Bestival

Certain things in life are overrated. The Ramones, for instance. The Inbetweeners. Most American foods. Free periods at school. All might seem "cool" or "sexy" or "big and clever" at first, but when it comes to pouring the milk on the cornflakes they're exposed to be stale and unsavoury, and you find yourself miserably tipping the contents down the plug-hole. Bestival, however, is truly a pint of Cravendale's finest. Run by Radio 1's Rob Da Bank (who, by the by, recorded a damn fine Fabric Mix which is well worth tracking down) and set on the (probably) picturesque Isle of Wight, Bestival is a festival that transcends the usual festival experience and offers you a vast array of treats and distractions - so much so that you might well find yourself wandering around a forest the whole day, sitting on plastic toadstools and pretending to be a little fairy man, before slumping back in to your tent in a blissful daze and drifting off in to a contented slumber, thus entirely missing a whole Saturday's-worth of music. Including The Sugarhill Gang. And Aphex Twin (not together, you muggins). IT DOESN'T MATTER THOUGH, as all of this is wrapped up neatly in a bundle of good vibes and friendly atmospheres, so any music that may be going on is simply a nice little bonus to the already great times that you will be having. However, having an amazing array of music on the line-up sure does make that nice little bonus all the sweeter.

Here are a selection of acts on this year's bill that I think are well worth checking out if you're going, or cyber-investigating if you're in the sorry position of not having a ticket and aren't already aware of them. Needless to say, Elbow will not be appearing on this list. In fact, they should have led the list of 'overrated things' at the start of this post; they are truly cack. Since they won the Mercury Prize and were added as headliners to my two festivals this year, I've been earnestly trying to 'get' them, to appreciate their music as seemingly everyone else does. However the fiendish little buggers have consistently withheld any indication of their quality from me, and even after patiently standing through their headline set at Benicassim I am still none the wiser as to why they have not been chased from this country and sent in to exile in Boringville. Underworld headlined the Sunday last year: mind-bogglingly immense. Elbow this year: may the Lord have mercy 'pon our souls. Hopefully the following acts should shine some sunlight out of the musical arse that is Elbow.

The Field

Kate Bush-obsessed Swedish techno producer The Field is definitely in my Top 2 to see this year. Following ultra-amazing debut album From Here We Go Sublime in 2007, he's just released the follow-up entitled Yesterday and Today, which I have just downloaded but haven't listened to fully yet so I dunno if it's good. From a bit of listening though I'd say it certainly is. If you haven't come across him already and were put off by the 'techno' of the opening description, then allow me to clarify a bit. His songs are really a bit of techno, a bit of shoe-gaze, a bit of trancey stuff, a bit of ambient bizniz, and, er, all seem to lead back to Kate Bush. Well not ALL of it, really just a couple of tracks on the first album. And his MySpace profile quote. But it's all good stuff, and you should check him out. Here's a track from his new album, a cover of The Korgi's classic 'Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime', which will unfortunately probably be best known for Beck's not-very-good version used in Michel Gondry's not-very-good film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime

And here's a track from debut From Here We Go Sublime: Silent

Right, moving on to...

Diplo/Mad Decent Soundsystem/L-Vis 1990

The Bestival line-up has 'Diplo presents The Mad Decent Soundsystem' listed, which I think is fair to presume is just a glorified way of saying "Diplo's DJing". Which is good, 'cos Diplo is bloody nifty. I saw him at Wax:On in Leeds earlier this year where he was ace, and his Radio 1 Essential Mix from a couple years back is really most enjoyable: http://fiftyonefiftyone.com/2007/09/diplo-essential-mix-91507.html

His Mad Decent label has released a steady stream of bad-ass tunes over the years, including recently the work of Major Lazer, consisting of Diplo himself, along with Switch. Two DJs who are both individually great, but seem to have given birth to a distinctly average creation in ML. Their tropical-infused songs seem more fitted to the dancefloor rather than bedroom listening though, and I will be looking to give them another chance as the Lazer are also playing Bestival this year.

