Peaches Geldof

FAME AND THE GIANT PEACHES
You'd be forgiven for forming an opinion on Peaches Geldof without meeting her. Splashed all over the tabloids, you can chart her ill-mannered escapades and impetuosity almost weekly; a marriage here, a near overdose there, a bitchy jibe sprinkled on top. Dig a little deeper and you can also find a young girl trying to forge her way in the world on her own merits, escape the endless comparisons to her dead mother and perhaps lastly, trying to enjoy a youth that all of the above has so far seemed to deny her.

Clubland 2008 in Review

So another year's diary heads towards obsolescence, presents are bought for nearest and dearest and we here at Real Groove mark off the time by summing up the year that was in music. 2008 has been an interesting year as far as techno and house are concerned. As an inevitable backlash to the rise of minimal that was suddenly branded as big and cool in 2007, house music made a proper comeback this year. It's not a necessarily fair comment to say that house music was foundering before that, because further inspection of some of the keys players this year (label Drumpoet Community, producer Sascha Dive for example) reveals a success achieved in 2008 but groundwork that stretches back many years.

The Killers

As one of the biggest bands in the world puts the finishing touches on album number three Real Groove ponders the cost of being at the top with Brandon Flowers.

If Brandon Flowers isn't guarded, then he's at least being a little bit weary. Arranging himself on a nondescript designer sofa in a roomy hotel suite, he appears coiled, ready for flight, ready for anything but than to answer another run of inquisitions about forthcoming album Day & Age. It is his last interview of three days solid questioning by international press so we can forgive The Killers front man for a certain reticence.

DEADBEAT

These are exciting times we live in. No, no, please keep reading. I'm not going to talk about the US elections. I couldn't give a toss, really. I'm referring to the astounding quality and fair quantity of albums being released that are patiently stacking themselves into my listen-to list this year.

Earlier in the year Sascha Funke, Loco Dice, Minilogue and The Mole all released superb albums. In the latter parts of 2008 we've had substantial additions from Shed, Stefan Goldmann, Headhunter and the topic of today's discussion, Deadbeat, with Roots and Wire.

Alton Ellis

The Godfather of rocksteady, the man with one of the sweetest reggae voices in the business has died from lymphatic cancer at the age of 70.
Despite being a huge influence on other successful artists, Ellis never enjoyed financial prosperity from his many successes. His biggest hit "I'm Still In Love", which he made at Clement "Coxone" Dodd's Studio One label was a source of controversy between the two men, as were the royalties of many of his other songs he recorded there.
Ellis had lived in England since the early seventies continuing to perform and record, though more sporadically. Listening to his music, you couldn't help but feel happy, whether he was singing songs of praise, lover's laments or hymns of repatriation.
R.I.P.

Keane

Rehab, the Berlin record, alternative media and hyping Dead Prez. Hang on, is this Keane we're talking to?

You don't expect soft rockers to have problems. They make their emotional ballads, play them to adoring fans, sit around with a cup of tea afterwards and head off back to the manor for a kip before the next Royal gala show.

Things are never what they seem though; beneath the veneer of culpable tenderness, cracks appear and soon enough large amounts of mind altering intoxicants are needed to keep that veneer in place.

Oasis: Dig Out Your Soul

Can the last great apes of rock pull out another rabbit from their velvet swag bag?

Liam Gallagher has been bounding around the old boozer like a young chimp, his jaunty swagger giving way to near scampering as he ascends and descends the rickety stairs with quad-pedal aplomb. His brachiating calms as he approaches the lounge where Real Groove is already ensconced with Gem Archer and Andy Bell, though it would seem things are off to a bad start as I’m sitting in Liam’s seat. Deferring to the alpha male I shuttle myself over to the couch.

Kerri Chandler

Clubland


Kerri Chandler once said that in order to enjoy your (house) music all you needed was “a basement, a red light and a feeling.” The simple truth spoken many years ago still holds today, as does the career of Mr Chandler, with his ongoing production of impeccable classic house cuts and a slight tweaking of that red light into a red laser.
House music in 2008 is seeing a renaissance, partly thanks to a backlash against formulaic minimal-by-numbers releases finally reaching a point of unsustainable dehydration. It's not that house music went away or anything, just that more DJ's are switching back to something a little more hefty in the soul department for their sets.

