A self-released EP, Orchard Hill’s ‘Make It Out Alive’ comes with a surprisingly American sound for a quartet from Oxfordshire. With some tough pop-punk/emo chops and a first rate production job from Ben Humphries [Maximo Park] and John Mitchell [You Me At Six], this debut is incredibly professional. For the genre, you’d be hard pushed to find a better sounding release from bands with ten times the budget at their disposal.
Audio & Anchovies: Real Gone meets King Pizza Records
Sometimes it can be easy to feel like the corporate giants are repeatedly flooding the market with expensive repackages of classic albums, hugely expensive box sets and the like. Truth is, while we all have our “classic albums”, music fans still need something completely new to discover and thankfully, we now live in a world where there’s more music than ever before at our disposal. So much, in fact, that much of it is in danger of being overlooked. There are literally thousands of underground bands and hundreds of DIY labels and you often have to put in some hard yards to find them, but we live in very exciting musical times. On the eve of the their first anniversary, a few faces from King Pizza Records – one of the US’s most no-nonsense DIY labels –met with Real Gone to give us the skinny…and, man, they had an impressive amount of enthusiasm!
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Ian McLagan: 12 May 1945 – 3 December 2014
Legendary keyboard player Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan passed away on 3rd December 2014 following a stroke. He was 69 years old.
Mac was a well loved musician throughout a career spanning several decades. He first came to prominence as a member of Small Faces, before becoming an integral member of the Rod Stewart fronted Faces. Later work saw Mac performing with The Bump Band, with Faces bandmate Ron Wood in The New Barbarians and as a full-time member of Billy Bragg’s backing band The Blokes.
Mac also lent his talents to many sessions including recordings by Frank Black and Izzy Stradlin.
REAL GONE GOES OUT: The New Pornographers – Shepherds Bush Empire, London 2/12/2014
On November 21st, London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire played host to arguably one of the best and most energetic gigs of 2014 when various forty-somethings said goodbye to their youths and goodbye to Carter USM at the first of their two farewell shows. Barely a week and a half later, the atmosphere in the venue couldn’t be any further removed from that particular gig, when – on a particularly cold Tuesday night – a sparser crowd gather to see Canadian music collective The New Pornographers promoting their sixth release ‘Brill Bruisers’ with support from the relatively unknown Mini Mansions.
Sick of it All announce UK dates
As part of the promotion for their most recent album ‘Last Act of Defiance’ hardcore punk legends Sick of it All return to the UK in early 2015 for nine dates, including an appearance at the Underworld in London.
Dates are as follows: