The 2009 debut album Conditions was a roaring success: the album sold nearly a million copies worldwide, and from a garage in Melbourne, Australia, suddenly The Temper Trap were big news around the globe. A combination of memorable and pleasing on-the-ear epic indie pop and a hard work ethic means that they can only be 100 per cent thankful that they took the plunge, leaving their birth place to live in the UK back in April 2009.

“It wasn’t a difficult decision to make,” says founder member Toby Dundas. “It was such a big opportunity we just couldn’t pass it up. It’s what every band dreams of, to tour around the world! Obviously you miss your family and friends, but everyone was so excited for us.”

While their debut album was recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer Jim Abbiss, they decided to work with Tony Hoffer in LA for the new one, another very highly regarded producer who’s worked with everyone from Beck to The Kooks.

“Tony has a studio there, with a lot of vintage synths… and he knows the room so well, so it was a good decision to put us in his home court. He’s taken a lot of the synth stuff to the next level; a world he is familiar with. Every time we were searching for a sound, he would disappear to the next room and come back with a keyboard in his arm and always had some good ideas. It didn’t hurt that it was 20 degrees and sunny every day!”

Back in the UK the band are about to embark on a short UK tour before hitting the festival circuit. “We did The Great Escape in 2009. We’ve played three shows in Brighton, but strangely it was raining every time! Hopefully, it’ll be better and we can all have a stereotypical Brighton experience!”

Their eponymous titled second album is out later in the month, and repeats the trick of their debut: outstanding, epic sing-a-long type affairs rubbing shoulders with more contemplative numbers, led off by current single ‘Need Your Love’.

“Things definitely aren’t always 100 per cent smooth! I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, but it can be intense and stressful. But we are lucky that we are friends, and we were friends before the band started, so we can always fall back on that when things aren’t going so well. If we didn’t like the people you had to spend 22 hours of each day with it wouldn’t be much fun…”

The Temper Trap, playing at Great Escape, Brighton and elsewhere in UK May 2012

Anyway, for three days in May you get the chance to see ready and fit bands, many here for the first time, some still banging away at it (but in need of a reminder) and many playing venues much smaller than they are used to. It’s a full-on rush to get yer money’s worth, but over three days and nights, if you plan it right, and don’t get too wankered early-on, well, it can be money well spent. Unless you’ve blagged it of course, and then it’s… free…

What to look out for this Year? Well, even for seasoned pros who talk, read and defecate new music all day long, there is no way in hell they know anywhere near all the bands performing… So, this is, with my limited knowledge of what’s what and what I know… And, what I know is this:

Alabama Shakes – everyone’s talking about them, front cover of Grauniad Guide, Later appearance.. despite their disheveled and some say dysfunctional look, they are at the tip of the zeitgeist, whatever that may be… Their laidback yet warm soul’n'indie hybrid is rather good.

Grimes – another Canadian who doesn’t follow the rule book – God, why are they so God damn talented? Another Gruaniad Guide cover star. Another queue around the block scenario… leftfield electronic indie from a young female. Very cool.

Retro Stefson – Icelandic indie-dance act ready to make an impression. Icelanders, by their very nature, are quite cool.

Slow Down, Molasses – fucked up name, but beautifully apt… Molasses ain’t fast whichever way you look at it… More Canadian talent (from Saskatoon… look it up!), lovely, alt-country meets My Bloody Valentine, complete with trumpets, vibes from a place no one has heard of, nor visited I’m wagering… And therein lies the secret of Canadiana – they are in a little bubble, where there are few rules, and no one is a Dedicated Follower of Fashion)

Willy Mason – A relative ‘veteran’, everyone must have time for this dude, an American of musical and literary intelligence. ‘Oxygen’ has got to go down as one of the all-time anthems from the noughties….

Trippple Nippples – I mentioned this to someone, and they said, ‘no way are they going to be any good’… After I pointed out they were Japanese females, they changed their mind… And they still hadn’t heard what they sounded like…. That’s the kind of stoopid prejudice one has to put up with… Anyway, they are almost unlistenable on record, but unbelievable live…

L.S.D from TRIPPPLE NIPPPLES on Vimeo.