If you've read any music blog in the past 6 months or so then you'll most likely already be clued up to the eyeballs about L-Vis 1990, and until I've finished sifting through the contents of his wheelie-bin then there's really nothing else about him I can add here. For now all you need to know is that I spent ages trying to find this particular tune to upload on here, but have discovered that it's been completely wiped off the face of the free file-sharing world. Which, I'm sure I'll come to realise someday, is probably a good thing. Anyway, here's the YouTube video of United Groove: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI2lUIsSdPs

Martyn

Now, be warned, in this next bit I'm gonna 'go there'. That's right - 'there'. So just a heads up before we go any further. Right - In my opinion, dubstep, 'the sound of the summer', is getting boring. I'm not saying that new dubstep releases are more boring than they were, say, two years ago, I just think there's only so much off-beat, heavily squelching bass that I need in my life. Quite a lot of dubstep tunes literally give me a headache when I listen at home, and I have to turn it off, or switch to something more ambient/shoe-gazy/trancey/techno-y. Much of what once seemed so gloriously shuddering has turned in to over-the-top sample-filled tat, and I don't like it, sir. What's needed, really, is something that will make the nation's 15 year-old's get their little heads in a whirl and think "hey, THAT'S not dubstep?!", before anxiously consulting their FabricLive 37 for guidance. That's why England needs to relinquish control of dubstep, and let the internationalists take over. Flying Lotus and his Brainfeeding chums (Daedelus, Nosaj Thing, Samiyam etc) are just what the doctor ordered, as is a chap from the Netherlands that calls himself Martyn. Forward-thinking music that takes dubstep and mixes it with a whole bunch of other goodies, without even a hint of a Guy Ritchie film snippet thrown in. If you're currently sitting at home scribbling down a list of 'Best Albums of 2009', then Great Lengths should hold a place right near the top. Here's a track from said album: Elden St.

Billed as part of 'Dublime presents Appleblim, Martyn & Reso', that should be a slot well worth catching.

And now, a quick run down of a few other acts that should make this year's Bestival pretty tasty:

• Squarepusher - One of Warp Records' finest, the legendary experiMENTAL producer/DJ should deliver a mind-melting set, so bring a saucepan to collect the drips. Planetarium
• Hudson Mohawke - Another Warpster, HudMo should, er, deliver another mind-melting set. He's got an album coming out in October, so this should be a good chance to have a little peek at material from that. Oh, what's this? A little peek of material from his album EVEN BEFORE BESTIVAL? Christ almighty, this blog is just quite brilliant isn't it. Rising 5
• Massive Attack - You might've heard of them. They're pretty good, really.
• Buraka Som Sistema - Here's a remix they did of an artist that you should sell your grandmother to go and see (but sadly isn't playing at Bestival this year), Lykke Li. She's awesome live. And I could do with your grandmother around the house. Dance Dance Dance (Buraka Som Sistema Remix)
• The Cuban Brothers - There's no trace of sarcasm when I say they'll probably be the most entertaining act you see all festival. Main stage, be there.
• I've saved the most obscure until last, in the form of three female acts who, although probably off your radar at the moment, I predict will soon rise to great things - La Roux, Florence & The Machine, and Little Boots. Don't be scared by these unfamiliar and strange-sounding names, if my finger is as much on the music scene pulse as I believe it is, you'll soon be hearing a lot more from these underground gems.

And thus concludes what is arguably the first proper post this godforsaken blog has produced so far. 1 out of 4 isn't too bad really now is it? As a bonus treat, here's a golden classic, by one of the mega-highlights of last year's Bestival:

George Clinton & Funkadelic - One Nation Under A Groove

Cyaz @ tthe festyval guyz!!!!!! ! ! ! !!!

