GIGS OF THE YEAR

I went to quite a few gigs this year, a lot of them were very good. Here are my top five.

1. Crowded House, Manchester Apollo

I was reviewing this for the MEN, so I took Brother John as my plus one. We had incredible seats, we were on the front row. John and I are big fans of the Crowdies, you can't argue with songs like theirs, and they're such damn nice guys. Admitting a penchant for the House will get you about as many cool points as being a Nazi sympathiser in most quarters, but sod it, they're brilliant (Crowded House, that is, not the Nazis).
Highlights included saying hello to Neil Finn's dad in New Zealand via Skype, the entire crowd holding the final note of Better Be Home Soon for what felt like a full five minutes, and the most middle-aged, middle class middle of the road moshpit you've ever seen for Weather With You.
And this was all before Johnny Marr came on for the encore and they did Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want and There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. Everybody left grinning from ear to ear, it was an incredible gig, one of the best I've ever been to.

http://www.citylife.co.uk/news_and_reviews/reviews/10018314_review__crowded_house___manchester_apollo

2. Jonsi - Latitude

Latitude was rubbish this year, make no mistake. It was full of dicks, the line up was rubbish and there was a gang rape on the first night. I'm never going back. However, Jonsi on the final night was all kinds of amazing.
I'm not a Sigur Ros fan and I'd never heard any of his solo stuff before, so I wasn't expecting much. However, me and Bob (who I was there with) just stood there with our mouths open for a full hour and a bit. I remember at the time thinking, “If I was writing a review of this I'd say it was like a rave in a sonic cathedral.”
It was epic post-rock pop on a grand scale, culminating in a brain-exploding brilliant white noise crescendo. And he was wearing a very impressive feathery headpiece.
Needless to say, I bought his album as soon as I got back and it was shit.

3. LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip – Magna, Rotherham

Two of the best bands at Glastonbury (more of which in a bit) coming together for a joint headline tour was the stuff of geeky electro rock fan's dreams. LCD are a brilliant live band, even if James Murphy is far too cool for school and does tend to shout a bit too much.
Hot Chip made one of the best albums of the year and are absolutely shit hot live, dismantling all of their songs and putting them back together in a different order just for a giggle. They've got properly amazing songs that make you dance and make you cry all at the same time. You just want to hug them all. And then dance some more.
Other highlights of this gig include the longest bar queue I've ever been in, during which I was recognised as a Plague Doctor by a man who tried to start a bar queue sing along of We Killed Everyone at Radio One. He didn't get very far, as no one else knew the song and just thought he was mental, but full marks for trying.

4. Scissor Sisters – Glastonbury

This year's Glastonbury was the best one I've ever been to. And I've been to LOADS, so there. The best non-musical act was the sun, which was so damn hot everyone almost died of heat exhaustion. As mentioned, LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip were pretty damn ace and Pet Shop Boys and the Flaming Lips both played absolute blinders headlining the Other Stage.
Ash were as reliably fun as ever, and have some surprisingly good new songs as well, fully justifying our decision to see them over Stevie Wonder. Judy Collins in the Avalon tent was the biggest namedropper and owner of the loveliest voice on site. Avi Buffalo made me realise that I didn't hate all new guitar music, which was surprising. And where else can you go from Snoop Dogg to Kevin Eldon to Shakira?
But Scissor Sisters were probably best, because it was Saturday night, there was a glorious sunset, we danced like loons and then Kylie turned up. What more do you actually want?

5. Wu Tang Clan – Manchester Academy

Another review for the MEN with Brother John in tow, this was hilarious. They were an absolute shambles, no stage set, just eight mikes, a set of decks and a group of incoherent shouting men. But they were incredible. The whole place stank of weed and the predominantly male, white, middle class audience bellowed back every word. It was weird. But it was brilliant.
They plugged the film they're allegedly making. They brought the motherfucking ruckus. They urged all the ladies to get naked, which one of them did. They ain't nothing to fuck with. They urged us to check out their gravel pit, which we did, and we saw that it was good.

Another Year Of The Plague

The Plague Doctors have had a strange old year. I can't remember everything we did, especially not the stuff we did back in January, so I'll just pick out some of the highlights.

