Arcade Fire

The bitter taste of success.

They've crashed into the mainstream and Hollywood adores them, but Arcade Fire aren't happy. Alexis Petridis meets a band trying to make sense of their ascent to stardom

Friday October 26, 2007

The Guardian

Randall's Island sits in the middle of New York's East River, a vast, characterless, landfill-augmented field, surrounded by straits given the kind of alluring names that New York's outer boroughs seem to specialise in: to the east there's Hell Gate and to the north, Bronx Kill. If it's not quite as ghastly as the waters around it suggest, Randall's Island certainly doesn't exude much in the way of charm, even in the sunshine of an unseasonably hot autumn afternoon. It is, concedes Richard Reed Parry - Arcade Fire's affable red-headed multi-instrumentalist sometimes known to play a crash helmet with a drumstick onstage - a far cry from the venues at which the band are renowned for performing: the churches that seem to echo the quasi-religious fervour in their music, the "aesthetically inspiring" spaces in which Parry has claimed they play their best. "We wanted the whole place hung with carnival lights," he sighs sadly, "but the city wouldn't let us do it." Instead, for the event they are headlining, Arcade Fire have attempted to stamp some quirky personality on the field by erecting a small stage to its rear on which a mariachi band play unamplified. Alas, the mariachi leader ends up singing his heart out and talking about how grateful they are to be here to a scattering of nonplussed punters, pausing only momentarily on their way between the hot dog stands and the Portaloos.

But if you wanted an indication of the magnitude of Arcade Fire's rise since the March release of their second album, Neon Bible, then Randall's Island and the nonplussed punters would do nicely. A couple of years ago, Arcade Fire were a critically acclaimed seven-piece, alt-rock act, albeit one noted for the intensity of their live shows, their frenzied, evangelical cult following, their penchant for dressing like 19th-century American farmers and for the fact that their two central members were a married couple, Win Butler and Regine Chassagne: the former the son of a wealthy Texan oilman who had moved to Montreal to form a band, the latter the daughter of Haitian refugees who had landed in Quebec in flight from "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorship. They played the kind of venues that critically acclaimed alt-rock acts perform in: when asked by U2 to support them on a handful of Canadian stadium dates, the band viewed the shows, Parry says, with the bemused detachment of people who weren't really supposed to be there, dumbfounded by what he calls the "huge, ginormo machine of a production". "It was," he recalls, "like, whoah."

And yet, here they are, barely two years later, performing to 22,000 people, a crowd, Parry notes, that is "as big as one of those U2 shows". They are at the end of a vast American tour during which they were feted not by the kind of rock aristocrats who have queued up to garland the band with praise since the release of their debut album, Funeral, (David Bowie and David Byrne have both performed with them, while earlier this year a journalist at a New York show reported, aghast, that he had seen Lou Reed actually smile at the conclusion of their performance), but by a rather different kind of celebrity: Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore and James Spader all turned up to see them in Hollywood, as did Rod Stewart, an artist whose love for apocalyptically inclined, anthemic baroque art-rock had previously gone strangely unnoticed.

The audience thronging Randall's Island, meanwhile, is conspicuously light on the kind of whey-faced indie-kid blogger whose early support earned Arcade Fire that most noughties of labels, the Internet Phenomenon. Instead, there are baseball caps and shorts and Gap casual wear in profusion: this is very much a mainstream American rock crowd.

It is all evidence of success of a kind that should, theoretically, cause headaches and hand-wringing in Arcade Fire's ranks. This is, after all, a band who zealously guard their independence and rigorously shun the celebrity that seems an inescapable by-product of your second album reaching the Top 10 around the world. "The song is independent of my face and what I look like," says Chassagne. "I know in pop music people are really used to, like, relating it to the person who made it and what they eat and what they do every day, but to me it's just independent." Nor could you accuse them of rapaciously pursuing global domination: earlier this year, Butler was heard to bemoan,"bands who think in terms of, 'I'm going to be the biggest band in the world, fuck all those bands who've got no ambition,'" as "a total crock of shit". Then there's the fact that Arcade Fire thrive, according to Parry, on "playing small rooms where you can really get in people's faces and connect with them and wrestle with them".

In an air-conditioned dressing room backstage, however, Butler is inclined to disagree. Slumping his 6ft 5in frame into an armchair - somehow he looks even bigger in mufti than in his onstage costume - he protests that there has been little hand-wringing about Arcade Fire's burgeoning mainstream success: for one thing, he says, success means it's easier to refuse to do things you don't want to do. Nor is he particularly sorry to see the back of playing small venues: indeed, he prefers playing Randall's Island or the Hollywood Bowl to the euphoric, wildly acclaimed performances they gave at London's St John's Church and Porchester Hall in January. "This tour is the opposite of the sell-it-out hype thing. It's more about letting people who want to see us, see us. That feels really good. A lot of these shows have been more intimate than the warm-up shows we did in the churches because they were so overwhelming and press-centered."

Perhaps Butler's contrariness should come as little surprise. He is famously no great fan of the media, claiming never to read anything written about the band which means that this year he'll have missed both the appearance of a blog called Arcade Fire Stole My Basketball, on which an outraged fellow user of the Cal Berkeley gym baldly accused him of the theft alluded to in the title, and Arcade Fire being called the Greatest Band in the World by at least three different British periodicals.

You get the impression that being interviewed seldom constitutes the highlight of his day. Today, he's scrupulously polite and thoughtful in his answers, but you would never confuse him with a boundless font of easygoing bonhomie. "I don't like the process of having to promote an album and talk about it," he says, flatly, "and I learnt pretty early on that the artist always seems like the asshole in the situation, no matter what you do. Even if, like, someone was poking you in the face and you went 'fucking stop that!', when the article comes out, it'll be like that happened in slow motion." He mimes giving someone the finger in slow motion, then sighs. "You can't win "

Both he and Parry think Arcade Fire's aversion to celebrity may have something to do with their roots in Montreal. For one thing, there are arts grants available to bands that instil a certain anti-commercial sensibility in the city's musicians: "They encourage people to think that being an artist is a viable way of life, that doing something that won't necessarily make money is a worthwhile thing to do."

For another, there is the shadow of the French Quebec pop scene, packed with artists unknown outside of its confines, but who apparently "sell as many records as Arcade Fire do worldwide, just in Quebec". "In Montreal, we're not celebrities at all, those people are celebrities," says Butler. Parry nods. "Occasionally, we've noticed that people are kind of surprised, like, wow, you've done really well, you're nearly as big as Jean LeClerc."

But whatever the reason, Butler has gained the reputation of a prickly and rather difficult customer. His understandable desire to avoid what he calls "the hoops" of the music industry - "all the things that have nothing to do with playing your instrument or playing together that take up a lot more energy than actually playing music and connecting with people"- has occasionally shown a tendency to look more like unappealing petulance.

