Lost Prophets at the Roundhouse venue, but for the new music connoisseur there was a plethora of lesser known delights to be discovered.

Inevitably, there was rain, cider was consumed and line up clashes meant that it wasn’t possible to see everything (The Gold Panda / Chew Lips / DEKADE / Clock Opera / Samuel and the Dragon / Lightspeed Champion six way clash on the second day was particularly disappointing) , but it wouldn’t be a festival without such features. The anticipated lengthy queues to get into venues didn’t materialise for Breaking More Waves (although admittedly on day one we only 'crawled' between two venues) and after watching full sets by seventeen acts over two days, the ticket price seemed like money well spent.

Saturdays Canadian Blast showcase at the Fiddlers Elbow was the perfect way to gently acquaint oneself with the event, and also provided one of the highlights of the weekend. The soft focus, sixties tinged folk harmonies of Wilderness of Manitoba (pictured) are effortlessly warm and wonderful. Understated cellos, banjos, bowl rubbing and child-like acoustic guitar interplay with dreamy male and female vocals to produce something utterly beguiling and beautiful - if no other band had played for the rest of the weekend it would have been worth it. Before this unexpected delight the band also help out as backing group to Octoberman, who covers the Springsteen classic I’m On Fire amongst his own slightly fragile folky tunes. The Polish born Canadian Artur Dyjencinski plays sultry downbeat tunes, his vintage melancholic baritone sounding like something from a black and white movie of old. With a band that includes a guitarist / co-vocalist from Sunderland who sports a brimmed red hat, they’re multi-national, and Artur confuses the issue even further by admitting that he thought that Sunderland was in Germany.

After Canadian Blast a blast of other sorts occurs as rain hammers down on the impractical fashions of the indie kids of London. It’s just as well this isn’t a festival in a field as there’s not a pair of wellies to be seen, ill advised short dresses, skinny jeans, hip hugging shorts and converse shoes being the order of the day. Thrashy electronic duo Kap Bambino makes sure that everyone dries out quickly though by generating heat with their mosh pit inducing blend of hardcore electro. Digital punk princess vocalist Caroline fizzes with energy, jumping into the crowd, screaming into her microphone whilst a barrage of beats and dirty computer noise assaults the ears. The performance is very Crystal Castles-esque - a frenzied blur of a one night stand fun.

Just back from a festival in Norway, the keyboard player of Stornoway sports a most unrock ‘n’ roll of pair of casual red trousers, but even this fashion faux pas cannot stop the band from producing simply charming songs about romance, travel and nature. Unfortunately the big space of Koko does the bands songs no favours, the sound losing intimacy and it’s only their more upbeat songs such as I Saw You Blink, Zorbing and the closing Watching Birds that really grab the audience. Smoke Fairies suffer the same problem. Their medieval blues conjures images of unicorns, misty moss covered forests and pagan dancers and would probably be utterly bewitching in a small attentive room. Unfortunately in the vast heights of Koko with a chattering crowd to battle against something extraordinary is lost.

They can now be filed in the box named ‘classic’, having been around for twenty years, yet Teenage Fanclub fail to ignite and their performance feels a little vacant and cold. Their songs are admirably well crafted and full of harmonies but their performance lacks the venom that is required at this later point in the evening. That is left to Autokratz and their twitching, pulsing spiked electronic jams that get hands in the air and the crowd grooving - a hedonistic end to the first day of the crawl.