PRESTON
We played at a festival in Preston in the summer to an audience of precisely no one. It was in the upstairs room of a pub at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon some time at the arse end of summer. The crowd consisted of the soundman, the promoter and our entourage of one.
Inspired by the complete lack of interest, I decided to go all out Freddie Mercury at Wembley, leading our entourage to describe it as one of our best ever gigs, despite no one being there.

SOWERBY BRIDGE
We fulfilled a long held dream of mine to play the Puzzle Hall Inn in Sowerby Bridge. It was a Tuesday night in early June, and virtually no one was there. Most of my so-called friends who live in Halifax didn't bother to turn up. THANKS GUYS. However, Party Andrei and his Afghan friend Ravi from the Nestle factory were there, which more than made up for it. They both enjoyed it, as did blog legend Claire Smith and her friend Lora.
We played a storming set, the highlight of which was the angry folded arms people on the table next to the stage getting up and leaving half way through.
Afterwards, we were paid £64 for our efforts, which remains the highest fee we have ever commanded. The last I heard, the Puzzle Hall was due to shut down because the owners couldn't afford to keep it open. I think it is entirely unfair to link these two events.
Other highlights included a decidedly perilous drive home through fog so thick you could top a shepherd's pie with it.

CHESTER
After a well coordinated but somewhat undignified Facebook campaign, we found ourselves on the bill at one of the heats of the Standon Calling battle of the bands contests. To the winner, a slot on the bill at one of the country's hippest music festivals. We went on second to last, after three bands so bad you actually felt sorry for them. Some of them had come down from Scotland to play in Chester, as it was the only heat that took place outside London.
There was literally no one there (again) in a cavernous trendy food pub bang in the middle of Hollyoaksville. But we had Brother Paul Thompson back on board for one night only and we gave it everything to try and impress the judging panel. We all thought we'd done pretty well, we were clearly the best band there so far and we started allowing ourselves to believe that we might just sneak it.
Then a band called The Feud came on. They were all dressed in white and they sounded slick, like Muse crossed with Editors. They had banter like “This is our new single, it's available on iTunes” and “We've just come off a European tour, it was great.” They had precisely no songs or tunes, just a collection of bits that sounded like they might be songs if you weren't really paying attention. They were the most godawful offensive pile of shite I've ever heard. And yes, I am bitter.
Within three seconds of The Feud starting, we knew the judging panel (a grade A behatted Shoreditch dick) was going to pick them and there was no point in any of us turning up. Sure enough, that happened. We drove back along the M56 in an angry mood, just glad that we we weren't going back to Scotland.

WALES
We played in Wales at the Workhouse Festival in early July. Somehow, some friendly Welsh hippies had got hold of Wasting My Time and decided they liked it, especially the dance routine. We tipped up in the middle of the Welsh Valleys late on a Friday night and set up camp, ready for our festival-slaying set the next day.
We didn't have long to wait, as our set took place at 11am on the Saturday morning. Again, not very many people turned up, but it was the premiere of my white suit jacket and sunglasses combo, and we had a very nice time. Apart from when some children wandered into the tent and John got the fear about playing Snipping Off Your Face in front of them. But it was all fine.
Later we wandered into the town I can't remember the name of and found out Raoul Moat had been cornered in Rothbury. Then we had fish and chips and went back on site, spending the evening discussing the plainly unworkable Freeman on the Land concept with a friendly Welsh hippy who might have been called Barry.
On the way home we visited a lovely waterfall, which was nice.

Other highlights of the year include a storming gig upstairs at Fuel in Withington where we threw flowers all over the stage and were cajoled into doing an encore, so we had to do our Christmas song, as we literally had no other songs to do.

We've not done any gigs for AGES, but normal Plague service will be resumed at some point in the New Year.

Brother Paul's Review of the Year - Albums of the Year

Album of the year by an embarrassingly large distance...

Kanye West- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Totes amazo...

Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Hot Chip - One Life Stand

The Divine Comedy - Bang Goes The Knighthood

Bubbling under...

Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo

Belle & Sebastian - Write About Love

Robyn - Body Talk

Janelle Monae - The Archandroid

Ash - A-Z Vol 1

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening

Take That - Progress

Best Coast - Crazy For You

Well, it's okay...

