GIG SCENE: Bottom of the Bottle moves
IT'S the first night at a new home for Harrogate's most popular long-running rock night Bottom of the Bottle this weekend.
This Sunday, February 7, BOTB will be held in Revolution in the main room, its biggest venue yet.
As always, main man DJ Trev will be on hand with not only top metal/punk/rock/alternative club tracks but also some class live acts.
Its debut night at Revolution will feature the following:
Rock anthems from Leeds-based Pray for Hayden, Harrogate's lively/metally AMP Award winners Book of Job and new local pop punk act Blaze Camero.
Doors open at 9pm, entry costs 3 (4 after 11pm) and it runs to 3am.
HAITI FUNDRAISER: AS well as the return of one of the area's best (alt-indie) bands, The Birdman Rallies next Thursday, the Blues Bar in Harrogate is also hosting a special Haiti fundraiser next Tuesday night. Starring cool York band Alvin Purple and talented local youngster Dan Cope, all proceeds will go to Oxfam's work on the stricken island.
Another act to look out for at the Blues Bar is world music figure Kwame D with his unique blend of reggae and roots music.
Other gigs at the Blues Bar this week include:Fri, Feb 5: Midnight Special. Sun lunch: Kwame D. Sun evening: Bluephunk. Tues: Act tbc. Thurs: The Birdman Rallies.
THERE'S more success for local promoters RipleyBlues at their venue at Ripley Town Hall.
Two sell-out show starring Bex Marshall have been followed by another sellout in advance for their Valentine's Day Party in Ripley Town Hall's main hall with the Cajun Roosters on Sunday, February 14 and, also, a sellout for the Ian Parker gig on March 6.
Parker has now agreed to play an extra show at Ripley on Sunday, March 7 at 2pm and a few tickets are still available (Tickets 8.00/10.00.) -so be quick.
Saturday, March 20 sees the Aynsley Lister Band with support from Dan Burnett Band. Aynsley is another long term Ripley favourite having first appeared at the club in 2000. He is one of the very few artists playing rocking blues with a modern edge and has been described by The Times as "superb." Tickets 10.00/12.00.
Other shows coming up at Ripley Town Hall include:
Ian Siegal (upstairs). May 22: Buddy Whittington Band. June 5: Lightnin' Willie & The Poorboys. July 17th: The Mods. August 6: King King (featuring lan Nimmo). Sept 11th: The Blues Band. Oct 23rd: British Blues Quintet & Dave Kelly. Nov 6: Doug Macleod (upstairs). Nov 20th: Dr Feelgood. Dec 18: Nine Below Zero.
RipleyBlues' sponsorship scheme is again available in 2010 giving businesses the opportunity to gain a higher profile by inclusion on their popular website and on gig tickets.The cost is 100 which includes a couple of tickets to the sponsored show.
Please contact RipleyBlues organiser Andy Herrington ASAP a t andy@ripleyblues.com or tel 01423 860340.
IT'S good to see there was praise all round last week for not only the 140 musicians of school age who took part in Yorkshire Jazz's Jazz Jamboree held last Sunday at Ripon Grammar School but also for the organisers Jazz Yorkshire.
Youngsters from across the district were given the chance of honing their musical help also thanks in large measure to of James Lancaster, Head of Music at Ripon Grammar School.
ONE of Corrine Bailey-Rae's favourite music festivals is to keep its prices the same as last year - and it's introducing a new family ticket.
The Limetree Festival, a three-day music festival, held amid the outstanding natural beauty of Limetree Farm near Grewelthorpe, returns on Friday, August 27-29 with a wide bill of world and roots music - from reggae to funk, Spanish to Irish.
Among the headliners at this year's event will be Chumbawumba and The Selecter.
In previous years at Limetree, top selling singer Bailey-Rae has dropped in to check out friends playing on stage as part of bands The Haggis Horns and Chunky Butt Funky.
