A fan of such diverse artists as Jill Scott, Etta James, Billy Bragg, Peggy Lee, Jeff Buckley and The Cure, Adele’s soul-tinged songs of love’s lost and memories made are set to resonate with all who hear them.

“I’ve got no problem explaining what my lyrics are about,” ADELE says. “I really like poetry: I’m not very good at reading it, but I love writing it. Singers like Jill Scott and Karen Dalton are amazing; proper poets.”

“My debut album is about being between 18 and 19; about love,” she continues. “‘Daydreamer’ is about this boy I was in love with, like proper in love with. He was bi and I couldn’t deal with that. All the things I wanted from my boyfriend, he was never going to be. I get really jealous anyway, so I couldn’t fight with girls and boys. It’s quite a sad album, [with songs about] being cheated on and not getting what you want”.

“As soon as I got a microphone in my hand, when I was about 14, I realised I wanted to do this,” she says. “Most people don’t like the way their voice sounds when it’s recorded. I was just so excited by the whole thing that I wasn’t bothered what it sounded like.”

A fan of such diverse artists as Jill Scott, Etta James, Billy Bragg, Peggy Lee, Jeff Buckley and The Cure, Adele’s soul-tinged songs of love’s lost and memories made are set to resonate with all who hear them.

“I’ve got no problem explaining what my lyrics are about,” ADELE says. “I really like poetry: I’m not very good at reading it, but I love writing it. Singers like Jill Scott and Karen Dalton are amazing; proper poets.”

“My debut album is about being between 18 and 19; about love,” she continues. “‘Daydreamer’ is about this boy I was in love with, like proper in love with. He was bi and I couldn’t deal with that. All the things I wanted from my boyfriend, he was never going to be. I get really jealous anyway, so I couldn’t fight with girls and boys. It’s quite a sad album, [with songs about] being cheated on and not getting what you want”.

The title is taken from a lyric in “Blankets of Sorrow,” the elegiac, wistful ballad that closes the album and perfectly encapsulates the theme that runs through So that you might hear me: the need to be heard, acknowledged, understood. That brief, simple sentiment that underpins all of the songs on the album expresses a universal desire that so often goes unspoken, but runs deep within us all -- the primal, fundamental need for meaningful human connection.

“To me, it’s about trying to communicate with someone and feeling like you can’t reach them anymore” says Andrew. “That deeply resonated with me. Unwittingly, it became a theme of the album.”

So that you might hear me is the follow-up to Bear’s Den’s, UK silver-selling debut, Islands, which earned them an Ivor Novello nomination in the UK and a devoted following worldwide, and 2016’s more expansive Red Earth & Pouring Rain, which went Top 10 across Europe. 2017 saw the band cap four, non-stop years on the road with the largest headline shows to date, from sold-out tours of the States to a 7000-capacity arena in Belgium, and sold-out hometown shows at London’s iconic Brixton Academy and the Hammersmith Apollo.

The speed and scale of their success meant that Bear’s Den hadn’t taken a break since forming in 2012 – Red Earth & Pouring Rain was written in just three weeks squeezed in between tours and main stage festival slots at the likes of Pukkelpop and Lollapalooza Paris. Last year, finally, they took a step back to focus on their future.

For the first time, Andrew and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Jones had their own studio, a cubby called Josiah Booth Studios next to The Church Studios in north London, where they could leave their instruments plugged in and come and go as they pleased. Musically, there were no self-imposed constraints. Nor was there a time frame.

Both had a hankering to incorporate piano and more electronic instruments into their sound. Kev began playing with ideas on piano and drum machines while Andrew alone went to a cottage in a remote part of the English countryside with a guitar and started scribbling lyrics.

“In the past, I’ve always tried to understand what I’m writing about,” says Andrew. “This time, lyrics came from a more subconscious place. Like they were things I needed to say and I worked back from there. I’m inspired by people who wrote as though they were trying to figure out their own feelings as much as explain them to anyone else. The aim was to be more honest and instinctive, like when you blurt something out and can’t take it back, so you have to deal with it.”

Glorious opener “Hiding Bottles” builds in to their rockiest song to date, but is also doused in electronics. The idea for the song began with a synth pad and the lyric “Hiding bottles in the cold blue light.” Like several of the songs, it turned out to be about Andrew’s relationship with a close family member with an alcohol addiction and his attempts to address it.

“It was a situation that I could file away while we were on tour,” says Andrew, “but back home, I had to confront. The lyrics recall real conversations, trying to reach and help someone. It’s also about recognising what you can and can’t change, however hard you try.”

The first single “Fuel On The Fire” blossoms from the throb of drum machine beats in to an orchestral beauty. “Laurel Wreath” is a majestic track built on piano with electric guitars and synths that shimmer like strings. Both the haunting “Fossils” and the deeply moving “Crow” fuse acoustic instruments and electronics so organically it seems daft to distinguish between them.

“I love how the boundaries between genres have gone in the age of streaming,” says Andrew. “No one listens to music in boxes anymore, so why make it like that? Our songs incorporate all sorts of sounds, but not in a pre-ordained way. We could start with a weird pocket synth sound or Kev playing a creaky old upright piano. We just tried to follow our collaborative intuition and go where each song suggested.”

The result is a record that is both bold and exposed, at once intimate and widescreen. While the music leads the listener down different paths, the lyrics unfold as though revealing secrets, each line littered with clues.

Lyrically, “Crow” was inspired by Max Porter’s award-winning, 2016 novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers while “Not Every River,” the album’s short, self-produced shimmering centrepiece, is about acceptance – or as Andrew puts it, “being okay with what’s not okay”.

Bewitching album closer “Blankets Of Sorrow” turns to nature to explore familial love and ends with Andrew sighing that tweaked album title over acoustic guitar.

“We decided pretty early that the title should be: So that you might hear me” he explains. “We changed the ‘will’ in the title for ‘might’ to acknowledge a sense of hope. The implication being that situations can change, particularly if you talk about them.”

So that you might hear me was demoed at Josiah Booth Studios and recorded at several studios in Seattle over the course of seven weeks with the producer Phil Ek (The Shins, Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty).

“Kev and I are both huge fans of The Shins – their early records helped teach us how to write songs,” says Andrew. “We’d never met Phil, but it was our dream to work with him so we sent him our demos and, luckily, he loved them. Working with him in Seattle was a deeply rewarding and massively educational experience.”

Bear’s Den’s four-man touring band also appear on the album, joining them in Seattle throughout the recording to beef up the songs with brass, drums, electric guitar and more electronics.

“The album has grown and evolved from all of the processes we went through. Every step of the way, it has been instinctive, collaborative and pushed us both lyrically and musically. From writing the songs to Kev and I working on the songs together in the church, working through them as a band together with Phil in Seattle and even ultimately mixing with Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, The National) in London. Each separate process shaped and informed the album enormously.”

