Fifty years ago this weekend, Ramones played their first two UK shows, catalysing the British punk scene. Simon Price talks to people who were there, and argues that anyone who dismissed them as cartoon cretins missed the point

Ramones live at the Roundhouse by Gus Stewart / Redferns / Getty

 There comes a moment in every Dolly Parton concert, as cherished as it is predictable, when the country icon reels out her famous scripted off-the-rhinestone-cuff remark: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

It’s a quip which could easily be adapted to fit Ramones: it takes a lot of brains to sound this dumb. Because, if there’s one defining question which still dangles over the New York City punk pioneers,…

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Everybody Talks About The Weather will be released by Upset The Rhythm

Photo by Luke Fowler

The Yummy Fur have shared details of their first album in 27 years, titled Everybody Talks About The Weather.

Spanning 10 tracks, the LP was recorded by the original core trio of songwriter and vocalist John McKeown, guitarist Brian MacDougall and drummer Paul Thomson. It comes 17 years after the band reformed for occasional live shows, and seven years after the release of the retrospective compilation Piggy Wings.

The album is led by single ‘Unity Over Europe’, which you can watch a video for below.

Speaking about the track, McKeown said: “‘Unity Over Europe’ was the first song we came up with when we started thinking about putting some new…

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The run of releases sees Kevin Martin link up with a number of female vocalists, including Dis Fig

The Bug has launched a new series of collaborative series, LADYBUG, on his own PRESSURE imprint.

The run of releases sees Kevin Martin link up with a number of female vocalists. For the first instalment, he collaborates with Dis Fig, real name Felicia Chen, on the track ‘Vanishing’. The original cut arrives alongside four alternate versions by Martin.

This marks Martin and Chen’s second collaboration after they linked up on the 2020 joint LP In Blue.

Listen to the full release below, and get it on Bandcamp here.

LADYBUG 1 is out now on PRESSURE.

Ladybug 1 by The Bug / Dis Fig
…

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The newly remastered album comes with original artwork

Light In The Attic is reissuing Charanjit Singh’s 1982 album Synthesizing: Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat.

With copies of the original pressing and a 2010 reissue by Bombay Connection hard to come by or fetching hundreds of pounds on the reissue market, the cult release has been newly remastered for its updated release. It will be made available on 2xLP and CD.

The release comes with original artwork and a booklet featuring unseen photos from the Singh family archive, along with new liner notes from Discostan’s Arshia Fatima Haq and Jeremy Loudenback, Charanjit’s grandchildren including singer-songwriter Rachel Singh and composer Joshua Singh, and others. The reissue is going ahead with the cooperation of Charanjit Singh’s Estate.

Recorded…

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A quarter of a century on Jon Buckland considers the complex emotional affects triggered by Christian Fennesz’ third album, Endless Summer. Contains discussion of suicide

Endless Summer by Fennesz

In 2001 Christian Fennesz released his third full-length record Endless Summer which followed the disrupted drone and noise aesthetics of debut Hotel Paral.lel and spectres-in-a-blizzard sounds of plus forty seven degrees 56′ 37″ minus sixteen degrees 51′ 08″. The strange string of numbers in the title of the second album were coordinates for the open-air studio in his native Austria where he recorded the album.

For the uninitiated, Fennesz tends to create music by processing his guitar through an array of laptop-based effects, warping and distorting the sounds until they’re completely unrecognisable. Watching him…

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Akusmi

Terra Incognita

Pascal Bideau’s latest album as Akusmi plays out like a collective expression of notional anthems from unknown lands, says Bernie Brooks

Terra Incognita by Akusmi

Just shy of a decade ago, I toured part of an automobile plant where trucks are assembled. While this was obviously a sanitised space intended for visitors, it was equally obvious that the place was far from a dark, satanic mill of yore. It was relatively bright and clean, and the work, while clearly skilled and not without risk, was well-paid. The factory – humans included – was less a collection of automated and operated industrial equipment and more like a single, giant mechanism. Or cyberorganism, maybe, each worker a part of the machine, filling roles…

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There Near is out next month

Photo by Jeff Fowler

Dinosaur Jr. have shared details of their first studio album in five years, titled There Near.

Spanning 11 tracks that were recorded in short bursts over the course of a year, the new record was made almost entirely by the band’s core trio of J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph. Friend of the band Ken Mauri also adds piano and organ on some tracks.

In a statement, Mascis said: “I’m not always sure what a song is ‘about’ when I’m writing it. I guess the meaning will present itself at some point. I’ll use whatever words work. And a lot of it will be influenced by whatever esoteric mumbo jumbo I’m reading at the…

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The festival’s 13th edition makes use of extraordinary sites, including a former granite quarry, a medieval village, natural gorges and thermal baths

Photo by Piercarlo Quecchia

Next month sees the 13th edition of Italy’s Nextones, a festival dedicated to “research and experimentation in contemporary music in dialogue with the performing and audiovisual arts.”

Taking place from 16 to 19 July across the Ossola Valley, Nextones utilises sites such as the former granite quarry Tones Teatro Natura, while site-specific performances will take place at the Premia Thermal Baths, the natural gorges known as the Orridi di Uriezzo, the medieval village of Ghesc, and the Oratorio di San Marco.

It opens with a performance by London harpist Miriam Adefris, the activation of a sound installation called…

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The whimsy had fallen away leaving De La Soul in a position to voice a an alarming diagnosis: hip hop faced a double-threat from sectarianism and corporate influx, says Jacob Manieson

The architecture of 90s hip hop was notoriously sectarian. Amongst and between enclaves like the Bay Area and Brooklyn, enormous personalities like Biggie and Tupac proved that the genre could be a commercial powerhouse. They flung stones from coast to coast, and sold an unfathomable amount of records as a result. At the same time, the south began charting its own musical course, away from the bustling scenes of coastal America. Yet all the while, within more bohemian circles, some artists began taking a different approach. A sound aptly named…

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This ambient side project from the guitarist in Squid reaches back through a deep history of British music inspired by the countryside

Credit: Holly Whitaker

Locked into the grind of city living, it’s easy to feel depressed, isolated, alienated. The world we live in feels so hostile, and it’s all too easy to feel completely disconnected from your peers, your purpose, and, especially the Earth itself. If you’re particularly unlucky, you might see less than a dozen trees and a sole grassy knoll during your daily flat-bus-work-bus-flat strife knot.

It would be naive to say the fatigue and implied hopelessness of modern life are solely down to our loss of connection to nature, but it’s a significant factor. There’s a clarity of thought…

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