The Futureheads - The Chaos

Field Music - Measure

Manic Street Preachers - Postcards From a Young Man

Approach with caution...

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

The Magnetic Fields - Realism

Not bothered listening to yet...

The Walkmen - Lisbon

Jonsi - Go

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

I think it's been a good year, better than most. Well done to everybody involved.

I wrote a massive long thing about how amazing the Kanye West album is, but all you really need to know is that it's amazing. Well done Kanye!

Buying Music

KANYE WEST has got a new album out this week. It's called My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and by all accounts it's very good. In fact, the internet has practically wet itself over how good it is, most notably with horribly-po-faced-and-pretentious-but-I-still-read-it-every-day music website www.pitchfork.com giving it a virtually unheard of perfect 10.0. That's not just ten out of ten, that's 100 out of 100. Oooh!

Always one to be swayed by media hype, I decided I'd quite like to own this record, so I set off to buy it. Now, being stuck in an office somewhere off the M60 for most of the week, there aren't many opportunities for buying records. The only shop near the office is a massive Morrisons, so I tootled in on Monday lunchtime, but Kanye's latest opus was nowhere to be seen. Thus followed a week of me visiting various towns and supermarkets to try and get hold of the album.

As well as Morrisons in Chadderton, Kanye's album was nowhere to be found in Tescos in Halifax and Haslingden, Asda in Rawtenstall, the whole of Accrington town centre and the whole of the Rossendale Valley.

Now, I know I didn't visit any actual music shops. But that's because they're not there. Accrington doesn't have a music shop. Rossendale doesn't either. Kanye West is one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, so it's fair to assume that some of the biggest supermarket chains in Britain might be stocking his album. But they're not. And when did WHSmith stop stocking music?

I know I could have ordered it off the internet, but I thought buying it from a shop would be easier and quicker. What a ridiculous idea.

And I don't do mp3s or illegal downloading. Sorry.

Having adopted and 'I've started so I'll finish' attitude, it looks like I'm going to have to go into a town centre that isn't dying on its arse to try and find the new Kanye album. It's a bit of a sorry state of affairs, whichever way you slice it.

In the meantime I've been whetting my appetite for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by listening to it on Youtube, specifically the track Monster, and even more specifically, the verse by Nicki Minaj, where she lays waste to everyone else on the track. When 'everyone else on the track' includes Kanye, Jay-Z, Rick Ross AND Bon Iver, that's no mean feat. It's incredible. Go find it NOW. Go Nicki Minaj!

A New Northern Soul?

Northern Soul is pretty much one of my favourite things ever. The music itself is amazing, obviously, but the whole story around it is brilliant too. If you broke the history of Northern Soul down into a timeline, it would look like this:

THE SIXTIES - Some people in America make some brilliant pop songs that for one reason or another get completely ignored on their release and are largely forgotten about.

THE SEVENTIES - Some people in Wigan discover said brilliant pop songs and start playing them in nightclubs in Wigan. Everybody in the north becomes obsessed with obscure long-lost American pop music.

How amazing is that? You literally couldn't make it up. Men used to sprinkle the dancefloor with talcum powder and then go and do ridiculously complicated dance routines. DJs would go over to America to find 'new' tracks, bring them back and then to stop their rival DJs from seeing what they were called and stealing them, they would cover up the names of the songs on the records when they were playing them. Amazing.

My favourite Northern Soul song is either Out On The Floor by Dobie Gray or The Snake by Al Wilson. Or Sweet Talkin' Guy by The Chiffons. Or the original version of Tainted Love by Gloria Jones.

Anyway, it got me thinking, it would be incredible if something similar happened these days. I would love it if all there was a club playing all the best overlooked pop gems from the last few years. I'd be there with a whole bloody vat of talcum powder.

Here are some songs that would be playing.