“The album started out as an attempt at trying to communicate with someone honestly. Our thoughts are not all rational, not all considered or tied up with ribbons and bows. This album is an attempt to reveal the honest and difficult challenge of communicating with anyone that you really care about.

“We’re immensely proud of it and hugely excited to share it with people.”

Paul Giamatti and Peter Tolan, “Outsiders” stars David Morse (“Treme,” “Hurt Locker”), Ryan Hurst (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Bates Motel) and Joe Anderson (“The Divide,” “Across the Universe”) and tells the story of the Farrells – a family of outsiders who live off the grid and above the law on their mountaintop homestead.

The Ben Miller Band are currently out on the road debuting their revamped line-up which recently expanded to a foursome following the departure of founding member Doug Dicharry. Multi-instrumentalists Smilin’ Bob Lewis and Rachel Ammons have officially joined the band where they bring an arsenal of instruments to the fold including fiddle, slide guitar, dobro, dulcimer, keyboards, mandolin, banjo, bass and harmonica and in Ammon’s case, an electric cactus, and inject the band with a whole new, exciting dynamic. When we thought of what the future might bring and how to fill the shoes left by Doug’s departure, my very first thought was of one of my favorite bands in the world, Tyrannosaurus Chicken,” says Ben Miller. “Smilin’ Bob and Rachel are two of the most gifted musicians I have ever met and, in my opinion, they make some of the most original and authentic American music being made today. Over the years, we have shared stages many times with them and jammed together every chance we had. There was always a strange and wonderful alchemy that came from our two groups mixing, it felt effortless and right. So, we called them with our idea of joining forces. After some careful deliberation we all came to the conclusion that the potential was so far off the charts that if we didn’t do it we’d probably always wonder what might have been. This is a very big step forward for all involved and we wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t fully believe that what we have put together is a very, very special band. So, here’s to the future, 2016 is gonna be a big one.”

The Ben Miller Band has not stopped touring since the August 2014 release of their acclaimed sophomore album, Any Way, Shape Or Form. In addition to a slew of festivals they have become ZZ Top’s go-to opening act and have opened for the blues rock giants all across the U.S. and Europe. In April, the foursome will tour Canada with George Thorogood. They will team up with JJ Grey and Mofro for a string of dates in May.

Produced by Vance Powell (Jack White, Wanda Jackson, Kings of Leon), Any Way, Shape Or Form, is an exhilarating listen that’s garnered the band considerable praise and has raised the their profile from grassroots DIY group to internationally touring sensation. Blurt declared: “As its name suggests, Any Way, Shape Or Form is a tidy mishmash of blustery boogie, down home designs and a well-heeled backwoods stomps...with a fun and frivolous outlook to boot. Oh, and it also rocks like hell.” Twang Nation hailed the album as a “work of considerable scope executed into a whole of rambunctious cohesion,” while Saving Country Music eloquently gushed: “Procuring the foundation for their music from the pre-war and Delta blues, and jug and string bands of the deep South, their amorphous sound is like a séance for the creaky bones of past generations to animate back to life from the inalienable pull of an infectious groove.”

‘The Weight Of Your Love’, Editors fourth studio album and the first to feature new members Justin Lockey and Elliott Williams is, according to lead singer and songwriter Tom Smith, ‘a band record, a musical record, a rock record with a foot in that alt-rock / americana world’. Inspired by Scott Litt’s work with REM amongst others and built around a live performance approach to recording, the album contains the most strident and direct Editors songs to date. With a lyrical fascination with love in all its myriad forms, ‘whether romantic or break-up or creepy or even stalkey love’ (Tom again) and recorded in Nashville at Blackbird Studio by producer Jacquire King (Tom Waits, etc), ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ represents a new chapter for the band in more than one way.

Cast your mind back to the close of 2010. Editors had just finished another round of touring and promotion in support of their third album, 2009’s ‘In This Light And On This Evening’. Six years on from their multi-platinum debut ‘The Back Room’, the band had seen many of their contemporaries disappear from view whilst steadily building themselves into one of Europe’s biggest bands. That third album debuted at Number One in the UK charts as had its predecessor, ‘An End Has A Start’ and spawned a continent wide hit in the form of ‘Papillon’, a thunderous electro rock tune destined to force arms into the air at festivals across the continent and the first non-domestic single to debut at Number One in the Belgian singles charts where the band are arguably the biggest name in the rock world.

Never a band to stop, the four reconvened in London to begin work with producer Flood on the songs that Tom Smith had been developing during that campaign for the next album. And then, slowly but inextricably, the wheels came off. The first week in the studio was spent fixing broken equipment, three rehearsal sessions came and went with declining results and Editors found themselves sliding from the peak of achievement into a trough of doubt:

‘It dawns on you slowly, sickeningly, that it’s not good enough. For the three of us, for me and Russ and Ed it didn’t feel like the songs were in the right place and they weren’t what we wanted to do’ TOM SMITH

Editors had been together for over a decade, first as friends at college, then Snowfield and then as Editors. The bonds between the quartet transcended the success of the band and encompassed parents and friends intermingled over that decade, their early days camping on their manager’s floors and working in call centres to keep the band solvent through to international success and two members relocating to New York. It wasn’t easy but, ultimately, as Ed Lay says ‘we were still mates but our life in the band was based on our music’. Simply put, the realisation dawned that Tom, Russ and Ed wanted to take the band in a direction that Chris didn’t want to take, and that if the next step wasn’t taken there would be no more Editors records. Chris Urbanowicz, founding member and iconic guitarist was asked to leave the band.

As if losing a founder member, Tom likens it to ‘losing a limb’, wasn’t enough, Editors were booked to headline Belgium’s Werchter Festival three months from that moment, their biggest ever show to 85,000 people. You can possibly read the beginning of the ‘new’ Editors in what happened next.

‘My gut was to cancel it’ Tom states directly, conversely Ed went the other way; ‘It was a little bit of a leap of faith but I was confident we could make it work’. Which left Russ with the casting vote and he went with Ed. Werchter was on and the challenge from here was how it would happen. But whatever happened now, Editors would continue. For now, filling a field with sound was top priority.

Enter Justin Lockey. Former guitarist with Your Code Name Is:Milo, film maker, Krautrock enthusiast and described by Flood, who suggested him to the band, as ‘a positive personality’. One email later and he was coming to London for his first rehearsal, an experience that he found somewhat odd to say the least.

‘It was the weirdest thing I have ever done. I’ve never played anyone else’s song in full, I never had that culture of covering songs. But, it was quite liberating. I was more concerned about the fans than the band, people waiting for you to fuck it up’.

To make things even weirder, that first rehearsal was minus Tom, absent with tonsillitis but, for Ed, that may have had its benefits, the three choosing to have a go at a new song alongside the old favourites. ‘It was a weird situation but we clicked. We worked on ‘Sugar’ that first day and Justin immediately impressed me with his ideas’.

