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Day: 3 February 2015

Preview: High Bank presents Richelle (Live)

High Bank is the new project of Manchester’s own Samename and Dj Croww, starting this Saturday (February 7th) at Soup Kitchen.

Speaking about their motivation in starting the night, the pair explain: “What we want High Bank to be is a place where people can experience different kinds of club music, some of which don’t have a proper platform currently or that haven’t been represented in our city before.”

“It’s an outlet for us to experiment in a small intimate space on a strong system, create and curate our own line ups and bring people who wouldn’t usually come to England or Manchester.”

This unique opportunity to hear underground club genres from across the world – be it Footwork or Jersey club from the US, Cumbia and Dembow from South America or Grime from closer to home – makes High Bank a vital addition to Manchester’s scene.

For their debut event they’ve invited a man who epitomises the High Bank manifesto: Richelle. The co-founder of influential Belgian label Pelican Fly is making some of the most forward-thinking and exciting club music around with his diverse intertwining of multiple club genres that are spliced with a southern rap swagger. Richelle will be performing a very rare live set.

High Bank have also just announced special guest and House of Trax honcho Rushmore, a Dj they affirm “specialises in raw and ghetto sounds like no one else”. Support comes from residents Samename and Dj Croww.

Further information can be found on the facebook event.

£4 early bird tickets are now sold out, but there are a limited number of £5 tickets available from Skiddle here.

Interview: Slaves

Picture the scene: it’s 2015, and it doesn’t take any degree of expertise to take a look at the charts and come to a few basic, depressing conclusions. It’s dominated by pop and dance entries, with a few artists (namely Sheeran and Swift) cropping up several times, and is scant in records that actually have something to say about, well, anything. All this at a time of political upheaval around the world and indeed within the UK, with what looks to be a closely fought general election rapidly approaching, and class war being waged across all strata of British life – this interview takes place the same week that James Blunt and Labour MP Chris Bryant have been exchanging a war of words
over the matter of privilege and success in the music industry.

Times like these just make you all the more thankful when a band like Slaves comes along. A duo comprised of drummer-vocalist Isaac Holman and guitarist-vocalist Laurie Vincent, over the past year they’ve taken new ownership of an abrasive, grungy punk, reminiscent of Nirvana, but you only need to listen to tracks like ‘Girl Fight’ to hear the sense of fun they also bring to their music.

I find Laurie having just wrapped work on their debut album. “We finished it yesterday; we decided the track listing and we finished mixing it. It’s getting mastered today and we’re finishing the artwork, so it’s going to be ready for pre order quite soon.” It’s even got a name – but they’re not allowed to announce anything just yet. The sound from their EP ‘Sugar Coated Bitter Truth’ has been bulked out with the help of producer Jolyon Thomas, who Laurie says “really made us step outside our comfort zone. We didn’t just stick to playing the same instruments; there are some songs where I play bass, and there are some songs where we use guitars plugged through synths, and drum machines. I think the biggest influence on us was just trying everything out.”

The last few months have seen the rise and rise of Slaves – they performed their song ‘Hey’ on Jools Holland, their upcoming album is one of NME’S 50 Records You Need to Hear This Year, and they were included in the BBC Sound of 2015 shortlist. It would be easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment; however Laurie views the whole thing with a healthy degree of scepticism. “I think it’s quite crazy that we’re in the mainstream. Radio 1 is such a fickle thing, so for us to be on the radio, I just feel like the planets are aligned, and maybe if we did this five years ago it wouldn’t have happened, because as far as I’m concerned, if we’re on the radio so should The Cribs, and all the bands like that. So I don’t know, it’s the powers that be that want to bring it back and have endorsed us, so we’re just really lucky.” Nevertheless, he’s keen to emphasise what being nominated meant to the band. “It was a real motivational, inspirational step for us. Because of this there’ll be more people at our gigs who never would have been there before, and you can’t turn your nose at something like that, it’s just something that’s good for us.”