Scooch - More Than I Needed To Know

Annie - Chewing Gum

Aly and AJ - The Potential Break-Up Song

Robbie Williams - Rudebox

All Saints - Chick Fit

Girls Aloud - Graffiti My Soul

Rachel Stevens - I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)

Natasha Bedingfield - I Wanna Have Your Babies

Paris Hilton - Stars Are Blind

Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Today The Sun's On Us (This would have to be the last song of the night, during which everyone would cry themselves to death)

Ok, so not all of these songs are desperately obscure, and some of them were even actual hit singles, but I have never heard any of them in a club and I'm never likely to and that makes me a bit sad. I might even have to start it myself. I'll look into it.

I'm sorry i haven't a glue.

Apropos of nothing, we're talking about glue. Not the drugs kind. Just glue for sticking stuff together. It turns out that the Plague Doctors have had some pretty harrowing glue incidents over the years. Here's some glue nostalgia.

BROTHER PAUL
On my first day of primary school, when I was three, I ate some white PVA glue. I don't remember why. I don't remember what the effects were, but I imagine I was sick.

The best thing about white PVA glue was the weird little spatulas you used to spread it on stuff. It was also fun to put it on your fingers and hands and play with it so it went tacky and you could peel it off and roll it into balls. Very satisfying.

When I was in Mrs Hickson's class we had moved on to using the glue gun. I loved the glue gun, especially the weird burning smell and the sense of danger. I managed to glue gun my hand once and ruined my best orange jogging bottoms in the process. I had to run my hand under the cold tap for about an hour and it was well boring.

In the second year at secondary school, I was playing football in the tennis courts in my brand new shoes and the stitching came off, leaving the front section flapping about and my foot getting wet. Not wanting to admit to my mum I had broken my new shoes, I bought some Bostik and glued them back together. This didn't work very well, so I had to buy a lot of Bostik. My mum then found all the tubes in my bedroom, arousing her suspicion.

Mum: Are you sniffing glue?

Me: No.

Amazingly this answer sufficed, as she didn't seem to care what I was actually using the glue for.

That was my last major glue incident. Over to John.

BROTHER JOHN
At the age of nine I was a pupil at a very nice little countryside school in Cumbria.

One day during some sort of crafts lesson one of my little friends was using the much revered glue gun to create a peg-gun (a gun that fires pegs). While waiting patiently to use the glue gun myself I noticed that my shoe lace was untied, bending down to tie it I put my head into the line of fire, resulting in a large unsightly white blob in my hair. Mother cut it out for me on return to the Kastle Inkredible.

My dad would occasionally refer to “The Knackers Yard” throughout my childhood. He would tell me with a big smile on his face how if next door’s horse didn’t get better soon then it would end up being made into the glue that I use to make airfix models. Thanks to wikipedia I can reliably tell you that horse glue is only used for pipe organs, antiques and stringed instruments nowadays. So you can get glueing those model planes without images of melting horses spoiling your enthusiasm.

We're still alive – promise.

First blog update since the beginning of the summer. I kept on starting to write things and then not finishing them. Sorry.

Anyway, here's what's happened this summer:

- The World Cup was rubbish.

- Glastonbury was amazing.

- The Plague Doctors went on holiday to the Yorkshire Dales and Brother John gashed his head open on a toilet door and had to have it glued back together.

- The Plague Doctors played at a festival in Wales at 11 o'clock in the morning and scared some children and learned about alternative culture from a nice man called Phil.

- Latitude was rubbish.

- The Plague Doctors played at a festival in Preston to a crowd of precisely no one, then declared it to have been their best ever gig. Mind you, they do that after every gig.

- Brother Paul went camping for four weekends in a row and started to think he was Ray Mears.

- The Plague Doctors played their last gigs for a bit.

With regards to this last one, fear not! We haven't split up, all that's happening is that one of the Plague Doctors is moving somewhere else. We're contractually obliged to keep quiet about the ins and outs of everything, but what it means for YOU, Plague fans, is that we'll be playing around town a bit less.

However, hopefully the new situation means we'll be able to write some more songs and finally update the set that we've been peddling to general indifference for the last 18 months, and then when we do play some shows they'll be super incredible, because we'll be all hungry, like.

If you're still in need of some unsettling musical entertainment the Cabinet of Curiosity will be rearing its mangled head at some point soon, so you can always go and see that.

Also, Brother Paul is rumoured to be finally starting work on dentist-pop side project the Plaque Doctors.

TTFN!