All three were conscious of the pressure on Justin and use the phrase ‘replacement Chris’ to jokingly refer to the situation he may have found himself in. Enter Elliott Williams, member of Airship and known to Tom, Ed and Russ through their shared management. Alongside taking the pressure off Justin, adding a second multi-instrumentalist made sense as Tom explains; ‘it was big shows and big stages and it felt right to have a more traditional rock set up, a more musical environment that didn’t rely on tapes and synths’. Now Editors were five and, following an intensive period of rehearsal, ready for Werchter.

No discussion of where Editors are now can underestimate the importance of that performance on June 30th 2012. All five regard it as a pivotal point for this album, Tom can only shake his head and say it was ‘something else’ whilst Justin says ‘I came offstage at Werchter and wanted to do more shows straight away’. In many ways, ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ was born alongside a new Editors that night. The big rock record was on, the band were set.

This new Editors were fizzing with ideas, the new members were not differentiated from the old, suggestions and parts came from all members from the off. Progress from here was swift and the new band found new ways to work, as Russ explains in relation to the new guys; ‘we looked for their suggestions, there was nothing guarded about it’, whilst Justin found the immediacy of the band bonding thrilling; ‘they pushed me to play in a way that I hadn’t done before, I learnt a lot from them and I think they really enjoyed the feeling of what it’s like to be in a band.’ This bonding increased with the choice of Jacquire King as producer and was cemented when he suggested recording at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, meaning the new Editors were destined to spend six weeks sharing a house and a daily studio commute in the early months of 2013. Those journeys were soundtracked by US rock radio, what Tom describes as ‘a lot of AC/DC and Van Halen but also The Stones and Beatles’, classic bands who made classic records totally in keeping with the vibe that was gradually playing out in the studio as ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ came together in an astonishingly short time.

The experiences of Nashville go beyond a radio soundtrack in terms of influence on the record. Russ believes that ‘the space really helped with everything. As soon as you get there you realise it’s a driving city and that feeling of space really seeped into the album’ ‘, for Ed, the communality of Editors existence changed his role in the band radically:

‘Everybody felt freer to speak their mind about parts. I didn’t feel that comfortable previously but recording this album I felt a fully-fledged contributing member of the band.’

The spirit of freeness and abandon flowed from the first take to the final wrap. Across the album are a series of ‘news’ for Editors. Tom’s falsetto on ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’ is his first, reclaiming a song he wrote following a challenge from his former A & R man to make a song for an X Factor contestant. He can’t help but smile as he explains how he came to keep it, ‘my A &R got fired, the X Factor singer got dropped and we decided to keep it. I think it’s one of the best things we’ve done’. Horns make an appearance on an Editors record for the first time, Elliott’s ‘amazing´ (the other four) singing voice gave Tom a melodic counterpoint, best displayed on ‘Formaldehyde’ whilst ‘The Phone Book’ suited just an acoustic guitar so that’s what it got. As Tom notes ‘I have a deep love of those big rock records that are straightforward and we really embraced that throughout’.

Even the problems were becoming positives. ‘Nothing’, a track that the band had debuted at their Birmingham fanclub shows pre Werchter had been earmarked as a potential single but recording it was proving tricky to say the least. ‘It sounded like a bad fight in an Irish Bar’, Russ deadpans of the waltz time track. A suggestion to tap up Clint Mansell, the Grammy award winning ‘Black Swan’ soundtrack man and, co-incidentally, native Brummie, was embraced with open arms in this sense of new possibilities and his reworking of the track into a stately centrepiece for the album once again reinforces the changes that have been wrought by this band in their approach to their music in the last year. As Ed notes, previously such a thing would have ‘been done reluctantly, we’d have been uncomfortable with it’ whereas now, for the band and in Russ’s words ‘the more I listen to it the more I get out of it, it’s a brave move and this record has been all about that’.

Which pretty much sums it up. A brave move, more a succession of brave moves, the kind of moves that bands increasingly find hard to make in modern times. Editors have become five but, more than that, they have rediscovered being a band. All the members continually refer to ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ as the product of a band, as a band record. For Tom Smith ‘it feels like we’re more sure of ourselves, more muscular. The record feels untouchable at times, I’m really quite surprised at what we’ve achieved.’. In the spirit of the new Editors, the democracy of old and new let’s leave the final word on the album to the new boys though: to Justin and Elliot, who uniquely can look within and without for the time being:

‘We have definitely bonded into a band, maybe more than we expected. Recording the album there were no egos around, all we wanted to do was help Tom deliver those songs.’

ELLIOTT WILLIAMS

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in a band that is this excited about what they have done. You start thinking, what will come from this, the progression that is possible. They lost a member who was integral to their signature sound and they’ve come back twice as big. I can’t wait to get out and play it live. We want to take the face off everyone who is watching.’

JUSTIN LOCKEY

EDITORS ARE

Tom Smith – vocals, guitar, piano

Russell Leetch – bass, keyboards

Ed Lay – drums, percussion

Justin Lockey – guitars, keyboards, films

Elliott Williams – guitars, keyboards, vocals

For one thing, they only began as a band when their sonic experiments in improvising three-minute pop songs - verses and choruses, yes, melody and arrangements, no - exploded into something deeper and darker.

They’re as comfortable discussing Guy Debord and Arthur Schopenhauer as they are John Coltrane and Black Sabbath. Their Twitter feed thrums with hymns to Mei Leaf tea and conscientious vegan messaging alongside plugs for Notorious B.I.G. and tributes to legendary jazz-funk drummer Alphonse Mouzon.

Will Ritson (vocals, lyrics) is a visual artist, writer and poet and has his own book publishing company. Multi-instrumentalist Matt Ritson (keys) is a stellar photographer. Jonny Tams (bass) spent his teens fiddling with broken synths before going on to work with producers like Spike Stent and Stephen Street, as well as artists including Björk and Russell Haswell. Kai Akinde-Hummel (drums) is fluent in three languages, and his grandfather was part of Nigerian trumpeter Dr Victor Olaiya’s band, the same one Fela Kuti played with. Sash Lewis (synths) has patched modular synths with the likes of Four Tet, Caribou and Floating Points, and has, as they say, “a history…”

As Formation, they make a noise that is the single most explosive and joyously angry thing you’ll hear for a long time. So that’s numerous remarkable things already and we haven’t even mentioned Yes or the Wu-Tang Clan yet.

Brothers Will and Matt grew up in a South West London household where one parent loved Northern Soul, disco and funk while the other loved choral music, opera and Queen. For seven years, Will and Matt sang in church choirs four times a week – church being a venue they appreciated more for its acoustics than its message.

In his youth, Jonny worked in a record store in Wimbledon, recommending classic albums that would inspire the brothers. Later the three would work in a warehouse together, sucking down every great record they could squeeze onto the shared iPod, quietly brewing the first Formation EPs.

Meanwhile, Kai shared the brothers’ orchestral upbringing, playing with orchestras and jazz bands, sporadically working on projects with Matt, until he was drafted into the band while still living in Spain. Sash was sharing studio space with Jonny and joined the live set-up to “tune” the synths before a more serious involvement with the band was born.

