Coolest video clip of the week.....

Is Everyday, by Noah K....a photo everyday for six years. It's part of a work in progress, he intends to do this every single day of his life.
More info here; including a myspace link to the music :)

Best New Band in the world....

At the moment is Born Ruffians......
Download these two tracks and you'll see what I mean, the first ("This sentence....") is nothing short of GODLIKE.

The end of another weekend....

Kicked off with a DJ set at First Friday, which was a blast (as ever) Still great to see everyone go APESHIT for that Arctic Monkeys remix; but also gratifying to watch the dancefloor go loopy for Jamie T, The Klaxons and Polysics.
Saturday? Well, slightly hungover, as you might expect. Then watched England beat Andorra and slept it all off.
Today was the first of my Sunday shows that I made a conscious effort to think outside the box a bit more and mix things up a little. This will be be a continuing process, so keep listening.
Tonight? Rabbit stew, crushed new potatoes and a glass of Shiraz.
Just the one, mind.

And, for all those people addicted to Youtube...

here's a really interesting piece on the whole Lonelygirl15 saga......
It's been one of the most amazing sagas on youtube over the last few months, and it looks like the fun is just beginning :)
FYI, and if you've no idea what i'm on about: Lonelygirl15 on youtube.

So.....

Reading.
Well, same as ever, really. Enjoy the atmosphere, try not to get distracted by too many bands (!) and sit in that backstage area and get wasted.
Franz Ferdinand as headliners was a mistake, I think: at the end of the album cycle, with no new material, it all felt a little flat. Certainly there wasn't the same level of expectation as there was around Muse on Saturday. I managed to inveigle some DJ time in the VIP tent (partly as an insurance policy against rain) which meant hanging around with The Towers Of London; this was EXACTLY as Rock'n'Roll as you would expect :)
The interesting thing about Reading was the increasing level of corporate involvement: from swanky backstage tents, to targeted marketing, the entire thing seemed more money-orientated than ever before. It's no surprise: we live in an era when physical record sales are plummeting, it was always obvious that the live music market would therefore be squeezed even harder to extract every penny that was being lost to downloads, P2P, file-sharing...Or whatever the major companies were blaming this week. But there was a desperation, a blind rush for profit evident at this years festival that slightly depressed me.

Sunday....

out in the wilds of Kent....
A lunch of cheese-topped foccacia, stuffed with caramelised onion, some mousetrap cheddar and slices of chorizo, juicy sliced tomatoes and whatever half-bottles of wine are left in the fridge. Actually, that meant the remainder of a bottle of cider as well..
Then picked ripening apples from the straining boughs of fruit trees...plump damsons and sweet plums out of the grasp of the wasps...
And settled down to read the sunday supplements as sheep slept in the nextdoor field. The lanes leading home were wet with the ghosts of the showers that were sporadically firing off all over the county, never actually saw any rain, just drove through the puddles; and at one point through the clouds of vapour rising off the shining leaves.
This week? Vines/View tonight, First Friday and the Air Guitar Championships on Friday.

My head hurts....

Reading was as fun as ever....i'll tell you more soon :)

Life goes on....

My sincere apologies for not posting for a while, and also my thanks to those of you who were posting comments to say you're getting impatient for news; well I have some, 'tis not so good. Recent schedule changes at the station have seen me temporarily sidelined- i'm doing weekend stuff at the moment, as well as filling in for daytime vacancies, that sort of thing. Will it be permanent? Who knows? There's no way of knowing just yet. It's nothing to do with my performance, which is rather galling, but on the positive side, it frees me up to look at other things. There are some exciting things surrounding the Xfm website at the moment, so i've got myself deeply involved in that: can't tell you more yet, but I will when I can. Also got a few programme ideas in tentative pre-production with a media company and am DJing as ever (Jet gig this week, Reading festival today, First Friday next week, International Hi-Fi and the Rapture the week after)
But overall, I just kicked back for a fortnight and let it all sink in. That's where I've been. And you?
Anyway, it's Reading today, so expect photos, gossip and other bullshit early next week. I love you all, iain x

how was your weekend?

Mine was somewhat stressful, actually. Came up to London on Saturday night to DJ at International Hi-fi, only to find that all the trains were completely screwed due to a lightning strike on the trackside (eeeeep!). That was my cue to sit on a sweltering Thameslink train (all the Southern services had been cancelled) without any air-con, as we dawdled up to London in about 2 hours. Gah.
Sunday at least brought with it a chance to eat BBQ and drink Scrumpy: without that i'd have just given up on the entire weekend.
This week then? John Foxx on Thursday night at the Scala, with Palace Fires at the Metro before that...there's the launch of Xfm's new club night, The Weekender, at the Islington Academy on Friday night, oh and Mumm-Ra and TheLongcut at Dingwalls tonight....

OK people....

