Sk8r Girl discovers secret to eternal youth

It appears that the secret to Never Growing Up is: panda eye make up, Radiohead t-shirts and singing at the top of your lungs.

2 out of 3 aint band.

Bert & Ernie Ante Up

Flight of The Conchords - Feel Inside (and stuff like that)

The Beatles cover Smack My Bitch Up

This would have to be the most interesting thing The Beatles have done in years, also The Prodigy do Help!

Danger Beach - Apache

If you like this as much as I do you can get it on Danger Beach's 2010 album Milky Way; purchase ($7) or download (free) via Dream Damage.

Two French Robots and a Black Guy walk into a bar....

No, this is not the set up for classic 'walked into a bar' based racism, it is the latest Adidas Originals World Cup advertisement.

Watch as Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg, Ian Brown, David Beckham and one of the guys from Oasis are transported into the Star Wars cantina scene.



While rap fans should enjoy seeing The Doggfather do some damage with a lightsaber, football fans will love the line, to David Beckham

He [Jabba The Hut] saw you play a long time ago for a Galaxy far, far away.

Another Version of the Truth: The Gift

Back in January 2009 we pointed you to some 400GB of raw HD footage captured during Nine Inch Nails' 2008 Lights In The Sky tour.

A year on and things have come along more than anyone could have imagined.

Fans have edited thousands of videos from the footage, assembled their own DVDs and live albums, even held theatrical screenings of their creations. And now, the ambitious and well-organised group known as This One Is On Us (remember this) have released their massive, highly-anticipated creation, Another Version of the Truth: The Gift.

Created by a team of dozens of NIN fans spanning the entire globe have pooled their efforts to create this professional-quality 1080p 5.1 concert film, and it has been released on just about every format from Blu-ray to DVD, iPod to YouTube.

That something of this scale was produced entirely by fans, on their own time, purely for the sake of giving something back, is absolutely unprecedented. You can read all about the project and find all the download links here, or watch it immediately on YouTube here. Theatrical screenings are already being organised, you can find more info about those here.

"Nine Inch Nails fans kick ass." – Trent Reznor

Bawley (Hearts) 2009: Top 6 Covers of the Year

6. The Big Pink – Sweet Dreams (Beyonce)

The Big Pink’s delicate acoustic take on Sweet Dreams is the polar opposite of Beyonce’s over produced/polished pop, luckily the song is good enough to work for both artists. (link)

5. Gomez - From St Kilda to Kings Cross (Paul Kelly)

Gomez are regular visitors to Australia but it seems they keep coming back for more than the sunshine and beaches, they have also grown to love Paul Kelly. Here they give this distinctly Australian song some international favour. (link – skip to 13:40)

4. Dappled Cities – My Girls (Animal Collective)

Dappled Cities reveal that beneath all the Animal Collective (OMG! Animal Collective) hype My Girls is a really great song. (link – 13:30)

3. Mariachi El Bronx - I Would Die 4 U (Prince)

My third choice from triple j’s Like A Version series and by far the most unexpected. LA punks The Bronx swap their thrashing guitars and screamed vocals to and give this Prince booty shaker some Mariachi sunshine. (link – 12:00)

2. The Dead Weather – Are Friend Electric? (Gary Numan)

Jack White’s other other band apply their dark swampy blues to Gary Numan’s paranoid classic. The result dark, swampy paranoia – superb (link)

1. The Muppets – Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)

Only The Muppets could pull this off, watch below - and I challenge you not to hit the replay button.

Two great free live releases this weekend

Spooky Fever Ray download

Back in March, one half of The Knife Karin Dreijer Andersson released a solo album under the name Fever Ray.

The self-titled album is one of the year’s best, full of claustrophobic electronic-pop songs that blend into each other so well that it almost finishes before it begins, leaving you reaching for the repeat button.

Fever Ray have performed the album’s tracks at some 50 shows, all of them reported to be among the most disturbing of recent years. Venues were completely filled with dry ice, through which you could vaguely make out eerie figures on the stage: a deeply sinister clown, someone dressed as a kind of insect.

This weekend, a recording of one of these shows has been made available to readers of The Guardian.

Guardian “readers” can download the album from http://guardian.co.uk/feverray

Crowd sourcing a Nine Inch Nails show

On August 23rd, Nine Inch Nails performed their self-hate masterpiece The Downward Spiral live in its entirety for the first time ever.

While the band were unwilling to pay the venue’s exorbitant fees to have the performance professionally recorded, they were able to negotiate an open camera policy, meaning fans could film the show themselves using anything from a mobile phone to hi-def video camera.

Almost as soon as the show ended, fans started using the nin.com forums and quasi official NIN fan sites NIN Hotline and thisoneisonus.org to hunt out and compile footage from all who attended. Now only two months later, a polished multi-cam edited downloadable DVD of the full Webster Hall performance has appeared.

Forget crowd surfing - crowd sourcing is the new thing to do at rock concerts.

You can download the DVD from http://theninhotline.net/features/TDSlive/ or stream the YouTube channel here.

Thom Yorke and Banksy

Thom Yorke has a new single: Felling Pulled Apart By Horses, is a radical reworking of the same 2001 track that spawned Radiohead's Reckoner.

The B-side to Felling Pulled Apart... is The Hollow Earth a glitchy song which Thom describes as a bass menace that developed from Eraser period leftovers.

The single is available now on 12 inch vinyl via w.a.s.t.e and will be in all the usual download stores from October 6th.

Ahead of this a video for The Hollow Earth has popped up on the web. The video directed by Raymond Salvatore Harmon couples Yorke's blips with images of London and retina burning flashes of Banksy's subversive graphics.

If you rather just listen cover your eyes and hit play:

Friday Freebie: Jarvis (hearts) Angela

Angela, an early track from Jarvis Cocker's forthcoming LP, Further Complications, is perhaps the most clichéd song about a girl you will download all week, and will download it: Why? Because you know, he use to be in Pulp.

Angela is no Deborah nor has she studied sculpture at St Martin’s Collage but she does make four-fifty an hour with a complementary shower, Angela!!

Bonus: While you wait for the download you can watch this video of Jarvis spelling his name with crazy plastic letters. C. O. C. K... I'm sorry, childish I know.

Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time, download this week’s Friday Freebie from http://www.jarviscocker.net

Drawn Together: Gorillaz Go Bananaz

"These guys aren't in the band but they know the animated characters who are"

Bananaz is the story behind the world’s most successful cartoon band: Gorillaz.

Created as a reaction to the seriousness of pop music Gorillaz have grown into the multi-million selling, genre hopping, simian side project spinning beast we know today. In Bananaz directory Ceri Levy reveals that this journey was not always planned, and that the relationship between the animated characters is just as complex as that between their human creators.

For the next month you can watch Bananaz on http://www.babelgum.com/gorillazgobananaz

Vince the Impaler

While the UK lad rock scene is generally a pretty boring place, Kasabian offer something more. Their electronic-indie-rock is played with the swagger and confidence of Oasis, but without some of the arrogance.

This week’s Friday Freebie is Vlad the Impaler taken from the band’s third album West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, you will have to be quick as the download link will expire at midnight tonight.

Get it now get it here.

Kasabian obviously know that we like funny men almost as much as freebies, inviting The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding to design promo posters and play the lead role in the video for Vlad The Impaler. Watch below.

West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum is out on June 8th.

Friday Freebie goes to Mexico

Five years have passed since The Bronx burst onto the hardcore scene, in this time they have released three self titled albums and evolved their sound into a swaggering blend of punk and hard rock.

Now let us introduce El-Mariachi Bronx: the band’s horn-spiked Mexican alter-ego.

Both The Bronx and El-Mariachi Bronx will be playing the Breeders curated ATP festival, before then please help yourself to this week's fridays freebie Young Bloods taken from The Bronx (the bands third self-titled album)

Your The Voice: Farnplay perform Australian Anthem at Sound Relief

Justice is in the House

In 1959 the call went out for designs to rebuilt West Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm Church, the winning design was a hideous master piece of concrete steel and glass.

In 2009 Planda (a bunch of cashed up european designers) have the drawn up plans for a crucifix bearing building that might just beat the Kaiser-Wilhelm for ugliness.

