Noir Magazine

I like the look of this one. Noir Magazine is launching on August 8 online and will printed bi-annually as well as having a special for LFW.

Unfairly, I think a lot of these magazines are put into similar classes purely because the thing they in common is their individuality. Again, as a generalisation, they all have massively clever and creative people working and imagining them creating beautiful, up to the minute articles, artwork and ideas. I love these types of magazines, like ANother and POP. It's such a treat when they arrive in my letterbox.

Noir will be available from MagCloud (a brilliant place to find similar material) and I'll be stopping off there shortly.

Secret Garden Party 2010 - until next year

My festival season is officially over. It really is quite upsetting. Secret Garden was amazing, one of the best weekends ever. I finally got to see I Blame Coco live after all my agitation, the atmosphere and free spiritedness had me feeling like I was born 30 years too late and I have discovered (and my friends agree) that I would make the world’s best groupie.


Here are some photos…

This is was floating in the lake and they set the fireworks off in it on the last night. All the paper burnt away leaving just the frame. I think the people got off first too.

This is the view from the top of the bank looking over the lake towards the entrance on our first night.

Fancydress in its prime, me and two friends on the Saturday night.

This is Marina and her Diamonds on the Friday night.

A pretty shocking photography display of the Gorillaz.

And these are just a selection of the photos I took of I Blame Coco. They were brilliant.

Grizzly Bear at Latitude 2010

I really enjoyed these chaps at Latitude. They were the final live act that we saw at the weekend and they put on an amazing show. I think I first heard of them through the Twilight soundtrack. Not sure, can't remember.

Rob Sheffield Talking to Girls about Duran Duran: One Man’s Quest for True Love and a cooler Haircut

This popped up this week. Rob Sheffield is a music journalist, most famously for contributions to Rolling Stone and this, his second book, was released last week. His first book, entitled Love is a Mixtape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, was released in 2007 (your Wikipedia knowledge is as good as mine on that one).
Hopefully, you’d expect someone who has made a big name for himself as a journalist, and a music journalist at that would be able to make a book interesting and a good read. That’s not a build up, I haven’t read it yet. I’ll let you know when I have. Here's the link to Amazon, where I'll be going once I get paid.

And here's a picture from Wikipedia, just show them a little love.

Secret Garden Party!!

Ah I'm so excited! I'm off to try and find a Unicorn horn in my lunch break today. Here's Gorillaz Sound System Festival Rehearsal, its been preparing me.

Slow Club, Yeah So

Just up my alley. An alley full of simple melodies with nice lyrics and a song with a lovely story. Tastefully straight forward.

Latitude Festival 2010

I got back from Latitude on Monday after a glorious, culture rich festival but a hellish journey back. Usually, I would be prime candidate for promoting public transport but a 3 hour wait, two trains, two tubes and a bus with a rucksack about three quarters of my weight has put off a little.

Not to linger on the negative though, I feel like we really took the best advantge possible of all that was on offer at Latitude. Kevin Bridges, Josie Long and Russell Kane were my top picks from the hours of time spent in the Comedy Arena, four music stages with Florence (a great set, beautiful costume and the whole crowd singing happy birthday to her little sister Grace), Vampire Weekend (I had forgotten how much I loved the first album, they were brilliant live and embarrassingly, I knew aaaall the words to every song), Rodrigo y Gabriela were absolutely captivating, I couldn’t take my eyes off them, The XX, I wasn’t really a fan of before but the performance was amazing, honestly absolutely flawless and the atmosphere was probably one of the best of the weekend. And then talking of atmosphere, my friend wanted to go see The Feeling (not top of my list, bit boring and mainstream) but they were just so happy to be there and had the whole crowd singing and dancing, it was a really happy set. Here are some photos I took, Florence and the Machine, The XX and Vampire Weekend.

The big downfall of the festival for me was the I Blame Coco set (which, if you click here, you can see I’m completely obsessed with). I arrived, after a certain amount of persuasion with a friend who hadn’t heard of her, in good time and we were busy making our way to the front just as Lissie were finishing off their set. They finished off and loads more people moved in and just as we were feeling a little smug about our front row spots, the organisers came on stage and told us to move out the tent. Not cool. So off we went and waited for 20 minutes away from the stage whilst they tried to prevent the tent from falling down. They then came to tell us that it would take up to an hour and a half before the band would come on. Reluctantly we left to go watch something in the Comedy Arena and made our way back an hour later to find out we’d missed it. I’m really quite sad that I didn’t get to see her. I did take this photo whilst she was standing outside rolling a cigarette waiting for the tent not to collapse though. Best picture of a van I've ever taken. And she is playing at Secret Garden so all is not lost just yet.

I Blame Coco Playwright Fate

I did say yesterday that I thought Quicker would be my favourite song that could well appear on the album The Constant but I think I like Playwright Fate EEven more. Thats how fickle I am. Just give me some new music and I will inevitably love it. It also looks spookily like the club venue I was at two weeks ago Shunt under London Bridge (bloody brilliant by the way) and I am hideously embarrassed that I am putting these onto the Internet myself but only as a point of comparison, I swear. And, its only the tame ones.

