In the ever impressive line-up of bands coming over to perform in Dublin the most recent additions are Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s Gorillaz who’ll be playing their first ever Irish show (finally!) in the 02 on the 22nd of September, and hotly-tipped Mancunian electro duo Hurts will be playing in Whelan’s on the 20th of May. While I’m sure they’ll get the obligatory comparisons between themselves and Joy Division, chiefly due to the fact that they are from Manchester and are musicians with a fondness for synthesisers, their music isn’t quite that easy to read which makes it all the more interesting. Lately I’ve been search through my CD collection to find some hidden treasures that I’d forgotten about in the intervening years since I bought them, and started listening to PJ Harvey’s ‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’ again. Very rarely can anyone make what appears to be quite vicious and intimidating singing sound equally as endearing as it is confusing.
After listening to the album and reminiscing I decided to look up what she’s doing now, and found a recent video of her performing her new song on The Andrew Marr Show. While I’m not too sure about the song, I was oddly pleased about the fact that Gordon Brown was watching from one of the monitors. I wonder what he thought? The song is called ‘Let England Shake’.
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1999 - 'The eMusic Market', written by Gordon McConnell it focuses on how the internet could change the music industry. Boy was he on the money, years before any of us had heard of an iPod or of Napster.