A local scheme - the Merton Music Foundation - allowed the brothers to rent affordable instruments and so drums, clarinets and saxophones entered the house at an early age. Up in Camden, Kai was already playing in - and touring Europe with - orchestras and jazz bands.

“Playing in orchestras and in churches opened us up to so much more music,” Kai nods. “It was those places that taught us how to communicate.”

Others took a less conventional approach. Jonny, whose young mind was being blown by early music software, would record things falling over until he’d perfected the art. Meanwhile Sash would sit around in his mate Kieran Hebden’s bedroom, discovering samplers and drum loops as “pure magic” unfolded.

In their early teens, the boys soaked up Pink Floyd, Free, Yes and Jimi Hendrix. And it’s here we meet the very heart of Formation: on the left; groove, on the right, power; and in the centre, know-how. And while metal helped shaped them as teenagers, you’ll not hear that influence on Look at The Powerful People as the record doesn’t feature a single guitar. What you will hear is the bass as lead, percussion as lead, drums as lead, vocals as lead, the groove as lead – everything where it’s needed.

And now there’s an album - named after Gino Vanelli’s 1974 pop-soul masterpiece. Co-produced by the fast-rising Adele and The Strokes engineer Ben Baptie and genre-defining house producer and DJ Leon Vynehall, Look At The Powerful People shares the same redefining air that lit-up Andrew Weatherall’s work on Screamadelica. And while Look at The Powerful People might appear to be flashing its arse at Trump and May, it’s about flipping that drive around to create a gang with an inner power.

“People have a collective power,” Kai says. “We’ve always been on the fringes. We’re misfits, never a member of any scene. So we’ve built our own gang and if people want to join us they can.”

Take “Back Then,” a euphoric ball of heat and fire, bejewelled by Jonny’s production skills, bouncing on a thick Motown-like groove. It skirts time-wasting nostalgia but still thrills to the memories of being care-free enough to spend weeks building skate-ramps and stealing trolleys. “Buy and Sell” is sheer aggression, a fantastically nasty, jagged piece of commentary tackling consumerism and advertising.

“Drugs” pulses wildly, it’s not an anti-intoxicant song as such, more of a be-aware-of-what-you’re-doing song. Elsewhere, “A Friend” is a lunatic pop blast, like a psychedelic Killers stripped of their showbiz glitter and jacked up on cheap coffee and cigarettes.

If any song were to sum this brilliant group up it would be “On The Board”. It’s actually about chess, which puts it in a small group with “Your Move” by Yes and the Wu-Tang’s “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’”.

“Us, Yes and Wu-Tang,” smiles Will. “That’s the magic pyramid of Formation! The first five Yes albums and the first three Wu Tang albums - I could throw everything else away. It doesn’t get more ‘us’ than “On The Board”. I wanted to make a tune someone else might sample - and this might be the one…”

Formation are something else. Something real. Something you can trust. They bleed Stax and Curtis Mayfield, Pantera and Sly Stone, Gil Scott Heron and Vaughan Williams. They’re built on the bones of visionary musicians and the desire to connect that’s within us all. Look at The Powerful People is “a diverse record from diverse people for a diverse crowd,” Matt says, summing it up to perfection. 2017 just got a whole lot brighter.

His first release, Lend Me Your Skin, a collection of songs inspired by the early 90s guitar sound of Pixies and Nirvana was self-recorded in Falmouth and became the catalyst for his relocation. Exploring the emotional disconnect and emptiness of early adult life, the EP; particularly the debut single ‘ Anxious?’ gained a lot of traction, attracted new audiences and press plaudits.

Gillbanks continued to gain traction in 2016 with his London shows, becoming known for his noisy, dynamic live sound. Communion Records released ‘Childhood’ which was highly received and in turn helped secure shows at The Great Escape, Field Day, Glastonbury, and Citadel.

'Y Dydd Olaf' has gained critical acclaim across the board, it also won both the Welsh Music Prize 2015 and Welsh Album of the Year at the National Eisteddfod in Meifod in 2015. Gwenno is a native Welsh and Cornish speaker and it’s this along with co-producing and co-hosting Welsh language show Cam O’r Tywyllwch (A Step Away From The Darkness) with Peski for Radio Cardiff and more recently, Resonance FM, that has led her to create music that translates her internationalist influences into layered, home-fi keyboard sounds wrapped in echoed vocals and musique concrète-inspired beats.

Meeting up to help finish off each other’s songs, sometimes they would become cavernous rhythms and more than often the pair would record just for the hell of it. (On one occasion the two were purported to have stayed up recording the sound of hair swishing across a microphone).

Fusing the elements of disparate musics, the vocal sweetness of Laurel Canyon, Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston and the modern electronic space of the past 40 years, in their first recording ‘Come Save Me’ they created a contemporary psychedelia, with the beauty and simplicity of classic sun-soaked beach pop.

Just weeks after putting it online, it had heavy airplay on Australian radio and a seven inch release on new label The Blue Rider, receiving a positive reaction to the mix of old & new, the uninhibited rhythm and a song rooted in celebrating sadness, its heavenly harmonies jilted by a lyric informing how leaving a loved one can really expose how lonely love really is.

“You can’t trick people in to liking a song” says Gab “We knew we liked it and that we had a really good time making it”.

Understanding that what they had was important and needed to be documented, they decamped to a friend’s studio in France in the summer of 2012 to record their debut album - just the two of them in an empty farm two hours south of Paris, with an 808, a Fender jaguar, a laptop & a pair of vintage Neve console channels.

Their time at La Briche echoes like a strange psychedelic film: cycling in fields of sunflowers, copious amounts of cheese, growing caveman beards and going crazy in the studio. While working they listened to twisted electronica from Liars, Aphex Twin and Autechre. “And when we sat down to dinner we’d listen to Sinatra and Nat King Cole" says Gab.

Meanwhile next door lived a convoy of tradesmen with a thing for hardcore dub…“They were from a scene which is based around homemade soundsystems” says Jono “they take them out in to the middle of nowhere and play literally the hardest most sinister kind of music I’ve ever experienced. It is the weirdest thing in the world”.

The long ways from home helped them to bond and cement their sound and at the same time absorb some of Europe’s cultural and artistic influences from the fierce beats of Berlin’s Berghain to London’s most interesting corners. A mission to re-create a two man wall of sound ensued and with help from friends, locals and a pre-historic desk once used by Conny Plank, the pair set about re-inventing the warmth, harmony and audio sunshine they’d hatched back in Australia.

Their collaborators along the way included long-time friend & Warpaint drummer, Stella Mozgawa and renowned producer/mixer, Ewan Pearson, a friend from Berlin, and they love that the songs have travelled (“they followed us around the world” says Jono) and their balance between old and new, the discovery of something vintage alongside future-looking experiments.

“Finding great music from the past is a way of being adventurous” says Jono " It’s that sense of finding something that you feel belongs to just you”

By the dying days of 2012 their time in France had not been ill-spent and a debut album Howlin was recorded and ready to be mixed.