It was Butler who smashed a camera with his mandolin and stormed off stage during Arcade Fire's appearance on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, apparently piqued because the band had to sit in the green room with the other guests while he wanted to visit a friend instead.

In fact, the ill-humoured appearance on Jonathan Ross was indicative of what was, by all accounts, a difficult summer for Arcade Fire. Despite the critical plaudits and commercial success, says Butler, "there have definitely been points in this year when we've been pretty down". Oddly, given their obsession with turning a live show into a communal experience in which the music invites a transcendent mass singalong, Parry came to the conclusion during a gruelling round of festival appearances that Arcade Fire were simply "not a festival band".

Certainly, their performance at Glastonbury, anticipated by many as the event's highlight, fell noticeably short of expectation: while no disaster, they didn't quite set the sodden environs of Worthy Farm alight in the way that their forebears Radiohead did a decade before.

For their part, Arcade Fire seem to have been faintly horrified by the Glastonbury experience. "There's something charming about how disorganised and hippy it is even though it's on that level," says Butler, his Texas drawl modulating into a tone that suggests he didn't think there was anything charming about it whatsoever, "but it was a fucking nightmare. It was like a mudpit. You have to drive your truck through the middle of the crowd of -" he pauses, as if grasping for the words to describe the ghastliness "- of shit," he finally decides.

"People are like, throwing up and hitting the doors and things like that. I get the appeal of wanting to get high for the first time and wanting to run round the fields, you know, but that's not necessarily the most engaging experience to me." Parry nods: "We were just, like, what in God's name is this?" "Why would I be here if I wasn't playing?"

They have toured almost consistently since January, a schedule that proved so punishing Butler and Parry alight on the singer contracting an acute sinus infection in March as an unlikely highlight: "Even though I was recovering from surgery, it was great, we had a month with nothing to do." They talk with a contagious wistfulness about the pleasure of being in the studio - at one point, Butler offers a description of recording a track off their debut album called Haiti that's so detailed it borders on fetishism - of returning to the converted church where they recorded Neon Bible, of finding a way to break out of the album-tour-album-tour treadmill. "We're going to find a way," says Butler. "That's the next great challenge. It's not the best system for creativity, because that's not the way it works: be creative for two years, don't be creative for two years."

That night, as they take the Randall's Island stage, he announces with barely concealed relish that this is the last time Arcade Fire will play New York "for a couple of years". The audience hoot their derision. "Yeah," says Butler, heavily. "Boo. Hiss."

Road-weary or not, they are magnificent on the stage. By the encore, Butler's brother Will is hanging perilously from the lighting rig and Arcade Fire have genuinely succeeded in transforming Randall's Island into something magical: a sea of swaying hands, a vast choir of voices singing along to Wake Up's wordless chorus. At the show's conclusion, the band rush into the crowd where they perform a frantic cover of the Violent Femmes' Kiss Off, to the delight of fans within earshot and the visible horror of security. It is, as Parry would say, like, whoah.

Backstage, I see Butler and Chassagne talking with fans, still holding an acoustic guitar and an accordion respectively, distractedly picking out a tune as they chat. Then they slip away into the dressing room, still playing their instruments.

· Arcade Fire play SECC, Glasgow, tonight. Then tour.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Soulwax

Nine tracks from Soulwax.

Alongside his brother Stephen, David Dewaele revolutionised dance music as Soulwax. Their work splicing together songs from unlikely sources (like Salt-n-Pepa with Iggy Pop) helped to give rise to the phenomenon of the mash-up, while their remixes continue to be the industry standard. Here David tells us about some songs that have influenced him

Monday October 22, 2007

Guardian Unlimited



David Dewaele eats with Soulwax. Photograph: Alex Salinas

Rollin' and Scratchin', Daft Punk

This track came out in 1996, when I was 21, and at the time I was mainly into the Beatles and American west-coast rock. This track changed all that. It was the first techno song I ever liked because it was such a consciously stupid track, but so funky and soulful with its stupidness. I'm aware that Daft Punk didn't invent that style of dance music but the sound of this track is very extreme. I remember wondering "How did they make it so melodic?" And also, "How are they going to get royalties for that?"
Buy the track on iTunes.

Firecracker, Yellow Magic Orchestra

Simple yet melodic music by people who are obsessed with analogue synths - the Japanese Kraftwerk, if you will. At the time this record was made, electronic music was still something for high-grade, skilled musicians, rather than the sort of populist stuff you get now, and it was a better quality, too. I find that when something first arrives, in this case the electronica of Devo, Kraftwerk and the Yellow Magic Orchestra, it's at its best. That's when you feel like boundaries are being pushed.

In that way, I feel Soulwax or Richard X or Erol Alkan have all stood the test of time in a way that many of the current mash-ups and bootlegs will not. We always wanted to combine technical proficiency with melody, but now the technical aspects seem to be more important. Plus, the style of music is a lot more familiar to people; you can walk into a supermarket and hear Jay-Z mixing it up with Linkin Park. (Not available on iTunes.)

I Believe in You, Talk Talk

I continue to love and admire Talk Talk. Their album 1988 Spirit of Eden, from which this single is taken, was considered a flop commercially and critically, but in time it's become apparent that it is the influential basis for a lot of bands today, bands who make atmospheric, beautiful music like Radiohead or Sigur Ros. This track gives me chills every time I hear it.
Buy this track on iTunes.

Soft Machine, Les Rhythmes Digitales

It's an incredible tune, if not the most popular. Stuart Price (Les Rhythmes Digitales) was on the same label as us, so we were friends before I'd even heard the album Darkdancer. It is what I'd describe as an offbeat IDN (intelligent dance music) version of 80s dance music. There are fucked-up drumbeats with vocals over the top, which is difficult to pull off, but here it sounds fantastic. We've told him on several occasions he should do more of that stuff.
Buy this track on iTunes.

The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel. Grandmaster Flash

When I was about 12, I saw a TV show about hip-hop in New York. I remember the producers visited LL Cool J's mum's house and things like that. Anyway, they get to Grandmaster Flash's house and he starts explaining how he DJs. He says that all he does is take the best bits of the records he loves and repeats them so people can dance. Which is a simple display of genius. The idea stuck with me and years later we adopted that approach ourselves for 2 Many DJs.
Buy this track on iTunes.

Afraid Himself to Be, Jason Falkner

Grammatically, incorrect; musically, very correct. Falkner is the sort of guy that pops up on the liner notes of all these great albums by bands like the Grays and Fabulon, but he releases a solo album and it more or less gets ignored. I'm OK...You're OK is an album of intelligent pop music with intricate melodies, in the vein of the Beatles or the Kinks. This guy is incredible and deserves popular acclaim.
Buy this track on iTunes.

