RECORD OF THE WEEK: WE ARE THE PHYSICS, Goran Ivanisevic

AS WILD as Goran Ivanisevic at his most magnificent, We AreThe Physics have released this topical lunatic single so contrary to thecivilised Wimbledon setting that it deserves to be noted. Amazingly, while starting out sounding slightly deranged,they have recognised the musicality of the sparkling, brooding Croat’s name and managedto layer it into an almost anthemic tribute as unpredictable as the man himself.

HOW TO BRING A SONG TO LIFE - A LESSON IN TALENT SHOW SNOBBERY

HERE'S an example of American Idol contender Phillip Phillips proving that real musicians can be uncovered on such shows.

This is the original Usher song Nice and Slow - scroll to 4.20 to see the matching segment.




And here's what Phillip Phillips did to it...




I don't buy talent show snobbery.
I'm quite happy to judge alongside the rest of them, often despairing at song choices.
But I aways find a favourite I love almost enough to want to stay in on a Saturday night - almost but not quite, there's always online catchup TV...
Granted, there's the inevitable sinking feeling that once the chosen one has been anointed, whatever it was that made them original will be filed away to nothing by the time their first overproduced single is released.
But that is the fault of others and, often, the runners-up end up having highly successful careers, sometimes credible even.
So next time you find yourself in a state of despair, think of Phillip Phillips...

NOBODY CANNA CROSS IT - A POSITIVE TAKE ON A SERIOUS SITUATION

I'm a bit late to this one but for those who haven't already seen it, here's a video to make you smile - a light take on a difficult time.
It was some time ago and not intended to mock the destruction caused by flooding at Mavis Bank in Jamaica last year. If anything, it'll have raised some awareness.



For the curious, the link below chronicles the history of the clip.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody-canna-cross-it

CAMDEN CRAWL - ARE YOU READY? ESSENTIAL SURVIVAL KIT TIPS

THE hour is approaching – the Camden Crawl Festival, our annual ramble through territories familiar and not so, begins tomorrow and we’re doing a reverse rain dance in anticipation.

While some are still recovering from the London marathon, we Camden types are in training for our very own Camden-style athletic challenge – a 3-day test of endurance comprising miles walked, queues joined, decibels tolerated, venues visited, pints drunk and all in skinny jeans and suspension-averse ballet shoes. Bring on the gold medal.

Headliners Glasvegas

There’s not enough room to tell you every name, venue or activity programmed so here are the basics. A weekend ticket can buy to Saturday and Sunday (May 5 and 6), hundreds of singers, artists, comedians and the first ever Crawlternative Media Expo at St Michael’s Church. Ghetts, Admiral Fallow, Clock Opera, Glasvegas, Lady Leshurr, The Futureheads, Alabama 3, Gaz Coombes and so, so many more will feature over the weekend, while the full list of artists, venues and details of the Crawl’s daytime programme can be found at www.thecamdencrawl.com Tickets for Friday’s launch headlined by Death in Vegas at Koko, can be bought separately.

To help you on your way, here’s my Camden Crawl survival kit.

1) Phone charger. Pack one for times when you want to check out SBTV’s Electric Ballroom urban takeover while your gig buddy would rather check out the record fair at St Mark’s Church or an acoustic act way down the other end of Camden High Street. If your phone has the misfortune to have a short iPhone battery, take every opportunity to charge it along the way – or risk spending the rest of the Crawl alone, or worse, unable to tweet.

2) Plan your timetable. Some acts, like Baxter Dury and Ellen and the Escapades play both days while there’s only one chance to catch others.

3) Plan for queues. You can’t always see everything, so be realistic. If there’s a real must-see band, get there early.

4) Comfy shoes – two days trekking up and down Camden High Street will leave even the most hardy feet feeling battered and bruised, perhaps finally an excuse to dig out that unwanted Christmas foot spa?

5) Layers and light waterproofs – We don’t want a repeat of the great Camden washout of 2010 when every inch of every layer of our clothing was drenched before the (cold) sun had gone down.  

