Music Blog

All the music-related posts gathered together in one place.

Coming Soon….

lonely-robot-the-big-dream

… to a Merch Desk near you…

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Lonely Robot, Touchstone and Ghost Community for Trinity 2

Trinity Live 2 Poster

After the success of Trinity Live in 2014, the all-day progressive rock charity show at Leamington Assembly, they’re doing it again. This year’s bash wil feature Ghost Community, Touchstone and Lonely Robot, with more acts to be announced.

“It is with great pride and excitement we can announce, in association with Prog! magazine that Trinity will be back with a bang on Saturday 27thMay 2017. Put the date in your diaries folks and get ready to rock in support of some fantastic causes!

The venue will again be The Assembly in Leamington Spa. We have the lineup complete and we have many special events going on throughout the day. The day will be split in to 3 parts – the afternoon session, the evening session and the after show.

We are also delighted to announce that the headline act will be the amazing Lonely Robot. This is an exclusive as it will be first public performance of the all new, yet to be released, Lonely Robot II album. As many of you know, their performance in London in December 2015 was a sell out and featured a fantastic stage show. This full production will also be brought to the Trinity stage. To top it off, we can also announce that Touchstone and Ghost Community, will be part of the evening session. Three rocking bands to get you dancing in the aisles.
The afternoon bands will be announced very soon. The after show party will have a very special guest live performance plus one of Jerry Ewing’s infamous DJ sets. A fantastic way to end a fantastic day with the bands and the organisers! Jerry will have you bouncing around that dance floor, we promise.

With your amazing support, the first Trinity show enabled the organisers to donate £12,000 amongst three cancer charities, and next year we want to smash that figure out of the ball park. Each and everyone of us has been exposed to someone who has dealt with cancer so let’s pull together and help raise some serious money to allow amazing organisations to fight this vile disease.

Get them while they’re hot and please, let’s light up social media and make this an event that will shine brightly for years to come and which will continue to raise more money, every year it takes place. Through music, through love, through adversity, together we can all make a real different”

It it’s anything like as good as the last one, this will be a show well worth seeing. And it’s all in a good cause.

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Rebecca Downes announces live album

rebecca-downs-be-live

Rebecca Downes, winner of Best Emerging Artist and Best Female Vocalist in the British Blues Awards 2016, announces a live album Be:Live to be released on December 1st. Recorded at a variety of venues across 2015 and 2016, it presents a typical setlist from one of her electrifying live shows.

This is the track listing:

1. Never Gonna Learn
2. Walking With Shadows
3. Another Piece Of My Heart
4. Night Train
5. Long Long Time
6. Sweetness
7. Back To The Start
8. I’d Rather Go Blind
9. Basement Of My Heart
10. Sailing On A Pool Of Tears
11. Believe
12. 1000 Years
13. With A Little Help From My Friends.

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Linda Odinsen leaves IOEarth

IOEarth

Birmingham’s IOEarth have announced today that ILindo Odinsen is leaving the band.

Hi Everybody,

Just a brief note to let you all know that, as of this week, IO Earth and Linda Odinsen have decided to part ways. It has been a difficult decision, but necessary in the end due to the difficulties of the band being based in the UK, and Linda living in Norway.

‘It has been a pleasure working with you Linda and we wish you all the best. Thank you for giving your wonderful voice to the New World album. You’ll always be part of the IO Earth Family’.

Linda Odinsen:

‘At the end of last year I decided to make a big change in my life, I needed to be home in Norway. Sadly the distance makes it difficult for me to continue my cooperation with IO Earth. I want to thank the fans for the love and support you’ve shown me and the band throughout the years, I can’t express how much this has meant to me. I will always look back at my time in IO Earth with pride and feel thankful to have been a part of the journey. I wish the band success in the future’.

For our fans:

Please note IO Earth tour dates will not be affected and are still going ahead as planned! Thank you for your love and support! See you on the road!

Peace, everyone at IO Earth

IOEarth have no further live appearances scheduled for 2016, though they will be playing on the Cruise to the Edge in February 2017, followed by a number of festival appearances over the summer. No word yet on who the singer for those dates will be.

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Marc Atkinson announces Home Grown

Singer-songwriter Marc Atkinson, lead singer of Riversea among others, announces his fifth solo album “Home Grown”. Recorded at his home studio in Cumbria, he plays all instruments, including some lead guitar.

He’s written a lengthy blog post describing the process of writing and recording, and the album is available to pre-order now from Marc Atkinson’s website.