Their first release from these sessions, The Throw, saw them occupying a space where Screamadelica and its wayward children used to live. A joyful seven minutes weaving melodies & beats with the sole purpose of making people move, of throwing caution to the wind & reaching a higher level with a greater purpose, or maybe without one at all, it touched a nerve & helped soundtrack the last few months.

Next single, ‘The Man I Need’ is more introspective, beats minimal and Gab crying “all you say to me, is all you want to see, you’re not the man I need, that’s what you said to me”. Its ten-minute version climaxes with a voodoo drum-breakdown and the instruction “exercise your chemistry”, and was picked up & played in full by Zane Lowe on BBC R1.

Across the album, Howlin's songs are full of classic hooks but often end in dirty clanking breakdowns. Pop songwriting is buried in layers of crunching synths and pedal effects. “How can you look gloomy? When you look so good to me” wonders Gab in 'Uncertainty', repeating “be my light” over Jono’s techno-inspired beat.

Having played a couple of festivals last summer, adding Jack Freeman on bass, they kicked 2013 off back in Australia on the Big Day Out before playing a packed breathless NME show in London, Gab ending up topless, the audience lost in sound & strobes.

Since then they've toured Europe with Foals, and Australia with the xx and will be back in Europe to play more headline dates and festivals across the summer.

The explosion of colour and sound will echo throughout the year, Jagwar Ma is written on the wind, painted on the stars (as someone else once wrote…)

For every sublime, a ridiculous. In the wake of his self-titled debut, James was invited to join a choir including Antony Hegarty, Laurie Anderson and Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt to sing behind Lou Reed at Carnegie Hall for an emotional finale at a Free Tibet benefit, curated by Philip Glass. ‘The reason I still can’t play in mainland China,’ he notes. It was an experience only marred by the toke of a joint handed him from one of the cleverly obnoxious Brooklyn hip-hop trio, Das Racist, before stepping onstage. ‘There I am, my gangly 6’6” self, poking out the back of this ridiculously well-appointed choir and I’m like just feeling so awkward. And paranoid, of course. It was a bit like being in Dad’s Army.’

During the making of The Colour in Anything, James has found himself in other rarefied circles. There have emerged amid the undeniable global musical elite new friends, allies and admirers attracted to his bespoke musical mood, his certainty with sound. His influence has proved legion. There is barely a boy in his bedroom making beats that is not in thrall to some of Blake’s methodology and sound. At the upper musical tier, his music has proven irresistible to the international r&b community who came courting for collaboration.

There was the meeting with Kanye West in Hollywood’s Hidden Hills, for which Blake, not West arrived two hours late (‘they were perhaps a bit too Hidden?’). The LA playback for a new Beyonce record, with the artist’s daughter singing along in approval to a vocal hook of James’ composition (‘Beyonce said “that’s how you know it’s catchy”). There were the hours he poured into sessions for Frank Ocean’s forthcoming opus (‘absolutely the biggest influence on this record’). And the Transatlantic passing back and forth of alchemical music files with his good friend (‘the closest I have to a brother’) Justin Vernon, Bon Iver, which forms The Colour in Anything’s arresting, surprising, rousing, beautifully semi-intelligible centrepiece I Need a Forest Fire (‘even I don’t know what some of the lyrics are’). There were sessions in Rick Rubin’s Zen Malibu retreat, Shangri-La, where James watched with sanguine calm as Rubin spliced together his hours of improvisation, lying on the floor, scratching his beard.

‘It’s gone by in such a flurry that I didn’t sometimes stop to appreciate what was happening to me,’ James says now, looking back on the surreal moments that have punctuated his brilliant musical life. ‘I’ve been around some of the most unbelievable writers and musicians, choreographers and composers. Only now do I feel like I’ve had some of the blindfold taken off me where I can see what actually happened.’ James is a prodigious, gifted musician whose area of speciality – that flirtation point at which club music goes in for the clinch with Classical – has yet to be bound by genre.

The night at The Prince of Wales brought James back down to earth from his wandering musical star. ‘Big sound system in an old room? Boom. It was great.’ They proved cathartic on two counts. Firstly, he was getting toward the disquieting closing stages of finishing a record. It had a title, The Colour in Anything.

The construction of the record, mostly conjured in his South London bedroom studio, was clouded by early ravaging waves of self-doubt. ‘The album is, I guess, about my growth as a person,’ he says. ‘When you come back from a tour, you feel like you no longer have a purpose. There was a period of quite a lot of confusion as to what the fuck my role was. A lot of the stuff I wrote at that point I didn’t use. It wasn’t like happy mistakes. It was more that I really didn’t know what people want. Or I don’t know what I want.’ The Mercury Music Prize for Overgrown which sits on his mantelpiece was a temporary cause for celebration, but sounds like it further exacerbated some initial third album neurosis. ‘I knew there was expectation.’

Then there was the central issue of James himself. Someone told James that the problem with being in the public eye is that you become frozen in time at the moment you step into it. This triggered a further quiet crisis of confidence. Had the touring, the recording, the being at the centre of a creative and commercial process just been about arrested development, after all? The title track alludes directly to this. It is about approaching becoming a man, accepting responsibilities. ‘All I wanted to do was carry you for aching,’ he sings, ‘all I wanted was to mend things that were breaking.’ This is his most personal missive yet, as close to the piano man tradition as he has veered. ‘I struggle to find the colour in anything’ is a heartbreakingly transparent evocation of the blackness of male failure.

The silver lining at the end of a period of rabid self-assessment was the most redemptive of them all: love. ‘I met somebody in the last two years really who completely turned my attitude and general outlook around and essentially made me grow up very fast in a way I hadn’t been made to before.’

James was brought up an only child in Enfield, North London. ‘It’s a solar system in which you are the sun.’ He says he has been useless in relationships before. ‘Very selfish. And allowed to be selfish.’ A new girlfriend began to challenge him to look harder and deeper at his life, to pull him up on failings, to correct himself. ‘In order to keep the person you want to be with, there were a lot of things about me I had to change. I met somebody who I very much appreciate for walking in at that point. Because my life was in a very untended state.’

As the album began to take shape, James Blake found himself asking hard questions of himself, in the company of someone who allowed him to do it. A record of self-reflection, that bridged his interior and exterior lives, about the communication difficulties shared between two people, sorting yourself out, learning to love and about simply growing up took arresting musical shape. The recurrent themes of miscommunication are set out transparently on the poignant album opener, Radio Silence, then further developed on the unlikely jolt of Put That Away and Talk To Me, I Hope My Life and Noise Above Our Heads.

The second byproduct of the Brixton night with 1-800 Dinosaur was more generational, tying to an emerging strain of maleness James directly connects to. A sweating night in a little pub, with banging music across the dysmorphic spectrum of a dance music gradation system in eclectic 21st century free-fall, confirmed to James something he has suspected for a long time among musicians of his ilk. That those experimenting at the outer edges of sound, on that magical hinterland between electronic experimentation and classical composition, have a subdued, sometimes melancholy overtone to their music on account of having missed the joyous mysteries of acid house.