Django Django – a lot of people have been banging on about this lot, and with good reason. They are ace… Great name, great debut album. They are like, to be controversial, what the Beach Boys could have sounded like if Brian Wilson had kept it together post ’66.

Lianne La Havas – getting dangerously close to ‘mainstream’ here, but punch me if I’m wrong, she is Brilliant!! How can you not like that cover that featured her rather suggestively with a big shaggy, stuffed dog… indie/blue note vibes for the ’12 form a very assured performer…

Beth Jeans Houghton – to the indie-art fraternity she is either one hot babe, or completely mental. A combination of the two can send some of these people into paroxyms of drooling ecstasy. Ahem, onto the music… It’s pretty fucking good actually. The multi-dimensional song Dodecahedron, is really hard to say properly…

and finally, there’s Foy Vance – he may look like he’s a troubadour with lots of worry and trouble on his mind, but when he’s on it, his voice, pedal/loop effects, and guitar work make for a quite spiritual experience.

www.escapegreat.com

Straight out of Brighton (via London), the dynamic duo of Jordan and Harley made an immediate impression with the song Down With The Trumpets (the video was shot on Brighton seafront and featured the iconic beach huts) which became a summer smash – a top 10 hit – while concurrently they also featured on Olly Murs Number One hit ‘Heart Skips A Beat’.

Family friends from the age of four, Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule both moved to Brighton independently and apparently re-met at a Sunday league football match. They both ended up going to The Brit School where Jordan studied Media and Harley studied Theatre. It was while Jordan was in the process of making his mixtape Minor Breaches Of Discipline – where he rapped over samples of artists such as Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys and Gorillaz – that he asked Harley to sing over some of the tracks. From that, Rizzle Kicks was formed. Via the internet, YouTube in particular, they posted lo-fi music videos to their channel which eventually caught the attention of record labels including Island who signed them up. Sadly, the pair have recently moved back to London. “We love Brighton for obvious reasons. We only moved back to London for the music. We spent the first 10 years of our lives in London, and the next nine years in Brighton.

“It was getting a bit repetitive [in Brighton]. We love it to bits, but because we wanted to pursue a career in music there is only so far you can go in Brighton. At some point you have to move to the Big Smoke,”Jordan reasons. “But Brighton will always be a special place for us.”
Recalling the golden age of paisley/daisy hip-hop era of De La Soul, Ultramagnetic MCs and Jungle Brothers, their sample-driven/live instrumentation hybrid is joyous, positive, witty and very mature for a pair this young (they have only just turned 20). Throw in plenty of Lily Allen stylings (whom they playfully satirised on their X-rated mix of LDN) and their old skool sensibilities have been transplanted to the ‘12 just in the nick of time…

“When we first got signed we got chucked in to work with a few producers, but then as the songs developed we thought about who would be the producers the songs would work best with. They turned out to be Future Cut, who made Lily Allen’s first records, and Ant Whiting, who is predominantly a pop producer, working with Pixie Lott and Diana Vickers, but he got our sound immediately.

‘I can find my place in my dreams/I don’t care what you choose as fact/I’m going to take myself to the moon and back/In my dream’
– ‘Dreamers’, Rizzle Kicks

“We also worked with a guy called Craigie Dodds who’s worked with Eliza Dolittle, and then there’s this one tune on there by Mr Norman Cook, Fatboy Slim, a Brighton hook up – Mama Do The Hump.”

Fatboy Slim doesn’t do records any more, and very rarely remixes or produces. But he couldn’t resist working with his fellow Brightonians for this classic Fatboy Slim-style beats and sample-heavy feast. “We made it at his place [Hove seafront] – his house is awesome!”

Their debut album, Stereo Typical, has certainly caught the imagination of the record buying public, who are perhaps in need of some cheery fun in these increasingly pessimistic times, and Stereo Typical supplies the medicine in big doses. From the big beat style of Mama Do The Hump to the jazzy trip-hop, drunken swagger of Miss Cigarette and the piano-driven sound of Stop With The Chatter, Stereo Typical is crystal clear and full of bounce; energetic without being hyper; smooth without being soft – it’s the distillation of the history of hip-hop (perhaps missing out the menacing gangster-style rappings of much of American rap) combined with touches of indie, jazz and plenty of pop nous. For many, it was the feel-good record of the year, and eventually it peaked at number five.