We Love The Program

The past two weeks of my life have revolved around the following song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqNPXUWaUo

That was the anthem that greeted me, along with my girlfriend Amber and a handful of other bemused Englishmen and women, as we marched in to the small Curzon cinema in Eastbourne roughly 2 weeks ago, before we were presented to the blank-faced German kids that we were to be teaching for the next fortnight. Yellow 'JM' flags in our hands, grins fixed to our faces and our shame well and truly around our ankles, we strode in to the cinema, and to this day I'm still unsure as to whether we were ushering in the latest pogrom - sorry - programme of English teaching, or the Fourth Reich. When Jurgen Matthes (of 'JM' fame) himself addressed the thoroughly un-bright eyed and un-bushy tailed crowd of German kinder, I'm unsure if Leni Riefenstahl was in fact busy at the back with her little camera, but one thing's for sure - we were mindlessly marching to the beat of the JM drum, and loving the programme as we did so. Non-lovers of the programme were, presumably, sent away to JM's 'alternative holiday camp', where they couldn't polute the minds of the rest of the children with their ungerman ways.

If you're just not that in to me describing minor events in my life in a borderline-racist way (the use of 'borderline' there is purely for aesthetic purposes - it is clearly fully racist to pick upon miniscule elements of a German organisation that may be slightly odd, and then blow them out of proportion with the result being a direct comparison between said organisation and the Nazi Party circa 1933. Please don't think badly of JM English school - this should restore some of their credibility: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeRTDeg5IFk&feature=channel).... I apologise for that ridiculously long use of brackets, it's kinda defeated the point of having brackets, as the bracketed stuff was much longer than the actual sentence it was supposed to be supplementing. I'll just start the sentence again: If you're just not that in to me describing minor events in my life in a borderline-racist way, then that last paragraph won't have been for you. It won't have been up your street. It won't have floated your boat. It won't have tickled your fancy. It won't have buttered your arse. And for that I apologise. I haven't actually got anything else to offer by way of recompense, other than a selection of songs to download, but I apologise nonetheless.

Now for the part of the blog that recently stormed to success in the 'Best Part of a Blog' category in The Webbys, and has been praised by such blogging aficionados as Goran Ivanisevic and the Big Cook from CBBC's 'Big Cook Little Cook'. That's right, it's:

Songs I'm Currently Loving:

• Dusty Kid - Here Comes The Techno
• Lukid - Veto
• Cut Chemist - What's The Altitude
• Zombie Nation - Worth It pt. 1
• Bibio - The Palm of Your Wave
• Christian Falk - Dream On (feat. Robyn & Ola Salo)
• Orange Juice - Rip It Up
• Freeform Five - No More Conversations (Mylo Remix)

Needless to say, with this post this blog has now outdone itself in terms of half-arsed and badly written blogging. The first two posts were bad, but this is truly dreadful. Just look at it - I start telling what could have happily developed in to a feisty little story, full of humour and little anecdotes about my teaching experience, but instead turns in to unimaginative comparisons between current day Germany and Nazi Germany, before cutting off the story completely with a paragraph so bad that it actually repeats the opening line twice, and descends in to a list of alternate phrases for 'it won't have been up your street'. For the more beady-eyed among you, you might have noticed that this is the second post in succession that has turned in to rambling, self-deprecating tosh, and I truly intend to deliver some blogging of better quality from now on. Can we fix it? Well, to paraphrase President Barack Obama of the United States of America: "We can, yes."

Hope Springs

Right, after just one post of this blog so far I've already decided that the name is crap and should have been one of the following:

- Ablogalypse Now

- Blogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

- Groundblog Day

- The Blog on the Tyne is all mine all mine

or in memory of everyone's new all-time favourite artist - Don't Blog 'Til You Get Enough

Due to the enormous international reputation and hype that this blog has already generated in it's short existence I feel it would be confusing to actually change the name, but from now on please choose your favourite name from the above list (or create your own, and e-mail me suggestions) and when you're next eagerly discussing it over breakfast with your family, or during breaks with your work colleagues, please refer to it under it's new alias.

