http://substance.tv/ Substance en-us http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/112/the-dregs-of-society Tony Blair thought he could bring the Parisien ‘café culture’ to the UK by letting pubs have 24 hour licences. He thought letting pubs open longer would make people drink slower, stagger kicking-out times and reduce the number of pissheads dispersed onto the streets at the same time. But our city centres still look the last days of Rome around midnight. TV shows like Soho Blues still have plenty of material to embarrass the nation’s drinkers as they fight, vomit and vandalise the night away.   Giving people more freedom about where and when they drink hasn’t reduced the number of ‘problem drinkers’ in Britain. It hasn’t even worked for drinkers, since a lot of them (Booze-filled Substance hacks included) still complain about not being able to find a pub open much after midnight, especially on weeknights.    Enter a Conservative government that believes more in discipline than personal freedom. We’ve had the carrot, now we should brace ourselves for the stick.    A minimum price for a unit of alcohol is on its way, meaning an end to the £2 two-litre supermarket bottle of lighter fluid cider. David Cameron wants to bring ‘drunk tanks’—only familiar to most Brits from the first lines of Fairytale of New York, where Shane MacGowan finds himself in one—into our city centres. Boris Johnson wants to bring another American policy for penalising boozers (dangerous ones at least) to London: electronic tags for repeat drink-related offenders that monitor the perpetrator’s alcohol intake every 30 hours. If he has found to have had as much as a thimbleful of White Strike or whatever repeat drink-related offenders get their kicks from, he will be hauled before a magistrate. These have about as much chance as reducing alcohol intake as Tony Blair’s head-up-arse idea that letting binge-drinkers get hammered for longer will actually reduce the amount of binging. Here’s why:    Creating a minimum price for alcohol may never get off the ground because it contravenes EU competition laws. Even if it does, the minimum price being mooted in Scotland, about 45p a unit, will make as much difference as taking a piss in the Atlantic affects water purity. It will only limit the pint of a price of Stella (3 units) to £1.35. So a can of Stella, which is less than a pint, can still be sold for about a quid. Pubs already charge way more than 45p a unit, so they won’t be affected. Even if the minimum price was increased to £1 or even £1.50 a unit, the Whitehall goons who formulate policy have forgotten that the people who drink discount cans of lager aren’t doing it because they prefer Carlsberg to Dubonnet. They do it, mostly, because it’s the most economical way of getting slaughtered. Just as prohibition in America didn’t stop people from drinking—they went to Speak Easy clubs and drunk moonshine—neither will increasing the price. Counterfeit, black-market alcohol is becoming more readily available because, in the current economic cesspit, people are already figuring out they can’t afford to spend what’s being charged for a bottle of vodka. So they will get it from the black market or make their own moonshine, which is a lot stronger and more deadly.    It’s strange, but predictable, that The Sun newspaper is a cheerleader for drunk tanks. Now, we know the people at The Sun aren’t idiots; they know exactly what their function is, and they do it remarkably well. Articles like this one, Drunk-Tank-plan-for-sozzled-yobs, brand a large percentage of The Sun’s readership ‘Sozzled Yobs’. It sounds counter-intuitive. But Murdoch’s organ has alw been operating a more subtle and devious editorial line than many of its critics realise. By placing itself as the voice of the people, The Sun is the organ most capable of spouting government propaganda, since its readers think they are getting the views of the man on the street, not the views of their masters in power. It’s a very difficult thing, to convince turkeys to vote for Christmas, the working class to vote Tory, and football hooligans to support drunk tanks, but that’s what the Sun does, and boy are they smooth operators.    Of course, not all of the Sun’s readership are yobs, sozzled or otherwise, but you can bet a fair percentage of them are. The reason they continue to buy a paper that sticks two fingers up to them every morning is because you can bet they don’t think of themselves as louts or yobs or benefits scroungers. It’s always the other guy, until, that is, the door of the drunk tank is slammed and the realisation hits home that those headlines were talking about me and I’m one of them.    The drunk tank is a short term solution. While it may stop a yob in his tracks on the one night he gets caught urinating in a pint glass and throwing it at people outside Wetherspoons at throwing-out time, there will be more nights where he doesn’t get caught, because with all the cuts to everything, the police simply can’t afford to up their presence in city centres above current levels, which, if you have ever walked down Broad Street in Birmingham on a Saturday night, are already at Battle-of-the-Somme levels. We already have hundreds of police in the drinking districts of city centres to prevent arseholes from beating each other to death when they are supposed to be having fun. They make hundreds, if not thousands of drink-related arrests every weekend, and will continue to do so. Having a ‘tank’ to put them in isn’t going to make much difference. It’s a PR stunt by a government trying to do something ‘positive’ and proactive, by introducing a ‘service’ rather than cutting it. As for the electronic tags, which would make Politics-Of-The-Body philosophers like Michel Foucault turn in their graves: they will most likely be as effective as electronic tags, curfews, ASBOs and the like are at tackling anti-social behaviour and gang culture. i.e. not at all. At a risk of sounding too sneering, liberal-media-elistist, the calibre of individual who repeatedly commits drink-related offences is probably too stupid/addicted/socially deprived to amend their behaviour after like the tenth time of being arrested for punching people outside Wetherspoons whom he suspects to be homosexual just because if he knows that if he has another pint of Stella he will be in court on Monday.    The really stupid/addicted ones will carry on drinking and end up in jail, perhaps not for the first time, where they will be lumped together with similarly poor and desperate souls keen to hook them on harder drugs or lure them into a life of habitual crime. The smarter ones, if you can call them smarter, will go straight to the harder drugs.    Besides the practical flaws of these schemes, it is obviously, sickeningly wrong for the Bullingdon Club to be telling the plebs that they have to put a lid on their drinking. We’ve all heard the stories of David Cameron and Boris Johnson getting lashed on champagne and trashing restaurants while they were Oxford. Of course, when an Old Etonian goes on a champagne-fuelled rampage it’s ‘youthful exuberance’ to blame (and be forgiven). But when a chav has too many pints of premium lager, it’s criminal.    The bottom line, though, is that with a double dip recession in the post, our one saving grace is the ability to drink ourselves into oblivion.  Lewis G Parker Substance 2012-02-22 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/111/the-racist-genie   English football was deeply racist 25 years ago. I not talking about the solo loon throwing a banana onto the pitch. I’m talking about mass racism, in which a majority, or at least a significant minority of the crowd are involved.    For instance, my team Spurs adapted an old British Airways ad. “Who’s that up a tree?” we sang. To which the answer was “Raphael Meade, Raphael Meade”. Raphael, by the way, was a home-grown striker whose name happened to scan. The song was sung with gusto by what sounded like the whole ground.  He played in the Arsenal first team between 81 and 83. And he was black.   Twenty years later I was leaving Highbury’s Clock End with around 3000 other visiting supporters at the end of a derby match (which Spurs had lost to a late penalty) when a man leaned from a window high above us in the neighbouring stand. He shouted down at us, jeering. An insult was hurled back - “Shut it, you goofy fucker!” someone shouted. The jeering man above us had big teeth. He was also black.    My point is that in 20 years everything had changed. I am not suggesting that no racists attended football matches. Far from it. The English Defence League is still largely manned by members of football firms from up and down the UK desperate to find an outlet for their views, partly because they no longer have an audience that would tolerate their views at regular club matches. Racism hasn’t been eradicated, but it has been suppressed.    What’s ironic is that football and the rise of black heroes aided the fight against racism in wider society. For instance, any vaguely racist Spurs fan must have seen the irony in hating blacks while idolising (pre-transfer) Sol Campbell and Ledley King. This scenario happened across the land and it changed people’s views.   In October last year, John Terry, captain of England, while playing for Chelsea called Anton Ferdinand of QPR a black cunt. In the same month Luis Suarez of Liverpool racially abused Patrice Evra of Man Utd and the game changed again. Now, in 2012, according to the BBC the nation’s biggest ever year of sport, it seems Micah Richards of Manchester City has to pull down his twitter account because the racist abuse thrown at him by anonymous haters was so disgusting.     He wasn’t the only black footballer to feel the vent of racist fury and that makes the reaction of the FA laudable in stripping John Terry of the England captaincy. But he should have been suspended from the team. It also makes the reaction of Fabio Capello so stupid. If a politician or policeman was due in court to face the charges that Terry stands accused of, there is no way he would been able to remain working as normal. This is basically the point of principal that Capello resigned over – that Terry should continue with his high profile role in our national life as if nothing happened.    Like Capello, Kenny Dalglish and Liverpool FC and its players have totally missed the point. Whatever they felt about what happened to Luis Suarez, the t-shirt wearing and Kenny’s TV interviews, like Capello’s resignation, are seen as apologist by football’s racist element. They have supplied the mass acceptance that allowed the racist songs of 80s and that is dangerous. Zero tolerance is the only way forward.    Suarez was found guilty and banned for eight games and not to show contrition and shake Evra’s hand on Saturday was not just brain-dead but also exemplifies exactly what the problem is. They have lost perspective. Suarez believes he was wronged, not Evra, because he feels he was misinterpreted. Liverpool were so desperate to keep their star striker on the pitch that they only saw their loss not the bigger social picture. Capello too, a huge ego, tied to Terry because of reinstating him as England captain once before (after he was fired over the Wayne Bridge scandal), could not see beyond his own selfish desire to maintain his first choice back four. Although John Terry is innocent until proven guilty, he can’t lead England with this accusation hanging over him. He could have got his court case out of the way before the Euros. As he didn’t he shouldn’t play. The suspicion is enough for him to be excluded.    What none of them see is that anything seen as tolerance to racism is unacceptable in the English game.    In the meeting to discuss the issue someone within the FA apparently called John Terry toxic. He is, but not half as toxic as letting the genie of racism out of the bottle again.    