The Palais de Justice is based on the cross graphic on the cover of French disco-rock band Justice’s debut album † and will feature a bar, movie theatre, studio, salon, pool and of course a cave.

Here is the plan:


GENESIS † HOUSE from PLANDA on Vimeo.


One can only imagine what might have happened had Justice (and Planda) been around 40 years ago.

400GB of NIN Tour Footage

In 2008, three Nine Inch Nails concerts were recorded in High Def video with the intention of making a 3D feature movie documenting the awesome Lights In the Sky tour. Record company issues got in the way of that plan.

Now, ‘someone’ has leaked the HD footage to the internet, with the hope that fans will pick up the material and make something more of it. These dudes seem to have a head start on most.

I have yet to edit my own wedding footage so I don’t think I will be taking up the challenge, but here are the torrent files if you have time and disk space to spare.

Victoria (125 GB)
Portland (167 GB)
Sacramento (112 GB)

Live Review: TV On The Radio, Academy 2, 07/12/2008

Back in September I declared TV on the Radio’s Dear Science my album of the year. After tonight’s show they may well be my live act of the year.

Tonight at Birmingham’s Academy, the bands are playing on the smaller Academy 2 stage. First up, London band Big Pink whose fuzzed out pop songs get a subdued but positive reaction from the crowd.

TVOTR’s decision to start their show with a few older tracks alienates some of the audience, but as soon as the drums of Wolf Like Me kick in everyone loses their shit and the band is instantly forgiven.

Golden Age and Dancing Choose keep everyone dancing, no one more than front man Tunde Adebimpe who has sweat pouring off his face.

On the Dear Science album DLZ is effortlessly cool, but tonight’s version is fierce: the lock step beat drags you in while guitars bring up a wall of noise and Adebimpe literally spits and sprays rage-filled lyrics.

The bearded Kyp Malone is everything Adebimpe is not. He barely moves, barely blinks, barely has a care in the world but on Province, when Malone’s falsetto vocal joins Ademipe’s midrange rhyme, you can’t imagine them ever being apart.

The five piece band and all their paraphernalia barely fit on the smaller Academy 2 stage meaning it is only when they leave the stage that the audience get a look at the mop-topped drummer Jaleel Bunton and bass player Gerard Smith.

Obviously the crowd want to see more, and the screams of encore are answered when the band return to play Family Tree. There is a short pause as the drum kit is dismantled, its parts distributed around the band’s five members who strike cymbals, crash drums and hit rhythm sticks right through A Method before going straight into Let The Devil In and closing out with the brilliant Staring At The Sun.


Family Tree:

LCD Soundstreet: New York I Love You But Your Turning Me Green

Look out for the James Murphy cameo, I bet you never saw that coming?

Fabchannel.com is Fab!

Fabchannel.com is a Dutch company that aims to give recognition to artists that are largely unrecognised by the mainstream media. Their main outlet is the Fabchannel website that streams live and on-demand of concerts for free.

Why should you care? Well, Bawley-approved artists such as Wire, MGMT, Midnight Juggernauts, Digitalism, A Place to Bury Strangers, CSS, Of Montreal, The Presets, Spank Rock, Iron and Wine, Xavier Rudd, Patrick Wolf, Bonde Do Role, Elbow, Bloc Party, The Arcade Fire, and Okkervil River all have full sets on the site.

An endless list of indie bands is all well and good, but the real treasure in the fabchannel.com closet is footage from the 2003 to 2005 Dutch air-guitar championship finals. Gems in three years of air-footage are the 2003 battle between The Scarecrow and Funky Jordie for the best air-version of Michael Jackson’s Beat It; Barbie Rock, a semi-hot blonde chick air-riffing on a metalled up version of the Grease Mega Mix in 2004; and the progression of The Devastator from middle-aged man with long hair, black jeans and black t-shirt in 2003, to slightly more middle-aged man with longer hair, black jeans and a sports bra air-rocking out to the Foo Fighters Low in 2005.

Each year’s air-guitar concert is closed by B.O.G. Holland’s best poodle rock tribute band: Van Halen (Jump), Bon Jovi (Livin On A Prayer), Europe (The Final Countdown), Guns n’ Roses (November Rain), ... they have it all.

It is no wonder the Dutch smoke so much.