There’s going to be a free festival this Saturday over in Ancoats New Islington. There will be music, arts, fireworks and Herbie the Treehead Dinosaur, apparently. Click here for more info.
Watching TV so you don’t have to!
Archive for the 'Music' Category
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Tony Ogden, front man of one of the best Bands ever, World of Twist, died this week! He was only 44.
There’s an article on the Guardian about him: It’s a twisted world.
In recent(ish) musical history, however, there is one exception to all this. In the early 1990s, a group called World of Twist attempted to drop into the slipstream of what was known as “Madchester” and wean Stone Roses fans on to a singular meld of Hawkwind, Roxy Music and northern soul.
For a few singles, at least, they were impossibly great. So much so that the teenage Noel Gallagher tried to join their road crew and nearly named Oasis after their peak work, a song called Sons of the Stage (the Oasis slogan “noise and confusion” comes from the same source). It all came to nought. An offshoot of Virgin records did what private firms always do and threw oceans of cash at them, but they still foundered.
In the poetic estimation of their singer and chief visionary, one Tony Ogden, they “spent £250,000 making an album with the smallest bollocks in pop history”.
Ogden went on to waste “four years on smack watching Third Reich movies”, and subsequently apologised to his fans for “letting them down”. Quite rightly, however, he just about stood by his pocket-sized oeuvre: “I’d ask anyone to play that World of Twist album 20 times with every dial on full. If it doesn’t rock, come and smash it over my head.”
Ogden died this week, aged 44, his personal history an apparent mess of unfulfilled promise and unreturned calls. He was, I’d wager, the last of the lost geniuses.
The Independent also has an obituary.
D Percussion, the music event is on at Castlefield tomorrow. There’s going to be 8 stages, 60 bands, 85 DJs and probably a huge crowd of people. You can find details here.
One of my friends (who used to be in Majic and Megarider) has just done a track for that Robotic Dance that Peter Crouch started. You can listen to it here. It’s rather funky!
Ireland’s Arts Minister congratulated Irish Eurovision song contest entrant Brian Kennedy on Monday for winning the competition — except it was won by Finland.
The creatures in the picture on the left are not the latest set of baddies from Doctor Who, they are in fact Lordi and Lordi have just won Eurovision 2006 with a song entitled “Hard Rock Hellelujah”.
Having been voted for by all countries except Albania, Armenia and Monaco, Lordi scored 292, the highest number of points for any entry in any Eurovision Song Contest to date. They received 12 points from eight countries: Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the UK.
And what i’d like to know is why? Come back ABBA all is forgiven!
The name’s Sidebottom, Frank Sidebottom! Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Frank’s World is on t’interweb!
Six things you may or may not know about Frank Sidebottom:
- His head is made entirely from paper mache.
- He is from Timperley in Altrincham (near Manchester).
- He has a friend called Little Frank who is a hand puppet.
- He once sold a video by mail-order called “Frank’s Home Movie Video”. He reportedly recorded a personalised intro on each video ordered, and coloured all the sleeves in by hand!
- He realised an ep called “Timperley” on which all the tracks are about Timperley.
- Out of all the comedians in the world with paper mache heads, Frank Sidebottom is the funniest and probably the most melodious.
A photo I took of the huge luminescent Cross at the Manchester Passion on my humble camera phone has appeared on the Listening Post page at http://blog.wired.com/music/. Blogger at the rehearsal, thats me! 
To paraphrase Keith Allen at the beginning of the show, it was outside, it was live and it was Manchester so anything could have gone wrong! Instead it was a resounding success!
Darren Morfitt was well cast as a ‘down to earth’ Northern Jesus. Tim Booth all angular and ‘weird’ made for a convincing Judas. And the city itself mixing old and new buildings made a stunning backdrop from the performance.
The songs were for the most part well chosen and sung. “Love will tear us apart” and “Blue Monday” were among my favourites from the evening. Some of the singers may not have been pitch perfect but that was never the point of those songs.
And the highlight of the show, Darren Morfitt, at the top of the town hall’s clocktower, singing “I Am the Resurrrection”. It was all very moving!
Read more: Easter marked with a passion, Day that Jesus came to the Arndale Centre.
I took these photos of the rehearsal outside the Manchester Corn Exchange today. Nicholas Bailey (Peter), Darren Morfitt (Jesus) and Tim Booth (Judas).
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