Hard Times, The League Unlimited Orchestra

Human League released the album Dare in 1981 and a year afterwards they released an album of remixes of it called Modern Dancing. It featured extended minimal dance versions of their pop tracks and became the blueprint of everything we did on Night Versions. Modern Dancing was mainly the work of Martin Rushent - the band were touring at the time - and he used lots echo effects and repetitive basslines. We've made no secret of paying homage to his style.
Buy this track on iTunes.

Lord Grunge, The Frogs

The Frogs are two guys from Chicago, the Flemion brothers, who are renowned for their very funny, very dark albums. I guess they're not dissimilar to Queen in that respect, where you have brilliant music but funny Zappa-esque lyrics. The track Lord Grunge really stood out from the rest of their music and a bit of investigation showed it has been produced by Billy Corgan. Incredible pop music meets fucked-up lyrics about a band getting eaten up and raped by the music industry. If you find an MP3, well lucky you. It's great. (This track is not available on iTunes.)

Loose, The Stooges

When it comes to garage rock, no one equals this band. We've played with them at festivals - trust me when I say that they're phenomenal. The whole band are innovators. However good a band like, say, the Datsuns are, there's no way they can imitate them. When the Stooges are on stage you believe it and having seen them on the reunion tour it gave me hope for the future. Many reunions can disappoint you but this was inspiration.
This track is not available on iTunes.

As told to Paul MacInnes.

· Most Of The Remixes, a two-CD compilation featuring most of Soulwax's remixes, is out today. For tour dates, visit their MySpace page.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Girl Power

If you wanna be a pop star, you better get with the girls.

'Girl Power', once just a slogan, now dominates the pop charts. So what happened to the boys?

Kitty Empire
Sunday October 21, 2007
The Observer

As pop manifestos go, the one touted by the nascent Spice Girls in long-ago 1996 was more suspect than most. Girl Power was a cheeky, hen-night vision of feminism riddled with body dysmorphia and worse. It was all catchphrase and little artistic control, as Spice memoirs have laid bare. But a decade on, with the Girls reunited and retailing their forthcoming album in lingerie chain Victoria's Secret, it turns out that Girl Power was no eye-rolling matter after all, at least commercially.

As 2007 sashays to a close, pop has rarely been more female. A glance at the albums being released up until Christmas reveals a coven of pop high priestesses handbagging each other in pursuit of pop buyers' cash. Britney's comeback has been rushed forward to stave off internet leaks; Kylie's big, sparkly two fingers to cancer arrives next month. In pop, as in life, women seem to outlive men. Deathless disco mama Madonna has a new £60m deal and another pop confection due next year. British pop's most confounding triad, Sugababes, continue to have hits despite having their DNA frequently rearranged; they are the perfect example of a brand, rather than a band.

After a year cooking up her debut in the US, X Factor winner Leona Lewis's imminent album will try to establish her as an enduring pop force. Rihanna's 'Umbrella' was a rain dance so effective it changed the climate and stayed at No 1 for 10 weeks. And the most entertaining girl group of all, Girls Aloud, defy rumours of their demise with a new set, also out next month. We need no reminder that the biggest pop news this year was Kate Nash. Meanwhile, the wellbeing (or not) of Amy Winehouse (though her retro sound is outside the realm of pure pop) remains a national obsession, and her arrest last Thursday in Norway ensures the prurience will continue.

But where are the boys? Genders used to be evenly matched in the pop game. For every female artist, there was a winsome romantic beau, sexually unthreatening to pre-teens but just lush enough to inspire filthy home-made banners from fans on the way to the sold-out arena. In pop's heyday, the Eighties, the Whams and Spands and Frankies defined the age more indelibly and with more make-up than the girls, who have faded from memory (although it is nice when Kim Wilde crops up on a TV gardening show). In the Nineties, clots of chaps - Bros, New Kids on the Block, Take That, East 17, Boyzone, Westlife - ruled the arenas, a status quo that the Spice Girls overturned.

The demise of the boy band has been widely mulled over during the past few years. Even those notional saviours of the genre, McFly, have lost their lustre. True, the Take That reunion and the continued existence of Westlife mean that there will never be a national shortage of swollen multi-part ballads. The odd trouser turn-up does occasionally breach the frilly cordon sanitaire in place around pop - this year Mika was the exception that proved the rule that boys in pop are missing, presumed dead. And Robbie? His most heartfelt and breezy album tanked, making you feel almost sorry for him. Almost.

If boys in pop are all but dead, we know the execution date and the executioners. It was 2002, when two Pop Stars: The Rivals teams squared up. In the red corner, Girls Aloud with their strange, twanging single, 'Sound of the Underground'. In the blue corner, slushy boy band One True Voice, Svengali'd by pop puppeteer Pete Waterman. The smart money was on the fellas, but Girls Aloud staged a historic pop upset when they trounced the hapless, derivative guys and went on to be the most successful British talent show act ever.

What did the boys do in the wake of this symbolic defeat? They stropped. Busted earned the boy band a brief, riffy reprieve from obsolescence. Many more of them felt sorry for themselves, and learned how to play acoustic guitar. Where once a young man could prance under a hundredweight of hair gel and get rich, in the mid-Noughties it was essential to become a sensitive singer-songwriter to impress. What is Paolo Nutini but a lost boy band member trying to cut it as a troubadour? It would take a stylist half a second and some bicycle shorts to shear James Morrison of all his hard-conjured credibility.

Perhaps pop's gendercide is better explained as a diaspora: the cute boys and their ballads moved sideways, out of dance routines and on to guitar stools - or into R&B. In the US, male pop is a one-man show. Justin Timberlake presides over the most impressive post-boy band career ever. Like us, the Americans also have plenty of pouting male singer-songwriters who might once have been pressed into pop shapes; John Mayer sees himself as a serious blues guitarist but has he looked in the mirror? Jack Johnson - a buff surfer with an acoustic guitar - is one of the US's biggest draws.

But if you are looking for the love of a soft-hearted stripling, you will find it has become almost exclusively an urban thing. While our own Craig David is now a figure of fun, in the US, the loverman brigade - Omarion, Joe, Ne-Yo, Akon and Mario - are potent chart players. They take the schmaltz of pop and dress it up in the more attitudinal garb of hip hop. At heart, though, these are ladies' men. Antecedents aren't hard to find here. American music is stuffed with old soul lovermen, and the new breed draw deeply from the well dug by priapic teddy bears Luther Vandross, Alexander O'Neal and R Kelly. But rarely have soppy men appeared in such numbers, so consistently high in the Billboard charts. Usher remains the undisputed champion of this eye-wateringly tedious strand of R&B.