‘As much as that sounds like a joke, I think it’s true,’ he says. ‘I’m gutted I missed hardcore and raves in Epping Forest or around the M25. Travelling sound-system parties? I missed all of it. We missed the drugs as well. My generation got the wrong ones.’ Accounting for some of the minor key discordancy and sub-bass experimentation at the challenging end of his work, James Blake’s music can feel occasionally like the most wilful distillation of the generation that missed out on the last proper offline teenage rampage. His music is full of shadows because he was born into the half-light, coming of age when the lights went on at the party. James’ generation were left to placate the woeful worries of turning boy-to-man without the comfort blanket of a brand new shape for bacchanalia. ‘We were 20 years too late,’ he says. ‘And,’ he laughs, ‘I still don’t really know what becoming a man is.’

Because James Blake is an artist whose music doesn’t depend on the ardour of youth, because it can be sedate in its beauty and rage, with each record his craft acquires a new vintage. The Colour in Anything might yet be considered his masterpiece. The influences are strange and new. Alternate listens suggest David Sylvian, Chet Baker, Laurie Anderson, Jeff Mills or Arvo Part. There are still genetic traces of the key records that marked his initial predisposition to make music – D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago and Antony and The Johnson’s I Am A Bird Now – but they’re now so entrenched in his DNA to sound almost invisible. ‘Just growing up is almost synonymous with self-improvement. So I think that’s what this album is about: maturing and shedding a slightly childish skin and trying to become happier in the process.’

There are tangible signs that James Blake is growing into an artist with tenacity, fresh perspectives and endurance, perhaps in the mould of a post-club Peter Gabriel brushing the detritus from the dancefloor as the lights go up. When James started making records, they were full of distorting effects on his true voice. There was a sense that he may be hiding not out of purely experimental motives but also a sense of young, mannish embarrassment. ‘Absolutely.’ At 27, he is at that fascinating precipice where adulthood itself becomes a matter of fight or flight. ‘I was incredibly self-conscious about how my voice came across to other people. I was incredibly self-conscious, full stop.’ Amid all the lessons that love and learning have taught him, the art of letting go was the least expected. ‘It was convenient that I wanted to experiment because it helped me to hide away. I spent a long time in the wilderness. I’m out of it now.’

With the help of Rubin, Ocean and Vernon, even perhaps through the countless requests that came through to collaborate, James has found himself by learning to let go. The transparency of songs like My Willing Heart and Modern Soul would not, could not have happened before. “With Justin, I wasn’t that interested in making music with him, initially,” he says, “I just wanted to be his mate.” The recording happened anyway. With Rubin, it was about allowing a second pair of ears in at the crucial development stages of building a new world on record. “The first time I was at Shangri-La, one of my band came to visit. I came out in a white t-shirt and slack trousers, no shoes and socks and I looked like I actually was at rehab or I’d joined a cult. Oh, James has changed.” It was true. He had. With Frank, it was about building a mutual support system. “I love Frank. He’s magnetic. The myopic viewpoint of my music and maybe my life slightly got in the way for a second. Then I caught myself. I stopped being an only child on this record.”

For James Blake, the transparency of light now beckons. It may yet be the colour in everything.

The album, which was released in October 2015 on Distiller Records, has been championed by the likes of NME, Q, Uncut, BBC 6 Music and Radio X, and Goffey’s mischievous wit on previously released tracks ‘Trials of a Modern Man’ and ‘Race of Life’ continues to charm the nation.

‘Sucker’ is no exception; a no-frills tale of a failed romantic pursuit, which showcases Goffey’s knack for amusing, relatable story-telling – a definitive trait of the man who wrote classic Supergrass hits ‘Alright’, ‘Caught by the Fuzz’ and ‘Late in the Day’.

The charismatic multi-instrumentalist currently resides in Somerset with his wife Pearl Lowe (singer of ‘90s post-punk band Powder and mother of Daisy Lowe), along with their three children, who star in vangoffey’s videos for ‘Trials of a Modern Man’ and ‘Race of Life’.

vangoffey plan to tour this year, the details of which will be announced soon.

By the very uninhibited nature of her sound, the understated approach in which Låpsley introduced her music came by way of the simplest of discoveries; a handful of people engaging so closely with it they couldn’t help but pass it on, write about it or play it. When you can’t keep a secret it inevitably works its way beyond what you believe is possible as an artist out there on your own - cue up support from the likes of BBC Radio 1’s Annie Mac, Huw Stephens and Phil & Alice, mentions in the NME and online support from Gorilla vs Bear, Disco Naivete, Pigeons & Planes and DIY among many more.

Gaining a plethora of plaudits for her minimal yet striking electronic production, and achingly beautiful vocals, the music that she has made available online gives an intimate insight into the concentrated potential of this young artist and a promising indication of great things to come.

Quite literally played, too: exposed to life on the road and frequently falling asleep to the vibrations of heavy bass coming from the home studio, Mabel quickly realised that her family were a little different from the others on the block (her Mum and Dad are Neneh Cherry and Massive-Attack producer Cameron McVey).

Mabel was less than forthcoming in her own ability, however: she dauntedly refused to play anyone bar her best friend any songs until the age of sixteen, and studied production and music theory at college in Sweden until late last year, when the family returned to London. Mabel unveiled her first track, ‘Know Me Better’, in July 2015. It’s an infectious and immediately-refreshing introduction, in her own voice: mixing big, Lauryn-Hill-inspired beats, soulful keys and little more than Mabel’s rich, crystal-clear vocal, ‘Know Me Better’ is about not judging a book by its cover, and the deeper understanding achieved when you let your guard down in a relationship. Spurred on by her grandmother’s advice to her Mum when she was pregnant – to never separate life, and that family and creativity can work together – Mabel has stepped out of the shadows as one of the bright young talents of 2015.

The band’s writing duo, Gaz Roberts (vocals, guitar) and Joe Forshaw (bass) draw on a wide range of influences to create their eclectic and adventurous music. Gaz, whose often heavily politicised lyrics are inescapably prominent, chooses the band’s song topics with unusual care.

“For me a song always has to be about something tangible, has to tell a story or be an explanation of something. We always try to make each song unique and unusual. So whilst one song might be a story set in a fictitious right-wing pub, another is a lament at widespread political apathy. We have a song that is an attempted explanation of a Roland Barthes essay and another that is just a list of things a carer has to do in a day. If I can’t think of an interesting lyric for something I don’t force it so I end up with something meaningless, I just wait until I see or hear something that gives me an idea.”

At one moment Gaz will be spitting and bawling his lyrics, at another singing in a haunting falsetto with harmonic accompaniment from his band mates. His ragged guitar sound sits alongside Joe’s pounding, hooky bass, the virtuosic keys of Chris Gallagher and Joey Bennett’s steady, splashy drum beats to create an exciting, inimitable sound, both live and on record.