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Can you sum up Prog in 50 albums?

Prog Magazine have a listicle that attempts to show the history of prog in 50 albums. It begins with the proto-prog of the mid-60s, continues with the defining albums of the greats of the 70s and ends with some of the groundbreaking redefinitions of the modern era.

Only Pink Floyd get more than one entry, and that’s because the Barratt-led 60s psychedelic rockers and the Waters-led stadium act were really two quite different beasts. You could quibble over the relative lack of women; though Curved Air, Renaissance, Fairport Convention and Kate Bush all get a mention there’s nobody from more recent eras. What about Nightwish, perhaps? Or are they not considered prog enough?

Who’s missing?  Aside from Nightwish, the most obvious omission is probably The Mars Volta.

What do you think? Who do you think is missing, and is there anyone who doesn’t deserve to be there?

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Showtimes?

This is a bit of a rant.

Why do so few venues publish the stage times and curfew times of their gigs? London venues are generally good at this, but it’s a very different story out in the sticks. Does it not occur to them that some rock fans in niche genres are willing to travel significant distances by train? Knowing whether or not the show will finish before the last train home is a significant deciding factor on whether or not to attend. Even if it’s “must see” gig by a favourite band, it’s useful to know whether or not you need to book a B&B; there’s been one gig where I could have saved a lot of money if I’d known about the early curfew.

Even if most people either go by car or live close enough that a taxi home is affordable, surely every single extra punter through the door is worth it? Especially those who don’t have to drive home and might be able to spend more money at the bar?

That’s before we get to the ridiculous guessing game over whether the advertised start time is doors or the actual start of the show. Rock clubs and provincial arts centres seem to have entirely different definitions on what it means, so you either end up spending half an hour in freezing rain outside the venue, or risk missing the beginning of the show.

What does it cost venues or bands to make this information available?

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A Stone’s Throw From The Line

a-stones-throw-from-the-lineIn August 2015, Big Big Train played three sell-out shows at Kings Place in London. The gigs saw the band return to live performance after a 17 year absence from the stage, during which they had built a reputation for high-quality songwriting as shown on albums such as Folklore, English Electric and The Underfall Yard.

The Kings Place shows were awarded Live Event of the Year in the 2016 Progressive Music Awards.

A Stone’s Throw From the Line is a two CD live album which features the best performance of each song played over the course of the three Kings Place gigs, with the album track listing reflecting the running order of the shows.

The album is released on December 2nd, with pre-orders taken now from The Merch Desk.

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Cult heroes: Mostly Autumn

gu-mostly-autumnMy “Cult Heroes” piece on Mostly Autumn is now published in The Guardian Music Blog.

It’s both a great honour and more than a bit scary to be asked to write about a favourite band for the online section of a national newspaper, especially when I’m on first name terms with many past and present members of the band. They have always had a few noisy detractors, mostly jealous fans of less successful acts. They also had some very defensive obsessives who used to take the mildest criticism as an personal attack on the band. There was always an outside chance of the comments turning ugly.

I wanted it to read authentically rather than something fanboyish, so I covered the downs as well as the ups; mentioning the mis-marketing during the Classic Rock Productions years as well as the wobbly period when Iain Jennings (briefly) left in 2006. But I hope those are balanced by more than enough strong positives.

With a word count of a thousand words give or take a hundred, there wasn’t room for everything I wanted to include. One thing I’d like to have said more about was the extended family of related bands in their orbit. That includes side-projects like Odin Dragonfly and Josh & Co, as well as separate creative projects by past and present members, such as The Heather Findlay Band, Halo Blind and Cloud Atlas. Or Breathing Space, the side project that took on a life of its own before being reabsorbed back into the mothership. They’re all part of the Mostly Autumn story, and they’re a part of what the fandom is about.

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Magenta Announce live DVD

Magenta are now taking pre-orders for a live DVD recorded at their co-headline gig with Touchstone at Leamigton Spa last November.

Titled “Chaos from the Stage”, the 105-minute DVD captures the entire set, drawing heavily from the band’s most recent albums “The Twenty-Seven Club“, “Chameleon” and “Metamorphosis” along with a few older favoutites. There is also an 80-minute audio CD.

The full track listing is as follows:

Glitterball
Lust
Guernica
The War Bride’s Prayer
Prekestolen
The Devil at the Crossroads
Towers of Hope
Demons
F.A.W.
Pearl
Metamorphosis
The Lizard King

IThe DVD is released on the 17th November

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