In terms of Slaves’ aims for their music, Laurie wants to shake the youth of today out of their cyber-induced stupor. “There’s not many people creating compared to what there used to be, with the whole mobile phone generation. I just hope that we might inspire people to maybe do something different. I think it’s good that music is accessing everyone but I would love to see a band come out and then sort of just take it back and give it some mystery again.” Maybe everyone just needs to take a nostalgia trip back to the heady days of Britpop. “I do think that in the 90s you had Oasis and Blur, and Nirvana, and Rage Against the Machine, all these bands that were saying something. Even Oasis, it was like lad rock but it was inspiring the working classes, inspiring everyone just to unite and enjoy themselves, whereas now I don’t feel that we’ve got that.” So perhaps in 2015 we need more Liam Gallagher figures and fewer bedroom producers as our rock’n’roll stars: “I love what house music has done where it came back with Disclosure,” Laurie laughs, “but we’ve just got a load of sixteen year olds chewing their faces off in fields, it’s not exactly something you’ll want to tell your kids about!”

So what’s next for Slaves? After a sold out homecoming show in Tunbridge Wells in February they’ll be off on the NME Awards tour, where they feature on the bill alongside Palma Violets, The Amazing Snakehead and Fat White Family. Not that they’re fazed by the presence of bands whose live performances have all been hyped to high heaven by the music press at one point or another; “That’s the best bit about going on tour with good bands, it makes you think more about what you’re doing.”, Laurie remarks. Beyond that, the band have plenty of goals for the future. “I love the idea of trying to get into the charts, maybe one day play the main stage at a festival. I don’t want to just be the band that says, “Oh, we want to play dingy clubs forever”, because I don’t think that’s true for anyone. You want to take your music to as many people as possible.” With a canon of hard hitting songs, and a savvy approach to the situation of the music industry in 2015, hopefully Slaves will be able to achieve this sooner than they think.

Album: The Decemberists – What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World

Released 19th January

Rough Trade Records

8/10

As soon as What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World begins, something seems wrong. The Decemberists, masters of storytelling, of hiding behind chimney sweeps, Japanese folklore and a nine minute revenge epic that climaxes inside a giant whale, are singing about… themselves? ‘The Singer Addresses His Audience’ is the first time the band have ever written anything so direct, and it’s a jolting change, singer Colin Meloy singing “you know we had to change some,” a song aimed directly at the fans perhaps annoyed with their recent output – the enormous concept album behemoth The Hazards of Love was accused of being overlong, confusing, a messy sprawl as much as it was called a masterpiece of storytelling through music. Its follow up, The King is Dead, was the opposite – the band retreating into traditional middle of the road rock that sounded more like R.E.M than Picaresque, and the response was again mixed – either overly simplistic or a cut down, lean rock album. The Decemberists simply couldn’t win.

As a result of this, their hiatus, or perhaps Meloy’s recent novel writing, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is the sound of the Decemberists simply doing what they want. Largely gone are the characters, and in their place are songs about Meloy himself – he is “seventeen and terminally fey,” on the beautiful ‘Lake Song’ – easily the album’s standout song. Elsewhere, on ‘Anti-Summersong,’ he is declaring his intention to never play another “summer suicide song,” referring to their own fan-favourite, The Crane Wife’s ‘Summersong.’ However, the Decemberists have not entirely abandoned their literary past – as soon as the dust from the opener settles, a fanfare blares, and Meloy sings “I am the Cavalry Captain!” breaking into a classic Decemberists character piece, about the Charge of the Light Brigade. This is followed up with another character track, ‘Philomena,’ a plea for sex from a young man, tongue nailed to cheek. The music is again traditional indie rock, but with more of their folky flourishes from their earlier works, as on ‘Lake Song,’ and spirals across the genre – girl group backing vocals join throughout, and the album moves from full on anthemic rock in ‘Make You Better,’ to sea-shanty-esque menace on ‘Better Not Wake the Baby.’