The boys’ Brighton connections run very deep: they cut their musical teeth at the Brighton-based youth music organisation AudioActive (“they are all legends”), and since then things have happened very quickly for the duo, to the point where they are now being featured in The Sun (‘Caroline Flack Gets A Rizzle Kiss’). “We didn’t expect this – when we released ‘Trumpets’ we had no expectations whatsoever, and it’s continued to grow. We haven’t really adjusted or realised the position we’re in. We’re having to roll with it. The main thing is that we have managed to get the album together and it’s what we wanted to make.

“We had ‘Trumpets’ as the first single, and Fearne Cotton of course, legend of all legends, picked up on it and it got A-listed and things were going nuts… we didn’t know what to think. But as it got stronger we had to re-think our plans and keep adapting to the situation.

“We got so excited that we were allowed studio time. We just wanted to get out all this stuff we’ve been making. It wasn’t the same old method as before where we make a song, make it really good, and then make a video. You have to plan stuff, we cant just upload anything to YouTube anymore!”

Mainly the work of Jordan, the so-called ‘mixtapes’ were a big factor in getting Rizzle Kicks noticed. “I used to look up instrumentals and just have fun with them. We’ve got a mixtape in the works – it’s got a different vibe… it’s more of our take on old swing tunes and stuff…

“When we started getting our stuff together as Rizzle Kicks I wanted the old stuff taken off and start afresh. But people were like, ‘no, no, no, you can’t do that’. People like that mixtape stuff. You know, I see tracks online that I made in 2009 and I think I have come on a lot more as a rapper since then. They were getting like half a million hits on YouTube, it’s really weird. But I recently listened to the mixtapes for the first time in a long time, and I didn’t dislike it that much. But at the moment the album is where we’re really at.”

Martin Stephenson and the Daintees are a British rock/folk/pop band combining elements of rockabilly, show tunes, rootsy pop, straight-ahead rock and punk. The band is fronted by songwriter/guitarist Martin Stephenson, signing with Kitchenware Records and releasing their first single in 1982.

Their best-selling and most acclaimed album Boat To Bolivia was released in 1986 and was produced by a young Gil Norton, who shortly after went on to produce The Pixies. This tour will see the band play that album in its entirety along with a selection of songs form their back catalogue, including tracks from Gladsome, Humour & Blue from 1988, Salutation Road from 1990 and The Boy’s Heart from 1992. “Simon Moran, who works for SJM national promotions company, at the end of last year he walked into one of my gigs and I hadn’t seen him for 20 years and he wanted to promote a tour with The Daintees.”

Although the Daintees split in 1992, they reformed in 2000 and have been playing the odd gig ever since, while Martin Stephenson has forged a career as a solo artist, releasing numerous albums and developing a love for folk roots music. For the most part a self-contained and independent musician with his own label, Stephenson has made a series of mail-order only acoustic projects. “It’s been a strange trip – I’ve converted my ambition to a more spiritual range – creativity and hard working rather than being famous. The rewards can be much better, not just material rewards…” he says from his base in the Highlands off Scotland where he has been for 17 years, initially moving there to kill off his liking for booze… “I’ve been sober that long; I thought I would kill myself with the drink…”

Upon Boat To Bolivia’s release the NME said it, ‘…builds bridges between love and hate, between cradle and grave, between folk and pop, between the past and present’. Stephenson says: “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing – I kinda got a job as the songwriter, and they said ‘you gotta do it’, so I started writing about my family, and things that were happening to us at the time.

“It was new, and exciting and fresh then. When we finished Gil had a tape of the next band he was working on and he played it to us and I said, ‘Oh dear, that’s like John Peel ten years ago’, and I told him not to do it and he phoned up a couple years later and said, ‘I’ll never listen to you’! and said that was The Pixies and it’s just gone platinum…. I saw him about three years ago at a gig I was playing and I was telling people ‘you see that bloke there, I told him not to produce The Pixies and he wouldn’t listen’!