6) Waterproof eyeliner / guyliner / mascara – there’s no shortage of heavy make-up in Camden, just make sure it’s of the waterproof variety, so it can withstand both the sweaty heat of a mosh pit and any potential torrents sent to try us.

7) Research the line-up – you can’t possibly have heard of every band on the line-up. Look up the unfamiliar ones, find the hidden gems lurking in the small print, they may be the next big thing. That’s how we saw Florence and the Machine some time back and Rizzle Kicks last year.

8) Keep your eyes open, listen out for the buzz and monitor Twitter. There are always surprises, guest appearances and random musicians – usually called Pete Doherty – wandering the streets.

FAREWELL MCA - BASTIE BOYS' ADAM YAUCH RIP

WHILE those in the know will today be taking stock of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch's contribution to music, I'll be remembering his effect on the formative years of my skateboarding friends. Their older albums were favourites but it was the era of Ill Communication that seemed to be composed to our lives. Sabotage was a masterpiece, Sure Shot's flute intro a crystal signal to action and The Beastie Boys' ensuing energy daring us to match them. Adam, or MCA, was not yet 50 and although his illness was not new, his loss remains a shock. Farewell MCA - the many tributes already posted online are fitting.



and the classic Sabotage...

RECORD OF THE WEEK - Cake, Long Time

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME.... since I've posted on this blog.

So, having been reminded by a repeat of Shameless USA just how magnificent Cake's song Long Time is, and in light of the apt title, I thought I'd start with this...

CAKE - Long Time

GHOSTPOET - A PRIZED SPECTRE

AFTER a heavy night out, when the sun and moon were at war and thoughts were pleasantly hazy, Tricky’s Maxinquaye album filled the silence with an intense cosy wooziness.
Sixteen years later the same foggy evenings are now smothered in Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam, the debut album from Ghostpoet.

One of Mike Skinner’s favourite MCs, and hailed as one of the most exciting new hip-hop talents in the UK, Ghostpoet aka Obaro Ejimiwe, was recently nominated for a Mercury Music Prize.

 We last saw him solo, accompanied by a complex-looking console of laptops at Barfly for the Camden Crawl. Next week, after his nomination for one of the industry’s prestigious music prizes, he plays Scala (Oct 13), with an entourage of musicians, promising a number of surprise guests.

Although he had never met Mike Skinner, The Streets’ frontman – on temporarily taking over the Guardian music page – nailed his colours to Ghostpoet’s flag, citing him as one of his favourite MCs and streaming his album on the website.

Obaro said: “It was really amazing because I’ve been a fan of his music for so long. The idea of him bigging our music up is really out of this world.”

Less verbose than his songs, his blog reveals some curious insights, like his appreciation for Haribo wine gums: “It’s one of these comfort things that sometimes you need in your life. It’s kind of fundamental on tour life to have a few sweets you can eat so Haribo is the sweet of choice at the moment.”



Food is important to Obaro, explaining how his album was named after household spreads: “I needed a title that encapsulated the feeling of the album to me personally. I never listened to it as a whole piece until it was finished. For me it was quite a lot of melancholy in there and the idea of being a bit down, a bit out, a bit grey, the idea of not having a great day but still hope for the future. That was where I was getting the melancholy...I like comfort eating when I feel under the weather so I like peanut butter, I like jam so I thought I’d put it together.”

He’s not as morose as his album, swearing he’s like any normal person: “Like everyone else I guess, (I have) good days and bad days. Some days I don’t want to get out of bed, I want to stay in and wallow, other days I want to enjoy the sunshine, whatever works. Up and down good and bad, left and right, round and round.”

Obaro, who is engaged but coy about how he proposed, is more reserved than expected, saving his innermost insights for his music: “It’s connected to emotions. I try to pour into the emotion and feelings I get out of the music I create, it’s about tapping into that and letting the music tell me what to write. I guess the lyrics are a combination of the things I come across over a period of time, it could be from my life, from someone else’s life, from something I come across on the road and I try to shape it around a particular tune that I’ve made.”