14 Tracks

It's a fast paced world out there. Too fast to nestle down to the computer night and day to forage for hidden delicacies of the musical variety, let alone group a bunch of them together in one silken, sonorous swag bag.
Good thing is, there's someone out there doing it for you.
14 Tracks is an affiliate of the mighty Boomkat on-line store out of Manchester. Those gorgeous little dance-wise goblins serve up weekly release sheets of the top end techno, dubstep, far out electronica and experimental whateverness. Most of it is on a dub tip, all of it quality.
Anyway back to 14 Tracks. Subscribe to this modern marvel of the new musical age and get a slippery electronic slice of mail inserted into your inbox on a weekly basis, updating you on the latest fourteen nuggets of sound gear assiduously assembled on whatever that weeks theme may be.
The best of dubstep, the most coveted covers, rootical radness, Kompakt's finest moments... the list goes on. A single track will run you 99p, the whole bunch you can net for a measly £6.86. As for the quality of the tracks selected, well just go to the site and find out.
Utterly ridonkulous!

Shackleton

Is this the end of the line for Soundboy? Has his bleak penchant for, well, bleakness finally become too much for him?
Soundboy's Suicide Note becomes the latest bassbin biscuit on the Skull Disco imprint to demand instant purchase; four tracks to measure your resilience to murderous low end frequencies by.
Vengeance Tenfold blathers beat-esoterica over the grim 'The Rope Tightens...', '...But the Branch Is Weak' offers brief respite, while the two cuts on the B-side dive into further subterranean duress.
Essential listening.

DJ BONE

CLUBLAND

The term underground gets thrown about like kids toys these days, without meaning, for almost no reason. It has been a long time since dance music could be denoted underground and have that really mean that it was pushing against the trends, forging new ground, remaining true to itself without following a bigger trend. With a recent purchase I was reminded of one artist I truly consider to be underground; evidenced by his longevity (yet relative anonymity) as a DJ and producer, uncompromising ideals and do it yourself spirit.

Ladyhawke

LADYHAWKE


The bar was old; a long ago given a sniff of paint type of boozer that had been providing a scrap of goo-plated carpet and scent-soaked atmosphere for the pint swillers of Lexington and Broadwick streets. Pip said it was meant to be haunted, though who knows why any ghost would hang around in such a dingy outpost of an other-time Soho.
We settle down to a cheap draught lager and Pip Brown starts filling me in on the details of her alter ego Ladyhawke.

Black Kids Interview

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Party lights are on dude. Florida’s Black Kids are here to show you how.

Reggie Youngblood, sister Ali and drummer Kevin Snow are pretty exhausted. Chatting with three members of Jacksonville, Florida’s pop darling band of the moment Black Kids, I’m getting a grasp on how much work their chance at breaking out of their hometown to an international stage has been. The easiest part apparently was being discovered; the band was playing at the Athens Pop Fest in August of last year to around forty people including several bloggers. After seeing the band they got typing and launched them into the worldwide blogosphere, though not necessarily with all the facts. An early blog mentioned the band sounded like My Bloody Valentine and Arcade Fire and since then almost every article about Black Kids has picked up the same thread. It’s something they are keen to dispel.

Redshape: The Man in the Mask

My monthly column from Real Groove magazine - this month: Redshape


CLUBLAND - AUGUST

For the past two years he’s been prescribing raw slabs of Detroit techno funk to a self-medicating faithful behind the anonymity of a red mask. Little is known about Redshape except that he is of shorn head and European decent. The rumours are many; that he is a well known producer; that he has produced for Delsin and Music Man before he adopted his current guise; that he is in fact Carl Craig/Deetron/Dave Clarke/Luke Slater/Tiesto… okay maybe not Tiesto.

We Have Band

WE HAVE BAND


Some of the best ideas start life as little more than an idealised supposition. So it is with We Have Band, the hotly tipped post-punk funk newcomers who started making music to fit the superlative name they conjured up one day.
Married couple Thomas and Dede Wegg-Prosser wanted a creative venture they could work on together, and thus was born We Have Band. Without any music having been thought up, they told friend Darren Bancroft of the band name, who immediately demanded entry into the group.

BUZZIN' FLY & VILLALOBOS

CLUBLAND JUNE



Listening to the innocuous soft house meanderings of Everything But The Girl (EBTG as a generation of MOR dance music lovers came to know them) it comes as no surprise that Ben Watt needed something a little different from his day job to keep his creativity piqued. Enter his Lazy Dog project with Jay Hannan and more recently his Buzzin' Fly label, which is a continuation and evolution of Watt's club night/label vision and just turned five years old. With his interest in house music gradually exploring the more minimal and synthetic end of the spectrum, the latest Buzzin' Fly release sees German producer (Martin) Stimming contribute a melodic, deep tech house twelve inch that would probably appeal to many of those aforementioned EBTG fans - though it can be fairly said that Stimming crafts his sound sculpture with a great degree more subtlety than the crossover hit artists.