Again, either no one has put a good version on Youtube or I'm just too technically retarded to find it (very likely the latter) but I just found another site so if you are reading this then please click this link to hear Playwright Fate by I Blame Coco. It's immense.

I Blame Coco - Coco Sumner - Quicker and Self Machine

I hope this is the next song that Coco Sumner releases after Self Machine (out on 12 July). It's called Quicker and I think I like even more. There are only three videos that I can find on Youtube and they are quite poor quality. One is below, here is a link to MTV Live sessions which is really good but I can't embed it. I'd recommend over the video below.



Her album, The Constant is released some time in August I think.

iPad

So I've been meaning to post about myPad for a while now and the reasoni haven't is just because I don't really know where to start. Not the strongest opening sentence, i'll agree. Now I have the controvertial mix of my BlackBerry as well as the iPad, which I do have to admit is not particularly ideal. I don't have the experience of the iPhone to launch me into what I assumed would be the complete amazement of the Pad.
I must say that although have enjoyed it thus far, I do feel very novice still. It's amazing, dint get me wrong, I think it really is a beautiful thing and a massively clever thing to think so much out the box but still I'm not sure what Mac are trying to get at. I know people have been completely slaughtered for suggesting that it's just a big iPhone and I can see why, the 'experience' is completely different, the screen is incredible and these of use is so well thought out, but the are things that even I can say it is obviously lacking. The big one is a camera, it really feels like it wants one. Other things that I don't like about it are that you can't have tabs open just a load of different pages, I do sort of understand why because it would get crowded but it's just because I'm a tab overloader on my laptop, I like to have loads open and see what's there so I can come back to it later. The other feature that I dislike is the separation of all the iPod features. There is an iPod button on the home screen but then also different ones for the videos, iTunes and App store. Obviously I'm just being slow but I still click on iTunes nearly every time I want to go to my music. I haven't got to the stage where I've gone app crazy yet, though have got a couple cool ones. I love coloursplash and tweet flow is great but I went for Kindle instead of sticking with iBooks because it's much much easier to find free books on the Amazon equivalent to the on screen reader. Downside is that kindle is Linked to the American Amazon site so I haven't worked out how to get the benefits of all the books I've bought off the uk shop.
Having said that, rant over, I am sitting outside on a gloriously sunny London evening with miPad on my lap having watched two episodes of Boosh last night and my music has been on full throttle for the last fifteen minutes and I've got 88% battery left. I think that is rather impressive. I feel like a geek carrying it round with me and I would have an aversion to reading on screen books in public transport. It's a little too accepting of the Internet age for my liking.
I need to get used to it and I'm very much looking forward to the day that I feel that I am.

Secret Garden Party art Installations

This all sounds terribly exciting. I’ve been doing a bit of Secret Garden Party website stalking and they’ve put up some of the installations that will be at the festivalo. Here are some that I have nicked straight off their website. I hope they don’t mind.

Great Little Place Event

I've spoken about these lovely folk before, on Heather Loves Jelly and on the Handpicked Collection of Gifts Blog. Great Little Place find lovely little places all in and around London to go to eat, to play or pogo stick if you so desire. They are holding their first event of sorts on Thursday 8th July and it should be a lovely spectacle and a nice place to meet some nice people. The tickets cost a fiver (you can get them here) and there are only 50 of 'em so they'll probably be gone pretty shortly.
It's being held at a Three Blind Mice on Ravey Street (map it out here),it's smack in the middle of Old Street and Shoreditch High Street stations - it's a brilliant pub with pints of character and good beer.
GLP people have got some things on their itinerary for the evening, singer and pianist Holly Walker is tipping up, who I've never heard of but they assure me in the newsletter that she's the bees knees. They've got the Youtube video on their homepage.

Here's that ticket link again.
And do follow them on Twitter, @gr8littleplace.

National Pride, Murray Wimbledon and the World Cup

It’s been a sporting month, hasn’t it? We were so so sure about the football, the ENtire nation had a wave, of frankly, completely unrealistic optimism. After all, the glory and pride of 66 is as thin as a pin, no one knows who any of those people are anymore anyway. Nobody is really talking about the fact that today’s ‘team’ have come crawling home with Wag tails between their legs. It was out of reach from the start.


Then there’s the tennis. We’re definitely going to win the tennis! Come on Murray! We all choose to ignore that you are particularly grumpy, English hating person because we love to cling to any possible glory we can muster. It’s this beast of competitiveness that explodes out of the Brits at any mention of sport bursting through our lion-tattooed chests and shouting down any Spaniard who might get in our way.

Labrinth Transmission #2

Now this isn't usually my cuppa soup but this video is absolutely brilliant. Labrinth collaborated with Tiny Tempah for their song Frisky and I'm sure will end up somewhere on the charts if he isn't already.