Joe Talbot – vocals
Adam Devonshire – bass
Mark Bowen – guitars
Lee Kiernan – guitars
Jon Beavis - drums

Passionate, political and darkly comedic, IDLES’ debut album “Brutalism” made an impact that no-one, not least the band, could have expected when it arrived, seemingly out of nowhere, in 2017. It was an album with such relevance to the fractured Britain that birthed it, that the band’s potent individuality and honesty simply couldn’t be ignored – and was described perfectly at the time by Uncut as: "a rare rock record with the rage, urgency, wit and shattering of complacency usually found only in grime."

No band toured harder, and invites to support the likes of Foo Fighters and The Maccabees (at Alexandra Palace) saw IDLES’ message spread even further, leading to a signing with the Brooklyn and London independent Partisan Records. IDLES second album saw them become leaders in a movement of new bands tearing down outdated perceptions of masculinity and bucking a trend of style over substance. Songs from the record were full-throated indictments of sexism, racism, the polarisation of Britain in the wake of Brexit, nationalism and toxic masculinity. The record felt both incredibly personal and at other times universal, wearing both its heart - and an active mind - on its sleeve. In a musical landscape that had become so safe and sanitised, IDLES were and remain a bolt to the arm of the norm.

Here was a band you could pin all your hopes on, ideals you could rally round, a set of songs you could believe in. And so many people have done just that – part of IDLES’ success has been down to putting their fans first. A community, the AF Gang, was formed on social media in the wake of “Brutalism” that has now grown to tens of thousands of members. A judgement free zone where people can discuss everything from their musical tastes to their mental health, the group features regular contributions from members of IDLES themselves. The tight connection between the band and those who back them remains a fiercely important part of what makes them what they are, even now.

That second album, 'Joy As An Act Of Resistance', debuted at no.5 in the UK charts upon its release last August, breaking Rough Trade’s all-time record for most pre-orders and sales in a day. It was, for a period, the no.1 best reviewed record of 2018 (average rating of 88 across 25 reviews) and at the end of 2018 it had won a fanbase far beyond the UK, featuring in album of the year lists across key media worldwide.

The band saw not only the album’s singles but the album itself A-listed at 6 Music and earned major features, amongst others, with the likes of Q, Mojo and The Guardian with covers to follow at DIY, Loud & Quiet, Kerrang!, So Young, CRACK and NME. IDLES won Best Breakthrough at the Q Awards, were nominated for Breakthrough Artist at the Brit Awards and performed a raucous Jools Holland debut which NME called “history in the making…incomparably brilliant,” likening it to Arctic Monkeys and Kanye West's first appearances on the show.

They were announced as 6 Music's no.1 album of the year, won the coveted Ivor Novello award for Best Album and saw not one, but two extensive tours sell out worldwide. Dates in the UK, US & Australia and festival performances across the globe were full of people eager to see a band famed as much for their frantic, unforgettable live shows as their rousing songs. Their last run of London shows, three consecutive dates at The Electric Ballroom in April, all sold out in minutes – and on December 7th this year they return to Alexandra Palace, this time as the headliners. Their biggest headline performance yet, it culminates a remarkable last couple of years for a band who have never given us anything less than everything. As well as a chance to celebrate all that has come before, it will also be the first opportunity for people to hear much-anticipated new material from an-as-yet untitled third album set for 2020.
 

Kikagaku Moyo (Japanese for "geometric patterns") are a Tokyo-based psychedelic rock band whose sound incorporates elements of Krautrock, Indian ragas, and acid folk. They balance heavy, crushing jams with softer, more contemplative moments, recalling Japanese psych groups like Acid Mothers Temple and Ghost, as well as their predecessors such as Far East Family Band and the Flower Travellin' Band. The group was founded during the summer of 2012 by drummer/vocalist Go Kurosawa and guitarist/vocalist Tomo Katsurada. Joined by bassist Kotsuguy, guitarist Daoud Popal, sitarist Ryu Kurosawa, and guest vocalist/theremin player Angie Gotopo, the group recorded its self-titled debut in 2013. Initially self-released digitally, the album was given a vinyl release by Greek label Cosmic Eye later in the year, followed by an American release by Captcha Records in 2014. The group released two more albums in 2014 (Mammatus Clouds and Forest of Lost Children), and became darlings of the international psychedelic scene, with appearances at Austin Psych Fest and L.A. Psych Fest, in addition to successful tours of America, the U.K., and Europe. In 2015, the group shared split 7" singles with Moon Duo as well as Kinski and Acid Mothers Temple leader Makoto Kawabata. In 2016, the group's fourth album, House in the Tall Grass, was released by Japanese label Guruguru Brain.

