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Friday 6th April 2012
All Day BBQ Festival

Sparrow and the Workshop
6 Day Riot
The Nuns
Singing Adams
Y Niwl
Colours
Dignan Porch
+more tbc

The Windmill
Brixton
Price tbc

On Our iPod

Golden Grrrls - New Pop 7”

Chris Devotion & The Expectations - Amalgamation & Capital (album)

Trailer Trash Tracys - Ester (album)

Throwing Up - Mother Knows Best 7”

Howling Wolf - Complete Chess Masters 1951-60

The Ketamines - A Rotten Bond/1 Yr (from Oddbox Singles Club Pt 2)

Cardinal - Hymns (album)

Proper Ornaments - Taking the Gamble Out of Buying 12”

Darren Hayman - January Songs (album)

Various: Marshall Teller EP 12”

Latest Forum Posts

Special Feature

10 Reasons Why La Roux Don’t Exist

Article written by Mrs Ray Flicker - Apr 6, 2010

We live in dark times. Ecologically, financially and morally the world is going to Hell in a hand-cart. And now, on top of everything else, we’re told that La Roux are trendy and exciting. Talk about kicking humanity when it’s down! Even worse, some people actually seem to be falling for this sinister pronouncement. The hip clubs of Notting Hill Gate are (for all I know) full of insufferable trend-spotters shouting “Doesn’t Ellie look interesting?”, “Isn’t Ellie’s haircut fascinating?”, “Ellie’s haircut – weird or what?” and “What’s the other bloke’s name?”

La Roux

At the risk of being overly dramatic, this is clearly a presage of the coming apocalypse. I’m not kidding. Check out The Book of Revelations, Chapter 8, verse 7: “At the end of days a flock of seagulls will be revived and lo! the world will tremble to the sound of scraping from the depths of a barrel.” Grim tidings from God, then. Only science can save us now.

Well good news, everybody! Top music boffins here at the Mrs Ray Flicker Institute for Intelligent Audio Design have looked into the matter and discovered that, contrary to all accepted wisdom, La Roux do not actually exist. Like fairies, the bogeyman and Fiona Bruce’s cleavage, they are merely a disturbing figment of the collective human psyche. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but then so is quantum mechanics and, besides, my boffins are scientists: they wear white lab-coats and everything, so you can trust them. Anyway, here are the results of their painstaking research. Obviously, we’ve stripped out the underlying mathematical equations so that dim non-science-types like your good selves can pretend to understand what it’s all about. The main thing is: humanity is safe – at least for the next few weeks.

1. Any pop act that slavishly attempted to re-hash a limp genre whose sole redeeming feature back in the day was that it sounded “a bit new” would implode under the weight of their own ghastly irony and form a black hole so dense that no sound could ever escape the crushing grip of its musical gravity.

2. The success of a song as ludicrously awful as “In For The Kill” would require so many people to be so stupid that, statistically speaking, the probability is as close to zero as you can get without the number actually being zero. It’s infinitely close to zero. There’s more likelihood of The Libertines reforming or Christian Rock storming the charts. Mercifully, therefore, the idea can be discounted.

3. “Retro-Futurism” is an oxymoron. An oxymoron is an eight-sided idiot. The internal angles of an eight-sided idiot add up to more than 180º. That’s mathematically impossible. QED.

4. [Censored due to military sensitivity.]

5. Music labels really do employ people to listen to stuff before it’s released so that they can spot anything that’s so embarrassingly shit that it’s clearly some kind of a wind-up and send it back to the studio with a Post-It saying “ha ha, very funny” in red felt tip.

6. In terms of depressingly pointless rubbish, The Editors represent the musical equivalent of 0 Kelvin. La Roux, if it existed, would be -5 Kelvin, and that just can’t happen.

7. Language is normative. There are rules governing the correct use of words and if you break those rules you simply spout nonsense. Some combinations are obvious nonsense, such as: “Milk me sugar”. Others are less obvious, but ultimately still just gibberish, for example: “It’s five o’clock on the Sun”. “Bulletproof is catchy” clearly falls under the former category. Indeed, any attempt to link the words “La Roux” and “music” is logically doomed to failure. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must shut the fuck up.

8. That haircut.

9. If you’ve got a voice like a tom-cat pissing into a rusty salmon tin, it’s best not to take lead vocals, unless you’ve got something at least vaguely interesting to say. You certainly shouldn’t try it if all you’ve done is taken a bunch of drably ordinary songs and synthed them up in the hope of disguising the fact that you’re just another tedious ex-folkie pretending to be modern. And under no circumstances should you spend a whopping thirty seconds going “ooh-ooh-ooh” in a way that you hope is soulful but actually sounds like a pig having an epileptic fit.

10. A good idea done badly is better than a bad idea done well. And even a bad idea done well is better than a bad idea done badly. But when an idea this bad is done this badly then… well, I just refuse to believe in it, that’s all. So there.

Links:
http://www.laroux.co.uk