Why has the XY factor gone out of pop? It's not an easy question to answer. Gay men are the pivotal early adopters of all puissant pop outfits. Groups like Take That spent their early months touring gay clubs as well as schools. Have gay men given up on smooth-cheeked wannabes? They may well have ploughed all their cash into supporting needy divas like Madonna and Barbra Streisand instead. According to a tabloid, London's Soho is to erect a statue of Kylie, thanks to lobbying by fans: Soho's denizens are hardly campaigning for Gareth Gates on a plinth.

But the real culprits are probably youngsters. The rosy-cheeked masses who loved pop are fractured now. They are forming aesthetic judgments earlier than previous generations. Instead of being told what to like by Smash Hits and record companies, they are roaming the web, favouring outfits like the Kooks over cute boys with no guitars.

It is also the fault of the acts themselves. With every generation of British boy band, the output became more saccharine. Take That were feisty; Boyzone far duller. By the time the boy band franchise trickled down to Westlife, it was all ballads, all the time. They appealed to grandmothers.

Some of the blame can be ascribed, too, to the lack of imagination of producers and record companies. In R&B, as in pop, it is usually the female-fronted records that take the most musical risks. Producers have done immensely cool, creepy, daft and marvellous things with Britney, Amerie, Aaliyah, Christina Aguilera; Gwen Stefani's records do nothing but monkey about with pop convention.

The sexiness of these female stars - the crux of pop transactions - is a given. As long as they gyrate and smoulder, and some sort of hook is present, the rest of the record can sound like an accident in an electronics factory, and no one will bat an eyelid. Pop's men are more limited, crooning sweet nothings to a swell of synthesised strings. They lack topspin, winks, daring. You can count the men who have fronted avant-garde pop records on two fingers: Timberlake and Usher, whose icy crunk hit of 2004 'Yeah' was the torso-toting dullard's finest moment. Until the records get more exciting, male pop stars are doomed. (We await the new Duran Duran album - laced with collaborations with Justin Timberlake and producer Timbaland - with great interest.) And the new breed? Up 'n' coming foursome Palladium are making a valiant attempt at rekindling the male pop band. Their single, 'High Five', contains such charmingly pre-sexual pop sentiments as 'three kisses for me, and I know she's the marrying kind'. But rather than just dancing giddily, Palladium have had to resort to playing instruments to get attention. They sound like the Feeling with a few added riffs. If they are the best the industry can cook up, pop's men are going to be missing in action for some time yet.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Subways news

The Subways preview new material at Club NME LA.

The trio thrill the packed house.

The Subways

The Subways previewed new material during their sold-out show at Club NME Los Angeles with Fred Perry Subculture last night (October 17).

The English trio breezed through crowd-pleasing favourites including 'Young For Eternity' and 'Rock And Roll Queen' in addition to new tracks 'Kalifornia', 'Girls & Boys' and 'I Won't Let You Down'.

"This is only the tenth show we've done this year, which is weird for us because we're used to playing a lot of shows, but we've been busy making our new record," frontman Billy Lunn told the crowd before launching into a new song.

The packed house, which included Art Brut's Eddie Argos, sang along to several tracks from The Subways' debut album and pumped their fists in the air.

"Thank you guys--you've been the best club we've ever been to -- ever!" gushed Linn at the end of their 45-minute set.

The band have been in Los Angeles for the past few weeks recording the follow-up to 'Young For Eternity'.

"It's nerve-wracking to play the new material for the first time, and I really didn't know what to expect from LA gigs," Linn told NME.COM after their set. "But it's been amazing and humbling to see so many people who know the words to our songs."

The Subways played:

'Kalifornia'
'Turn Around'
'With You'
'Young For Eternity'
'Girls & Boys'
'Oh Yeah'
'I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say'
'I Won't Let You Down'
'Mary'
'Rock & Roll Queen'

Club NME with Fred Perry Subculture takes place at Spaceland in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles every Wednesday night.

Next Wednesday (October 24), Air Traffic are set to headline Club NME LA with Fred Perry Subculture.

For more information, visit Myspace.com/clubnmela.

--By our Los Angeles staff.

Bat For Lashes live

Bat For Lashes preview new material at sold-out LA show.

Brighton band also cover Tom Waits.

Bat For Lashes
Picture: Guy Eppel

Bat For Lashes previewed new material and covered Tom Waits during their sold-out show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles last night (October 9).

Brighton's Natasha Khan was backed by an all-female three-piece band who traded instruments throughout the night including violin, harpsichord, xylophone, flute, drums, guitars and keyboards.

The band created a mystical atmosphere with dark stage lighting and renaissance-style costumes replete with glittering headbands, which was mimicked by several girls in the audience.

"We're two weeks into our American tour and we just went to the Grand Canyon, which was amazing," Khan told the crowd, adding that she picked up a giant walking stick there, which she used as percussion on some songs.

Bat For Lashes previewed an atmospheric untitled new song, which featured haunting harmonies and a heavy bassline.

"This is our second time in LA in two months and it's great to be back," Khan told the crowd, who cheered loudly in response.

The recent Mercury Prize nominee played every track from the debut album 'Fur & Gold', as well as a cover of Waits' 'Lonely' during their 75-minute set.

--By our Los Angeles staff.

Sugababes

Sugababes, Robots in disguise

(Island)

Alexis Petridis
Friday October 5, 2007
The Guardian

The arrival of the Sugababes' fifth album is heralded with a set of gawp-inducing statistics. The trio are the most successful female act of the century. They have had more Top 10 singles with original songs than any girl group since the Supremes. They are the first girl group in 20 years to release more than three hit albums: stitch that, Destiny's Child and the Spice Girls.

But more gawp-inducing still is the fact that the Sugababes are still here. Normally, when a pop act releases a greatest hits album, it's a signal that the jig is up and the record company are filling out their contract with one last release. But a year on from Overloaded, their hits compilation, their single About You Now has just entered the charts at No 1. Normally, when a member of a pop band decides to quit, that's it: solemn press conferences are called, tearful announcements are made thanking the fans, distraught tweenage girls and gay men have to be talked down off high ledges. But the Sugababes shed members without denting their success. In early photographs, latest recruit Amelle Berrabah wore a weird, rigid, glazed expression that suggested solitary original member Keisha Buchanan might have finally opted to cut out the middleman and start replacing her departing band mates with shop-window dummies. But it seems Berrabah is very much alive: last month the tabloids were rife with rumours that she was for the chop as well.

