Sometimes we ask a lot from our popular music – it’s gotta make us laugh, make us cry, make us work, get us dancin’ on a Friday night – give us the impetus to make love  – and then stick it to the man on a Monday morning.  It must do all this while simultaneously [...]

Audio.Video.Disco is a pouting, sulking, smouldering almost vampiric looking band ( vampiric in a good ‘True Blood’ type way) with darkly handsome Rich Berkshire up front on his guitar and providing lead vocals, loyal henchman and gigster Matt alongside, twiddling his lead guitar and supporting with vocals and Tox on the bass giving it [...]

Currently promoting their brilliant ‘Whale EP’, an apt title given the sheer size and power of their live show tonight, this blues/grunge three-piece take to the stage and defy the limits of their stripped back line up.
Whilst melting into the general throng of Buckle Up gig-goers to watch tonight’s support acts, the eclectic and sometimes [...]

15th May – Sticky Fungus
I have seen this band a couple of times in bars and they were kinda underwhelming… but put that frizz and fizz on a big stage like Sticky Fungus, Staines and – KAPOW – Four Wheel Drive are sizzling sensations.
Strongly influenced by the blues of the South with its virile aggression [...]

A heavy blues-rock sound interlaced with subtle jazz-funk touches and glorious vocal arrangements in the Shona language

folksy strumming chords and icy-cool licks from this sweetly innocent band…perfectly formed low dependence electro acoustic numbers of brilliant quality..

grandiose and eloquent… a layer-cake of sounds…this hypnotic and fanciful band are a truly remarkable act

So we are here at The Siegfried Sassoon (named after the Great War poet) “single release party” at The Hob Staines. But the Chertsey boys haven’t got their singles with them (a mix up with the post-production). Hmmm. And the crowd in Staines is forgiving. Probably more forgiving than they ought to be. In fact, [...]

Arcane Roots are like a rock and roller-coaster… gnashing, clawing and crashing their way through unconventional time signatures and frequent changes of tempo like an out of control Thorpe Park thrill ride might cut through a throng of ne’er-do-well pink-faced chavs playing chicken on the rails. Their combined energy, the electricity that this band produces,  [...]

If poncey new-age Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal was cooking up a tray of Cherry Brakewells his list of ingredients would probably include snails (because all his recipes do) and a slug of Tennessee sour-mash to intoxicate the mind, a generous fistful of gunpowder to spice things up a bit – and a large scoop [...]

I once went water skiing. And the instructor said, It’s easy. Just hang on. If you can. Then rise up. That is all there is to this game. Yes. Fine. I said. But it wasn’t. And I couldn’t. And I didn’t. But so what?  I tried.
Here are some equally useful instructions for Staines newest band [...]

When the strange character (looking like the spurned son of 70’s comic Bobby Ball- I piggin’ hate you, Tommy) burst onto the stage and screamed “Hello, Goodbye! We are havin’ a party… you’ll f**** love it!” the audience automatically started to protect their softer nether regions whilst backing carefully and slowly away in a wide-eyed [...]

It is said that gravity is much weaker than it should be. They say that this is because it has the ‘other’ eleven-or-so dimensions  to deal with. They say this will all be revealed once we start to get results from the Large Hadron Collider. So, to quote Laura Veirs, it does look like “Gravity [...]

Albany Down are on the way up! I saw the boys at the Hobgoblin Staines last night performing new tracks and laying down the beat. They are also soon to be heading for the Purple Turtle and the Barfly in Camden, as well as completing some new [free] streaming MP3 tracks.
The sound of Albany Down [...]

When I (once) went English windsurfing (February in Lincolnshire) it was a truly miserable, miserable experience. It was cold and wet and achingly painful. But Heathrow crash test pilots fiN have built up a unique song book based upon their shared experiences of exactly this kind of shivery English hobby. You see, although windsurfing on [...]

When I was just a mere kiddie-wink back in the glorious Seventies my Mum used to enjoy a box of ‘Weekend’ at the weekend… Do you remember ‘Weekend’? These weren’t just a box of chocolates, in fact they weren’t even a box of chocolates! ‘Weekend’ were a box of ‘stuff’. Some of the stuff looked [...]

It is a truth, self evident, that Men love music. But straight men don’t like to dance. For men, music is for listening whereas, for ladies, music is to dance to and romance to. Even those big macho hip hop and RnB geezers don’t really like all the dancing that is involved in their genre [...]

Summer lovers, Mimi Soya, have grown up. This post pop-punk quartet from Brighton brought their own-brand of compulsive/obsessive motifs, purity of being and light lyrical montages to Staines Hobgoblin last week and we could tell they were now embarking on their second stage of metamorphosis from punkpop nymphs to stadium-sized superflys.
Back in 2007 when the [...]

‘Out of Here’ with its stripped down to the pine atmosphere and chinkle-chinkle of acoustic rhyhtm guitar along with a light dusting of snare and cymbal, like a pre-electric White Stripes (but only with Joni Mitchell singing) is like being on a date with a supermodel who hasn’t yet had her supper. Full of promise [...]

Bloodloss are in appearance, general style and musical ability, much like ‘Lamb of God.’ But, as with most successful basic metals bands from The New Wave of American Heavy Metal, you will find that there is a lot more going on ‘in there’ than you might at first think. There is a glimmer of melody [...]

The ancient Greeks thought that if you took the head of this, the legs of something different and the hind quarters of that thing over there you could make up a new beast. And that beast would be a viable creature. The final product – the chimera – a single organism with genetically different sub-cells [...]

The Purge noise is bass heavy with song structures that deftly incorporate low-to-mid tempos (with some well crafted tempo changes)- reminiscent of something from the Welsh stoner metal band ‘Acrimony’ (and so,in turn, their music also doffs a respectful cap towards Black Sabbath especially Sabbath 4 era.)
But the Purge sounds faster and more energetic than [...]