Substance 2012-02-17 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/110/the-substance-editorial   Substance is a new platform to debate and report on the issues that affect our culture, from music and fashion to protest and technology. We have emerged at a time when everything that we assumed to be permanent is dissolving.   The idea that the 20th-century was effectively the End of History, that global capitalism will be permanent, that things will only get better, has all proved to be false. The institutions that shape our culture—governments, banks, music and film industries—are struggling to cope with the technological and intellectual changes of the 21st-century.   These are exciting, if daunting times. We are the first generation to be able to download music, films and books without paying for them, and to coordinate protests against injustice through a worldwide web.   But we are also the first generation in a long time to have worse living conditions than our parents, who face a new set of political threats; constant war, attacks on our freedom of expression and the ever-growing global security-surveillance state.   We are here to provide an enlightened view of the new paradigms in art, media, celebrity and power, as well as humorous and irreverent takes on the micro-trends happening around us.   Feel free to comment and contribute.   The Substance Team Substance 2012-02-08 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/109/sounding-off-the-love-police   A few weeks back, we bumped into Charlie Veitch from the Love Police who was haranguing shoppers with his megaphone on Brick Lane. While we like Charlie speaking truth to power at a high volume, we couldn\'t understand why he was getting up in people\'s grills about buying vintage -- or as he says, \'second hand\'  -- clothes.      So we had a little chat with Charlie over email to see if we could figure out why he turned his wrath away from the corporate crypto-fascists and towards \'hipsters\' on the lookout for new winkle pickers. Read through to see us muling over the importance of fashion, the self, and the makings of a new Gok Wan-style fashion show.     Hi Charlie,   Good to see you on \'Prick Lane\' the other day. As you may know, I admire your work with the Love Police, which campaigns for democracy, equality and -- most important of all -- freedom of expression. But our encounter left me perplexed, and I hope you can enlighten me as to why:    1) You chose to harangue people shopping for second hand clothes with your megaphone, when there is so much corruption, inequality and censorship still out there? It seems to me you have wandered off message, abandoned your role as Chief Constable of the Love Police, and become one of the Fashion Police. You\'re a cool guy. But a man who looks like a sack of spuds should probably avoid commenting on other people\'s dress sense, especially with a megaphone.   2) You were trying to deter people from expressing themselves through the clothes they wear. Doesn\'t this detract from your beliefs in free love and freedom of expression?   3) You resorted to using the term \'hipster\' as an insult. I\'ve been called this many times, and have always thought it says more about the person saying it than it does about me. The people using it as a derogatory term always seem jealous of people who have a better dress sense.   4)  People who buy \'vintage\' or, as you put it \'old\' clothes is so objectionable. With so many people buying products made in slave-labour sweatshops, surely recycling materials is a step in the right direction.   Fight The Power   Substance     Hello Substance   1. There is indeed a lot of corruption and inequality in the world, but from my frontline experience, there is NOTHING one can do about it from a third-party perspective, except to make people think and inspire them to....be more human? More humane? For there to be a master-slave relationship, someone has to accept the "slave" position voluntarily. OK, let me try to rephrase. Certainly not Fashion Police, but I do see conditioned behaviour and a "cult of cool" emerging from Brick / Prick Lane, much like we see on Oxford Street. OK, the clothes are more \'vintage\', but the inbuilt desire to change inner soul through outer clothing is still the same. I may dress like a sack of spuds, but luckily once a year I get some new clothes from my sister (former hipster) that keep me almost up to date. After all, isn\'t a pair of jeans, t shirt, jumper and jacket enough?    2. Was I really trying to deter people expressing themselves by the clothes they wear? Would you not say this is a defensive interpretation of my megaphoning the vintage clothes shops? Was I not simply helping people to think about paying £100 for a fur hat from the 70s? Also, most people understood the jovial haranguing. It was good humoured. Also, I do not feel any segment of society is above satire. If I am to meditate properly, I would say that "fashion" and textile self expression are a healthy by-product of a society that is moving away from war.   3. In fact, I am not too sure myself about what hipster means. But I think we can both agree that a 19-year-old Hoxton trendy with ZERO substance (personality) but AMAZING clothes / haircut is worthy of satire and derision. I believe clothing should complement a personality, not make up for lack of one.   4. Selling recycled clothing at a marked-up premium to entice hipsters to pay fat prices is not simply eco-friendly, it is very capitalist! Nothing wrong with that!   All the best   Charlie     Hi Charlie,   I agree that rampant consumerism rots the brain. But vintage clothes shopping tends to be borne of a relative state of enlightenment rather than ignorance, at least when you compare it to other cultural sectors which you could have chosen to harangue.    There are shallow idiots who frequent Prick Lane and other vintage fashion outlets. And yes, it is "faintly capitalist" to be selling second-hand clothes for a greater price than which they were purchased. But what is the alternative, besides a return to bartering? Or do you expect the people who sell you things to do so at a personal loss? Then how would they feed and clothe themselves?    The vintage clothes industry (scene? market?) does operate within an imperfect system of capitalism. But I\'m going to try to convince you that it\'s one of the better things about an imperfect capitalist system, and that choosing vintage isn\'t necessarily a symptom of ignorance, greed or spiritual depravity. Not only does it look cooler, vintage is often the most sensible, economical and humane option.   First, let\'s consider the non-vintage options for those of us shopping for clothes on a budget. Topshop and its ilk are multi-billion-pound companies which exploit workers in Britain and where their piece-of-shit clothes are made, avoid paying as much tax here as they can, and strip the world of natural resources to manufacture and transport their products.    Charity shops are also second-hand and cheap, so they don\'t do as much damage to the earth -- they actually do more good, since their profits go to good causes. But they have much narrower ranges. You could spend hours trawling every Oxfam in London and not find a pair of shoes or trousers that fit. So while charity shops are the number one option for the ethical, conscious shopper, it\'s sometimes not possible to find what you need in them.    Vintage clothes, on the other hand, are cheap -- I\'ve bought t-shirts for under a fiver, leather jackets and jumpers for a tenner -- and you can find them all in one place, and know that you are recycling materials and saving the world\'s resources. Consider that vintage clothes are generally well manufactured, and you\'re getting a much better deal, since those jackets and jumpers I bought have lasted me years.   Sure, you can argue that blindly stumbling into Retro Heaven or wherever and splashing out on surplus clothing is excessive and shallow. I\'m sure there are plenty of people who buy vintage clothes to "change inner soul through outer beauty," as you put it. But it\'s not an inherently nasty business, and its patrons aren\'t all shallow, insecure and vain, as you implied by shouting at them all as a whole. Sure, it was good natured, but it was also judgmental and shallow to assume that everybody who walks through the door of Retro Heaven is "Hoxton trendy" with "zero substance." Maybe they understand the benefits of shopping vintage, and you\'re judging them unfairly -- assuming that because they care about personal grooming, their choices aren\'t informed by a social and ethical conscience.   Don\'t get me wrong, vintage can be the refuge of dunderheads obsessed with self image. But it\'s also the choice of champions: discerning, responsible and economical.    If you\'d like to venture into one of London\'s old-clothes shops, I\'m sure one of the more fashionable cads at Substance wouldn\'t mind holding your megaphone while you browse the racks.    Speak soon, homeboy!   Substance     Soon after laying down the gauntlet, we received this reply from Charlie:     Yeah man. Why don\'t we do a little film about it? Could be cool. Hope you guys are up for it?   Charlie   Substance 2012-02-02 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/music/108/skrillex---the-globalisation-of-dubstep A sweaty mass of revellers pulses, arms raised in worship, illuminated only by the bright lights around the DJ. The tension rises to palpable levels as the frantic, programmed drums move the crowd. Silence for an apprehensive moment before the shamanic figure on stage shouts: “Alright, drop the bass!” Euphoria sweeps across the room, accompanying the low-end assault even the least discerning listeners have now come to know as dubstep’s weapon of choice. This priest of bass with an extremely dodgy haircut is Sonny Moore, better known as Skrillex.   This scene was uploaded to YouTube by an audience member. It’s only had around 2,000 hits. It’s a familiar, unremarkable video: one dubstep fan-video plucked from the multitude. And the show could be anywhere in the world.  But just years ago this would have been a rarity, the sort of experience witnessed only by the few inducted into the London dubstep scene on small, grimy club nights. This video was filmed in Arkansas, ‘The Natural State’, home of Johnny Cash and Bill Clinton. So how did Skrillex bring bass-music from an underground London scene to the conservative ears of the American South?   Electronic music is largely alien to these less cosmopolitan states. A quick search of the acts on in Southern or Midwestern towns delivers everything from bluegrass to industrial metal, but you’ll have to search hard to find a programmed bass drop. Skrillex is fully aware of this. He told the Guardian: "It doesn't matter if it's some place with lots of clubs where people are used to dancing. It might be some place in Arkansas where they're only used to rock clubs, and they react in this very different physical way - but it's all good, it's still sexy!” It’s these rock clubs that are the key. Knowing what the fans are used to has allowed Skrillex to expand the borders of the dubstep empire beyond anyone’s expectations. Unlike many electronic artists, he feels at home in the aggression of rock music. At 16 he became lead singer in emo/hardcore band From First to Last. The band captured the weepy hearts of angsty teens worldwide, selling hundreds of thousands of records and touring these venues for the first time.   Now aged 24, rock clubs are still Sonny Moore’s turf. He knows the audience and continues to make direct, antagonistic music that any rocker can comprehend. One critic said his “belligerent, attitudinal techno” betrayed his roots in the hardcore scene. Maybe rocking hard is just what comes naturally to him. Maybe he just doesn’t understand subtlety.   But From First to Last were never a purists’ band. The critics dismissed them as another mediocre attempt to give hardcore punk some tenderness. Their second album was titled Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has A Body Count and there is one very revealing, age-related, word in that title. Sonny Moore, it seems, knows his audience.   