The Sugababes' refusal to quit is starting to rankle in some quarters. Bands like them were supposed to have been bulldozed from the landscape long ago, to create more room for earnest singer-songwriters and mortgage indie, yet they cling on, like a doughty pensioner who refuses to vacate her home despite the fact that it's now encircled by motorways and there's a DFS where her back garden used to be. Radio 1 has offered few more delicious sounds this year than that of Jo Whiley huffily premiering About You Now, muttering darkly about not being a huge fan, before cueing up something really worthwhile from the Pigeon Detectives or the Hoosiers. If you didn't like About You Now before - perhaps your enjoyment of its fat-free construction and skyward-bound chorus was tempered by the fact that producer Lukasz Gottwald was essentially repeating the trick he minted three years ago on Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, that of turning out a zippy pop take on the Strokes' Barely Legal - here was reason enough to love it wholeheartedly.

Those baffled by the Sugababes' longevity might note their pragmatic willingness to shift with the times. They exploited the vogue for bootleg mash-up remixes by re-recording Richard X's We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends as Freak Like Me. While R&B held sway among the nation's youth, they nearly did themselves a mischief trying to establish their gangsta credentials, knocking out songs called things called Nasty Ghetto and Buster. These days, with ersatz indie the basic currency of the charts, they've made an ersatz indie single. Change finds them still on the move, with their most celebrated collaborators relegated to the subs' bench. Xenomania, the team behind hits Round Round and Hole in the Head, get two songs - both Never Gonna Dance Again, with its lyrical nods to George Michael's Careless Whisper, and the propulsive My Love Is Pink are classy examples of their trademark clever, referential pop - and R&B producer Dallas Austin gets only one: understandably so, if the dreary AOR of Back When is the best he can muster.

One of their replacement collaborators is credited as Novel, thus raising the interesting prospect that Change may be the first pop album in history to be partly produced by a paperback book. In fact, Novel is one of the producers that Austin, in his legendarily chivalrous YouTube outburst, accused Joss Stone of "fucking for tracks". Regardless of his chequered past, Back Down is a pleasingly odd conjunction of reggae skank and synthesised squelch. But the rest of Change is indisputably a mixed bag: between beautifully-crafted bulletproof pop songs such as Denial, there are longueurs, during which one track after another seems to evaporate as it comes out of the speakers. The longueurs drag because they're characterless, but then so are the Sugababes themselves. They're famed for a certain reserved chippiness, but the rest is a bit of a blank, in sharp contrast to their great rivals, Girls Aloud. The latter's cartoonish personas seem to fuel their producers' creative spark, giving them something to play with, inspiring them to risky heights of inventive daring. That may be why they can do the one thing that the Sugababes, despite the impressive statistics and achievements, cannot: make a consistent album. In the greater scheme of things, perhaps it doesn't matter. After all, who needs character when you seem to be immortal?

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

PJ Harvey interview

Songs of innocence and experience.

PJ Harvey sings like a child on her new, stripped-down album, but it's full of grim subject matter. John Harris hears how the elusive singer-songwriter was just trying to get the soul back in her music.

Friday September 28, 2007
The Guardian

Polly Harvey's latest single is called When Under Ether. You may have heard it, perhaps on the occasions when Radio 1 DJs - usually, it has to be said, after dark - have decided to treat their listeners to the unbelievably sparse, gorgeously unsettling sound of a solitary voice and the barest of piano accompaniments. Its chorus, if such a word is appropriate, amounts to the occasional recitation of the words "human kindness", and it concludes in just over two minutes. If the prevailing sound of 2007 - chumbling indie-rock, of the kind associated with, say, thePigeon Detectives, or the faux-yobbery purveyed by the ubiquitous Hard-Fi - has an antidote, this is surely it.

"The funny thing was," she says, "the other day, I knew that Zane Lowe was going to play it. I'd been told: Radio 1, seven o'clock - so I was out in the garden listening. I never listen to Radio 1. So I put it on, and there was all this kind of noise happening, and all of a sudden he played When Under Ether, and there was something absolutely shocking about it. And that's great, isn't it?"

I meet Harvey in the garden of a pub in the Dorset village of Abbotsbury, close to her home, and only a short drive from the farm where she grew up. The last time I briefly interviewed her - in the autumn of 2000 - she was in New York and sporting the sleek, manicured look that went with the Mercury Prize-winning album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. By comparison, she now looks nigh-on unrecognisable - her hair has grown out into a tangle of curls, and she is dressed in functional attire that's uniformly black, a colour scheme that carries over into her chosen means of transport: a gleaming, jet-black utility vehicle that looks rather like a souped-up Land Rover.

In the context of her eighth album, the location is pretty much perfect. From its title onwards, White Chalk seems to be an evocation of the surroundings in which she was raised, and the mess of memory, love and loss that goes with them. As has long been the case, to ask her what particular songs are about is to invite a display of Olympic-standard evasiveness, and any attempted forays into her personal life will be politely stonewalled. Whether any given song is the stuff of fact, fiction or something in between is thus left unresolved, and her music - as she seems to see it, anyway - thereby retains a closel guarded integrity. That said, from the recurrently bucolic imagery to a pointed reference in the title track to a place where "Dorset cliffs meet the sea", it's obvious where the new album is set.

The record sounds as if it's populated by ghosts, full of strange, discomfiting music that often seems rooted in the distant past without ever succumbing to sepia-tinted pastiche - as she puts it, stuff that could be "from 100 years ago, or 100 years in the future". It all coheres into arguably the most perfectly realised album she has made. The prospect of a new PJ Harvey record is always bound up with reinvention - the charged-up, polished rock of Stories from the City ..., for example, was succeeded by the stripped-down grit that defined 2004's Uh Huh Her - but this album is pitched in virgin territory. Notably, there is barely a guitar to be heard, which serves to underline the fact that its 37-year-old author remains among the most restless, inventive and mysteriously underrated talents around.

White Chalk's genesis dates back to the tail-end of 2004, and a brief period during which Harvey told at least one journalist that she was considering enrolling as a mature student and studying English literature - something she claims to have been "seriously considering" (though at similarly loose-ended points in her career, she also admits to having entertained thoughts of dropping music in favour of nursing or becoming a vet). This time, however, something was definitely eating at her: the sense that since 1998's Is This Desire?, she had strayed some distance from being creatively satisfied. "I wasn't feeling like I'd done good work for quite a few years," she says. "I think that's quite natural; that people go through phases of great creativity and not-so-great creativity. But I felt like I'd been on the lower end of the curve for a while."

It's strange to hear her say that, because Stories from the City sounded like a very bold, peak-form, all-guns-blazing kind of record.

"It definitely did what I was trying to do - which was to make an album full of great pop songs. But that's not really where my heart is. It was more of an experiment with the craft rather than the heart, if that makes any sense. This album - and, I think, Is This Desire and To Bring You My Love - were times when I felt the craft and the heart married well. Other times, I just go through phases where it's more of an exercise in exploring something, and not really where I want to be in my soul."