“People noticed that we had a lot of different musical styles and the reason this happened was that I was trying to learn guitar… I would get a classical book and I would get a song from an exercise book… I remember doing a gig with the Go-Betweens and Grant McLennan (the frontman for the band) in ’84 and during the soundcheck he said, ‘that’s exercise number 24′ – it was really funny, he spotted it from a jazz guitar book!”

But Martin wasn’t cut out for the pressures and demands of the mainstream industry: “You might think this is nuts, but we would have all these meetings, we would have stuff in NME, the single was creeping up the charts, and at these meetings there would be panic if the single started going down… we weren’t really into promoting ourselves, but what we were into was playing live.”

Reaching a high of 39 in the album charts for second album Gladsome, Humour & Blue, the fortunes of the band declined, and they were dropped by their label after The Boy’s Heart. “The third album budget was £140k and that was complete nuts, I hated it,” says Martin. “When I got away from all that, I did the complete opposite: I did an album at home and I had my own mailing list, and I would sell all the copies in a week and a half and that would manifest enough money to pay the musicians personally. I put every CD in the bag – it was a cosmic experience; I was in touch with every part of the process…

For the tour original member John Steel will be with the band, someone who disappeared from Martin’s life back in ’86. “He was my manager’s cousin, but all of a sudden he disappeared after our John Martyn tour. He went to work for the BBC, editing Match of the Day and stuff like that, and I never saw him for 25 years, but I reconnected with him eight years ago.”

Also joining Martin on tour is Helen McCookerybook, who resided for a time in Brighton, including singing and playing bass with local legends The Chefs. “We were very influenced by The Chefs,” says Martin. We met just after we both got divorced and we did a gig together. To me she’s a national treasure.”

On tour in the UK

Born out of another acclaimed American indie band, Okkervil River, Shearwater have just released their seventh album, Animal Joy, their first for legendary label Sub Pop. “I wanted to take a different approach this time, including the recording process,” says founder member Jonathan Meiburg, from his base in Austin, Texas. “I wanted to write more about my life this time even though I am generally suspicious of confessional songwriting. I wanted to make a record that had more flesh and blood to it. I like the other records a lot but they are a little bit more cerebral, more removed. I also wanted it to sound more like a band as well… But we’re still very meticulous about our records…. I love the recording process; you have to pry me out of a studio with a crowbar…

Meiburg was originally with Okkervil River, and along with Okkervil’s frontman Will Sheff, they formed Shearwater as a side project. Co-existing for several years, and releasing a stream of critically lauded albums, the pressure of being in two bands became too much for Meibug and he decided to concentrate full-time on Shearwater in 2008, while Sheff continues to head-up Okkervil River. “The previous three album formed a loose trilogy,” says Meiburg, referring to Palo Santo, Rook and The Golden Archipelago. “It wasn’t the goal from the outset but as we were making them I noticed similarities, so I tried to make the artwork similar, and went back to the same themes…”

Shearwater is named after the long-winged seabird of the same name, and Meiburg is a big bird-watching fan. “I studied to be an ornitholgost for years… I’m even going back down to the Falklands for a month in the summer to work on a bird survey. I’ve been there four times. I went there before I ever went to the UK! I really enjoy the remote outer islands where there is no one at all; it’s one of the best places for sub-antarctic wildlife… Shearwaters actually breed on the islands….”

And with the sound of sea birds in the background while on the phone, Jonathan is once again looking forward to playing Brighton, just one of four UK dates a part of a European tour. “Brighton seems to me like it’s barely hanging onto to the English coast… Brighton would go well on the mediterranean coast!”

Shearwater, UK tour 2012

Formed in 1983 by Mike Scott, The Waterboys have been in essence his band along with a revolving nucleus of musicians, playing in a number of different styles but with celtic folk and rock’n'roll at its core. The band dissolved in 1993 and Scott pursued a solo career before reforming in 2000. Scott has previously emphasised a continuity between The Waterboys and his solo work. “To me there’s no difference between Mike Scott and the Waterboys; they both mean the same thing. They mean myself and whoever are my current traveling musical companions.”