While it’s true that dubstep has not yet penetrated the older demographic, Skrillex’s fans are noticeably younger than most. Fellow mainstream DJ, Example, confessed that he found one of the populist dub-star’s London shows particularly exciting, claiming: “His music is like the new punk rock and most of his fans are young kids. Everyone at Koko seemed to be around 18 and they were moshing for the whole gig.”   You only need to glance at online comments to realise Skrillex’s market. Feedback on the Arkansan fan-video is telling. Davethebritishdinosa says: “This was my my first concert ever. So happy I could see someone like this. All the sweating was worth it.” jfkcry has similar feelings: “Yea that was my first ever dubstep concert. It just blew my mind away. Best night of my life. So ready to go to another one.” These comments are typical of the online conversation surrounding the young producer. They appear all over YouTube on videos of shows in the Midwest and South. And they tell us a lot about Skrillex’s fans. These aren’t dubstep aficionados, they’re not ravers or beat-junkies. They’re just kids going to their first live show and enjoying the visceral collective experience of live bass music. And it would be great if Skrillex provided a way into the more nuanced, creative areas of a genre, but these kids seem to stop at the conclusion: Skrillex = dubstep. Take a look at his “similar artists” on Last.fm – a list compiled from the musical taste of over 400,000 Skrillex fans – and you won’t find Kode9, Coki, or even Skream without a long scroll down through the Neros and the Flux Pavilions.   His targeted marketing towards younger tastes goes hand in hand with an exploitative betrayal of dubstep’s roots. In order to mass-market dubstep to the youth audience, Skrillex has hijacked its original sound, cleverly tweaking it until it appeals to teenagers who like rock music. Since the introduction of the electric guitar in 1948, technology has shaped rock music. Rock and electronic genres do not have to be diametrically opposed. Think The Prodigy, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.   This is no new phenomenon. Music has always commandeered before it is popularised. Elvis Presley wasn’t the first man to sing rock and roll, but he was the first white man to do it in a commercially viable way. Pendulum weren’t the first outfit to make drum and bass (not by a long shot), but they were the first to distil it down to a formula that sells records to rock kids. Skrillex is a product that’s easy to buy into.   Added to this local music scenes are in decline, giving rise to a burgeoning, global online community, where kids can expand their tastes quickly and effectively for free. As the commenters and forum-trolls prove, today’s young rockers are discovering there’s actually not much difference between a rave and a mosh pit. And Skrillex makes no distinction between the two.   Moore’s American interpretation of the dubstep genre is certainly a mosh-worthy one. His bass drops are intense assaults on the senses – as abrasive on the first listen as on the twelfth. But he provides little more than this. While he claims to be a Warp records devotee, his sound is not often lauded for its subtlety. And plonking a variety of electronic genres, piecemeal, between these moments of auditory violence has not done much to convince people of his diversity.   His music has been derided as ‘brostep’ – a genre in line with the pints-in-the-air approach to dance music that does so well within the pissed-up mainstream clubbing culture. One critic called his music: “blindingly obvious, lowest-common-denominator electro utterly lacking in subtlety, nuance and originality.” But it gets people moving, despite what the critics say. And if anyone in dance music has a buzz about them right now, it’s Skrillex.   In just over a year, the title track from his 2010 record, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, has had over 59 million views on YouTube. To put that into perspective, that’s double the number of views dance superstar Deadmau5 ever got for a track. The word “phenomenon” is overused, but it’s quite justifiable when it comes to the attention Mr Moore is getting.   Scarily, even those with their roots in dubstep support his cause. In an interview with the Guardian, Skream, a huge figure in dubstep’s rise, said: "His production is so fucking clean but twisted, but the real thing is how he's shaken everything up without even knowing it. He's almost done to dubstep what me and Benga did to garage." Presumably the old guard of the genre can see the storm that’s coming. Dubstep is becoming mainstream and, if they pick the right side, they might land themselves huge new fanbases. Even the surviving members of The Doors have jumped on board, collaborating with him on the track “Breakin’ a Sweat” – surely a sign of the coming apocalypse.   And now the musical establishment are jumping on board. In December last year he received five Grammy nominations, including Best New Artist – a remarkably rare thing, especially for someone who streams all his records for free online. It remains to be seen whether he will win, but he’s certainly got something that’s working.   In 2011 he played well over 300 shows, often two or three in one day. In between these he released two EPs, six singles and featured on five other artists’ records, including Korn’s new dubstep-influenced LP – The Path of Totality – that he helped to produce. Say what you like about his talents, but you can’t call him lazy.   Whether it’s intentional or not, Skrillex has come with just the right formula at just the right time. He’s taken the distinctive flavour of dubstep and tinkered with its recipe. Ultimately, he’s created a bland dish, obliterating the intricate flavours. But for many, he’s given them a first, enticing taste of something truly alien. Kids in hick towns are throwing shapes to processed bass. Something big is happening.   Substance 2012-01-28 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/107/keeping-it-unreal Do you think Rageh Omaar watches X Factor? The al-Jazeera correspondent’s Twitter has got plenty about the Middle East, but nothing about music, or reality TV. But when fellow journalist John Pilger asked Omaar about the BBC’s rolling coverage of the Iraq War in The War You Don’t See, his answer could have been about something else entirely. In the short clip Omaar calls 24-hour news a “giant echo chamber.” “Basra was reported to have fallen 17 times before it actually fell,” he says. “And yet in 24 hour news when you’re reporting it for the seventh time in that chain, the fact it’s been wrong the previous seven times just doesn’t matter.” Omaar is suggesting there is a disparity between reality and how reality is shown on television. The worry is that when it’s abused to that extent, reality as shown on television becomes unreal, a deceitful form of reality.   24-hour news and reality television share this problem. Reality, the truth, becomes coincidental when producers have to justify a programme’s existence to their public. BBC News 24 has to justify the endless news by getting bigger and better scoops (even when they’re not true) and turning the mundane into the newsworthy. Meanwhile X Factor has to justify itself against falling viewing figures by getting more exciting, more emotional, more entertaining.   And more desperate. X Factor, in its desperation to entertain, now looks more like Islamic fundamentalist propaganda.   Sapped of all its tired irony, X Factor is not a very pretty sight.   Now we’re facing another bout of hysteria as Britain’s Got Talent 2012 auditions move into their early stages. There’ll be tears, laughter and the redemptive joy of discovering that ugly, old and poor people can be talented too. I can’t wait.   And remember, it’s just one audition away.   This is the latest of the great reality TV myths (like the one that it’s all a postmodern psychological experiment, Big Brother): you’ve got one shot (so make it count). This is how the programme’s patronizing narratives are created – working-class contestants pull themselves out of pitiful surroundings through raw talent; (often black) contestants turn their back on difficult upbringings (single parents, obviously, Great Britain) to sing Aretha Franklin covers like they mean it.   “It’s all about entertainment”   Tom Lees, 21, auditioned at Birmingham City’s football ground in 2009. In the end his group, Indigo, got as far as the Boot Camp stages – along with the other 100 people left, including “loveable” ska-munchkin Olly Murs and the indefatigable Jedward twins. By then Tom had gone through five other auditions and interviews, where the producers determine who’s good to watch – funny, mental, tragic, beautiful or not very good – and secondly, who can sing.   “It literally didn’t matter how good we were,” he says. “It’s all about entertainment and whether you can provide that. They’re always looking for the best TV.”   Tom believes it’s a far cry from the way producers present the competition – that you queue up outside, then walk out in front of the judges. The reality is quite different.   Clare Thompson, 23, found this when she auditioned at the O2 in London in March last year.   Outside entrants were given “I LUV X FACTOR” signs, and asked to “silent scream” (for a backing track to be added later) and generally look chuffed to be there. After queuing for five hours, then another three inside the O2, Clare was sent down to the arena floor, where rows of curtained booths waited. Inside was a bloke on a stool – a “complete automaton,” she says, “not rude but not friendly, either.” Clare then sang a verse and chorus from Martina McBride’s feminist nu-country ballad ‘A Broken Wing’. The automaton said: “Thanks for coming, but it’s a no,” and that was that.   “It’s made to look like you just go along and walk straight on and meet the judges,” Clare says. “But the thing is, everyone knows that’s not the case. I don’t know why they still have this weird pretence about it.”   Tom agrees, but thinks people enjoy the disparity because it’s entertaining – like high farce imitating real life. “It is obvious that it’s completely different in reality compared to on the telly,” he says. “I think people like watching it because they know it’s fake – everyone knows.”   “Fake and ridiculous”   But Clare still feels a bit cheated – whether it’s from her experience at the O2 or the programme itself. “I still watch X Factor and love it, but I have complete contempt for the entire show. Everything about it is so fake and ridiculous,” she says. “Obviously I still watch it though.”   Plenty of people feel the same. X Factor satisfies the age-old pleasure of laughing at people, feeling for others. The producers are good at what they do, but they have to work for it. Tom tells me about the backdoor manoeuvres that go on in the later stages of the competition – like tiring contestants out to make them emotional.   He believes Indigo had a “fast track” through the competition because they didn’t take themselves too seriously. “We tended to take the piss a bit, gave stupid answers, that sort of thing.”   But other people enjoyed the same “fast track” – sometimes to the point that you could basically tell who would make the televised finals. “Once you get to Boot Camp, there’s no doubt who’s going to be in the final,” Tom says.   Jedward walked their auditions despite allegedly interrupting their competition mid-audition, being booed by other contestants and, of course, being demonstrably shit.   “It wouldn’t make good TV to show how hard it is because that would put people off entering, wouldn’t it?” he says. “X Factor misleads people, but most TV shows mislead people.”   A cynical view, but one you can go along with after the cross-channel phone-in scandals, as well as the fact time and again our journalistic TV has been found lacking – with the Leveson Inquiry and the Iraq War.   “Distracts us from reality”   In this week’s Radio Times, columnist David Butcher claimed television’s ultimate aim above all else is to entertain. “What matters is that the end product makes us laugh or distracts us from reality long enough to forget the miserable weather and the looming tax return,” he writes.   Butcher’s right that telly can be a form of escapism, but not always – I’d argue – when it does not claim to be real, but simply assumes it. (Reality TV never refers to its falseness, it just is.) But this is now the over-arching theme of modern television: it’s escapism because by ‘eck our lives are so much more difficult now than they used to be.   This argument might stand up to reason if we had a modern journalism we could really rely on when it boiled down to the big stuff – Wikileaks, Iraq and “austerity” – if we had a stable understanding of what was true and what was not. But we don’t. Journalism is a constant struggle against corporate influence, spin and disinformation; finding truth and not received wisdom; and getting a good by-line at the end of the day.   So rather than escapism versus real, the two are often blended together into one hotch-potch of indeterminate mass media: the pill that’s easier to swallow.   Mass media: 1984   Charlie Brooker’s 15 Million Merits, which aired on Channel 4 in December, demonstrated this perfectly.   Brooker creates a dystopian vision of the present-future where an X Factor-style competition is the only way out of a monotonous, meaningless existence spent working, consuming then working to consume a bit more. It is 1984 for the mass media age.   Jessica Brown-Findlay (Misfits) plays Abi, the songbird who wins with an innocent voice only to be eaten up by the entertainment machine, vomited back out as a humiliated, abused porn actress. It’s brilliantly grim.   The fact is, if Black Mirror’s Abi had sung her own song on today’s X Factor, the rights would be automatically owned by Simon Cowell and Sony BGM. She would not be able to talk about it in the press because of another contractual clause.   It’s not quite the Official Secrets Act it shows X-Factor’s producers are keen to keep its real reality from the public. It might be just to carry on that suspension of disbelief people enjoy so much. But this is reality, should we have to believe in it?   People tell me I over-think things. May they’re right. X Factor won Best Talent Show at last week’s National Television Awards after all. Still, this unreality-by-stealth still seems like a dangerous thing to accept – culturally and politically – in the grand scheme of things. And anyway, the NTAs gave Best Factual Programme to This Morning, so their opinion is as good as Philip Schofield’s, I suppose.   Evidently don’t have a problem watching high farce imitating real life. So why should we have a problem watching political spin and lies imitating it too? The two combined begin to break down what we identify as real and true. Look at the pitch-perfect news event: Saddam Hussein’s statue pulled down at the orders of a US psy-ops officer, made to look like the “liberation” of Iraq for the pleasure of swathes of reporters in Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel. What about Tripoli, Misurata and Benghazi? Damascus? Tehran? How much longer can our disbelief be suspended?   Even if Rageh Omaar doesn’t sit down in front of X Factor, his “giant echo chamber” is growing.   So remember everyone: keep it real.   Tom Rollins   Substance 2012-01-26 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/music/106/come-to-burma-its-dead-funky Myanymar (Burma) and the West have had a complicated relationship. We colonised them, they snubbed the Commonwealth, and it went on. And yet we don’t seem to have that complicated a relationship with Burma’s music. Why? We just don’t know all that much about it.   But now the walls are coming down. After decades of repression and isolation the Burmese military junta seem to be relaxing their fist-grip on power, allowing a power-share with a civilian government for the first time. Journalists have noticed censorship is easing. A freer democracy and the cultural goodies that come with it are beginning to grow in Burma.   But what is there for us to discover, and what has the West been missing out on all this time?   Ne Win, Ne Free   Years ago I found a compilation of Asian psych – Love, Peace and Poetry – with a South Korean record by Shin Jung Hyun & The Men, “Korean Titel A2.” It’s a melancholic 10-minute outpouring of wandering fuzz guitar, tinny organs, soaring Korean flutes and choral vocals; sublime to the very end.   I always expected Burmese music to be like this – the folk traditions would infuse with the heroin and marijuana fields of the countryside, making for a strange brew of Asian folk-psych, years of dictatorship giving the music a dissident edge. If it could happen in Czechoslovakia, why not Burma?     Because while the rest of the world was falling like dominoes to teeny boppers, The Beatles and lysergic acid, Burma was under the yoke of an irrational dictator, General Ne Win. Ne Win’s “Burmese Way to Socialism” hated “decadent” Western culture – including its main export, rock’n’roll.    Pop music was stifled, leaving Burma way behind. The country’s early attempts at the bad thing – a mixture of folk, pop and rock’n’roll – were later picked up by Sublime Frequencies, a Seattle-based record label that specializes in world music and esoterica from South East Asia, the Middle East and beyond.    The real “Burmese Way?”   Sublime’s Alan Bishop, once vocalist and bassist with experimental Arizonan outfit Sun City Girls, put together Princess Nicotine: Folk & Pop Sounds of Myanmar (the first Western compilation of Burmese pop) following a visit to Burma. It is the first in a three-part series charting the beautiful, otherworldly and downright mad music of a far-off country we do not know much about.   “I travelled to Burma for the first time in 1993,” Alan says. “When I got there I turned on the radio and it immediately hit me – the scales, the Burmese harp, how they use piano, amazing percussion, the rhythms and tempos. It was as if I had landed on another planet, musically.   Alan found these songs on cassettes, originals and re-presses, around Burma – in shops, marketplaces or mates’ houses. It does sound like another world. Traditional instruments – hne (oboe), saung gauk (harp), pat waing (drums) – creating manic, beautiful songs like Bo Hein’s ‘Burmese Golden Drum’, which opens with feedback loops made with wood and steel, before eery call-response vocals.   Alan believes that Burma’s isolation fostered a radically different musical landscape, valuable in its own way. “There was not a true popular music movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s, as we had seen everywhere else,” he says. “So the Burmese have managed to maintain the integrity of their musical independence.”   Independence, or isolation? The first major hit in Burma was 1969’s ‘Mummy, I Want a Girlfriend’ – a kind of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ schmaltz for a society stifled by censors and dictatorship, by then a distant memory to a West already suffering from post-Altamont stress disorder.    The other Sublime albums in the series unearth more Western-style sounds. Volume two, Guitars of the Golden Triangle, unearths early-1970s garage, psych, even country and western. It features the “Burmese Texan,” Lashio Thein Aung, with ‘A Girl Among Girls’ – nodding to British freakbeat with the help of his rough R’n’B guitar. Aung now lives in the US and performs with a cowboy hat, but remains one of the dictatorship’s most outspoken critics.    This is what I’ve been looking for!    But not quite.   “Different from the mainstream”   “Music like Princess Nicotine is not what people in Burma are really interested in,” says Heather MacLachlan, ethnomusicologist from the University of Dayton, Ohio, and author of a new study into Burmese pop – Burma’s Popular Music Industry: Creators, Distributors and Censors.    “That’s all rather different from the mainstream,” she says. “In the West, we’re looking for something original and creative but that’s not something that Burmese people value in their music.”    Instead Burmese music has always mirrored Western pop but thousands of miles away from it. “Pop music in Burma sounds exactly like UK and US music,” she says. “For the last 40 plus years, whatever is popular there at the time is pretty much what’s popular in Burma.”   So Lashio Thein Aung translated the British Invasion and American country/rock, and now Burmese musicians are translating rap, metal and dance-pop.    Burma’s hip-hop ranges from angry young men (who can’t talk about angry young men’s favourite topics: politics, sexing or violence) to something like a Nicole Sherzinger/P-Diddy duet with far more clothes on – like Nan Su Yati Soe’s ‘Don’t Run Away.’ Kou No We is a popular performer in this vein, symbolically rebellious with long hair and sunglasses; his worst excess is threatening an unfaithful lover, rather than the powers that be. Like One Way telling their ‘Personal Experiences,’ No We raps about love, not bitches and forties.       Musical sounds and styles are similar between Burma and the West, Heather admits, but the way music is made there is totally different. Burmese musicians perform “own tune” (originals) or “copy thacin” (covers, “thacin” means song) – songs copied exactly and then dubbed with new Burmese lyrics, not translations.   Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein’s version of Shakira’s ‘Whenever, Wherever’ is eerily faithful to the original. Even more surreal – Zaw Hin Htut gives his best Rod Stewart on ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ (still beats Rod’s American Songbook). But sometimes the results are less impressive – Tint Tint Tun’s school-disco ‘La Bamba’ sounds like it belongs on a hazy dancefloor in Bangkok’s early hours, a mystical scene I’m not sure I ever want to see.   Rock politics   But a dictatorship isn’t always the best place for creativity.      The “only rock band in Burma” in 1973 – The Wild Ones, musician Sai Htee Saing and songwriter Sai Kham Lait – had a Christmas concert broken up by rock-bashing General Ne Win himself. It set a precedent for the next 30 years.   It’s a shame because The Wild Ones were good. But by 1988 the band were already assimilated, photographed side-by-side with their country’s military leaders. Saing even performed on an album written by one of the military leaders – Mya Than San – a selling-out the integrity-obsessed West won’t be too familiar, or at all comfortable, with.    The government started using music more after 1973 with the distinctly un-rousing ‘Let’s Go to the Polling Booth’ was recorded to promote a sham referendum. Burmese musicians still write and perform for government projects like public works and rigged elections today.    “The government is actually quite dependent on pop music,” Heather says. “And that’s something nobody is really acknowledging.”    Here music becomes a tool of power and control – but it’s occasionally used to resist it too. Aung Suu Kyi has long supported musicians and artists. Now, in a few weeks’ time, Rangoon will host a benefit concert to celebrate her return to politics – a good a sign as any that things are changing.   Girl Power!   Despite years of pop in Burma, the Western press has been getting very excited by Burma’s latest offering – the Me N Ma Girls. The band, dubbed “Myanmar’s first girl band,” are challenging Burma’s conservatism with brightly coloured outfits, suggestive lyrics and a sound that is more Guetta and Gaga than Myanmar.    Their sophomore album, MinGaLarPar (Greetings) released in December last year, combines Japanese and Korean K-Pop with clubby Eurodance.    In the video for single ‘Festival,’ the girls flash the cash and go clubbing, singing: “Hey you! Are you happy? You want some?” Jarvis Cocker won’t be wishing he’d red-penned that into ‘Babies’ but it’s a million miles from ‘Mummy, I Want a Girlfriend.’ Women don’t normally act like this in Burma.      It would make a nice Hollywood story for a journalist with a deadline but music has not really changed Burma. In many ways their music is inherently reactionary – it copies more than it creates – but tastes are changing. The Me N Ma Girls’ success is a litmus test for the rest of the country, showing that even conservative, repressed Burma can do “Girl Power.”   And for many Burmese, the epitome of girl power, and people power, is Aung Suu Kyi. As long as her National League for Democracy are at the forefront as Burma moves towards democracy, the Burmese may have real hope for change. Musically, copy tachin isn’t going anywhere fast, but neither is Burma’s deep love for pop. With time may be the West will find something to love in the music of a free Myanmar.   It’s easy to laugh. But the cultural imperialism of sending Beatles records and lunchboxes to some far-off Asian country in between the B-52s and Agent Orange, and then laughing is an uncomfortable place to be.    I didn’t find what I expected. But what was I looking for?    As it turns out Shin Jung Hyun’s “Korean Titel A2” is called “Beautiful Rivers and Mountains” and was commissioned by South Korea’s military dictator, Park Chung Hee. Jung Hyun wrote it after disobeying his leader, then being tortured and thrown in a mental institution. It was a self-preserving act of collusion. In the end he wasn’t all that different to the musicians of Burma.   It could be one of those tourist board adverts: “Come to Burma, it’s dead funky,” it’s been one hell of a trip.    So instead of vaults of integrity-friendly music, I found a Burmese cowboy and a Burmese Rod Stewart, censors and sell-outs, master-copyists and, well, the Me N Ma Girls and with them, the stirrings of free speech in a long oppressed country.    Wasn’t it all a bit glorious?   Tom Rollins   Substance 2012-01-19 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/subcast/103/mcde---exclusive   What’s in a name? In Danilo Plessow’s case, a lot. The 25 -year-old DJ/producer from Stuttgart’s moniker instantly summons up images of Detroit techno.   It’s also a neat play on the fact that Stuttgart is home to two of Germany’s biggest car manufacturers, Mercedes Benz and Porsche. And it’s a nod to an older Detroit music tradition, namely Motown and soul. All three strands - techno, both US and German, plus soul - come together in Plessow’s unique take on house. Over the last 18 months he’s released a string of emotion-drenched tracks including Lonely One on 20:20 Vision and Sun Sequence for his own Four Roses imprint. Plessow’s Substance podcast focusses on what’s on his stereo at home. In a word: jazz. The feelin’ kinda blue sort. Mr Motor City talks us through his selection...   Is there a theme behind the mix? If so, what is it?   Actually, not really. I was thinking of doing a couple of more free mixes while I do stuff like cleaning the apartment or taxes a while back. Just track to track with stuff that is in my ‘listening’ crate at that moment.    What are they key tracks and why?   It was really spontaneous. I just tried to have a certain amount of vocal tracks in it as well, but that’s about it.    The mix seems quite sad. How come?   Well, this kind of music is my preferred home listening, and I think it can be very sad but very uplifting at the same time. That’s a quality I also find in very good electronic music, but more often in jazz.   How did you get into jazz?   I started playing drums in the school jazz big band quite young. It was mainly big band type of stuff. Through that got more and more into ‘real’ jazz, more Coltrane rather than the big band stuff. At the same time I got into hip hop as well.    How does jazz and soul impact on your own music?   It’s my biggest inspiration, for sure. This sadness you describe is something I’m longing to capture in my own stuff as well. Feeling blue, and all that. That’s just me.   What new music excites you?   There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening right now, including, thankfully, some inspiring ‘soulful’ stuff. Since Dilla [late hip hop producer who worked for Common, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul] I thought there was a little gap. But this whole crazy new post-whatever hip hop/dubstep - I hate all these names - is very interesting, for sure.   Substance 2011-12-02 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/subcast/102/mental   We don’t like it when media outlets use anniversaries of events as excuses to rehash old articles about the Berlin Wall coming down or the death of Elvis. We especially don’t like whole magazines dedicated to nostalgic calendar-ticking (that’s you, Mojo!). But there are some events worth celebrating an arbitrary round-number of years later, especially if you missed them the first time around.   So to celebrate the release of the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s ramshackle masterpiece, Thank God For Mental Illness (fifteen years ago, give or take), we’ve put together a mix with mental illness as the theme. Or, we really wanted to make this mix, and finding an arbitrary ‘anniversary’ seemed like a good way of explaining why we spent a whole afternoon on Audacity pasting some fairly morbid subject matter together with audio clips of 50s TV shows.   We’re not talking about songs that just contain the words ‘crazy’ or ‘mental’, or even ‘bonkers’. These are our favourite songs about being institutionalised, schizophrenic, suicidal and terminally addicted. We’ve incorporated as many genres as we could—from country to electronic, hip-hop and psychedelia—because, like sex and drugs, mental illness is explored in all genres, and all art forms. Some of these cuts are explicit (Cage, Gravediggaz), some more subtly trembling (Porter Wagoner, The Groundhogs), and others we’ve merely interpreted as analogous to experiencing electro-shock therapy (Bernard Szajner).   Download the mix, and go rock yourself into a frenzy in the corner of the room    Track listing:   Bernard Hermann – Twisted Nerve Porter Wagoner – The Rubber Room Bernard Szajner – Welcome To Death Row The Groundhogs – Split (Part 1) Gravediggaz – 1-800 Suicide Cage – Suicidal Failure Daniel Johnston – Life In Vain Eminem – Insane Brian Jonestown Massacre – Sue    Substance 2011-12-02 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/subcast/100/wolf--lamb--soul-clap The strapline on the Wolf + Lamb website says it all: A Music Community. Zev Eisenberg and Gadi Mizrahi, together with Charlie Levine and Eli Goldstein, otherwise known as Soul Clap, are that rare thing in dance music - DJ’s who transcend the dancefloor to make a real connection with people’s hearts and minds.   The four-man collective from New York are the latest chapter in the city’s unique clubbing history, an echo of such illustrious names as Larry Levan, David Mancuso and Nicky Siano. They recently toured their stretched, out bohemian sound across Europe and the US in support of their Wolf + Lamb Vs. Soul Clap mix for !K7. The first Substance podcast, all 90 minutes of it, captures their mood-elevating live show at its best. Zev Eisenberg talks us through it...   What was the recent tour like?   It was a new experience for all of us, the four of us being together for weeks on end, and of course the sheer quantity and length of shows. The perfect way to close off the months we spent working together producing our album. We all walked away ecstatic.   What was the highlight?   Spending two months together and meeting up and connecting with thousands of fans across the world. The combined knowledge and confidence of four people let us push the boundaries of our show. It developed into something new that none of us were expecting in terms of breadth and variety of tempo and mood.   Are you hedonistic on tour, or do you play it sensible?   It started businesslike and professional but quickly devolved into hedonistic once we all got comfortable. Maybe it even bumped up against sloppy once or twice, but we don’t remember.    What’s your DJing philosophy?   We play whatever feels right, whatever will elevate with no regrets. There’s no right or wrong track. DJing shouldn’t be a big deal - it’s light, it’s fun and easy. It’s OK if the music stops for a moment, it’s not about technical mixing prowess, it’s about the feeling. It’s about making people feel good. We want to explore all of your emotions - up, down, happy and sad - through the music that we play. We want to take you on a journey.   What are your favorite tracks from the mix and why?    Picking favorites is always a real tough question, especially with this mix, which is not only a collection of all of our most cherished songs, but also of the most magical moments from tour. We’re really lucky to have these opportunities to see these songs manifest themselves into reality on the dancefloor. As a DJ, when you get new music you can close your eyes and imagine a perfect scenario to play a particular record, but to actually have that moment come to life, that’s what DJing is all about. So, my top picks are, firstly Baby Prince, aka Gadi Mizrahi [one half of Wolf + Lamb], Want To Squeeze You. Every year Gadi outdoes himself by breaking new ground both in and outside of our genre. He’s constantly pushing boundaries and Want To Squeeze You is perfect evidence of that. This hyper sexualized mid-tempo grinder, which features Baby Prince himself singing thru a harmonizer, definitely soaked a panty or two on the dancefloor. Second, Pillow Talk The Come Back. Hats off to Sammy Dee and his crew for reinventing themselves with this Sam Cooke/doo-wop/808 dance music. The Come Back was the epicenter of many of our DJ sets, bringing the shows to a emotional, bass heavy, heartbroken boiling point. Then there’s the Konphibious Piano Re-Edit of Everybody Dance by Chic. Our Boston mentor DJ Kon is truly the king of the re-edit. This über-epic end-of-the-night jam had the crowds choking back tears. Kon takes the classic and strips it down to pure piano pleasure.    Is this mix a fair reflection of your live sets?   Definitely, the mix was chosen from all of our faves from the tour. It reflects the uncertainty that comes every single time to start a show. You don’t know what the energy will be like, you don’t know what people will be feeling. The mix travels in all directions, sometimes at all at once. That’s exactly what you can expect hearing us play.    Sussudio by Phil Collins is a brave inclusion. What made you pick it?   There has actually been some confusion about this track on the web. If you look up Sussudio on Youtube it comes up credited to Soul Clap, but actually this track was done by a guy from the UK called Iain O'Hare for the Outcross Records imprint run by our good friend Miguel Campbell.  Miguel has put out a ton of releases on Outcross and it’s commonly overlooked.  There’s lots of gems in there, people. Best get yer dig on. We did and found this one.   What’s your sure-fire floor filler?   One track that has to be considered a sure-fire floor filler from the tour is Greg Wilson’s Re-Edit of Talking Heads Psycho Killer.  This edit uses the suspense and ambience from Psycho Killer as it’s performed in the 1984 Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense. Crowd sound effects, the iconic drum machine beats and a whopping kick drum make this thing a real dancefloor monster. It’s a perfect hybrid of dance music and rock’n’roll!   What next for the Wolf + Lamb/Soul Clap collective?   We’ve got another few months in Europe, with our family Voices Of Black, Tanner, Slow Hands, all here to finish off another amazing summer. After that we’re getting ready for the Miami winter and producing solo albums. The label-inclusive Wolf + Lamb experience is something we’re already exploring and beginning to plan and produce for summer 2012. A new show that encompasses all of our artists live sets in some kind of almost theatrical event. Stay tuned.   Text: Chris Cottingham   www.wolflambmusic.com     Download Greatest Tour Hits Mix here    Wolf+Lamb & Soul Clap Greatest Tour Hits Mix_www.substance.tv by substance.tv Substance 2011-12-02 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/music/92/young-soul Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club didn’t seem like the sort of place to premiere, Young Souls a film about Northern soul. East London’s denim-clad pretensions seem a world away from the rootsy diehard vibe of the northern soul scene. But the fact is, soul is spreading.   Dean Chalkley, music photographer, journalist and the man behind Young Souls, grew up as a mod in Southend in the ’80s, so knows more than your average filmmaker trying to get in on the soul thing. He also studied photography at Blackpool, itself one of the high churches of Northern soul, home to thelegendary Mecca club in the ’70s.      In a recent issue of 125 Magazine, themed on religion , Chalkley produced a photo-feature dedicated to soul culture. “As soon as they said religion I was like, this is the moment. Keep the faith, Northern soul – it’s a perfect fit.” The follow-on was Young Souls, three years in the making, which features some of the same faces and dancers.     Countless books, documentaries and featurettes will tell you the same – rather old – story. Officially, Northern soul was centred on Wigan Casino, the inconspicuous club that turned the dour, post-industrial town in Lancashire into the home of the most famous soul club in the world. A 1978 Billboard magazine survey voted it as much, beating New York’s Studio 54, in comparison a vainglorious pit of society kicks and cocaine-fuelled disco fever.     As with any religion , tall tales, myths and a fair dose of rose-tinted specs get woven in. It wouldn’t be such a good story otherwise. A number of films, like 2009’s Soul Boy, have tried to re-tell the story to those who were not there. Most people are inclined to say they have failed.     Chalkley’s 10-minute short is not your standard Northern soul offering. It actually tries to penetrate the passion/obsession. Unlike previous films, which try and let the music (and some knowing, we-were-all-there-weren’t-we references to the Winter Of Discontent) explain the subject, Chalkley shoots an impressionistic black-and-white image of the scene. It’s an experience, not a narrative. “I’m not trying to make a definite statement about northern soul. For anyone trying to do that, it’s a very hard task. You’re always going to be held to account.”     So Young Souls does not go in for all that retro fun. It is set in the now, along with the odd Adidas kit bag, Oxford bags and vintage motor. But in recent years the soul scene has attracted younger and younger audiences. And this is what makes the film such a success. It records the present day’s scene while duly acknowledging the past.  “Now is a good time, a perfect time, actually. There’s something happening which is very healthy. I think people are trying to break away from conforming.” Chalkley believes London is fast becoming a central venue for this new interest in soul, far from its traditional centres in Northern towns and cities like Stoke and Wigan.       Move\'s being busted...      Jo Cook, 35, from Twickenham, cameos in Young Souls. She’s another Londoner too young to have experienced the Casino, Mecca or the Torch. “I’ve been on the scene for like 10 years. I got into Northern through the mod scene, but I still like both. The Northern soul dos go on later, so I just like to go to everything I can and dance all night.”     Northern has always been a dancers’ scene, as well as a collectors’. “It’s possibly one of the only music forms where you can go to a nightclub that lasts all night, and you’ve got people who are over 50 and they’re not being looked at as weird”, Chalkley says. “They’re actually the best dancers!” Now younger people are getting wise too. A string of northern soul dancing schools and tuition DVDs have started doing the rounds for those who want a quick step-in to club moves.      It’s all very different to how it began, Chalkley remembers. “Back in the late-’60s through to the ’70s, people would go to a club, see someone dance and then go home and practice. Now people want to be taught a bit more, and why not?”     The point is that soul is “all about the music”. It’s a dictum repeated by soul connoisseurs and beginners, badges, graffiti and record labels up and down the land. “You don’t have to dance like a genius dancer to enjoy the music.”      As for genius dancers, there’s Liam Beckett. Liam, 19, a bricklayer from Sheffield. He won the Blackpool Weekender Dance Competition last year, making him Northern soul’s World Dance Champion.  “It’s such a good thing to get into it,” he says. “It’s a close-knit scene, a big family really. Young people who like it and are into it, as long as they’re having a good time, it’s good. We all sort of stick together.”     Now more people are sticking together. Liam sees Northern as a meeting-place for different sub-cultures; mods, skinheads, suedeheads, and now, more and more younger people. “But we’ve all still got one thing in common – love of soul.” After that, he says, comes the fashion, the records, the scooters and the dancing.     Northern is a resort for those tired of the same old Saturday night clubbing scene, in myriad ways that it may be didn’t in the ’70s. For some it’s a way of dressing, others it’s a whole lifestyle. “Music is shit nowadays, I’ve always preferred ’60s Motown and soul. I got into it from my dad.” Liam remembers the first time he went to a Northern club, in Sheffield. “I went to KGB when I was about 15. It was dead dark, in this shitty little basement, playing proper raw soul which I’d not heard before. I was fascinated by the dancing.”   Liam started to teach himself how to dance, watching others on the scene and then practising in his bedroom. “I picked it up over two years, dancing in my room and watching all the Wigan videos off the internet.”  A few competitions later, and he has been asked to dance live on-stage with Plan B at the O2, and will feature in A Northern Soul Film next year, which is being directed by a woman who went to the Casino growing up. The film-makers have been careful to include plenty of new (and established) young people on the scene.   And so northern soul has come full circle, and now with a new generation of faces - collectors, dancers, scooterists or just soul-lovers – whether they’re in Bethnal Green, Sheffield, or anywhere else up, or down, the country.   Text: Tom Rollins   Dean Chalkley is involved in two soul and R’n’B nights in London – Black Cat at The Silver Bullet in Finsbury Park, and Shake at The Boogaloo in Highgate. Substance 2011-08-18 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/style/90/the-only-jacket-required The 1950s were a busy time culturally speaking. The teenager was born. Cash and Presley ruled the charts. No small matter both. Just as important, in fashion terms anyway, was the cult status achieved by the Harrington jacket. James Dean wore one in the iconic 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause, turning it into the epitome of cool in the process.   However, the jacket’s history goes back a lot further than that. Its roots are in the North West of England, specifically Manchester. John Miller first designed the G9 jacket, as it was originally called, in 1937 for the clothing brand Baracuta. Its name was changed to Harrington because Ryan O’Neal wore the jacket in the ’60's TV series Peyton Place - his character was called Rodney Harrington. The jacket went on to become fashionable among Mods and Skinheads in the UK during the ’60's, and again in the ’70's, early ’80's and today with skinhead and mod revivalists.   Dale Hicks, MD of the communication and marketing portal the Manchester Fashion Network is full of enthusiasm for the Harrington’s Northern heritage. “Manchester used to be the textile capital of the world, a legacy that is still evident today,” he says. “And it’s always raining, so we’ve become quite good at making and wearing jackets. You don’t see a lot of good summer fashion coming out of Manchester.” No surprise, then, that he has a classic Harrington in his wardrobe. “Yeah of course I have one,” he says. “It’s unbranded and I absolutely love it.”   Bobby Langley, Head Of Merchandising at Sony Music, is another Northerner with a deep love of the Harrington. “I looked after Oasis a few years ago and we hooked up with Baracuta to design some Harrington jackets. We produced three great colourways. I still have the City blue one tucked away somewhere.” He recalls his first encounter with the Harrington. “My mum bought me the original black Harrington with red/black wool check lining from the underground market in Manchester when I was very young. I teamed it with black monkey boots and Lee jeans.” It’s a classic look.    The latest incarnation of the Harrington comes from Baker Street Clothing, who have taken inspiration from another culturally rich jacket brand, Stone-Dri, to create a Harrington for 2011. Stone-Dri began back in the ’40s. Four brothers trading as Joseph Stone and Co Ltd produced simple, good quality outerwear in their Manchester factory. In 2002, Joel Brown, owner of Baker Street Clothing, found a Stone-Dri advert on the cover of an old 1953 football program. It was the inspiration for the rebirth of this classic brand. Taking Stone-Dri’s history as a starting point, Brown has created a new range that includes technical advances such as coated cotton and mixing of Italian wools and durable fabrics, but has kept the heritage of outstanding quality and attention to detail that Joseph Stone and Co created back in 1945.   The result is a cult classic similar to the ethos behind the original Baracuta G9 Harrington jacket. From the North West. As it should be.   Text: Danny Higgins Substance 2011-08-04 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/79/coming-at-you Strange machines, mysterious headsets and a dizzying array of screens clutter the bunker-like space in the demonstration basement. A man standing in a bright white cube steps from side to side while a computer sprite on a screen reproduces his every gesture.  A tiny-scale cast of John Cleese’s head – accurate to the tiniest detail and painted realistically – sits on the table by a whirring, clicking machine that created it: a 3D printer, one of the most cutting edge toys in the field of 3D technology. This is the headquarters of Inition in London, a company whose gadgets are blurring the increasingly fine border between the real and the virtual. They have a host of immersive technologies which are on their way to churning out virtual worlds almost inseparable from reality. For example: Haptic devices allow us to interact with virtual 3D environments and feel the same sensations—force, temperature and texture—as if the computer models were real. One of them allows a virtual ball of clay on a computer screen to be moulded, gauged and stretched using a robotic wand that reproduces the resistance of the clay, while another can be used to spin a virtual ball around on elastic.  Haptics are already being developed to improve robot-assisted surgery, allowing surgeons to ‘feel their way’ inside the patient’s body, since the lack of sensory cues has been blamed for the increased risk of internal injuries from robot-assisted surgery. They’ve also written software which mimics injecting a needle into flesh with botox, so that medical students can perfect their art before plunging pieces of metal into people’s faces.   