For the most part, the new album was written in Dorset, on an instrument that served to propel her somewhere new: the piano, chosen because she felt she had to be "out of my depth" to find exactly where she ought to be heading. "It's entirely different from the guitar. It's like arriving at a giant beast. I had a piano sitting in my house for about three months before I even dared touch it. It's like a giant body - it's got a ribcage, teeth, tongues. It almost feels like it does you rather than you doing it.

"I wouldn't call myself a piano player," she says. "I think of what I do as quite hamfisted. I pretend that I'm a piano player: I go to the piano and I act like a virtuoso giving a concert."

She rolls back her sleeves, theatrically throws head back, and crashes her fingers down on pub table. "Ba-bammm! I do all the movements. You may laugh, but that's how the record came about. I'd improvise with myself, pretending I was a piano player, record it, find good bits, and elaborate on them. That's a completely different way of writing for me."

Though her piano technique was still in its infancy, she eventually resolved to play some of her new songs in front of an audience. When she performed solo at the Hay festival in May 2006, she confessed that she had never played a piano in public before, and that she felt nervous beyond words. "Every time I play a duff note," she told her audience, "I'm going to pull a face like Les Dawson."

"It was absolutely terrifying," she says. "I can't think of anything more terrifying than standing up on stage in front of a thousand people, on your own, not feeling like a musician."

Did the fear go?

"No. I've done five or six solo shows now, and I just spend the entire time in utter terror. It doesn't get any easier."

Then why do it?

"I just have to. I've got an overwhelming desire to sing and play music, particularly to people. I don't feel like I'd even be living out my role on earth if I didn't do it. I'd probably get ill quite quickly, just because I wasn't doing what I'm supposed to do."

But to do it on your own, without the safety net of a band ...

"Mmmm. But it feels very right at the moment. This feels absolutely like what I should be doing."

Perhaps the single most fascinating aspect of the new album is Harvey's voice. Whereas her vocals were once full of the nuances she imbibed from the soundtrack to her childhood (her father was a close friend of the Rolling Stones' de facto sixth member, their long-standing aide and piano player Ian Stewart; her parents, she once recalled, "played rock'n'roll and blues constantly - every day"), she has discovered a new voice: pure, intimate and uncharacteristically English.

"It took a long time to find out how I wanted to sing," she says. "It was trial and error, really, and quite a lot of thought about the aspects of my voice that I didn't find rewarding. And out of knowing what I didn't want to do came this new way of singing.

"I feel more English these days," she says, with an air of slight surprise. "I've become more and more aware that I'm an English woman, and I wanted to sing as an English woman. I grew up listening to blues music, and every record I ever heard was sung by Americans. You can't help but have that in your blood when it's all you hear, and I almost had to get back to who I am, and how I speak, and where I come from.

"Stylisation - that was what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to have caricatures going on in my voice. I wanted to sing in a very pure way, and not do, 'Here's the spooky voice,' and 'Here's the high Minny Mouse voice.' I'm so tired of that. So as a reminder to myself of how to sing, I'd put up Post-It notes around me, that said things like, 'Childlike' and 'Five years old'. I was trying to remember the purity of childhood - but childhood imagination, too, and the way that it can go absolutely anywhere. You can create an invisible friend, you can live in a castle - you can make anything out of nothing. Where does that go? I became really interested in trying to regain it, and at the same time, the voice took on this childlike, naive quality."

On a few occasions, the mixture of that affected innocence and the songs' subject matter takes the new album's unsettling quality to almost unbearable heights - as with the aforementioned When Under Ether, an apparent glimpse of the termination of a pregnancy whose most striking lyric runs as follows: "I lay on the bed/ Waist down undressed/ Look up at the ceiling/ Feeling happiness." It goes on: "Something's inside me/ Unborn and unblessed/ Disappears in the ether/ One world to the next."

I find that song very difficult to listen to, I tell her.

"Mmmm. [Pause] I don't. I find, erm ... [Pause] I can listen to it quite objectively. What are you laughing at?"

The idea that you can listen to it objectively. Because it's so visceral. It's raw.

"Yeah," she says. "So I can hear it as ... [Pause] Well, I don't feel attached to it in any way. But that's a process that seems to happen with every record and every song. I don't feel attached to them. They kind of do themselves, and they're nothing to do with me any more."

That sounds like one of Harvey's trademark evasions, but I make one last attempt at divining the song's source. I've just not heard anyone evoke the termination of a pregnancy as bluntly as that song does, I suggest. Certainly not in pop music.

"That's obviously what you hear, but for me it's not actually tied to anything specific, like an abortion." She pauses. "These aren't just words," she insists. "They're songs. They inhabit themselves, really."

Our time is almost up. In the car park, Harvey points out the remains of Abbotsbury's 11th-century abbey and a chapel dedicated to St Catherine - the patron saint of spinsters, she tells me - and then goes on her way. On my long journey home, I tune into Radio 1, and hear Zane Lowe once again playing When Under Ether, which sounds every bit as singular as Harvey had suggested. By comparison, the music that follows it seems hollow and generic, which rather puts me in mind of something she had said earlier on - an outburst, by her standards, in which she said her sense was that the quality of music, literature and film seems to be going "down and down and down, and I struggle so hard to get excited about anything".

Characteristically, she wouldn't be drawn on exactly who or what she was railing against, but lurking in what she said, there was a kind of mission statement. "There's too much of everything in the world, but particularly too much of everything that's not all that good. The world doesn't need any more art that's just all right. It only needs mind-blowing, inspirational, life-changing stuff." White Chalk is out now on Island.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Polly Jean Harvey

PJ Harvey's White Chalk is genius with a dark heart.

As the tracks unfold, Jude Rogers finds herself acting as Polly Jean's agony aunt while listening to her wailing like a Kate Bush from hell on perhaps the saddest album she's ever heard

Friday September 21, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

1. THE DEVIL

0.10 Out on the wild and windy moors, Polly Jean Harvey's made another album. And even though we're used to her darting madly between different worlds - as a gothic, red-frocked goddess one moment, a squalling noise-botherer the next - White Chalk is still quite a shock. This opening bang-bang piano figure is like The Supremes' Baby Love - or Amy Winehouse's Back to Black if you'd rather - put through a bone-white filter.

0.59 And here's another strange thing. We generally know PJ for her belly-deep vocals, full of fire, blaze and brimstone. This tiny, nervous voice seems to come from someone else entirely. "The devil wanders into my soul," she sings. Her high register is like a tense infant's, and the shaky zither that accompanies it only heightens the tension.
1.39 But here's her roar. "Come! Come! Come here at once!" It's the call of a spoilt child, a terrified soul and an impatient lover all at once. Yet a sad girlishness seeps through, Polly's Phil Spector-style backing vocals sounding like ghosts from another time, tapping Kathy-like on the window.

