Latitude Festival - Friday

Saul Williams, The Zutons, The Crimea, Vega 4, Cord, M. Craft, Republic of Loose, The Pipettes, Iain Archer, The Organ, Marissa Nadler, The Lemonheads, Stephen Fretwell, Noisettes, Jakokoyak, and The Aliens

Venue:
Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk »

Lineup: Snow Patrol, Saul Williams, The Zutons, The Crimea, Vega 4, Cord, M. Craft, Republic of Loose, The Pipettes, Iain Archer, The Organ, Marissa Nadler, The Lemonheads, Stephen Fretwell, Noisettes, Jakokoyak, The Aliens

Date: 14/07/2006

Price: £95 weekend, £40 day .

Who was there? (9) / add your name

About the venue

Henham Park

About the artists

Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol started life when Gary Lightbody (guitar, vocals) and Mark McClelland (bass, backing vocals) met at Dundee University, and discovered that they had lived a few streets from each other in their native Belfast - and of course a shared desire to make some delicately crafted guitar noise. With the help of Belle & Sebastian's Richard Colburn on drums until Jonny Quinn could travel from Belfast to join the band full-time, the band (then called Polarbear until legal issues later forced the change) were snapped up by Jeepster on the strength of the ultra-rare single 'Starfighter Pilot', released through Electric Honey records, the label which also has the super-ultra-rare 'Tigermilk' by B&S to its name.

After releasing the critically ignored debut album Songs For Polar Bears at the turn of the century, Snow Patrol went on to release what should have been their breakthrough album When It's All Over We Still Have To Clear Up in 2001, and even though the radio exposure clicked into place this time around, Jeepster's advertising budget was poor.

Relations between Jeepster and the Patrol soon soured before they parted company, Jeepster folding soon after. Snow Patrol retreated back to Belfast to write and record third album Final Straw off their own backs, before securing a major deal with Fiction/Polydor. Having worked with Iain Archer as something of a fourth member on the second album, they instead recruited Belfast boy Nathan Connolly from local act Fuel for what was to follow.

They still needed some luck though, and it came one morning when their friend Radio 1 DJ Colin Murray chased Jo "The World's Most Mainstream Hippy" Whiley down the road one day in the summer of 2003 clutching a copy of 'Run'. Even though 'Spitting Games' was the forthcoming single, the radio play it received was negligible, and before long 'Run' hit both the airwaves and the charts.. and then everywhere else.

Sensing the indie-kids wanted Coldplay instead of Rock Music, the record label set about releasing all the slow tracks from the zillion-selling Final Straw, earning them some kind of reputation as indie bedwetters. As the gruelling tour schedule wound down, Mark was unceremoniously kicked out of the band one night without discussion (he alledges) for reasons which have remained top secret, and Paul from Terra Diablo joined as his replacement immediately. They also welcomed on board long-standing but, until then, unofficial fifth member Tom for keyboards and electronic wizardy.

Fourth album Eyes Open was released May 2006.

Saul Williams

Never before has the power of word and our ability to dictate our reality been expressed so clearly and creatively, at once. Saul's poetry represents an evolution of thought, artistry and spiritual consciousness delivered with the lyrical fervor of hip hop and the grace and linguistic mastery of Shakespeare. Saul channels the voice of the New Age, yet, allows a wide ranging stream of consciousness to distort the melody like some sort of lyrical Hendrix. »

The Zutons

The Zutons are a four piece band from the dusty streets of Liverpool, they consist of: :-

Dave McCabe - Vocals & rhythm guitar
Sean Payne - Drummer
Russell Pritchard - Bass guitar
Boyan Chowdhury- Vocals & Lead guitar »

The Crimea

Out of the ashes of The Crocketts staggered Owen Hopkin and Davey Macmanus, beaten and bloody. They found new battle comrades and a smoother sound, but no label. After recording an album, Tragedy Rocks, they released three singles in 2003 on differing labels, and jetted off to South By South West for a shambolic showcase that left them battered.

Out of the darkness, phones rang.

After spending some time in America honing their trade, and getting Davey some cosmetic dentistry, The Crimea flew into action in late 2005, now a slick four-piece of jangly guitars and broken nerves. The nightmares still remain, you can hear it in Davey's voice. Three years after its completion, Tragedy Rocks was finally released..