Whilst it is hard to tell where this release places in their canon, and despite not breaking any musical new ground, with What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, the Decemberists have finally decided to be themselves, and in doing so have created another excellent album.

Interview: Monster Magnet

When someone mentions ‘Monster Magnet’ it’s easy to dismiss them by their name, which tends to evoke heavy metal stereotypes of sweaty, hairy, Viking-like men screaming unintelligible lyrics over a background of grating distortion. And yet this couldn’t be farther from the truth as veteran hard rocker and Monster Magnet front-man Dave Wyndorf tells me as we discuss the driving forces behind his new release Milking the Stars: A Re-imagining of Last Patrol.

Dave makes no bones about the influences behind his music; sex, drugs, comic books and UFOs. “People don’t want to hear songs about how your job’s really boring and your fucking sad because your girl left you; they want to hear songs about overdosing on drugs and feeling like your heads gonna explode man!” With this in mind I’m interested to find out how the latest album, a re-imagining of their 2013 release Last Patrol, has come about. “Really it’s all been about experimentation. There’s been so many times on the tour for Last Patrol where I’d find myself awake at 6 a.m. at the back of the tour bus, everyone else asleep, and I’d be wired on Coffee playing the songs and think ‘Shit! I should have done that!’ or ‘This would sound so much better if we added a Mellotron or a Sitar!’ A lot of the thinking behind this one was less about the ‘Why?’ and more about the ‘Why not?’”. Dave explains to me his reasoning for going with a late ‘60s Psychedelic vibe. “When I grew up man, heavy metal wasn’t this little clique for nerdy white suburban kids. I grew up with Hawkwind, Sabbath and Zeppelin. And the chicks got it just as much as the guys did, you know? There was so much more weird music around back then, and that’s kind of what I wanted to do to my own music. Add a whole lot of new weird shit to it and see where it goes.” I ask Dave if he’s left the more debauched side of rock n roll he was once renowned for behind. “Sometimes you gotta write the song with your cock man!” he says, only half-jokingly, being very aware that this reputation is what helped Monster Magnet break through.

Interested by Dave’s love of comic books, having written songs with references to the likes of The Fantastic Four, as well as legendary Marvel artist Jack Kirby, I’m curious to know how this has influenced the latest release. “Comics are one of my favourite things in life Chris, and I think that by combining a lot of that in my music I can add an element of surreality and added weirdness.” I ask Dave his opinion regarding the rest of the current rock scene. “The problem I have with a lot of guys is that, yeah it’s a hell of a lot of fun to get up on stage, crank the amps and melt the faces off the audience with solos and distortion, but if you’re going to write songs about warrior-princesses and fuckin’ satanic shit then the audience has to be able to believe that stuff. You’re playing the role of a story-teller on stage and you can’t be effective at that if all you want to do is play loud. You have to seduce the listener into your music. Seriously, how many chicks want to go see a guy on stage screaming ‘Hey buddy I’ll kick your fuckin’ ass!’ you know?”.

With this in mind I ask Dave his opinion on the Internet and its impact on the future of rock. “It’s not good man! Now that radio’s dead all these different branches and genres of rock have their own little clubhouses online. To me, there’s just rock music. All these labels are just unnecessary bullshit.” Dave clearly spends a lot of time thinking about this and I’m interested to know what solution, if any, he’d have for this. “I don’t know exactly what to do man, but I’ll tell you this, all this new music? It ain’t new, it’s just fuckin’ Kraftwerk man, there ain’t no new sound. Drum machines, keyboards, dude shouts ‘Drink another overpriced drink!’ That’s all there is to it. If anything, we need an online cabal of intelligence, a freakin’ Internet fortress, where if you ain’t got the rock n roll know-how then you can’t be a part of it. There has to be an Arab spring of rock n roll, a renaissance of sorts, where we strip rock music back to where a lot of it originated from and start over again and see where it takes us this time around.” Dave seems to have a better understanding than most of the inherent problems and paradoxes within the world of rock n roll.

