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A Crazy Musical Fortnight - Part 4 - My Weekend at Manchester's Parklife Weekender

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This was only the second music festival I've ever been to. I know, shocking. Parklife takes place in Manchester once a year, normally within the first fortnight of June and this year was situated at Heaton Park. After being thoroughly let down by Beach Break (they moved to Newquay and had a terrible line up), we started looking around for others we could go to. After seeing Chase & Status at the Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, it only seemed right that we should go to the Warehouse Project's own music festival. Taken at the end of Saturday Saturday's timings The weather was ridiculously good. Hardly any clouds whatsoever, and flippin boiling. Which was good in some cases, but we had expected rain and wind and dressed accordingly. Getting into the park was badly organised as they didn't have very many of the silver barriers, but never mind. The first thing I saw was the latter half of Delphic's set: I'm a big fan of these guys so was ...

A Crazy Musical Fortnight - Part 3 - My Week at NME

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So THEN I travelled back down to London for my NME work placement on the Sunday of getting back from Muse. I stayed with my lovely friend Anna in West Norwood, so it took roughly an hour to get there every day, which includes walking to and from stations so that's not bad at all! I always find it fascinating, working out how to get from one place to another in London. It's all just so clever! So every day I would get into the London Bridge overground station, next to The Shard: And I would walk to the Blue Fin Building in which NME is based. Here's a view from the top of the building: On Monday we were given a tour of all the important bits of the building that we'd need to know. Karen Walter is the Editor's PA, and was basically in charge of us whilst we were there. She gave us two tasks to complete by the end of the week; one was to go through last week's edition and analyse it by saying what we liked and didn't like about it. The other was...

A Crazy Musical Fortnight - Part 2 - A Night With Muse

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Saturday the 1st of June, I saw Muse at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester. They were INCREDIBLE. My write up of it for Stereoboard can be found here , but the unabridged, full fledged version is below. This band have been on my top-ten-bands-to-see-before-I-die list for rather a while. So when I opened up that envelope with the ticket confirmation email in from my parents at Christmas, I was suitably ecstatic. Regardless of whether you’re a Muse fan or not, you can’t watch a video of them at Glasto or similar doing their thang and not want to be there! It was a suitably lovely day in terms of weather as well, and that is kind of what makes or breaks a stadium gig in my opinion.  The support acts were Bastille and Dizzee Rascal. I’m not a massive fan of Bastille, but went in with an open mind. They were surprisingly good, so fair play to you guys! They played new single “Laura Palmer” really well, and “Flaws” sounded good too. I slightly questioned the judgement of whoe...

A Crazy Musical Fortnight - Part 1 - An Evening with VICE

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If you regularly follow/look out for my blog (which I should hope you do!) then you may notice that I haven't posted in almost two months. My bad. To be fair, May was filled with exams and university work. But what a month June has been! Gosh. Let me tell you about it: Thurs 30th May: You Need To Hear This launch in London - writing for Stereofox Sat 1st June: Muse at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester Sun 2nd June - Fri 7th June: Down to London for my work placement at NME Sat 8th June - Sun 9th June: Parklife Festival in Manchester Thurs 20th June - You Need To Hear This party in London - writing for  Stereofox Let's just say The Trainline have done well out of me! So the launch. You Need To Hear This is an idea created by Phillips and Noisey, the music section of VICE magazine. It's a fantastic idea, music documentaries that are topical. Check it out! It was down in Haggerston in London, at a place called "The King's Head". Looks like an old pu...

Delphic - Baiya - Collections

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I first heard of this band about 4 years ago, when their first album "Acolyte" came out. There's a great track on there called "Doubt", click here  for the Spotify link. The whole album is pretty good to be honest, it's indie but is quite electronically focussed. When this album came out, there weren't that many bands doing that kind of thing, but obviously now there's quite a lot of bands doing this (just look at this blog!). They were supported by Everything Everything, who are also within this genre and also from Manchester, but are slightly more eclectic. Delphic are made up of Richard Boardman, Matt Cocksedge, James Cook and Dan Hadley.

Post War Years - All Eyes - Galapagos

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Haters of Made In Chelsea look away now. No, I'm kidding. Please don't! I used to be a hater myself, but my housemates forced it upon me once and... well, you can probably guess the rest. However, I'm safe in the knowledge that I'm not obsessed with it, like so many are. I just find it fascinating to see how these people live. Craziness. Anyway, MIC (as it's affectionately known)'s redeeming quality for myself and many others is the music, chosen by a lady called Andrea Madden. Nice work Andrea! In one of the episodes was a song called "Nova" by this band.  Click here  for the Spotify link. It's a great song, so I looked for them on Spotify, and found this song, "All Eyes".

London Grammar - Metal And Dust - If You Wait

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I normally like to start my posts off with a little bit of background about each artist. I feel like it helps us get to know them a bit better. Context always helps. But I can't actually find very much on this band at all. They're from London (obvs), their names are Hannah Reid, Dot Major and Dan Rothman, and they played a very well received gig at Electrowerkz a couple of weeks ago, but apart from that there's not that much. Nothing is really given away on their facebook page, twitter or even on their own website. Maybe that's what they're going for though, they want to be elusive and aloof... Maybe not. Anyway.