It’s already possible to get a high five from a hologram and feel it, using a Haptic glove. So the next logical step is to stretch it out into a suit, so that our whole bodies can interact with the virtual world and experience its sensations. Considering the geeks at Inition regularly get commissions to make realistic replicas of people's genitals, it can’t be that long before Haptics is used to thrust us inside porn movies, so that we can really feel the texture of Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey’s bodies and interact with their doppelgangers as though they were really in the room. It would make the sci-fi vision of the interactive porno fantasy land a reality, although it would raise a few ethical issues, like whether the people depicted in the fantasy-land consented to a lifelike reproduction of themselves being penetrated by thousands of men simultaneously wearing Haptic suits.   Substance 2011-07-01 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/music/77/is-there-too-much-music Here’s a question for you: is there too much music around? It’s something a well-known female singer-songwriter (500,000 albums sold) recently asked me during an interview.  “I sometimes wonder if the problems the music industry is having aren’t to do with illegal downloading and the internet at all,” she pondered. “Might it not be the fact that there’s no quality control these days. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I bought an album. There’s only ever two good tracks, aren’t there. And there are just too many albums as well. In fact, there’s just too much music around these days.” You can understand why, after making these comments, she asked to remain anonymous.   She’s got a point, although, in fact, the internet is to blame for the surplus of music on two counts. Firstly, the fact that you can make music on computers, something everyone in the Western world has easy access to, means that it’s easier than ever to write a song. You don’t need instruments or spend time practicing. You don’t even need friends to be in a band with you. If you can put together a spread sheet you can write a song. And once you have a song the internet means you can distribute it yourself.    Which is all very egalitarian and punk, and, let’s be clear, the fact that the internet means musicians can wrestle creative and financial control back off record companies is A Good Thing. But the downside is that in a world where everyone can make and release music, it seems like everyone is doing exactly that. Problem is the one thing technology can’t do for you is provide the spark of creativity that’s the difference between the moment of genius and the commonplace. Result: there’s an awful lot of the latter.   Arrrggghhhhh...     The second reason the internet fuels a surplus of music is that the online world is a voracious beast that chomps through content at dizzying speed. Columns such as The Guardian’s New Band Of The Day demand a constant supply of new artists. At the time of writing, New Band Of The Day is on band number one thousand and forty nine — in under five years. Sure, it’s an amusing read, but, seriously, who could possibly process that amount of new music?    The same applies to numerous music blogs and websites. The only criteria for featuring a band is that they are new. Because blogs constantly reference one another, coverage in one frequently leads to coverage in another. Momentum can build on the back of not very much apart from the fact that someone somewhere had to write about a new band and everyone else followed suit. That qualifies as a buzz to a record company. The band get signed and release one of those albums with only two decent tracks on it. If you’re lucky.   The internet has had positive impact on music in many ways, but that shouldn’t blind people to the negatives. It’s fuelled an explosion in music, a lot of which is average at best. Is there too much music around? Yeah, there just might be.   Text. Chris Cottingham Substance 2011-06-27 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/76/the-new-drug-trade-part-2 When two US Senators announced last week that they wanted the Feds to wipe out Silk Road, an underground version of eBay where users can by illegal drugs online, the not-so-invisible hand of the market began its attempts to wipe the Internet clean. We’re not talking about research chemicals that are undesirable to most drug users here. These are users’ Most Wanted narcotics like crystal meth, cocaine, ecstasy and super-strong hallucinogens which are being sold through the back-channels of the Internet, and they’re almost untraceable. But Silk Road is only one of the places to buy illegal drugs online. Substance just received delivery of Class A hallucinogens and Class B stimulants from other sites on the web. If the tabloids were tripping out when they heard that legal drugs like Mephedrone and Ivory Wave were available online, they’ll be crawling up the walls when they know the extent of the illegal drugs available. Forty years since it began, the war on drugs has entered the digital domain; but as the opening shots ring out, it’s clear that the web is a battlefield tailor-made for the drug trade.   As with most criminal lairs, the headquarters of the online drugs trade aren’t that easy to find. To get to the kingpins willing to ship acid to your door, users first have to find the underground marketplaces where dealers advertise their goods. Silk Road was hoisted above ground by the news site Gawker, in an article headlined “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable.” But before all the attention from the press, it operated under the radar for a couple of years because of how difficult it is to find.   Firstly, it has a garbled combination of numbers and letters as its URL that doesn’t show up in search engines. Second, it’s only visible to users running the TOR encryption software so that its users can’t be traced. And third, all transactions are made with Bitcoin, the as-yet untraceable virtual currency that’s becoming a problem not just for government narc squads, but law enforcement agencies of all kinds, since it can be used to trade drugs, weapons, kiddie porn, hacker codes and pretty much anything else of value.   The amount of hype surrounding Silk Road means that it can’t be long before people get stung by Feds posing as crack merchants, but that’s hardly going to deter the swathes of people flooding to the site as a result of the Gawker article. In reality, the chances of being stung by an undercover cop are pretty remote if you pay attention to its merchant rating system, which lets customers leave feedback on sellers, just like on eBay.   The downside of the surge in popularity is that Bitcoins have become more expensive to buy, which makes the drugs more expensive. So while cocaine used to go for the Bitcoin equivalent of £30 a gram, now it’s going for over £100. Add to the fact that the Bitcoin server recently got hacked and millions in users’ currency stolen, anybody who knows a reliable dealer in the real world will find Silk Road a much less attractive option.   It’s also unlikely that, like other illicit trader sites—whether it’s for drugs or file sharing—Silk Road will be around forever. People are already selling their accounts in online forums because they sense that the administrators may stop accepting new members soon. The site has already been taken down and then re-emerged with new URLs a couple of times, and this is bound to continue as the admins try to keep it out of the authorities’ reach. But like Napster, Silk Road will probably spawn a host of other sites which will take over the supply side of the equation. New sites are cropping up all the time, like the TOR-encrypted Open Vendor Database, which was just another version of Silk Road that has already disappeared from the web.   Substance 2011-06-24 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/style/75/why-i-love-vintage Vintage has been one of the dominant trends in fashion for at least the last five years now. Other fads come and go, but vintage endures. For some it’s part of a passion for music from a different era — see ’50s rock’n’roll stylings or ’40s swing cool. For others, it’s a financial necessity or a political statement. For a few it’s escapism, a reaction against the modern world. Substance asked London’s vintage fans what it means to them... Steven Philips, founder of Rellik, one of London’s first vintage boutiques,  reckons that these days people buy vintage for different reasons than they did ten years ago. “People are a lot more label conscious,” he explains. “In the ’80s a lot of the big fashion houses were out of vogue. Lacroix and Yves Saint Laurent were for women in Knightsbridge, but you look at kids today and they’ve all got an Yves Saint Laurent brooch or Chanel scarf. You wouldn’t see that back then. It’s all about getting something different rather than something from Topshop that you know you’re going to see eight other people wearing. That will never go away, the joy people get for finding something that they know they’re never gonna get one anywhere else. But I think vintage is an over used term. People are looking for a quality item, something different. Regardless of where it came from.”   That’s something that Alistair Maddox, manager of Broadway Market, one of London’s top street markets, would certainly agree with. “It’s more about the end product. It doesn’t bother me where it comes from. If you go for a classic look, then it lasts through the ages.” Alistair wears a new suit, bought for £50 in Spain, but the traditional cut means he can dress it in all manner of ways. Here, vintage brogues from Paul Goby’s market stall, his own grandfather’s shirt and a tie his mum bought complete the look.              Old Hat, a vintage menswear specialist in Fulham               Estonian menswear designer Kristian Steinberg mixes his own designs with a vintage jacket for a great example of how vintage can casually add another layer to an easy contemporary look. “I like vintage because of the better craftsmanship,” Kristian says.   Paul Tiernan is the founder of Savvy Row, an online emporium specialising in second-hand Savile Row suits. Discovering his father’s old suits during a clear out one day started a passion for traditionally tailored suits that turned into a business when his own collection got out of hand. “When you look at these things you start to realise the tremendous workmanship and quality that’s in them,” says Paul. “They have a character that mass production just can’t replicate -the handmade detailing. These days, a suit can be made in 90 seconds, something like that. And there’s probably some accountant calling the shots, so there’s just no time for detailing. I thought these suits are wonderful things and where do we get some more. I think for a lot of people, a suit that would normally cost four figures to buy new, they can buy from us at a fraction of the price. Have a few alterations done by their own tailor and they’ve got a beautiful suit that’s been hand made, and you know, it fits them perfectly. They just couldn’t do it otherwise. Some of the suits we find from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, they’ll do the same number of years again  because they were put together properly and they were put together generously, in that you can open up the seams and make them a little bit bigger if you need to. They were made with that spare material. You don’t need to be fully kitted out though. You know, mix and match. Sometimes I see outfits out that are really contemporary pieces matched with a really distinctive vintage piece. It might be a jacket or even just a waistcoat that can really set off a modern outfit.”   Photographer Tem Stills got into wearing vintage clothing through working on market stalls himself. He discovered a whole world of style you can gain from a few unusual pieces. Wearing vintage glasses with shade attachments, hat, gloves and jacket for a really individual look. You can’t get that on the high street.   Harry, Matt and Nick, young musicians from the band Flamingo Drive and are clearly inspired by the possibilities of vintage. “There’s so much history to exploit in vintage clothing,” says Matt. “It’s definitely about the music too. Mens high street clothing is awful and embarrassing.”  