I've named this post Hope Springs because I was planning on delivering a scything and hilariously cynical review/rant about a really bad TV programme that was on BBC1 recently, about a bunch of ex-con women who rob some geeza of some money and then escape to a remote village in the Scottish countryside where they start running a pub, and of course the humorous potential is limitless because A GROUP OF FEMALE EX-CONS WITH LOADSAMONEY DON'T BELONG IN THE COUNTRYSIDE RUNNING A POXY LITTLE PUB DO THEY?!!?!! THAT'S BLOOMIN' BARMY THAT IS!!!!! THEY'RE SO UNACCUSTOMED TO THESE RURAL WAYS!!!! Anyway, I was gonna write this thoroughly side-splitting review of this thoroughly un-side-splitting show, and you were all gonna sit at home reading it, chuckling along and thinking, "Oh God isn't TV these days rubbish, I hope whoever created Hope Springs gets knocked off their bike tomorrow, but not in such a nasty collision that it actually causes serious harm, more so that it can just inconvenience them and perhaps disrupt their daily routine in a way that will further compound their misery e.g. making them just slightly too late to get any of the good sandwiches at Boots so they'll have to buy a cheese salad one. SERVES 'EM RIGHT FOR MAKING SUCH A DREADFUL SHOW."

So I WAS planning on writing such a review, but then realised that seeing as it's been quite a while since I watched the show in question I can't actually remember much of it whatsoever. One thing I can remember is that they've got that woman from One Foot In The Grave along for it, and she has an unconvincing accent. So, er, yeh, take THAT Hope Springs! hahahahahahahahahalolololololololgodisn'ttvrubbishthesedaysroflmao.

To make up for that disappointment, I'll write a bit about music. As I'm sure you're aware, the last post caused the global media to report mass internet server crashes as hordes rushed to download what have now been dubbed 'The Server-smashing Seven', i.e. the 7 tracks I made available for download. For those of you half-wits with your heads lodged firmly in the sand who didn't hear about this cyber-phenomenon, I wouldn't bother trying to check the BBC News website or anything like that for reports on the story if I were you, they're probably all still down due to the strain placed on the world wide web by this very blog yesterday. You'll just have to take my word for it. But for those of you that have realised by now that 'The Hardcore and The Gentle' is a blog with attitude, and a bad one at that, you'll know that more system-fucking is just around the corner. Let's just say that if this blog witnessed a petty crime on the street, it would hang around long enough for the police to arrive and begin questioning witnesses, but then flip the policeman the bird (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgmp4MmfG0) as he politely asked to take down witness contact details, before running off giggling and dropping an empty crisp packet in an area where hedgehogs are known to roam. Dang, this blog would probably have commited the petty crime in the first place. That, my friends, is why there shall be no less than EIGHT tracks uploaded in this post. That's right, a whole one more than the previous post, and I recommend you download them sharpish, before the FBI get involved.

I've just reached a stage in this post that's known as "Blogger's Long & Empty Baguette", whereby you realise that what you've been happily chomping away at for a while actually contains no filling. In other words, I've written A LOT, but at the same time haven't written anything. There's literally nothing there. I've discussed a non-review of a show that I've forgotten all details about, and made up various attributes of this blog and discussed them in a long-winded and rambling manner, without actually doing any proper blogging. If those were my trump cards, the things that I felt I just HAD to talk at length about and make everyone listen, in normal everyday conversation, needless to say I'd be scorned and ignored.

So without further ado, here's a small slice of music-related blogging. Mono-browed German electro master Alex Ridha, who appears to share his name with the protagonist of Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker book so wisely often refers to himself as Boys Noize, has made a new album. But he's not gonna give you it until October I'm afraid. However, here's one of the tracks from the new LP - entitled 'Power' - for you to welcome in to your music library: Jeffer

And here's a dubsteppin' remix of one of his own classic remixes: Feist - My Moon My Man (DZ Remix of Boys Noize's Remix)

Now it's time for the ever-popular section I like to call:

Songs That I'm Currently Listening To:

(but will from now on refer to as 'Songs I'm Currently Loving', as the 'listening to' doesn't convey just how down right bad-ass they are)

• Zomby - Mush
• Hudson Mohawke - Overnight
• Birdy Nam Nam - The Parachute Ending
• Moodymann - I'm Doing Fine
• Nosaj Thing - Fog
• Joker & Ginz - Re-up with Tempa T - Next Hype

DRAAAAAPES, GET OUT THE CAR!