His mild superstitions prevent him from revealing any unrecorded lyrics: “I couldn’t do that, I’m really bad with stuff like that. I don’t like saying lyrics until they’re recorded, they may change if I say it out loud it may jinx it, can’t say anything until it’s recoded...I don’t like saying much about potential things, rather wait until its set in stone before I announce stuff.”

He harbours a plan to one day open a dog farm: “It’s not an easy task starting a farm for dogs. But I think it could potentially happen if I have the means and the finances. I have one, I wish I had four. I never really was into dogs when I was a kid. I got one about three years ago and they’re just great companions, no matter what kind of mood you’re in they’re always there for you.”

While the glare is all on Obaro, his reaction couldn’t be more understated.
He said: “I’ve become slightly busier... people who may have never heard of my stuff before have been exposed to it a bit more I guess and that’s great, kind of what I wanted from the Mercury if anything so I was grateful to get that awareness, pick up a fanbase and cement a career of sorts...to be part of the Mercury was a complete shock to me.”

He added: “It’s definitely a case of more doors are opening because of the position I got myself into now and I’m really pleased with how things are going.”

AMY WINEHOUSE - OUR TARNISHED CHANTEUSE

Here's a piece I wrote for the Camden New Journal. I took the picture at Amy's Snakehips DJ night, The Monarch, 2008.

AMY Winehouse, our treasured, tarnished chanteuse whose talent lay as much in the heart-shattering cracks in her vocals as her ability to bare her darkest moments in song, soul laid bare on the kitchen floor, has left us too soon. Camden without Amy is muted, the loss immense. Such was her omnipresence that the void is even greater.

I saw her at her best – The Dublin Castle, Camden Crawl 2008, entrancing as her aching vocals beguiled observers into feeling her pain, and her worst – oblivious, lost, transformed into a museum piece during her Snakehips DJ night at The Monarch as, roped off like an exhibit, Blake brooch in her hair and blinded by a constellation of camera flashes, she barely played a disc. Instead she painted her nails. I last saw her at The Dublin Castle, Camden Crawl 2010. A combination of brassy barmaid and vulnerable child, she pulled pints, enjoying every delicious second of her semblance of normality.

Some mourn Camden of old, before the market mushroomed into a mall of trinkets, when punks were more than just a curiosity carrying a sign to the nearest tattoo shop.

But Amy saw past this. She exposed the lure of Camden to a new crowd, each eagerly mimicking her style with backcombed punctuations on every corner.

While tabloids leapt in excitement every time Amy made a surprise appearance, Camden barely raised an eyelid. She was a fixture, part of the furniture, and one that was expected to turn up any moment. This knowledge was a comfort.

Amy showed her fierce loyalty to her beloved borough by not becoming precious, visiting her favoured kebab shops, newsagents and pubs regardless of the 24/7 media glare.

As she showed her allegiance to Camden, the borough returned the favour. When spotted in the street at night, it wasn’t the locals who followed Amy but the paparazzi. Her attraction to the area could well be put down to the safe familiarity of the characters and venues that went out of their way to protect her.

She saw the positive side of Camden while others were busy pointing out the dark side.

Her troubles were widely known and while the sorry end to this tiny girl with the exquisitely loaded voice was somewhat inevitable, there was the always hope that another surprise appearance was imminent and this time, those troubles would have melted away.

SHE BECAME A MASCOT FOR CAMDEN - IT IS A QUIETER PLACE TODAY [Amy Winehouse tribute in today's Times]

AMY Winehouse was synonymous with Camden. Here is a piece I wrote for today's Times.

IF HOME is where the heart is, then Amy Winehouse’s heart — larger than most and perhaps more prone to bleeds and breakage — was in Camden Town in North London.

Her fierce loyalty to the place was made obvious in 2008 when she was at the height of her success. Thousands of miles away, having heard that she’d won a Grammy Award for Back to Black, a stunned Winehouse dedicated her award to London “because Camden Town ain’t burning down”.