KOKOROKO are a young, London based Afrobeat 8-Piece band led by trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey. We play music we love, we grew up with and our parents got funky to. Inspired by Fela Kuti, Ebo Taylor, Tony Allen and the great sounds that come out of West Africa, we put on a performance to honour the master that taught us.

Most of us are London Jazz school kids who met playing in London. We noticed a void in people like us playing Afrobeat and KOKOROKO – with proper London fire – was born.

Trumpet - Sheila Maurice-Grey (Bandleader)
Saxophone - Cassie Kinoshi
Trombone - Richie SeivWright
Bass - Mutale Chashi
Guitar - Oscar Jerome

Keyboards - Yohan Kebede
Percussion - Onome Ighamre

Drums - Eddie Hicks / Ayo Salawu
+ some serious friends!

“As soon as KOKOROKO hit the stage, the 900-strong audience was flawed by the band’s musical prowess and stage presence. The band’s beautiful soulful and spiritual compositions both healed the soul and got bodies moving! Without doubt they are ones to watch in 2018” (Nick Lewis, Operations Manager, Ronnie Scott’s)

“The V&A was delighted that KOKOROKO played a part in REVEAL festival, a week-long series of art and design commissions, fashion shows, and performances to celebrate our new Exhibition Road Quarter opening; the V&A’s largest architectural intervention in over 100 years. Their music was lively, original, and multi-faceted, contributing to a diverse cultural exchange that makes London’s arts, culture and music scenes one of the best in the world. KOKOROKO performed at the press view and the public opening – a special V&A Friday Late in collaboration with Boiler Room – which drew in over 6,000 visitors to the Museum that evening.” (V&A Museum)

No one is quite sure where the enigmatic Lazarus Kane emerged from. A US transplant now living in the UK, he appears a relic of some recent past. Armed with a drum machine and some old synthesisers, the music could be mistaken for something that might once have been heard coming out of CBGB’s decades ago. However, the songs tackle the everyday trappings of modern life; drinking too much, social media and the Kardashians.

Shame have been together just over three years and in that time have become the most viscerally thrilling new band in the UK.

“South London’s Shame concoct a filthy mess of The Doors, Sleaford Mods and Pixies while intense singer Charlie Steen strips to the waist and beats himself with half a mic stand” – The Guardian

“Shame, five boys in a tornado…play rock, but with the patter of Streets, the spittle of Mark E. Smith, and the class of Johnny Marr but above all the frenzy, rage, exasperation of their age” – Les Inrocks

James McGovern - vocals
Damien Tuit - guitars
Cathal Roper - guitars
Gabriel Paschal Blake - bass
Diarmuid Brennan - drums

If you have ever seen The Murder Capital live then what will strike you most about the experience is not the heaviness, the bleakness or the rage you might expect, but witnessing a most extreme vision of tenderness. Their debut album, ‘When I Have Fears’, recorded over the Spring with Flood (PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, New Order etc.), embodies this tenderness; it is a purple bruise on the hard knee of the so-called post-punk resurgence. It is not a labour of love but a struggle through love, loneliness and grief that now sits weightless upon their five shoulders, not marching, but dancing, out into the cold light of day. It exists in two worlds which oppose each other yet breath each other’s air, because ultimately it is an album about accepting that which you fear, loving that which you hate, feeling the excess that can only be found in isolation. The name, ‘When I Have Fears’ acknowledges its own vulnerability, and was given very early on to ensure that consistency of thought, and that beautiful arch in the narrative which gives space for the purging of guilt and leads, ultimately, to its final cathartic moments.

Listening to how many places opening track For Everything reaches sonically within the first ten seconds is representative of the album’s attempt to touch upon “the whole spectrum of human emotion”. The guitars, like saws, sing to each other, tenor and baritone; a chiming tambourine compliments even the methodical and angry deep-set drums. ‘Not at all, not for everything,/ It’s not for everything at all./ Not for everyone, it’s not for anyone at all,’ is so much more than just a smart, slick trick of the tongue, because the poetic and sonic landscape of which it speaks, and that which the whole album speaks, is both a mountain and a valley - it really becomes both everything and nothing.

