John Cage was an avant-garde composer from the US who believed that every type of music, from classical to blues to pop, was of equal worth. In 1952 Cage wrote 4’33†and revelled in the controversy it created. His most famous orchestral piece, 4’33â€, is a three-movement composition consisting of 273 seconds of silence.
John Cage
Tonight Pete Chapman‘s Punk Show (11-midnight) is
an hour long tribute to Ari Up who sadly died on 20th October after
losing her battle against cancer.
In Tim Moon‘s Folk Us show (Mondays @ 9pm) he has the following guests….
1st November ; 3 Daft Monkeys
8th November ; Jon Boden of Bellowhead
15th November ; Fay Heild
(Yes, I know, I’m shoving this up on the blog somewhat after the event, but I’m a busy man y’know. Better late than never…)
Bloody hell, it’s windy. Either that or someone has got hold of the outside of my tent and is flapping it about like a Killer Whale with a half dead seal. Maybe it’s them Spam bastards paying me back for nicking their tent pegs. One thing is certain – the noise it is making has rendered any further sleep impossible without tranquilisers. I dare say there’s a fair bit of Ketamine washing around the festival site, but personally I’ll give that a miss if it’s all the same to you.
Horse tranquilizers: it's a race horse called Horlicks, apparently.
I am a parent now and hurtling towards middle-age, so 8am is considered an indulgent lie-in anyway, so I get up and go for breakfast – the details of which started the first blog, so we’ll skip over that. However, before I can go to eat I am refused entry to the festival main area as no one is allowed in until 9am. Eh, do what? The festival closes at night? I thought this was supposed to be a playground of non-stop revelry and no sleep ’til Brooklyn. Now I find that everyone went to bed before me, tucked up with a cup of Horlicks (other revolting bedtime drinks are available).
It occurs to me that I’ve not really had a proper look around the whole site, so I rectify this. There’s not a great deal around other than food stands and stalls selling t-shirts with wanky slogans, although I do spot a place which sells ale as opposed to the rather flimsy Tuborg which is the only other beer available onsite. Sadly, further investigation later in the day reveals the ale to be rather horrid as well. Continue reading
Since Untitled Noise (SUN) started in August 2009, there have been almost 400 blog entries, which I think is a terrific acheivement in just a year. This blog has done wonders for bringing together information about BCB music shows in one place.   Before Untitled Noise (BUN) we were a rather dispersed set of islands. But now we have come together as an archipelago I feel we all communicate with each other, and also with you the listeners/readers better. I do still wish that all BCB music presenters contributed to this blog in the SUN era, because it has the potential to be ever better , but I appreciate that not everybody has time.  I find it hard enough keeping up with it myself, but I feel it’s really important, so I make the time to do at least one blog a week.
A big thanks to those presenters who do contribute, it’s hard to think how we ever got by in the BUN era.  A huge thanks must go also to Adam Wells who set this blog up for us, and continues to offer his support despite moving to The Big Smoke about 6 months ago.
We’re not above the petty theft of intellectual property on When Big Joan Sets Up and so we’ve nicked an idea from Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2. A fine programme, if only for the fact that for every cracking Small Faces album track and Northern Soul stomper that he plays,there’s a shit Petula Clark b-side which provides excellent ammunition against the “they don’t write them like they used to” brigade. (The answer to this question, by the way is “Yes they do, you just stopped listening and started buying fucking Jamie Cullum CD’s from Asda”)
Anyway, Bri does an unending A-Z of The Beatles, so I thought we’d do an A-Z of The Fall which started this week with the fine “Australians In Europe”.
Next week, snooker on the radio. Quack quack oops.
Following the story a few months ago (blogged here by yours truly with some ire)Â that Sting played a concert for a tyrannical despotcomes the peculiar tale that fat fingered fool Elton John recently pocketed $1m for his AIDS charity by tinkling his ivories at the wedding of US Radio DJ Rush Limbaugh.
Elton and former EastEnders star Letitia Dean.
On the face of it, $1m (around £690,000) being whacked into the coffers of a good cause for a couple of hours work seems to be a splendid return, but throw a glance at Limbaugh’s CV of controversy and it begins to look like an odd gig for the plump pompous pianist to take on. Although pretty much unknown in this country, Limbaugh is known in the United States as a right wing shock jock, reviled by the left.
The Guardian reports that
Last October, Limbaugh compared H1N1 to AIDS in Africa, a “hyped” disease. “Everything in Africa’s called AIDS,” he said on his radio show. “The reason is [that] they get aid money for it. AIDS is the biggest pile of – the biggest pot they throw money into.” Continue reading
Snooping on each other is common ground nowadays, blessed as we are with the ability to know what our friends/siblings/that weird guy from primary school are all doing every minute of everyday thanks to Facebook. Now Spotify has opened up the realm of snooping to epic and potentially humiliating proportions with its new ‘social’ feature, purpose built to let us pass judgement on our friend’s music tastes. Jonathan from Spotify optimistically tells us its designed to allow users to share music between each other. Pah. It’s much more about being able to discover that that friend you have, who purports to listen only to neurofunk, darkcore and nitzhonot (which for those of you that don’t know, is a crossover between Goa trance and uplifting trance that emerged during the mid-late 1990s in Israel*) quite clearly thinks the new album of Lady Gaga remixes is pretty great.
*I didn’t make this up, it has its own wikipedia page
Record Store Day 2010
This Saturday, 17th April, is Record Store Day, the day on which we celebrate the independent record shop and acknowledge its importance to music. This year there are dozens of special limited edition releases coming out to mark the day (many limited to just 1000 or even as few as 100 copies). For a full list of releases, see the Indie Record Shop website. You will be able to get these in Leeds at Crash and Jumbo on 17th April.
If you heard the Drive show this evening you will have heard us talking to Jumbo Records about the day. Then in Too Much Too Young, you might have heard Joel, Patrick and Keiron talking about the day, and they played She & Him and Peggy Sue, both of whom are releasing singles on Record Store Day.
I dedicated the whole of my show to things being released on Record Store Day tonight, and this is what I played:
Hello, my name is Nico Franks, and, for fans of irony, this blog post, intended as a first-foray into music criticism, puts to you that the thousands of internet blogs devoted to finding new music (like this one) are killing music criticism. The days of paying the seasoned rock critic for their opinion are over, because all we need do now is enter the blogosphere to find out what anyone thinks about a new band, gig or album. Is this tidal wave of free-criticism shining a light on the cream of the crop, helping us choose only the best and most worthy bands to listen to, or is it creating a whirlwind of undeserved hype around new bands?
As today is International Women’s Day, BCB will be broadcasting women’s only voices all day – from About Bradford through to Drive, and ending this evening with shows by the ever-entertaining Buffet girls (8pm) and an hour taking you through Riot Grrrl from 11pm to midnight by yours truly and the jen fox! Tune in and enjoy 🙂