2. DEAR DARKNESS

0.10 Here's the joanna again, its high notes sharp and icy. Thinking through Polly's catalogue, her music has rarely placed its focus on the ivory keys. In the early 1990s, on Dry, Rid Of Me and 4-Track Demos, Polly's sound was all about the guitar and how to make it bare its teeth. 1995's To Bring You My Love was about orchestral swampiness, and although parts of Is This Desire?, Stories From The City... and Uh Huh Her played with gentler textures, there's never been this sort of delicacy - or frailty - to Polly's sound before. This riff rattles like the sound of quivering teeth on a cold winter's morning.
0.27 "Dear darkness, dear darkness, won't you cover, cover me - again?" What a sad, sad phrase. It makes you worry for the girl.
1.13 But, fret not, she's got company - long-time collaborator John Parrish, singing backing vocals in his warm, soft tenor. Although the words that emerge from his mouth - "around the throat of the one I love" - aren't the most warming, I grant you.

3. GROW GROW GROW

0.46 The piano winds and whirls as Polly treads through mystical groves in heavy boots. This sounds like a Lewis Carroll story - curious and curiouser.
2.21 "Teach me MUMMY/How to GROW!" It's a wide-eyed and terrifying phrase. Hounds Of Love-era Kate Bush would be a good reference for this stuff, if Bush's spookiness wasn't always surrounded with sweetness and playfulness. As Polly's vocals wheel and wail, sweetness and playfulness are very far away.

4. WHEN UNDER ETHER

1.41 You may have heard this song already. It's Polly's new single. In it, deeper piano notes pound, the ceiling moves in time, and "the mind is alive/Conscious of nothing but the will to survive". It's so ridiculously chart-unfriendly that if it bothers the hit parade, Satan's working at the BPI.

5. WHITE CHALK

0.16 White chalk hills will rub Polly's bones and stick to her shoes here. I want to put a fez on, Tommy Cooper-style, and go "don't go on the hills, then!" But that would be inappropriate.
2.27 "Dorset's cliffs lead to the sea/Where I walked our unborn child in me". Unborn children have cropped up in Polly's music before, on 1995's Down By The Water most memorably, a period when Polly was not at her happiest. This album so far suggests the same. John seems to have disappeared too, so she's not got company. And our girl's not referred to home so vividly before, making it a reference point for such deep, engulfing sorrow. The twin echoes of the place Polly was born, and the ancient carvings of the past make this title track even more heartbreaking.

6. BROKEN HARP

0.16 "Please don't reproach me for how empty my life has become." I am starting to think that this is the saddest album I have ever heard. There's the way Polly's voice is crushing itself willingly, then there's the sheer weight of the lyrics. This record belongs to a different musical world than Joy Division's Closer, say, but it shares a similar mood - a horribly candid exposure of agony and despair. It reminds me of Wuthering Heights the novel much more than Wuthering Heights the song - it teems with details of overwhelming desolation, rather than floaty theatrics.

7. SILENCE

0.23 Funnily enough, though, this song, called Silence, has more blood in its cheeks - plus a brisk, soft, shuffling drumbeat, and a more vivid bangy piano.
1.41 Although Polly's singing, "Though you never wanted me/Anyway." At least there's an element of anger in her voice, which is the first step towards dealing with heartbreak. It is. (Although, yes, I should stop trying to be Polly's agony aunt and carry on being a heartless music critic.)
2.22 "SIGH-LENCE...SIGH-LENCE...SIGH-LENCE!" You tell them, Pols! You TELL 'EM!

8. TO TALK TO YOU

1.25 This is a song about Polly missing her grandmother. Her voice has skirted that dangerous line between affecting tense soprano and strangled kitten so far, but for the first time here, the cat seems to be winning.

9. THE PIANO

0.15 "Hit her with a hammer, teeth smashed in, red tongues twitching, look inside her skeleton". Nasty stuff. Still, if you look behind the horror movie imagery, here's a great metaphorical description of Polly's relationship with her baby grand. She bangs and she crashes, letting the keys shiver and flame. Tori Amos thinks she's like this, but she hasn't got half this talent.
1.26 "Daddy's in the corner, rattling his keys. Mummy's in the doorway trying to leave." This family's degenerating quicker than the Addams.
2.06 "Nobody's listening - Oh God, I miss you, oh GOD, I MISS you." That's decided it. This is the saddest thing I've ever heard.

10. BEFORE DEPARTURE

0.33 "Farewell my friends, farewell my dear ones." Now this is playing like a suicide note. And I've run out of tissues.

11. THE MOUNTAIN

3.10 "In my own heart every tree is broken. The first tree will not blossom, the second will not grow, the third is almost fallen since you betrayed me so." The zither shivers, Polly wails like she did on The Dancer, the last track of To Bring You My Love, and White Chalk stops as it started - suddenly, sharply and inconsolably. Twelve years after she first wandered into the territories of loneliness, Polly's found the heart of darkness - and she seems to have found her genius there too.

IN CONCLUSION:

Imagine the saddest thing you've ever heard, then douse it in tears, swathe it in heartbreak, and drop it into the seventh circle of hell. Yes, it's that moving and, also, marvellous.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Sir Richard Branson

Never mind the high street: Branson sells his Virgin Megastores.

Sir Richard rids himself of the business that brought him to public attention in the 1970s

Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Tuesday September 18, 2007
The Guardian

Sir Richard Branson yesterday severed his last remaining link with the high street, offloading his Virgin Megastore chain at a time when record shops are under unprecedented pressure from the internet and supermarkets.

The sale of 125 stores throughout the UK and Ireland to a management buyout group for an undisclosed sum marks a final retreat from the music industry after more than 35 years.

After setting the company up as a mail order business in 1970, Sir Richard opened the first Megastore in Oxford Street, London, the following year and founded the Virgin record label in 1973, selling millions of vinyl copies of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells.

The Virgin brand - which has been attached over the years to everything from trains to credit cards and wedding dresses to vodka with varying degrees of success - will disappear from store fronts from November to be replaced with the name Zavvi.

Fresh start

The new owners, led by the Virgin Megastore managing director Simon Douglas and finance director Steve Peckham, promised to safeguard all 2,500 jobs and overhaul the stores to compete more effectively in the iPod age.

Mr Douglas said the name change gave the group the opportunity for a fresh start, saying it would concentrate on providing an independent alternative to the "corporate" HMV and develop ways of appealing to new generations of music, games and DVD buyers.

"Most of my generation know all about Sir Richard Branson and what he has achieved in music," he said. "But it's an opportunity to reach out to people who now associate him more with his other businesses."

He admitted the music market was "under the spotlight", partly blaming the release schedule for this year, but he remained confident that the store could battle the combined threats of digital download stores such as Apple's iTunes, costcutting by supermarkets and the devaluation caused by piracy and free CD covermounts.