For tickets costing 80 (adult weekend) and 25 (junior weekend) plus a family ticket 200 (two adults and two juniors), visit www.limetreefestival.co.uk
IT'S congratulations to a teenage acoustic perfomer who used to go to King James's School in Knaresborough who has won through to the finals of a national battle of the bands. Guitarist /singer, Alice Ostapjuk, 17, who lives in Long Marston, sailed through the audition stages of the Live and Unsigned Festival 2010 in Sheffield beating hundreds of other auditionees along the way to win herself a place in the regional finals to be held on Sunday, March 21 at Sheffield City Hall.
Alice has two gigs coming up if you'd like to hear her sing. Dates are Wednesday, February 24 at the City Screen basement, York and Tuesday, March 16 at Stereo, York. Tickets for Live and Unsigned will be on sale at the events.
For more details, see her myspace page www.myspace.com/cissiepip
FRESH from a headlining show at The Cockpit in Leeds, popular Harrogate indie-rock band D'Nile have also recorded a radio session.
Liam Gray and the boys appeared on Yorkshire Radio last week with a session recorded earlier.
The band's next big date is the Royal Hall in Harrogate on Friday, March 19 where they will be giving fans with an insight into their forthcoming new album
For tickets, tel 0845 130 8840 or visit www.harrogateboxoffice.co.uk
RIPON gig promoters DMB have a couple of cracking indie concerts coming up next month in the shape of hotly-tipped Glasgow band Zoey Van Goey and Leeds-based solo genius Napoleon III. More news next week.
DESPITE going through an unsettled period of line-up changes, Harrogate rockers PseudoNympho have won through to the regional finals of the national Live and Unsigned battle of the bands.
The group, led by Wolfgang C Bailey, who triumphed in last year's Battle of the Bands art Rehab, impressed at an audition in Sheffield recently with a new song called TheImmaculateHeartOfMary.
The boys now appear in the regional final at Sheffield City Hall on Sunday, March 21 and you may be able to travel to see them in action.
If there's enough interest in travelling to the event, the band are thinking of hiring a coach to take fans there and back.
Tickets for the show costing 7.50 are available from the band in person or via their Facebook address or on www.myspace.com/pseudonymphoband
HARROGATE Jazz Club launches a new jazz talent/open mic night for aspiring singers and instrumentalists.
Hosted by one of their resident bands, The Watermelon Men, it starts on Friday, February 5 at 8pm.
Entry is 3 and all are welcome.
Next Tuesday, February 9 at the same venue, Harrogate Jazz Club hosts Kate Peters with the Watermelon Men. Entry 3.
A REALLY great Big Band called the Little Big Band are playing a Pimms & Swing evening in Killinghall.
Held at St Thomas the Apostle Church on Friday, February 12 at 7.30pm, the event is designed to rias emoney for the ongoing upkeep of the church.
Tickets costing 7.50 (including Pimms cocktail and posh nibbles) are available from Sylvia Bentley on 01423 531 136.
HARROGATE-based bassist Joe Wilson can be heard in action on Fret Buzz's myspace site.
The young band, who are otherwise Leeds-based, have their own compositions (largely written by lead vocalist/guitarist James Thompson) on www.myspace.com/fretbuzz900
The band recently recorded a four-track EP in the studio and are due to take part in a Harrogate Battle of the Bands at Rehab on Sunday, April 19. Tickets costing 7.50 (including Pimms cocktail and posh nibbles) are available from Sylvia Bentley on 01423 531 136.
IT'S good to see there was praise all round last week for not only the 140 musicians of school age who took part in Yorkshire Jazz's Jazz Jamboree at Ripon Grammar School but also for the organisers Jazz Yorkshire.
Youngsters from across the district were given the chance of honing their musical help also thanks in large measure to James Lancaster, Head of Music at Ripon Grammar School.
LIVE REVIEW
Leeds Festival, Bramham Park, 2009, by Graham Chalmers
WHAT on earth are the Arctic Monkeys doing?