Debbie Harry

I've been lucky enough in my career to interview some of my favourite artists and producers, but interviewing Debbie Harry was one of the coolest things I've done.

DEBBIE HARRY


They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two years ago, and now, thirty years after the release of their breakthrough album Parallel Lines, Blondie have announced a world tour to celebrate the milestone. No Magazine speaks to singer Debbie Harry whose image stands as legacy to the band, perhaps even more so than the music they created.

Minilogue & Loco Dice

CLUBLAND MAY


The Swedish production team of Minilogue have barely put a foot wrong over the last few years. Originally starting out as Son Kite, producing progressive house and trance, they quickly branched out into more techno and house-centric material, finally abandoning their Son Kite project in 2004 in favour of their Minilogue moniker. Most of the releases have always held some element of this beginning but with ever more stylistic touches they have been refining their art, stripping back the clutter whilst enhancing the overall effect. With their debut album Animals recently released it looks like they have reached the zenith of this process. The album is in two parts; a dance oriented chapter and an ambient one, but let’s just look at the floor fare for now.

Portishead

PORTISHEAD

Back from the hinterland of an eleven year hiatus, Portishead gear up to release the aptly titled Third album; just don’t call it trip hop.

The nineties nostalgia capsule may be filled with rollerblades, Vanilla Ice and more about Jennifer Aniston’s hair than anybody ever wanted to know, but it also gave us musical sustenance (and pigeon-holing terminology) with grunge, drum & bass, brit-pop, and trip hop. The latter was one of those sleight of hand moments in music journalism that sought to define a style of emerging music but generally looked upon by the artists unfavourably.

The Littl'ans

NO MORE HIDING FROM SATURDAY NIGHT


London four-piece, the Littl’ans saw their indie rock star rise with an instant hit aided by the effortlessly shambolic Pete Doherty. Now after crashing back to earth they’ve picked up the pieces and once more set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Mark 'The Cobrasnake' Hunter

CAMERAS READY, PREPARE TO FLASH!


It’s there, for your immediate friends - no, the world to see. Your eyes fluttering even in the frozen still-motion of a captured image; drink hanging lazily by your side like a faithful puppy and cigarette pasted to the corner of your mouth but perilously close to succumbing to gravity’s inevitable conclusion. It’s not necessarily how you remember (?) your night but thanks to some scurrilous camera jockey and their photo blog it’s how it will go down in history. Elsewhere on the page everyone else perfectly epitomizes your imagined hipness.

Claro Intelecto

Clubland April

Spring slowly brings a thaw to the chilling vise of winter that held London gripped between its icy jaws. Early mornings are met now with shimmering dew and blinding shards of golden sunlight, the foggy breath of harried commuters heaving a ragged seasonal farewell, scarves giving way to flashes of bare milky necks.

Jimpster, Aaron Carl, Booka Shade

CLUBLAND

Chatting to a friend the other day about tennis shoes, Dadaist art and finally music, he was telling me how he found the latest Poker Flat comp just a little too dry for his tastes. To be honest I haven’t heard it yet so that’s about the only mention it’s going to get in this month’s column. But I could understand what he was on about; despite the fact that we’d just taken in a rather abstract and minimal art exhibition that seemed like it could have been the visual equivalent to sparse techno and arid, housey meanderings, that ultra stripped back sound isn’t for everyone.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

ARTROCKERS

Séances with Nick Cave, recapturing the great concerts of psychiatric hospital history and mixtapes for the social networking generation; the art world according to Forsyth and Pollard.
It’s almost a courting tool of years gone by, a knick-knack you might find in Grandma’s hope chest in decades to come, something that exists now but through changing media has lost its true essence.

Shackleton, Quantec, Pablo Bolivar

CLUBLAND

If you’d never heard of Shackleton before Ricardo Villalobos got a hold of ‘Blood on my Hands’ then that record cemented him into your memory for all time. To extol the virtues of Villalobos’ immaculate remixes in two parts is somewhat pointless; if you know the tune then more than likely it’s been hanging around in your head/record bag/lap top/top ten ever since.

Sascha Funke - Mango

CLUBLAND FEBRUARY

A slack gray sheet of cloud whimpers across the London sky, spluttering greasy grains of moisture on to my head as I await the bus that begins my morning commute. I push my ear phones deep in to my aural cavity, remnant drops of my recent shower suctioning loudly against the pliable rubber moldings. There’s only one way to blank the pressed humanity of London’s daily commute, the jostling throngs of scurrying maze-rats about tube stations, the weak pushed aside or trampled underfoot.
Music, the sunglasses of the ears.