The band signed to legendary A&R man James Endeacott’s rejuvenated 1965 label in November 2014.

Their first release was Honeysucker in April 2015 coinciding with the General Election; it’s an attack on specific companies, specific politicians, who are named in the song and shown in the video. The release caught the attention of protest rock icon Billy Bragg, who invited them to play the Leftfield stage at this year’s Glastonbury Festival.

The bands second release, All Right, which will appear together with Honeysucker on limited 7” for release in August, is currently out digitally alongside another DIY video.

Make no mistake: their new album Who Sold My Generation sounds like it has been created against a backdrop of burning Stars and Stripes flags and with the whiff of napalm hanging in the air - an alternative universe where ‘Helter Skelter’ is the national anthem and Charlie Manson is still on the loose. Acid-test heaviness is Night Beats’ currency, but this is no out-right nostalgia trip either. Instead of Nixon and Vietnam, Night Beats have their own epoch of God and guns and bombs and drones to rail against...or flee from. Besides, bad vibrations, blues jams and id-shattering explorations are timeless pursuits – why shouldn’t today’s young generation be allowed to take a ride down the slippery spiral that sits within the centre of each of us?

On their third album – and first for Heavenly Recordings - Night Beats perhaps most recall their Texan forefathers and psyche-rock originators 13th Floor Elevators at their ‘69 peak, just before The Man busted young Roky Erickson and dragged him to the psyche ward for barbaric doses of shock treatment. These boys represent the best of the Lone Star State’s flipside – that vast dusty hinterland of the soul where it’s easy to drift off the map and reinvent yourself as part of the long lineage of creative cowboys who prefer psychotropics to rodeo riding, guitars rather than firearms.

“Old cowboy culture is alive and well in Texas,” says frontman Danny Lee Blackwell. “I grew up with Texan mythology all around us, so as a band its instilled in our blood. My Dad didn’t wrangle steers but he did pick cotton when he was young. But then cities like Austin and Dallas, where we spent most of our time growing up, have a real sense of musical history that runs deep, so we feed off that legacy too.”

From the Elevators and The Red Krayola on to pre-ZZ Top band The Moving Sidewalks, Butthole Surfers and The Black Angels – whose record label Reverb Appreciation Society have released Night Beats - and a clutch of other early cult bands besides (Bubble Puppy, Shiva’s Headband and the Golden Dawn, anyone?), Texas has always been a prime breeding ground for such outlaw music. “The Elevators were one of the reasons I decided to become a singer and form the group,” says Blackwell. “I loved their attempt to play R ‘n’ B music, but from a distinctly Texan approach. I'd say they have profoundly influenced the group, but it’s now our job to take it to another level in a new age.”

It took a cross-country relocation to instigate their formation. Night Beats were born when frontman Danny Lee Blackwell upped stick from Dallas to Seattle, Washington and was soon joined by childhood friend James Traeger. “James got me a copy of Ginsberg's Howl when I was around 15 and it changed everything,” remembers Blackwell of his old friend. “We grew up together and once he moved up to Seattle we did everything together there too. I wanted to try out a different place, a new city, where no one knew my music and there wasn't anything remotely similar going on. Coming from Dallas, Austin seemed like the obvious choice but I needed something more. Seattle was at one time the home to people we love like Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones so I didn't feel too disconnected.”

The two existed initially as a guitar and drums duo, named in honour of Sam Cooke’s 1963 album Night Beat, before fellow Dallas resident Jakob Bowden joined on bass after a stint in Austin. Filtering a collective love of pioneering artists as disparate as Buddy Holly, Fela Kuti, Etta James, James Brown and Leonard Cohen, Night Beats dropped a clutch of singles, split-singles, cassette release and two albums – their self-titled debut in 2011 followed by Sonic Bloom in 2013 – as well as featuring on all manner of compilation albums that document the cutting edge of the head-bending, modern counter-cultural US underground.

Night Beats hit the road too, touring extensively with Roky Erickson, The Zombies, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Strange Boys, Black Lips, The Growlers and The Black Angels in North America, Europe, Israel, South Africa and Australia.

Recorded on old two-inch tape in Echo Park, Los Angeles at the home of producer Nic Jodoin and featuring co-production and guess bass playing from Robert Levon Been of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, new album Who Sold My Generation goes beyond merely being a retreading of well-worn garage / R&B path. Instead it offers a contemporary take on the psychedelic experience, a heady set of hoodoo voodoo songs. Mordant and corrosive opener ‘Celebration #1’ sets the tone with its wailing guitar jams and Messiah-like monologue, while ‘No Cops’ makes like the imaginary soundtrack to an orgiastic party somewhere in the LA hills as the summer of love gave way to an era of greed and paranoia. ‘Sunday Mourning’ is the sound of blood dripping on the twitching remains of a generation’s super ego and with a rockabilly strut, ‘Egypt Berry’ chases the White Rabbit down into a cosmic underworld while shaking its burning tail feathers

With new Who Sold My Generation, Night Beats have not only painted it black, they’ve torched the fucker and driven it off the cliff, crashing and burning into the arid canyon below.

In its afterglow only the lone howl of a solitary coyote remains.

The idea was to get the three sisters, Elin, Elisabet and Sigga to sing live house music which would serve not only the exquisite combination of their beautiful voices into new and exciting territory, but would also showcase their abilities in a different context as all have more acoustic-driven music careers.

After spending considerable time searching for “the one” to work with, the missing link was found in producer and DJ, Oculus. Together they have managed to create something very unique and special.

The bands main focus is live performance as this is the best environment to experience their one-of-a-kind talent, together with the intense energy of the music. Although the musical journey of Sisy Ey has just begun, the band is already receiving an impressive amount of attention for its music and performances.

Sisy Eys first single, Ain't got nobody, has been extremely well received in Iceland and elsewhere.

So, you buy it, take it home, play it and it sounds like tosh? Yeah, well this is not one of those times. This is the story of The Temperance Movement: five guys, four of them in London, one in Scotland. In short, they rock.

Big, sweaty, old-school, sincere rock. But, like all the best rock bands, they roll too. They have a swagger, a bravado. Soul.

This is a band that merges two highly valuable commodities: riff driven blues based rock and seriously impressive – nay, spellbinding - musicality. Sure, it’s been a long time coming but, thank god, they’ve finally arrived.

Their songs seem to occupy wildly opposite extremes; wide angle panoramic vignettes or short, sharp shocks to the system. They all, however, have one common denominator – a stunning ability to deliver a message. The emphasis, lyrically, is always on aching, some might say painful, life issues – everything from heart-on-sleeve confessionals to a defiant, let's-get-back-into-the-ring-and-take-on-all-comers boldness. Out of it all though, there is a sense of revelation, a feeling that these guys are actually writing about real life lessons learnt on the road to redemption.

