I Give You Power

Regularly consulting Florence Welch's twitter feed has it's rewards :)

Done it!

I have finished and dispatched the first draft of my chapter on punk women and fanzines!

This was the only photo I thought might convey Work Being Done, but it doesn't really look that impressive now I upload it.

I had a really hard time writing this chapter, it was like pulling teeth, and I didn't start to get into it and enjoy it until about a month ago.

So I'm very pleased it's done. I hope they like it at MUP...

The next task is to finish the book proposal for the punk women book. Not sure how long that will take, but it's not been as bad as I thought it would be to do, so hopefully not too long.

Allred & Broderick - The Ways

My favourite new band of the past year

I can't quite remember when it was that I first heard Overcoats, I just know it was sometime last year. If I login to my Spotify account I daresay I can find out exactly when it was as it was thanks to them that I found them, via one of the new music weekly playlists I subscribe to.

It wasn't the hauntingly beautiful 'Little Memory' (which you can watch above) that I heard first, but the unsettling, eerie folkatronic 'Smaller Than My Mother', which despite it's sparseness, proved to be a particularly nagging ear worm... A good one though, not an annoying one, as you can hear below...

I don't know an awful lot about this duo, but they are Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell, and they are from New York. Their debut EP was released in the summer of 2015, and they've since spent a lot of time gigging in Europe, particularly Dublin, when word of their aceness travelled beyond the US.

I like watching the way they interact with each other in their performances, there seems to be an easy friendship and comradeship there that enhances their performances as much as the quality of their songwriting does.

I am really looking forward to hearing more from them in 2017.

Helen McCookerybook and Charlie Tipper - Femme Fatale

December 2016: All proceeds of the sale of this sly and stylish take on the Velvet Underground and Nico classic will go to Refugee Action.

Even more so than Brexit, the refugee crisis has been the big story of the year, influencing world events, elections, commentary and media coverage not just in the UK but in France, Germany, Netherlands, the US and beyond in ways that we simply could not have predicted back in 2015.

Beyond the hysterical headlines and attention seeking politics are real human lives, real human stories. And I think that that has largely been forgotten.

Goodbye 2016, hello 2017. Let's hope it's a better year for all of us.