A casual introduction to... The Hardcore and The Gentle

First things first, I've just been to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and can now confirm that if Alan Partridge was to model his hair in the style of a German lesbian then he would look identical to Draco Malfoy.

On a lesser note, allow me to welcome you to the latest, and for now almost definitely the worst, addition to what is often named 'the blogosphere'. I thought it wouldn't be appropriate not to name the blog after a somewhat obscure song lyric which is far from instantly recognisable (it's drawn from 'Big Time Sensuality' by Bjork), and for those that were worrying that this blog will discuss songs that are purely either hardcore or gentle then I can assure you that's not the case, as that would be a ridiculous premise for a blog.

Any songs that may feature on these pages will be songs that I consider to be 'just great songs', and won't necessarily be brand spanking new. This is so that I can throw a range of - what i consider to be - mega-dope tunes at you, whether they be old, new, or not even created yet; tunes that I feel will be pleasurable upon your dainty ears, but won't necessarily grant you the opportunity for a self-satisfied smug smile (not a sentence for the lispers, that) whenever a new dancefloor destroyer is dropped in a club, as the crowd around you goes mental but you are able to calmly shrug and smirk, "Huh, this is old news".

For those of you who were rightly not taken in by the previous explanation, the real reason that the songs on here probably won't be particularly new is because I don't have any prestige as a blogger, and therefore no-one sends me their new tunes. They don't even send me their old tunes. Shiiiit, I really need some tunes. For the love of God, PLEASE SOMEONE SEND ME SOME TUNES, ANY TUNES, POST ME YOUR OLD COPY OF 'SPICE WORLD' ON CASSETTE TAPE IF YOU MUST, JUST SEND THE DAMN THING. Anyway, to cover up this fact from now on, the songs will be presented in a special section I like to call: "Songs I'm Currently Listening To". Whilst not a very imaginative title, it does handily dodge the need for the songs themselves to actually BE current. So basically, if you want a blog with a silly and slightly emo-sounding name that sneaks around pretending to be a properly constructed music blog when it is in fact the complete opposite, then 'The Hardcore and The Gentle' is for you. If however you want new, fresh songs, well thought-out reviews and thoroughly researched and insightful background detail, then I suggest you look elsewhere, and get your 'ead checked you wally, you're bloomin' maaad you are!

Right, without further ado, here's the inaugural edition of 'Songs I'm Currently Listening To'. Here's an indefinite selection of tracks (depending on how quickly I get bored of uploading them, it's probably gonna be five) that you can download, listen to, and treasure, and perhaps the next time you see me you'll even feel compelled to proclaim, "Hey, yeah, Jack, loved that tune dude, U DA MAN!" and do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAopLTK4qVs

(I should mention that these songs won't all be of a particular genre, although I imagine quite a few will be of the electronic variety. Also, if by some incredible turn of events you happen to be reading this and you aren't simply one of my Facebook friends who I'll have sent this to who'll be reading this out of a sense of pity, and are in fact someone important or even more incredibly the artist themselves and don't wish for me to be giving out your material willy-nilly, then just lemme know and I'll take the track down.)

Songs That I'm Currently Listening To:

• Spektre - Pacemaker
• LeLe - Breakfast
• Nirvana - Breed - influenced by 2many djs' storming set at Benicassim
• Sticky K - Bandari Funk
• Flying Lotus - Parisian Goldfish
• JoJo - Too Little Too Late - huge tune. too huge some might say
• Michael Jackson - Earth Song - woahhh and there was you thinking the tunes couldn't get any huger than JoJo