If you go to the Aberfeldy page on myspace, you can DOWNLOAD "Whatever Turns You On" the title track of their new CD, which has been on constant rotation here at Westway Towers for the past fortnight. It's just a wonderful slice of shimmering pop genius: I can virtually guarantee that your life will be better for owning it.
And if you've got a spare quarter of an hour, I can also implore you to check this out: it's a 15 minute piece of photo-journalism about the Grime scene in East London.

Thank God for that....

The temperature must have dropped about 10-12 degrees overnight, it's still humid, but no longer stultifyingly opressive.
Have yourselves some Sun Ra.
While we're on the subject of mp3's, i've started doing a link on the show to "Download Of The Day" so i'm guessing that some of the people who get the daily email may well stumble across this humble little blog. If so, then welcome. Say hello in the comments :)

Sweltering....

It's hot. Damned hot
*sweats*
Anyway, it's been a few days, so what have I been doing? A quick trawl of the boot sales on Sunday turned up some great old Balearic vinyl : "Afro Dizzy Act", that sort of thing...So Sunday night saw me at the decks, pretending I was back at Shoom :)
Sunday was also a time for swimming: nice and late in the evening, just when the sun dips towards the horizon is exactly the right time to swim in the sea at Brighton...The water may be FREEZING when you get in, but after a while you don't really notice (or maybe it's just that you can't feel your extremities any more)
This week has been ridiculously hot: nights filled with cold showers; days spent wilting on the Tube. But there's quite a (cliche alert) Blitz spirit to the whole thing: we struggle on, secretly proud of ourselves for coping.
Monday was Palace Fires at the Barfly, they were excellent: assured, languid and relaxed, yet focused completely on what they were doing. I spent most of the gig trying to work out who they reminded me of (with little success);at the end of the night I told Steve (guitarist) that fragments reminded me of The Stars Of Heaven (and BTW, ignore that review, they were an AWESOME band) only for Steve to tell me he loved TSOH, making him the only other fan of the band I've met in 15 years.
Yesterday night was The Sleepy Jackson at the Scala: he's a cocky little bastard and no mistake about it...But it's no understatement to say that Luke Steele is a genius. Last night he veered between feeback excess (including some heroic guitar-tossing antics and lots of windmilling axe-hero shapes) and impossibly frail episodes that counterbalanced the squall of noise and ideas that always swarm around his head. There were a couple of moments which bordered on the spiritual: I could feel my spirits rise in tandem with the goosebumps on my arms. Can't just have been the cider, can it?

Tim's 40th.........

And also, I went back to the land of my childhood, to my best mate Tim's 40th birthday party. Dj-ed at the bash (obv.) and met loads of people I hadn't seen in years (sometimes, up to 20 years!) The memories came so thick and fast I had to stop and catch my breath.

Ooooooooops

Well, I was going to tell you about wireless....And how much fun it was...And the people I met, and the things I did...But then I did this festival and it put a lot of it into perspective. It was great to give a little bit back for once: to support kids who have a hard time in whatever they're doing: kids to whom music represents a real form of escape, something to aspire to, something to throw all their energy into. I met a lot of people who feed off the energy of the music business, as opposed to people who end up dragged into a vacuum of cynicism. I've got an awful lot out of music over the last 15 years, and now? It's payback time.

Iain's Wireless.... Part 1.

So, how was it for me?
Great, really. Another year for Wireless (its second) and the organisation, as ever, was impeccable. Peoples main gripe with the festival seems to be that it's somewhat corporate... But the money generated from sponsorship seems to mean that it runs like clockwork, where's the problem in that? Seeing as the first people I bumped into were Michael and Emily Eavis, both with big grins on their faces and clearly enjoying the day, I'd say it's not really an issue (and hey, Glasto has its fair share of big-business involvement now)
So, Wednesday. A beautiful day, bright sunshine, a cold beer and some DJ-ing in the O2 bubble to start the day off. As you'd imagine, I gave the crowd a judicious slice of the Sukpatch CD, as well as a couple of gems from the new Trunk Records compilation "Fuzzy Felt Folk" From there on, the day began a course that was to become familiar over the next few days: namely running between the three main stages, announcing bands. Went to the myspace stage and bumped into White Rose Movement, as I was with Zeb, an old compadre from the days of The Pretenders, his bro Finn is singer in the WRM. Also chatted to Sean McCluskey and his charges Cazals: who put on one of the shows of the day. Ran down to the Xfm stage (pushing to check out the Raconteurs on the main stage) to stand by the monitor desk while Bob Mould was playing. Being that close to one of your heroes when they're playing "Celebrated Summer" was quite awe-inspiring.
Once all of my commitments had been honoured, I obviously started on a course of serious drinking: I left the festival early, about 10-ish, but made the mistake of having a nightcap (or three) when I got back home. Cue: a broken night's sleep and a bleary start to the next day.