Last year the band released An Appointment with Mr Yeats, an album that feature the words of famous Irish poet W.B. Yeats, along with the music of The Waterboys. “My mother was an English lecturer and I remember her talking about Yeats in the house as a child, usually in hushed tones. In 1970, when I was 11, she took me to the Yeats summer school in Sligo and I went to some of the readings and lectures which gave me a sense of who Yeats was; I came to him in my own time… I like his poems and I like his use of language and the subjects he writes about. And I noticed that some of them suggested music in my mind, suitable for musical treatment.

In 1988, on the Fisherman’s Blues album, we did ‘The Stolen Child’ (one of Yeats’s poems) and ever since then I’ve kept going through his poetry books until I had enough for a show which was The Appointment With Mr Yeats, and which became the album.” Yeats was the recipient of the Nobel Prize, and became a giant of Irish literature. “He’s Ireland’s national poet in the same way Robert Burns is Scotland’s national poet and Shakespeare is England’s bard. His quotes are used in daily conversation, and a lot are familiar beyond Ireland like No Country For Old Men which is one of his lines.

“Yeats was fascinated by myths, legends and mysticism. That’s part of the pull of his work. People sometimes over-interpret his work, and some people can’t deal with his mysticism, and try and treat it like a folly because they don’t understand it… I’m not sure what the Yeats glitterati make of it, but I don’t actually care! I’ve read a couple of biographies of Yeats by people who don’t get him.”

The UK tour will feature a mix of Waterboys songs as well as An Appointment With Mr Yeats in its entirety.

Joan Baez made her first public appearance all of 53 years ago, and has since released over 30 albums, consistently championed and continues to be a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice, dated Bob Dylan and Steve Jobs and become, in effect, the first lady of American folk, although over the years her music has also encompassed county, gospel and pop. Despite this very long musical career, Baez has said: “Social justice is the true core of my life, looming larger than music.”

Baez’s (whose mother is Scottish) tour of the UK will take in a Brighton date – there won’t be too many more opportunities to see this hugely influential figure, who first came to these shores in her early 20s, performing at the Royal Albert Hall amongst others places. “There is a spot on Brighton Pier where I love to go to eat. The man recognizes me and knows exactly what to bring me! It’s a whole fish – head and tail on, crispy and I can eat it with my hands..

At that point she sings: “Mad Dogs and Englishman, out in the noon day sun, out in the noon day sun…

“I love traveling around the UK and the fan base there has been a very important part of my career from very early on. The UK audience may be a bit more reserved than in the US but they are also very attentive and appreciative. It is so easy for me, I don’t have to pretend to learn another language, I like the British public… there is a lot of things to recommend it! The English public? Who is going to gripe! It’s quite simple for me touring here… We’re going to hire a van this time, instead of a bus. If I need to I can fall asleep in the back. The drives are short enough so that we can stay in a hotel rather than getting on a bus and having a half sleep…

Although a songwriter herself, Baez is generally regarded as an interpreter of other people’s work, having recorded songs by The Allman Brothers Band, The Beatles, Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan (who she covered very early in Dylan’s career, helping him to gain a wider audience), Violeta Parra, Woody Guthrie, The Rolling Stones, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Leonard Cohen and many others. “I haven’t actually written any songs for 20 years, it’s one of the reasons we are having opening acts so I can steal a song! I don’t go out much, but I know there is a lot going on… When I was traveling and there were a lot of singer songwriters opening for me I was more connected with the music world. Somebody said to me, ‘What do you listen to these days’, and I said ‘I don’t, I like the silence’! Everything in my house that is supposed to be high-fidelity is not working…

“When there is a project, songs are carefully listened to, and carefully eliminated, and there is no rule that says this one works and this one doesn’t. It sounds corny, but a song picks me, because I can’t figure out why I pick it. It has to ring more than one bell.”

So, does she still enjoy touring and playing live? “My friends say that when I call home it’s the happiest they hear me! I didn’t realise that at all, but I know I like it. I know it won’t go on forever, and the things about it I do love are worth going out for a little bit longer.

“I didn’t really begin enjoy playing until 25 years ago. I was busy carrying the world around on my shoulders, and I still had lingering stage fright that I have since wiped off the scene. But now it’s a breeze, just walk out there and play and sing. I can pin a lot of that on therapy – my life changed radically and eliminated so many phobias and uncertainties, and that cleared a path for me to walk out there and enjoy myself…”

Do you feel at one with myself now? “I feel pretty damn at one with myself!”