"There is still very much a place on an increasingly homogenised high street for an independent entertainment specialist that puts customers, product, service and personality at the top of the agenda," Mr Douglas said. The new name was a "modern and independent take on the word savvy".

Sir Richard had previously pledged to overhaul the Megastores for the digital age, introducing instore downloads and other innovations. But a spokesman for Sir Richard's Virgin Group said the Megastores were increasingly an "anachronism" in the company's portfolio, with other Virgin stores around the world already franchised to new owners. The company contributed only 5% of the group's UK turnover in 2006.

Under its "branded venture capital" strategy, Virgin is increasingly looking to float its businesses or sell stakes in them to joint venture partners. In addition to his airline, train and communications networks, Sir Richard has put the Virgin name to personal finance, health clubs and space tourism.

"Our most recent investments have also included renewable energy and clean technologies, in line with the group's desire to become one of the world leaders in that field along with sustainable transportation and travel," he said yesterday. "In the last six years we have been withdrawing from entertainment retailing, which is no longer viewed as core to the group's future."

V2, the record label he set up after selling Virgin Records to Thorn EMI, was sold to Universal last month. By that time the label, home to the Stereophonics and Patrick Watson among others, was 95% owned by Morgan Stanley with Virgin retaining only 5%.

Virgin Media, the cable group in which Sir Richard is the largest shareholder, will soon launch a high-profile TV channel called Virgin One. The company, which is embroiled in a bitter regulatory row with BSkyB, is up for sale and the chief executive recently departed but Sir Richard is expected to retain his stake.

Virgin Media and Virgin Mobile will retain their concessions in the new Zavvi stores under the terms of the deal.

Mr Douglas said he was confident the chain had a bright future despite the pressure on all high street entertainment stores from the rise of internet shopping and digital downloads, as well as the increasing activity by supermarkets in the sector.

Smoothie bars

Famous names such as Andy's Records, Tower Records, MVC and Music Zone have disappeared in recent years and the Fopp chain lives on in just six locations after being rescued by HMV.

HMV, under pressure from the City to rebuild collapsing sales, last week unveiled a bold concept store featuring a wider range of entertainment products, smoothie bars and internet terminals designed to lure shoppers back to the high street and encourage them to spend more. If successful, it will be rolled out nationwide.

But, despite criticism from analysts who said they were too slow to react, industry bodies insist the death of the high street record store has been exaggerated. "The fact that the management has been able to secure funding for this deal shows the robust prospects for entertainment retail," said the Entertainment Retailers Association's chairman, Paul Quirk. "The computer games and DVD markets are buoyant and even in music, despite misguided predictions that somehow record stores are finished, 90% of sales are still on physical formats."

According to ERA figures, in 2006 specialists accounted for the biggest slice of the music market with 46.5% of CD album sales by value. Supermarkets had 25%, high street multiples such as Woolworths and WH Smith 12.2%, the internet 11%, mail order 2.5% and others 2.7%.

The rise of Sir Richard

1950 Born in Shamley Green, Surrey

1970 Launches the first Virgin business - a mail order record store

1971 First Virgin Megastore opens on Oxford Street

1973 With Nik Powell, Branson launches Virgin Records. One of its earliest releases is the prog rock instrumental classic Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, which sells more than 5m copies. Other signings include Tangerine Dream and Faust

1977 Amid huge controversy, Virgin signs the Sex Pistols after they had been sacked by EMI and A&M. Other successful acts through the 1970s and 1980s include Genesis, Simple Minds, Janet Jackson, Phil Collins and Human League

1979 Opens flagship Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, which remains the world's largest entertainment store.

1986 Virgin Group floats, funding expansion into Birmingham, Brighton and Dublin

1988 Sells 67 smaller shops to Our Price for £63m

1992 WH Smith takes 50% stake in Virgin Retail. Sells Virgin Music Group to Thorn EMI for $1bn to fund expansion of Virgin Atlantic

1994 Virgin Megastores and Our Price merge

1996 Launches V2 label, home of the Stereophonics and Moby

1998 Virgin Group buys back Our Price from WH Smith

2004 Takes ownership of Tower Records brand in the UK

2006 Launches Virgin Megastore "store of the future" in Manchester

2006 Sells V2 Records North America for £15m

2007 Sells Virgin Megastores to management

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

The Streets

Hip to the beat of the Streets.

Rob Fitzpatrick uncovers the contents of a successful Streets tour

Saturday September 8, 2007
The Guardian

"I had Rohypnol on Friday," says Fulham-born rapper Elliot Example Gleave. "It was a mistake - someone spiked me - but I still lost my wallet and woke up with a headache.

Example has just returned from a five-night tear-up across Scotland with his colleagues (the Mitchell Brothers, Professor Green and the Streets - there were 32 people involved) from Mike Skinner's Beats label. "I'd planned to be really well behaved," he says. "But the whole tour was pretty blurry to be honest."

A rolling, full-on party, one without recognised start or end times, a Streets tour is one that, however out of hand it gets, is always immaculately dressed. The shows, from the "pilled-up craziness" of Dundee to the "bouncing nutters" of Edinburgh, were all (in Example's words) "completely amazing. I got used to waking up stinking of cigarettes and beer, but I never got used to arguing with people who stole my breakfast cereal. But the crowds made every hangover worthwhile - every Scottish person I've ever met has been fucking mad. And I mean that as a compliment."

Originally intended as a one-date warm-up for the new Streets album, the tour grew when Skinner decided he wasn't going to finish it in time. "I'd been working on it for a year and I didn't know what I was listening to anymore," he says. "I needed a holiday - I thought this would be a great way of getting away and having a good time."

Skinner's tour diary reveals his desire to provide Johnny Drum Machine with a suitably vast and luxurious armchair, his enjoyment at lumbering the crew with extra soft furnishings and the quality of each evening's "crowd surf". Example's notes are full of the desire for quality, nervous-system soothing comfort food ("I opted for a chicken and ham calzone from some classy Italian deli, nutritious breakfast smoothie..."), mixing his album on the tour bus and securing stage wear on the cheap. Sounds lovely, but there must have been bad moments?

"Someone stole my bunk's duvet one night," moans Example. "Although that might have been my fault for only getting to bed at 5am."

And why were you going to bed at 5am?

"Well," he says. "On the first night a girl came up to me backstage and handed me a packet with 20 pills in it."

Add this to some of the team's enthusiasm for a tour tipple known as "H2E" and you begin to understand why DJ Professor Green wrote in his own diary how, "a smell of destruction lurks, just waiting to rear its ugly but familiar head".

"I needed another holiday after that," Skinner admitted. "There were levels of madness that shocked even me," offers Example. "I've been eating healthily and running every day. I've now had two complete weeks off. Apart from the Rohypnol, of course."

· Example's What We Made album is out Sep 17

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