Unveiling tracks from their new album as if they were the Rolling Stones in the mid-1970s, thinking they could persuade fans the future was going to be just as good as the past?
Having dispensed early with I Bet She Looks Good on The Dancefloor, the surprisingly long-haired Monkeys try to repaint their short back catalogue in a darker shade than the 'cheeky northern chappy' guise they made their name with three, short years ago.
It's not that the Humbug tracks are bad, just a bit boring for the dark of the closing moments of the first night of Leeds Festival.
Whether their subtle strengths would work better in a more intimate environment isn't the question; right here, right now they're boring their audience.
When, at last, the still young Sheffield band deign to return briefly to crowd-pleasing with the opening chords of Fluorescent Adolescent, they bravely, or foolishly, slow the pace halfway through in a fit of artistic adventure.
It's as if boyish, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, carefully coiffeured lead singer Alex Turner no longer believes in the things which made him famous.
Even more alarmingly for the Arctic Monkeys' future, he seems to lack faith or patience in his own fans' capacity to warm to his new persona, to grow with the band.
Radiohead should be about to bring the day to a close on a downer but, in their post-In Rainbows frame of mind, their iciness of the past has melted.
Neither attempting to re-educate their fans like the Arctic Monkeys, nor suck up to them like The Prodigy, instead they play the coolest tracks from all their albums from OK Computer onwards plus a brand, new track, These Are My Twisted Words, and, thankfully, no Creep as we heard they'd dug up the night before at Reading.
It's not that the band have become fun, exactly, even if they do play a few tracks off fans' perennial favourite The Bends.
What's changed over the past decade is that Radiohead no longer bring a chilly alienation to everything they touch.
In their hearts they are more mellow; Thom Yorke has become a warmer individual, and that warmth seeps through not only in the mysterious beauty of tracks from In Rainbows but into every other song they play, too.
Combined with stage props as clean and clever and arty but unthreatening as this new version of Radiohead themselves, and the end result is stunning - perhaps the best headlining show at Leeds Festival ever.
No one goes off home to the tent or the car or the bus jumping and singing but everyone leaves impressed.
There's no sense of Radiohead having to work to achieve this effect, the band have simply grown into a great musical ensemble.
It's easy to believe in Kings of Leon or it was until lead singer Caleb Followill's not first, not second, not even third or fourth speech about how "great the fans in Leeds are" but the fifth stab at such embarrassingly, possibly semi-drunken fawning to the crowd like a Las Vegas singer whose just had his gambling debts wiped off by the house.
Kings of Leon used to be a half-hour band with a one-trick approach.
If you saw them on their UK tours for their first and second albums, early delight at their subtle skills at squeezing the maximum effect from tiny changes in the playing of simple, old-fashioned guitar pop - with a slight Deep South r'nb rock slant - always turned to tedium as they ran out of memorable material to work their miniature magic on.
Now, after the growing success of albums three and four, they have become an hour band with a two or, sometimes, three-trick approach.
What's done this for them, what's made last year's Only By Night the bestselling phenomenon it has become from HMV to ASDA, is the toughening of the sound and the injection of late night atmosphere a la Where The Streets Have No Name era U2 - those epic build-ups and swelling synth washes adding poignancy to their very manly approach in all other matters.
At their best, bathed in reds from the stage lights under a black sky, Kings of Leon transcend their redneck roots and less than intellectual lyrics by dint of their brooding, sweating sound and gut level emotions.
Their songs conjur up images of a man lying awake at night trying to get to grips with the impact and morality of some tangled indiscretion he's committed earlier with some girl he shouldn't have with.
At their worst, as their sound has gotten larger and darker, they threaten to lose the last of the charm from the early tracks on Youth and Young Manhood.
Their show, rapturously received at first, a little less so by the end, poses the question whether Kings of Leon have anywhere left to go musically.
For more, see www.modernmusicreview.com
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Weather for Harrogate
Sunday 05 February 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 2 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: West
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Sunny spells
Temperature: 0 C to 6 C
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