A key appeal of Baez is her pure and unique voice, full of vibrato, although her voice has changed over the years: “There are a lot of songs I can’t sing now because my voice has changed so radically. Technically, it’s the high sustained notes that I have a problem with – a lot of songs I knock down a tone or half a tone and it’s fine.”

In recent years, she has found success interpreting songs of modern songwriters such as Ryan Adams, Steve Earle and Natalie Merchant. “We had met (referring to Steve Earle who produced and contributed to her latest album Day After Tomorrow) a few times and admired each others work as musicians and as activists, so working on an album together was a natural fit.

And, of course, there’s the on going issues of social justice, not only in the US but throughout the world. “I’m pretty interested in the Occupy movement, from a respective distance. My feeling is that they should go home for the winter, get warm, make plans, and come back for the Spring. I saw a film on the youth revolution under Milosevic, in Serbia. These kids were so young, and they had a non-violent movement, and they were all over the country and each one didn’t know what the other was doing. Over there they had only one goal, to get rid of a dictator. Here, it’s everything, it’s way too confusing. But a lot of things they have done so far have been wonderful. It’s the first time in 40 years that any kid here has been willing to take a risk to go to jail – that has not been on the agenda for that long…

So, she hasn’t become disillusioned over time? I would have been more disappointed if I had bigger expectations. I learned really early that the fewer expectation I had the less depressed I’d get!

Joan Baez is on tour in the UK throughout March 2012 finishing Dome, Brighton, 26 March. She then tours Europe this summer.

Radio Reverb Show 1 March 2012 by Jeff Hemmings on Mixcloud

Led by the charismatic Yolanda Quartey and featuring Massive Attack collaborator Stew Jackson amongst their ranks, this Bristol five-piece have just released their second album, In The Pines, follow up to their self-titled 2008 debut. With Yolanda’s powerful, soulful, deeply impressionistic voice allied to some memorably melodic songs, Phantom Limb have developed a cult following here in the UK. Her voice is pitch-perfect, never fancy nor is there much in the way of show-off frills flair – just pure essence of soul…

Musically, In the Pines has an air of resignation, inspired by ideas of escape and life as a grinding making-ends-meet effort. It’s mix of gospel, country and soul though is deeply moving and rather contagious. “Country and gospel are the same,” says Yolanda, “but with different race singers.”

In the Pines was recorded in the oil capital of California, Signal Hill, with The Black Crowes producer Marc Ford. “That was awesome! Essentially, we went there because we needed a certain level of objectivity – and we didn’t want to spend years toiling over a stove. We knew we could trust him to take us in a direction that we wanted to go, but didn’t have the benefit of objectivity to get there or at the speed we wanted to get there,” laughs Yolanda. We wanted him to take us further on into our influences, into the things we love… We were looking to artists such as Neil Young, The Band, Delaney & Bonny, Mad Dogs and Englishmen…(the infamous Joe Cocker touring band name and live album of 1970). It was a real eye opener, that experience of being produced… We’re massive Crowes fan anyway!

“Stew was pretty much my co-writer for the first album, but for this album everyone in the room contributed, so it’s been more about a band in a room this time. Also, the first album was written when I was 21/22, the second album when I was 26/27 – I felt a lot different with the lyrics…

Over the years they have toured with the likes of Rumer and Will Young and Yolanda has been a guest vocalist with Massive Attack (I was with Massive Attack for only two and a half months – I did a handful of gigs and then it was all over – I spent longer at Butlins as a kid! Nobody seems to mention that Stew was working with them for three and a half years!!) and Nitin Sawnhey, as well as performing backing vocals for artists as diverse as Adele and Dizzee Rascal. Combining session work with a bit of voice training she does and the band means that Yolanda is these days fully immersed in music.

“I was curious when I was a kid – mostly through my friends, Stews family and friends, just naturally curious… I got Dolly Parton from my Mum’s collection, and sang along to it – my voice is Dolly like! I try to sing a song as it is, to prove you can sing a song.

