New York singer-songwriter Charles Mansfield cites a wide range of big-name influences and claims the results come out somewhere between George Harrison, Neil Young and PJ Harvey. Our panel set out to see if they agree. Tom White: Frank Sinatra…
FFS New Bands Panel: Jay Stansfield
Jay Stansfield grew up near Burnley, where he tells us he was raised on dub, psychedelia, acid-rock, alternative folk, new wave and punk. That sounds like a real hot pot to us, so the panel gave the results a taste…
Schmercury Awards 2010: Shortlist announced
Not one to be left out of all this Mercury spoofing, FFS is delighted to announce this year’s Schmercury Awards shortlist. We had such a hard time whittling all the fantastic albums released this year down to just 12 that…
Live: Otis Gibbs @ The Sheepwalk, Leytonstone
It was in the intimate, low-key surroundings of Leytonstone’s Sheepwalk pub that around a hundred or so people took their places to witness a little slice of Americana . Indiana’s very own Otis Gibbs performed protest songs such as ‘People’s…
How to write a good song: Part Three: ‘Content’
A song shouldn’t mean nothing. It’s shouldn’t be a string of half arsed pseudo poetic metaphors cobbled together in isolation because they just sound good, padded out with truisms, clichés, trite observations, gossip and blank ‘Facebook status update’ style affirmations of the writer’s mood.
Festival: Indietracks 2010
When they said Indietracks was held in a remote part of Derbyshire, they weren’t joking. High on road-trip junk-food and cursing the iPhone’s rubbish navigation, we circled Swanwick’s one-way system 7 times. But all rumours of troll-like staff were quashed…