She was referring to the infamous fire that razed half of Camden Market, taking with it her drinking headquarters, the Hawley Arms.

Asking what the appeal of Camden was to Winehouse is a bit like asking about the private habits of bears in the woods. It doesn’t require interrogation. She was attracted to its intimate villagey community but also to its excess. The vibrant market centre, which sits between the commercial district of Westminster and the cosy affluence of Hampstead, has a long history of this. In the early 1800s, the influx of Irish railway workers brought with it a legacy of institutionalised alcoholism that lives on today. Added to that today is a lively drugs scene.

More recently, the Britpop heyday brought the first generation of the celebrated “Camden caners”. Blur and Oasis drank in the Good Mixer, an unreconstructed drinking hole that focuses more on fun than on pretty decor. The second wave of Camden caners — including actress Kirsten Dunst, Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell, Kelly Osbourne, Mischa Barton and Paris Hilton — was headed up by Winehouse. Their home was the Hawley Arms, right in the heart of the market. Messy-haired, vested bar staff in skinny jeans kept the beer flowing, and then it was back to someone’s house for a party.

Musicians love the place. Name any act, from the Killers to Supergrass, from Madness to the Specials, and they will have played the darkened stage of the Dublin Castle, one of the borough’s most iconic music pubs. And this is why the tastemakers will always be here. Radio 1 DJ Steve Lamacq can often be found at the Barfly checking out the latest talent, or curating a night at The Bull and Gate. The Camden Crawl — a two-day festival bringing together more than 100 acts in as many venues — has become known as one of the few places you might get to see a superstar act in a tiny venue.

Winehouse and Camden were mutually dependent. She helped make it cool again after Britpop faded; after the glorious downfall of the Primrose Hill set and later the huge redevelopment of the market. She became a mascot for the borough.

No matter where you were, Winehouse’s influence, in music and style, shaped Camden’s culture. Take a walk down Camden High Street tomorrow and count the backcombed hairdos and ballet shoes. Although her minders were a necessary accompaniment, there were no airs and graces or presumptions about her. She didn’t demand special treatment, and no matter how infamous she grew, she was more likely to be seen eating kebabs at Marathon Kebab House, than sipping cocktails at the Met Bar.

Winehouse loved playing the Dublin Castle backroom and told the landlord, Henry Conlon, as much. Once, she was waiting to be served and Conlon told her to come around and serve herself. She stayed three hours and came back again and again. She craved the interaction and chat with the locals, but needed the safety of the bar between her and them.

Winehouse’s addictive character extended to more than substance abuse. She was hooked on music and the jazz and soul records she grew up with. In Rehab she says she’d rather be at home with Ray and Mr Hathaway, a reference to Ray Charles and Donny Hathaway. But she was addicted to her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil too, and to drink and drugs and to Camden. No matter how often she moved away, to Barnet, a calmer more suburban area at the end of the Northern line, or St Lucia, her home from home, she always came back.

I became used to seeing the tip of the diminutive Winehouse’s beehive as she made her way through the crowds, sandwiched by 6ft tall, 6ft-wide minders. Her catalogue of performing appearances included a spellbinding set at the Dublin Castle, an unforgettable evening during which I witnessed the raw beauty of her voice, up close and away from the drama surrounding her.

Most telling was the night in July 2008 when she was due to DJ at the Monarch, but turned up looking vacant. With a “Blake” brooch in her hair, she painted her nails while someone else took over the decks. Events took a bizarre twist when the crowd spent two hours photographing her rather than dancing, as she became a real-life waxwork.

Now her neighbours and fans will have to go to Madame Tussauds to see her. Camden is a quieter place today. We miss her very much.

Roísín Gadelrab is music editor of the Camden New Journal

CAMDEN CRAWL 2011 - LAST MINUTE TIPS

IT RAINED for the first time in the history of the Camden Crawl last year. When I say rained, more like giants stood atop Primrose Hill hosing down Camden High Street until all the little indie ants were washed down the drain.