“I worry about my voice, I had to find out more than what was available. Every time a cold turned up it would hit the things I missed (referring to the voice therapy she practices). Adele lost her voice when I did some backing vocals for her and I was nattering on about losing my voice… you need therapy whichever way you look at it. I’ve been looking for at all sorts of therapies to make my voice work. I try and perfect by any means necessary these vocal programmes when on tour when everyone is coughing and spluttering around me. The colds are trying to get at my voice so I get to test these theories out. A lot of cats are getting onto this stuff – a lot of people are getting pissed enough to want to find out for themselves… It’s ridiculous to accept that there is no cure for this sort of thing. (when on tour) I do have to choose what I say, and if you talk in the right way you get away with a lot more,” she says by way of explaining how she copes with the vocal rigors of touring.

Bristol is heavily associated with trip hop, reggae, dub, drum’n'bass and dubstep so how does the band’s sound fit in to the Bristol scene? “Since that Coen Brothers film came out, O Brother Where Art Thou, there has been a real resurgence of Americana… It hit Bristol so much so that someone coined the phrase Brashville – where Bristol meets Nashville… this magazine said there was a glut of people picking up a banjo.. I think it’s happening everywhere.. It’s also down in no small measure to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings; they are my heroes. Most of the people I know who went to their (recent) gig had a nice little cry… I blame them directly, it’s all their fault!

Saturday 3 March, Latest Music Bar, Brighton (and on tour in the UK) 8pm, £6.50

The original lead singer with Ultravox (they were initially known as Ultravox! but dropped the exclamation mark…) before being replaced by Midge Ure in 1979, John Foxx aka Dennis Leigh embarked on a solo career in 1979, whilst pursuing a parallel career in graphic design and education. A truly seminal figure in the pioneering musical fields of electronic synthesiser music, Foxx’s status is that of a bona fide cult artist, a musician who whilst never attaining much in the way of commercial success post-Ultravox, has nevertheless carved out a career as an impeccably uncompromising artist.

Now 63, “I’ve been around since the 60′s,” he laughs. “I started playing around with tape recorders and synthesisers even then (when he was at the Royal College of Art). It’s this love of ‘synthesised’ music that has informed most of his music, although during the 70s he did flirt with glam rock, punk and new wave music. His first proper band, Tiger Lily, featured future Ultravox member Billy Currie, before morphing into Ultravox! in the summer of ’76 just at the point when punk was ready to spill out out of both Manchester and London. But it was during this time as Ultravox that the use of synthesisers (and possibly the first recorded instance of the Roland TR-77) became prominent on their recordings. Their third album, Systems of Romance, and last with John Foxx, is regarded as the first ‘synth-pop’ album and was a huge influence on other bands who came in the wake including Gary Numan. “Drum machine, synths, distance, minimalism – we’d got to the next era while punk was burning itself out. This was what Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and many others picked up on. I guess it became a sort of blueprint for lots of bands,” says Foxx.

Foxx gave up performing in public in the early-80s, and whilst still making music, forged a career as a graphic artist – using his real name he produced book covers for the likes of Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson – but the nascent sounds of Detroit techno gave him the inspiration to record again. “I was just totally bored with music in the 80s – I felt that there was nothing out there that inspired me…. but the sounds of Detroit and Europe techno re-awakened my love of music.”

Listening to the most recent Foxx offering, The Shape of Things, it seems everything has come full circle – within it’s generally minimalist grooves lies the heartbeats of Kraftwerk, Detroit techno, ambient music, early Ultravox, and touches of PiL. It’s still industrial in sound, and yet romantic and earthly. For the last two years Foxx has collaborated with Benge, with two albums under their belt, Interplay and soon-to be-released The Shape of Things, re-establishing Foxx amongst the artrocker fraternity as an musical pioneer of venerable status. Indeed Artrocker magazine named John Foxx & The Maths as Best Electro Act of 2011. “I really enjoy playing live these day, but it can be a headache bringing all that gear of Benge’s (he is an analogue synthesiser obsessive, with all its concurrent machinery and cabling). They’ll joined by Serafina Steer and Hannah Peel on stage, whilst Brighton’s Gazelle Twin (“the sound of someone going somewhere”) aka Elizabeth Walling is in support

John Foxx & The Maths, Friday 24 February, The Haunt, Brighton (and on tour generally)