To be continued..

Joseph Udwin - bass
Owen Hopkin - drums
Davey Macmanus - guitar & vocals
Andy Stafford - keyboard
Andrew Norton - lead guitar

Vega 4

Vega 4 are...

John McDaid - vocals, guitar
Simon Walker - bass
Bruce Gainsford - guitar
Bryan McLellan - drums

Vega 4 may cover the Commonwealth (McDaid is Irish, Walker is English, Gainsford is from NZ and McLellan hails from Canada) but their aspirations and potential is nothing short of global.

Vega 4 combine influences as diverse as Radiohead, Led Zeppelin and Fugazi to deliver songs loaded with sentiment, intensity and, above all, melody. The band signed to Taste Media (the home of Muse) in September 2000. When the band ventured to New York they found themselves the subject of an enthusiastic industry buzz. A subsequent A&R tussle saw them sign with Capitol for North America on the top of the World Trade Centre.

Cord

M. Craft

North London singer/songwriter (by way of Canberra) making dark and mysterious pop. »

Republic of Loose

Michael Pyro: Lead Vocals

Brez: Guitar

Benjamin Loose: Bass

Dave Pyro: Guitar

Coz Noleon: Drums»

The Pipettes

LET US write the histories of pop music (the plural has a certain importance). A history at once oral/aural but not linear or progressive. A history that snakes and twists and turns back on itself, a history of ruptures and wrong-turnings. But let us not start with The Beatles.

Let us not speak their name.

There is a traditional historiography of popular music which in some way or another always seems to come back to the Beatles; and Lonnie Donegan who begat The Beatles, and Elvis who begat Lonnie Donegan John Lee Hooker who begat Elvis and Robert Johnson who begat John Lee Hooker etc etc. But that is not what we are interested in here.

We don't love you (yeah, yeah, yeah).

We don't want to hold your hand.

So let us start in the year Phil Spector aged wrote and produced his first hit, "To Know Him Is To Love Him", taking the title from his father's epitaph. Phil Spector, the first Tycoon of Teen, the first Pop Genius, the first person making this crazy new music who was actually of the age of its audience, the first guy with any power in the music industry who actually liked this stuff.

Spector wasn't trying to bolster his label's back catalogue with a few easy money spinners in order to create the capital to record and release the Real music, the great classics that he Really cared about. Much like punk rock, pop music was developed and incubated in quite a cynical and pedestrian fashion.

It was often those who came just a little later, those who almost missed the boat, like the Pop Group, DNA, Sonic Youth, who took the promise of punk rock at face value and got excited about it and tore it apart in ways their progenitors could never have imagined; they made punk great and significant and important

Spector took the promise of rock'n'roll and the new socioeconomic class of the 'teenager' at face value and ran with it. This was the real music that was important and valuable and serious and worth caring about. And anything was possible.

So let's draw on the magic and the energy of this period that we might almost think of as a golden age: the Spector years, the Brill building, Joe Meek's Triumph recordings in England and beyond that Motown, Stax, Studio One.

Let us make this our starting point and start here to tell our story, from whence we shall move both backwards and forwards (in historical terms, the two are never easy to separate anyway).

Already the astute amongst you may have started to notice a broader spectrum creeping in; shades of Philly soul, of afrobeat, disco, glam rock, riot grrrl, dance pop, R'n'B and, in the other direction, of doo wop, Broadway, the radio hits of the thirties and forties, music hall, the European folk tradition...

Let us continue to expand our temporal and spatial borders in this fashion and let us do so using the tools at hand. Like a bricoleur we shall construct our histories from what we already have around us, what is available to us immediately and what we already know: guitars, drums, percussion, a Philicorda organ, a saxophone, our own voices. But we will never be limited by our own boundaries, never hypostatized into a bind from which we cannot move. We must grow and at all times be reaching out, through the personal relations we already have and that we constantly create and develop on a daily basis. Art, according to John Cage, is not a thing made by someone but a process through which everyone involved learns and experiences new things.

So let us draw towards us our friends, our enemies and our casual acquaintances, without regard for their talent, their ability or their experience and lets see what we can learn together through the action of simple, practical music making.

Let's see what new histories we can write together.»