All pick up pieces from Ebay, markets and even skips.   Playwright and novelist Josh Marsh wears a second hand Parker that shows a really simple way to get a strong look. Josh says he goes for vintage, or second hand as he calls it, mainly because it’s cheaper. “Plus I really don’t like half the junk on the high street. And it’s ridiculous, if you think about it, the amount of money and everything that goes into labels.”   Text: Polly Braithwaite All Street Portraits: Alexander Sebley Substance 2011-06-21 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/74/the-new-drugs-trade-part-1 When 26-year-old Joe gets home from work at one of the world’s biggest banks in the City of London, he rolls up the sleeve of his designer shirt, goes to the bathroom and shoots a dose of morphine imported illegally from a crooked pharmacist in the Far East. Then he gets a white packet from his stash in the kitchen and shows off a baggy with white powder inside. It’s a compound called 5-MeO-DALT, a psychedelic with almost no history of human consumption, bought from the Internet. It’s a research chemical, which means that it’s perfectly legal to buy and sell, as long as it’s not marketed as being for human consumption. “It’s the cousin of the gym teacher who fucked LSD, rather than a sibling,” he says.   Forty years after the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971 was passed in the UK and a year after the last drug to be classified, Mephedrone, was banned, people are still trying, and mostly succeeding, to get high. While illegal street drugs still have millions of users a year, an increasing number of people are staying ahead of the law by ordering new and obscure drugs, mostly ‘research chemicals’, from the Internet. They can be found on sites like Disco Food Store or Wide Mouth Frog, and like Mephedrone, they’re cheap and posted to your house. The legal stimulants they sell now are either known by their chemical names like MDAI and 5MeO-DALT, or they’ve got a name like Ivory Wave, Benzo Fury or now get this: Flephedrone.   Mephedrone was the first Internet drug to break into mainstream society around 2008, when it became the legal alternative to cocaine and ecstasy. It cost about a quarter of the price, usually about £10 a gram, and was marketed as ‘plant food’ on websites. It quickly became as popular as its illegal cousins. The fact that it could be ordered from the Internet meant that even school kids were ordering it using their parents’ credit cards and getting off their tits in the playground. They didn’t need to trawl a council estate looking for a dealer. They used Google.   When the tabloids found out about it, they started a hysterical campaign against the new powdered menace to society. Every day there were stories about the dangers of this new designer drug that was killing people who took it. Some of them were plain ludicrous, like the Sun’s memorable “Meow-meow drug teen ripped his scrotum off,” and most were based on distorted or fictional versions of events. The story about the guy who ripped his scrotum off was based on a joke posted on an Internet message board. The cases of death by Mephedrone were found to be misleading, since the fatalities had been caused by a mixture of Mephedrone and copious amounts of other drugs. But despite the government’s drugs adviser Professor David Nutt warning that there should be a scientific consultation before implementing a ban, it was made illegal with widespread support from society.   But there are still plenty of drugs not covered by the Misuse Of Drugs Act that do similar things to the illegal ones. Ivory Wave, MDAI and NRG-2 for instance—which are similar to Mephedrone—have already become pretty popular at parties. And there are loads of others whose effects were largely unknown five years ago, and have almost no history of human consumption. It’s not as though people are snorting totally unknown white powders with no idea what the effects are going to be, because you only need a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry to analyse the chemical structure of a compound like MDMA and look for something similar. For example, MDAI is chemically similar to MDMA, so it doesn’t take a chemist to work out what it’s going to do. The same applies to another legal research chemical called Dimethocaine. The name sounds similar to cocaine, as is the structure, and so are the effects.  Substance 2011-06-18 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/70/metafictional-titty-pinchers Jump aboard the narrative freak train, folks. Tickets are selling out fast, because the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle awards have been awarded to Jennifer Egan for her really cool novel, A Visit From The Goon Squad. As the New York Times review says: “Is there anything Egan can’t do in this mash-up of forms? Write successfully in the second person? Check. Parody celebrity journalism and David Foster Wallace at the same time? Check. Make a moving narrative out of a PowerPoint presentation? Check. Write about a cokehead music producer who demands oral sex from his teenage girlfriend during her friends’ band’s performance? Check. Narrate another chapter from the perspective of the above girlfriend’s best friend, standing at the same performance on the other side of said producer? Check. Compose a futuristic vision of New York? Check.” Mind-altering fiction is hardly a recent phenomenon. Its heyday—if we’re not counting the emergence of the very first novels, or the modernist explosion of the early 20th Century that were revolutionary in their own right—was around the cultural insurgency of the 1960s, when Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and William Gaddis were getting readers strung out on intensely weird narrative trips. In an essay for the Atlantic, Barth defended his and his fellow outlaws’ approach to writing by maiming the tradition of literary realism, where the construct of the novel goes unquestioned. Realism was all “used up,” he said. Since then, we’ve had a steady supply of dealers willing to provide us with the goods to challenge our idea of what fiction can be, from the Americans Don Delillo and Paul Auster to the Brits B.S. Johnson and Alasdair Grey, and foreign pushers like W.G. Sebald, J.M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul. Junkies for innovation now have more intoxicating works available for ingestion and the tabs have never been more potent. If you’re the kind of reader who likes to think of periods, eras and generations as being particularly precious metal-like, you may wish to consider the period of the last twelve months or so as golden. Here’s why. The Sixties vanguard was always an orgy of clever ideas and “Look Ma, no hands” trickery. But the novels of Pynchon and Gaddis were often emotionally empty. So no author in the last twenty years has changed the way we view fiction quite as spectacularly as David Foster Wallace, the self-confessed post-modernist who writes about human feelings. His posthumous novel, The Pale King, was unleashed this year. This is the Wallace, of course, who wrote a novella about a man who shits fully formed pieces of sculpture; the author who, in 1996, dragged the novel into the computer generation with his thousand-page acid trip of footnotes, acronyms and three-hundred-word sentences—the wondrous and beguiling Infinite Jest.   Substance 2011-06-12 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/music/67/new-generation-guerilla-gigs Pop-ups have penetrated every aspect of modern life. Restaurants. Shops. Hotels. Those annoying ads on the internet. They’re everywhere. Music, too.  London three-piece Real Fur have applied the pop-up concept to gigging. Over the last six months they’ve earned a name for themselves by playing a series of live shows in launderettes. They call the peripatetic night Safari Funk. It started in their local washateria in London’s East End. Since then they’ve played a national tour of launderettes, travelling as far as Edinburgh and Glasgow. Safari Funk 4 from Real Fur There’s a long tradition of clubs and gigs in unlikely locations going back to the M25 orbital raves in 1988 and The Beatles playing their last ever gig on a Savile Row roof top in 1969.    But Real Fur are more like an echo of the guerilla gig fad from 2004, which saw The Others playing  Great Portland Street station on the London underground and, in one memorable instance, The Libertines performing an early gig at an old people’s home. However, Real Fur frontman Leo Duncan says the inspiration for their launderette idea is in fact much more prosaic. Apparently, it came from their local launderette owner, who “needed cheering up”.   Real Fur formed a year ago after meeting at a climbing club and discovering that they shared similar taste in music. Their debut single, Animal, out next week, is a marriage of jaunty, Afro-inspired guitars and Duncan’s vaulting vocals. It sounds not dissimilar to a British Vampire Weekend.   But it’s the gigs in launderettes that has attracted attention from the national press. Talking about the recent launderette tour, Duncan says: “It was brilliant. It’s safe to say that we didn’t know how it was going to go when we set off, but we got a great response from everyone involved. Both Scottish gigs at the end of the tour were memorable. In Glasgow someone thought they’d turned on the mains switch, but actually they’d turned on the gas instead. We had a few frantic minutes until that was resolved. It turned out wild after that. I think it was the relief. Edinburgh the night after was great too. I saw someone stage dive off a washing machine, which was a rewarding sight.”    The key to a successful pop-up is to ensure the content is as memorable as the mode of delivery. Duncan isn’t worried that the gimmick might overshadow his band’s music. “No, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he says, firmly. “In fact, we’d love to do it again and will head to any launderette who wants us around the country. Definitely feel we\'ve got more launderettes left in us.”   Coming to a coin-op near you soon.   Text: AR Love     Substance 2011-06-01 http://www.substance.tv/magazine/life/66/why-you-dont-own-your-mp3s In 2009, Amazon went into customers’ Kindles and remotely deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm bought from the site. The editions of the books sold had copyright issues and should never have been on sale to begin with. But if the customers had bought physical copies from a book shop, the shop wouldn’t have been allowed to break into their homes to retrieve the books, like when publishers tried to recall first editions of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom last year because they had accidentally printed an early draft full of errors.  Amazon can't delete Kindle content at any time...     In the case of the Orwell titles, the offending works were removed without permission, and an explanation arrived only after the fact. “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased,” said Charles Slater, one of the customers whose copy of 1984 disappeared. Afterwards, Amazon promised never to do it again, but that doesn’t change the fact that they could if they wanted to.    When you don’t own a physical copy of a product, you don’t really own anything. You’re in possession of pure intellectual property (IP for short) and that IP does not belong to you. It belongs to the license holder and they can legally take it back whenever they wish. Electronic devices like the Kindle, Nook and iPhone are all subject to invasions like the one described above, although it’s an invasion in a moral rather than a legal sense, since Amazon did nothing illegal.    If you have a magazine subscription on your Kindle and you cancel that subscription, you lose all the back issues you paid for. So what did you pay for? You paid for a finite loan agreement that allows you to access the IP on your device as long as the owner continues to agree to the loan.    Substance 2011-05-26