Curious as to what the future holds for Monster Magnet I ask him about the upcoming re-imagining of their 2010 release Mastermind. “Yeah man, we’ve just been in the studio recently putting down some of the new tracks for it. Expect the quiet songs to now be loud, the loud to be quiet. We’ve reversed a lot of the previous dynamics on Mastermind. Expect it to be weird man.” Dave seems to represent an entire generation of rock musicians and fans alike in one man and sums up their attitude succinctly, “The older I get the more fun this job gets. I’ll stop doing it when it stops being fun.”

University of Manchester to mark World Cancer Day

The 4th of February will be World Cancer Day, a great opportunity to raise awareness about cancer on a global level. It is an initiative organized by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), one of the major non-governmental organizations, who collaborates with UN.

According to UICC, every year 8.2 million of people die from cancer and more than a third are premature deaths of people between 30 and 69 years old. In the majority of cases this disease is curable if discovered early enough.

A plethora of options to prevent and treat cancer are now available thanks to new research findings in the last few decades, and this positivity is reflected in the new slogan of World Cancer Day, “Not beyond us”.

The University of Manchester (UoM) plays a crucial role in the global struggle to tackle cancer. Research involves the study of cancer from a molecular and cellular level to further development, as well as testing of new drugs and other new, innovative therapies. Physical, emotional and economic impacts of cancer are also examined and treated.

1.5 million of women suffering from breast cancer have now a better chance to fight this disease due to endocrine therapies developed at UoM, and researchers have also increased the life expectancy of 25% of people with lung cancer after their diagnosis.

Philanthropic donations contribute significantly to achieve this important results at the University. They support the construction and the maintenance of new buildings and they fund research students.

The Manchester Cancer Research Centre will open in Withington this year, as a new project developed by the collaboration of The Christie, Cancer Research UK and the University of Manchester. The South Manchester centre will operate in order to provide innovative and personalized cancer treatments to an increasing number of people.

Professor Nic Jones, the research centre’s director, said: “Manchester Cancer Research Centre aims to improve understanding of how cancer develops, in order to translate basic and clinical research into new treatments that benefit cancer patients in Manchester and across the world.”

“Our vision is to develop a personalised medicine strategy that spans the entire patient’s journey from diagnosis to treatment.”

In Manchester, Ph. D students are currently working along with world-class scientists to tackle cancer and they represent key contributors to this research. Many of them are funded by UoM alumni, friends and staff.

Patty Doran, a second year Ph. D student at the University of Manchester, said: “For my Ph. D research I am looking into the impact of older people’s social networks on cancer treatment outcomes. This research will bring together the fields of ageing, cancer treatment, and social support. My hypothesis is that if you have access to support when you are making treatment decisions, you are likely to receive more treatment than those without support.

“The funding for my three-year PhD comes from University of Manchester Alumni, through the Research Impact Scholarship. I am very grateful for the opportunity to spend three years learning new research skills, and applying these to contribute new knowledge to the area of older people and cancer treatment inequalities.

“The social support needs of cancer patients are often overlooked, however with cancer treatments and survival outcomes improving, now is an opportune time to look at cancer differently, to engage in multidisciplinary work, and to increase knowledge of the patient and their cancer journey.

“As put by Ciarán Devane, Chief Executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, “Measuring success by one and five-year survival rates is simply no longer enough. We must see the reality–and the people–behind the numbers” (Cancer’s Uneven Burden, MCS, 2014:5). So here I am, continuing my quest for reality.”

Little donations can make a difference, such as small contributions of £10 a month donated by alumni and friends of the University of Manchester every year. If you would like to join this fight against cancer and help UoM to carry on with researches, you can make a donation at https://your.manchester.ac.uk/support-manchester/donate.