So let’s hope this year, the giants take a break from watering their gardens just long enough to let us music-loving ants swarm over Camden and Kentish Town’s finest venues for the Camden Crawl’s 10th anniversary.



Odd Future, Miles Kane, Killing Joke, British Sea Power, St Etienne, Graham Coxon, Frankie and the Heartstrings, Villagers, Giggs – the list of unmissable acts is endless but to be sure to catch your top choices requires military precision.

Army-style discipline alone is tough but throw in sun, good times, queues, clinging onto friends in a sea of people, navigating dark venues, and mountains of alcohol and the best laid plans are bound to dissolve into a haze of good intentions and gigs you didn’t quite plan to see.

This is not a bad thing –the Crawl is the ideal spotting ground for new music so enjoy the unknown acts and see if you can predict which ones are going to make it.

Here’s a few tips for the day – I won’t labour the wear comfy shoes point this year no matter how vital I think it is:

- It’s not all about gigs in dark places. There’s a whole daytime programme of comedy, theatre and the chance to pit your mind against some of the industry’s biggest musos at a choice of challenging pub quizzes.

- Manage expectations – don’t expect to see every band you want – there will be timetable clashes, mad dashes from Mornington Crescent to Kentish Town, and just plain old queues so prioritise and enjoy the unknown.

- Keep your eyes and ears open for secret appearances, pop-up gigs and the unexpected, last year Amy Winehouse was pulling pints at The Dublin Castle and Pete Doherty was hanging around outside the job centre, a few years previously David Schwimmer joined the crawl.

- Try to predict collaborations – as Giggs and Lethal Bizzle are both booked to play and they’ve just released the Monsta Man remix, that’s the one I’m guessing.

- Check out the Red Bull outdoor stage – it’ll be a rare chance to see rap collective Odd Future who made waves at this year’s SXSW festival. And if you can prove you’re an NW1 resident, you can get into Hawley Crescent for free.

- Download the Gaymers Camden Crawl 2011 The Album compilation – free to ticketholders from www.7digital.com/camdencrawl – and check out the bands you haven’t heard yet, you never know, it might just stop you missing out on the next band of the year.

- AND FINALLY – follow me on twitter for live updates throughout the weekend and tweet me any Crawl news, gossip or rumours of secret gigs – I promise to share – @roisingadelrab

ROCK 'N ROLL MAYORESS LINES UP EXTRAVAGANT BARFLY BALL

CAMDEN'S rock and roll Mayoralty were such a hit the first time they DJd at Barfly Camden they’ve been invited to return.
But this time Camden’s illustrious Mayoress Amy Lamé takes control alone as she plays gracious hostess at The Mayoress of Camden’s Charity Ball.

Ms Lamé has handpicked the acts that will invade Barfly Camden on May 6, chosen a bunch of class DJs and thought very carefully about the entertainment for the night.

And unlike what you might expect from a parochial do, this mayoress will not be turning out the lights at the respectable time of 10.30pm and there will be no carriages awaiting.

Instead, the night will run into the early hours – 3am to be exact so pack your flat shoes in your handbag for the stagger home.

Playing live will be The Caezars, UP, Suburban Mousewife, Emily Cappell and Kites with DJ sets from HORSEMEAT DISCO, Kevin Rowland (Dexy’s Midnight Runners), Hushpuppy, Gary Crowley, Readers Wifes, Martin Green and Broken Hearts.

There will also be installations and performances from the notorious Scottee, last year’s Time Out Performer of the Year, a Charity Cake Stall by Lily Vanilli (who has baked for Elton John, Alexander Mc Queen and Henry Holland), a mini salon giving Camden makeovers – a must for outsiders keen to capture that deliberately scrappy look – by Nina's Vintage Hair Parlour and a badge making stall by Philip Normal.
Expect surprise guests and performances throughout the night.

Proceeds go to the Mayor’s chosen charity, The Roundhouse Trust.
Tickets - £5adv from www.barflyclub.com