The music was secondary, and the ethos of compassion and ability to fully understand one another always came first. “The last time we played through the album we felt every second of those 6 months spent writing it and a lot of it is a reflection of what we went through together.” Just to hear Feeling Fades, to glimpse it, you immediately understand The Murder Capital’s insatiable need for unity and empathy both to banish and beautify the crux of loneliness. We hear that isolated voice searching out to sea, ‘And as the feeling fades away/ The tearing streets create a wave’: it lurches forward with uncertainty over the resounding bass that creeps slowly, slowly, and eventually catches up with a crack of those chugging drums. And suddenly we have union, we are there running alongside that voice, hand in hand. And, as everything falls in time and into place, we become acutely aware of the present, and that present which the voice sings of, ‘the now elapsed round you and me’, is no longer a lonely existence.

You might be surprised to know that the debut album from that dark, twisted Dublin quintet, The Murder Capital, is in all its boyish innocence and vulnerability, a coming of age album. “When you get to your teens you begin to feel like you’re playing catch up with your inner child. You have to dismantle all the shit that was put into your parents brains and given to you.” A generational baggage handed to us perhaps not consciously, but by virtue of blood and guilt, as explained in More Is Less: ‘If I gave you what you wanted/ you’d never be full./ That’s the trappings of your boyish mind/ Become unshakeable”. Something as small as questioning why at six years old your hands were clasped in prayer, becomes a quiet revolution, “and we’ve tried to dismantle it in the fact that we've been completely honest in attempting to dismantle ourselves.”

It is an attempt to hold a mirror up to emotion, to pain, which for this group is quite a specific pain; an unequivocal suffering as sharp as a shard of this reflective glass. But by focusing in on this struggle it comes undone, unanchored, deconstructed- but never diluted. It is simply allowed to float freely within the soundscape, where it may become transformed as another harnesses it. The same, but different- it is the cracked mirror. ‘Came home from somewhere,/ Somehow covered in myself./ Came home from nowhere,/ ‘Somehow now I’m someone else’ sings Slowdance I, with its intense reverb, drone-like bass and stinging atonal guitar. Its murky, anonymous and unsure compared to the elation of Slowdance II, and even though the tracks bleed into each other, you can sense it emerging from the pain, reborn as the cello sings and we enter the second half of the record.

This relationship between pain and freedom is an important one. The suicide of a close friend led not only to the birth of the band’s name but to the philosophy of the entire record, “every single one of those lyrics relates back in some way to his death”. Discovering the work of photographer Francesca Woodman who took her own life at 22, was also a significant touch point. “The biggest impression her work left on us was relating to the loneliness of her photos. That sense of being completely on your own, but also taking solace in the beauty of the work as well. I think we’d be lying if we ever truly admitted to ourselves that we weren’t afraid of dying young. I think we push the boundaries at times. There’s something about Francesca Woodman’s work that just takes control of that.” Listening to Green and Blue, a track written immediately after discovering her work, you can hear that isolation as each instrument seems to exist entirely in a world of it’s own- so self aware. Lyrically too, its completely subjective. It's a song that can see only out of your eyes, it blurs the background and draws a thick black outline around the iris, gothic and indulgent.

If this work inspires within us a sense of self-reflection and confrontation, then the album too came to realise itself, and in the most poignant way possible. One member buried his mum half way through recording, and so was born the dark grooves and tragic beauty of the record’s bravest track, Don’t Cling To Life. “Even through everything that was going on we didn’t want to write a sad song, we wanted to write a song you could dance to. Feeling grief and wanting to dance through it, and feeling the rawness and emptiness of our own grief, because any relationship that involves love is so specific to you.” And this quiet but violent contemplation will eventually lead you to the sobered ecstasy that we hear in the anti-chorus of Love, Love, Love. The final track’s words are weighted with their own importance, they are sure, and the instrumentation is round and whole and warm with the friction of the constant flitting snare, beating like a human heart. Love, fear, hate, grief: it is not the fact of these experiences but their uniqueness, that makes them universal. It is the knowledge that no one else is feeling how you feel, and yet you all find yourselves huddled round that same small dignified fire in the corner of the room at your darkest, coldest moments.

When I Have Fears is not black and white, it is a unique experience that becomes universal simply through listening, tethered together by an unbreakable tenderness.

Not black and white, but three anonymous bodies, cloaked and embracing in a pallid, grey-beige.
It is everything and it is nothing.
Shared by everyone and no one.