It started, as these things so often do, by chance. Singer-songwriter Phil Campbell's impressive solo career should be well known to you. A Scottish Ryan Adams but with better songs, his flight to fame was interrupted by the sort of obstacles only the music business can throw in your path. He was saved by an unexpected call from guitarist Luke Potashnick. “We're starting a band,” said Luke. “A proper band. Bluesy. Rocky. A bit Black-Crowes-ish. Do you fancy it?” His head said, “I'm not sure,” but his gut said, “Yes.”

The we turned out to be Luke and Paul Sayer, two friends who’d known each other for some time. Both were seasoned songwriters and musicians but wanted to step into something more permanent. With Phil on board, they knew they had the foundations of something very special indeed.

Recruiting the perfect rhythm section took a little while longer than expected with the trio working their way through a few combinations until jamming with bassist Nick Fyffe and Australian-born drummer Damon Wilson. The Temperance Movement was born.

In the 12 months they've been together, they've written plenty of songs. A well-received five track EP, 'Pride', has recently been issued to soak up some of the interest and the album is good to go. It came together easily. They are just one step away from finding a home for it.

Although initially only intended as a filming of a band rehearsal rather than a proper video, the effortlessly brilliant EP track 'Only Friend' has become a firm favourite on YouTube leading to play-listings on several clued-in radio stations. Live shows are selling out and touring is set to commence.

Says Damon: "People are loving our stuff. Older people are getting the influences - Free, The Band, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, The Stones - and the younger crowd, they just think it's a Black Keys slash Jack White kind of vibe. They can see it's real and they get off on that."

He was entertaining his band mates performing handstands in the kitchen of his flat. He lost balance, he recalls with a cackle, toppled and crashed down into an open dishwasher, impaling his foot on a carving knife. Bassist Kieren Webster took a photo of the resulting injury. It is a close-up of Falconer’s left foot – the handle of the knife protruding from the ball, the blade buried three inches into it.

Here’s the deal. These days we bemoan the dearth of proper, death-or-glory, Devil-may-care rock’n’roll bands with tiresome regularity. Bands that exist for the thrill of living life to its fullest and that operate entirely on instinct. Well, The View is precisely that kind of band and they’ve been here all along. They don’t conform, don’t adhere to rules or make things easy on themselves. What they do is make music fired by passion and soul and joy.

The simple details of their story are these: school mates in Dundee, singer/guitarist Falconer, fellow songwriter Webster, guitarist Pete Reilly and drummer Steve Morrison formed the band in 2005. Within two years they’d torn up stages supporting the likes of Primal Scream and The Babyshambles and released a hugely successful debut album, Hats Off To The Buskers.

That debut fitted the post-Libertines music landscape of the time. The easy thing to do next would have been to stick to the formula. The View instead made a more challenging and diverse record called Which Bitch?, which ran a gamut from ramshackle folk-punk to sea shanties. After it, came the slick, sophisticated guitar pop of 2011’s Bread And Circuses. Great records both; but overlooked too – blame as much on the fact neither pandered to expectations, on a break down in relations between the band and their then record company, and perhaps too on the sheer wilfulness of The View themselves.

Now, a year older, and maybe a little wiser, The View are back with new label Cooking Vinyl and a new album, Cheeky For A Reason – recorded in Liverpool with producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, Foals) and the best thing they’ve done.

Such are the basic facts. Better still ask Kyle Falconer why Which Bitch? was such a leap ahead and he’ll tell you: “Drink, man, copious amounts of drink. We were spending a fortune every day on every kind of alcohol and we thought we were geniuses. The greatest time ever.”

Or have him reflect on the intangible, transitory nature of success and he’ll say: “Chart positions? They genuinely don’t mean anything to me. We’ve never been in a band just to be in a band. It’s about creating something together, about keeping the dream alive.”

Or probe him on how and where it is that he writes his songs and he offers: “When I’m smashed and it’s whatever comes into my head. If I’m thinking about it – that’s when it goes to shite.”

Because Kyle Falconer is so much of what’s special about The View. Like the best pop stars he is a fascinating character – charming and complex and contrary. His eyes twinkle and yet still there seems something deep, dark and troubled just below his surface. One minute he will regale you with tales of misadventures in strip clubs and police cells. The next he’ll talk with disarming frankness about losing both his parents by the time he was 22 and how he’s suffered anxiety attacks ever since. Of which he concludes, with a what-can-you-do shrug: “I’ve been told it’s because I’m not taking care of what’s going on in my head.”

All this – the peaks and troughs, the highs and lows – is integral to the make up of Cheeky For A Reason. Its 12 tracks (nine by Falconer, three by Webster) represent a coming of age, a statement of intent. Be it Anfield Row – Webster’s hymn to the street in Dundee he grew up on – or The Clock, arguably Falconer’s best song yet, the whole is a record to sing along to, to take to heart and to cherish.

And at end, ask Kyle Falconer if whether, with all that has happened to him and his band en route to making it, he’s ever had pause to doubt in their freewheeling unpredictability or his own mercurial gift, and he doesn’t pause to answer. “Never,” he says firmly. “All I ever need is to see people dancing.”

20 year-old twin sisters Catherine and Lizzy Ward Thomas have the vocal power and versatility to make you forget the external. Fresh, wholesome, honest and sincere, they both portray an easy-going, confident style that oozes a mixture of the untainted swagger of youth with the confidence and bravado of adulthood, and the soul of classic female icons well beyond their years.

Family harmony singing, especially sibling harmonies, has long been a staple of Country music, and Catherine and Lizzy deliver an intricate and effective vocal package. Their harmonies dissolve into the musical bloodstream and their original thoughtful and intuitive song lyrics aid the process. More to the point, both possess strong, powerful voices and a distinctive feel for modern Country.

In 2014, in between putting the finishing touches to their debut album, Ward Thomas headed out on the road, touring all across the UK and also working doing gigs and showcases around Nashville and other music venues in America’s deep south, where their uniquely ‘British-take on Country music’ has been well-received.

In the spring of 2014 they made the BBC Radio 2 playlist with The Good And The Right. That coincided with the releases of their FOOTNOTES EP, which featured their first non-original song. They make Dougie MacLean’s Caledonia very much their own as they strike a stunning balance between vulnerability and self-assurance.

Ward Thomas are one of the most refreshing acts to come along in some time and in ‘From Where We Stand’ they have put together a beguiling debut album that is sure to charm all who come across it. They are the kind of act whose future literally seems unlimited.

Alan Cackett (Founding Editor, Maverick Magazine)

Since the 80s they have had a string of massive hits, spawning some of the best and most instantly recognisable singles within the Hard Rock genre – ‘Gimme All Your Loving’, ‘Sharp Dressed Man’, ‘La Grange’ and ‘Legs’ to name but a few.

The band released their 15th studio album, ‘La Futura’, in September 2012 via American Recordings. The album, produced by Rick Rubin, was the band’s first studio offering in 9 years and was received with mass critical acclaim.