Archive for January, 2009

The greatest Scottish collaborations – who gets your vote?

Monday, January 19th, 2009

There are 2 for 1 deals everywhere right now - Walkabout for burgers, Domino’s for pizzas, Orange for cinema tickets, Millie’s for cookies and Wetherspoon Lodges for post-pub accommodation in Glenrothes.

But what you really want is two for the price of one with your indie heroes… and we’ve got just the thing with five of the most magical all-Scottish collaborations to be found in recorded music history.

There’s Monica Queen’s legendary cameo with Belle & Seb, poet Edwin Morgan’s poignant spoken-word finale to Idlewild’s The Remote Part album, Eddi Reader’s subtle backing on a Roddy Hart epic, Paolo Nutini’s guest appearance on The View’s new album and KT Tunstall’s harmonious contribution to the best Travis track on The Boy With No Name.

But which is the best? Listen to all five then cast your vote in The Pop Cop’s first-ever reader poll below.

EDDI READER
b January 19, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow (tickets)
b January 24, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow (tickets)
b January 30, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow (tickets)
b February 1, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow (tickets)

THE VIEW
b February 12, Picture House, Edinburgh (sold out)
b February 13, Caird Hall, Dundee (sold out)
b February 15, Ironworks, Inverness (tickets)
b February 16, Music Hall, Aberdeen (sold out)

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Music Alliance Pact – January 2009

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

The Music Alliance Pact is taking over the planet. We know this because Página 12, one of the biggest newspapers in Argentina, featured our worldwide music sharing project in a full-page article last week. Our Spanish is a little rusty so we put the text through an online translator. What follows is possibly the most extraordinary words you will ever read…

To communicate with songs. This is the slogan of Music Alliance Pact (“Agreement of Alliance of the Music”), a network of blogs that came already to twenty-two countries, including the Argentina.

The idea materialized in last October, thanks to the Scotch blog The Pop Cop (“The police officer Pop”, thepopcop.blogspot.com). I joust the opposite thing to what the big FM offers, or the channels of music. Forty or fifty melodies repeat themselves tirelessly twenty-four hours, with presenters forced to feign spontaneity and rebelliousnesses designed in an office.

Opposite to that the MAP proposes mental trips without fixed destination, and confirms that always to learn to listen was related to the art of tuning in to the different thing. Every group has histories, a language, a city that contains them, a group of friends that does the endurance.

Perhaps is it a question of a new wag of the tail of so-called World Music? The Pop Cop, the principal precursor of the exchange, thinks that not: “This is another thing, we are in the stage that it continues. At present, a South American band can dream closer to Radiohead that any of the Englishwomen, and vice versa. There is no necessarily an exotic thing in the contact. Simultaneously, we verify that for the public English-speaker the songs are stopping taking the Englishman as a condition for the popularity”.

The initiative has demonstrating it fully. For the MAP talents maraud as that of Dotjr – it is pronounced “dot yey ar”–, a pibe of twenty-one years that clears solitudes with the help of his guitar and from Lewis’s Island, in the north end of Scotland.

Along the same solitary line Henrik goes along Tvärvägen, band integrated by only one man, Öhberg. The Swedish is inspired inside a piecita and in his profile of Myspace there can be read the annotations of his neighbor, who praises the inventive simultaneously that confesses to have seen it testing nude. And what to say about Fright, Iberian duo that rushes forward at the politicians on having sung that “one more idiot does not fit in Spain”.

The catalogue is inexhaustible. With the time it is probable that representatives of the interior catch fire.

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. Without further ado, here are this month’s offerings…

SCOTLAND: The Pop Cop
4 Evan Crichton – Holiday Time
Glasgow-based Evan Crichton is a rare talent. He’s a singer whose songs have a timeless feel, perhaps because they are immaculately paced and seem to exist in a world and space all of their own. After a year-long absence, Evan has just returned to playing live with a full band set-up and the Scottish music scene is a better place for it. Holiday Time is taken from his debut record Bright Our Broken Days.

(more…)

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Celtic rejections

Monday, January 12th, 2009

The rewards that come with running The Pop Cop are not financial. They’re certainly not sexual (if only those hours of lost opportunities for heavy petting could be recouped…). The biggest perks, in fact, take the form of occasional invites to parties and complimentary tickets to write about events such as T in the Park, Hydro Connect and, of course, Latvia’s International Competition Of Young Singers Of Popular Music.

The people who are lucky enough to get paid to work in this business are almost always accommodating to our quirky ways when they realise we’re just like them – we love music, we have dubious morals. We say ‘almost’ because when we politely asked the organisers of CELTIC CONNECTIONS if we could review one of their shows last year they basically told us The Pop Cop wasn’t a worthy enough cause.

But you know what? We don’t bear a grudge. And to prove it we’re going to encourage you to check out some of what’s on at Celtic Connections 2009, the Glasgow music festival for broadsheet readers.

If you want some Scottish folk music there’s Roddy Woomble and friends, other indie bands gone solo include Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci’s Euros Childs and Catatonia’s Cerys Matthews, the sound of Ireland is well represented by Sharon Shannon, Mundy and Cara Dillon, one-hit wonders The Bluebells reunite, Youssou N’Dour adds an international flavour, Martha Wainwright and James Yorkston bring in the cool crowd, and you can find out why buxom English girl Clare Maguire is being hyped up as the new Adele, i.e. she’s got talent but she’s not actually that good.

b The Burns Unit (inc King Creosote and Emma Pollock); Kris Drever, John McCusker, Roddy Woomble, January 16, ABC (tickets)
4 Kris Drever, John McCusker, Roddy Woomble – Into The Blue

b Sharon Shannon Big Band (inc Mundy); Cara Dillon, January 16, Royal Concert Hall (tickets)
4 Mundy feat Sharon Shannon – Galway Girl (live)

b Attic Lights; Norman Blake & Euros Childs; BMX Bandits, January 17, ABC (tickets)
4 Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – Let Those Blue Skies

b Edwyn Collins; The Bluebells, January 23, ABC (tickets)
4 The Bluebells – Young At Heart

b Clare Maguire, January 23, The Classic Grand (tickets)
4 Clare Maguire – Strangest Thing

b Youssou N’Dour, January 23, Royal Concert Hall (tickets)
4 Youssou N’Dour – C’est L’amour

b Cerys Matthews, January 25, ABC (tickets)
4 Catatonia – Strange Glue

b Martha Wainwright, January 27, Old Fruitmarket (tickets)
4 Martha Wainwright – Bleeding All Over You

b James Yorkston, January 31, The Classic Grand (tickets)
4 James Yorkston and The Athletes – Surf Song

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