So when the sound engineer casually mentioned in the soundcheck that sometimes the power fails in the Mother Bar and that, being the sound guy, he often gets the blame, we slapped our thighs heartily, laughed and thought no more. Until 20 mins into our set when BOOM! Darkness and silence…Now neither of these things are your friend when you are on stage.

And the problem with being an electro band (the clue’s in the name), is that cracking on with a quick acoustic set in these circumstances just isn’t possible.  However, I was by this point on a bit of a roll so, like some latter-day Vera Lynn in black shiny leggings, I decided to get the troops singing till the power came back on. Surely the only sensible thing to do (not to mention pal Carrie furiously whispering ‘SING SOMETHING WE ALL KNOW’ in my ear…) The chorus of old favourite A Little Respect soon rang out over the Hoxton skyline and whilst the high notes somewhat escaped me, in the circumstances it could have been worse. Even Oli sang and that NEVER happens…

Sadly however we did eventually have to admit defeat and give in to Motherboard Failure. Maybe next time we should decamp to the Electricity Showrooms just opposite. They have loads of power there, surely..?

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POSTSCRIPT 1: talking of covers, we at Cassette Electrik Towers keep toying with the idea of doing a version of an archetypal and still amazing 80’s hit by a well-known male/female pop duo. Then stepping back and going, ‘no, we CAN’T’… (Those of you who’ve seen me in a karaoke frame of mind can probably guess what that is). Could be sacrilege, could be awesome – but then that’s always the fine line you walk when doing a cover, I guess. Might be just something we pull out of our musical bag at next gig, so keep an ear out.

POSTSCRIPT 2: at the opposite end of the spectrum, we really enjoyed finally doing new tune Feels Good, despite the fact it was curtailed – hopefully we’ll do it justice next time. We also didn’t get to do our new favourite singalong anthem No Knowing.  So to all of you who were there but didn’t get a full gig out of us (Dawn & Duane, Rick, Andy, James, Zoe, Lisa-Marie, Adriana, Carrie, Lucio, Lili, Tony O’Dell, Blatchkey Kid, Matty T, Melissa, Marc KN, Damien, Neil, Lisa, Al, Olaf and all you other lovely peeps who gave us your support) we salute you and No Knowing goes out to you next time.

POSTSCRIPT 3: a final shout out (I’ve exhausted myself now with all this gushing – it’s a good thing I only blog about once a year) to bearded geniuses (genii??) The Flippers for their continually fabulous visuals. One of these days I’ll actually get to watch some. If anyone would like to sample more of their work there’s all kinds of visual trickery here – including some very cool Halloween goings-on from their front room in Romford. Scared the neighbours shitless, no doubt. http://www.deathtotheflippers.com/

Yo, people of the world! We are headlining the 333 club on Saturday 7th November!

http://www.333mother.com/home.htm

(It’s the club next door to the main 333 Club – the Mother Bar)

We should be on around 10pm – see you there – or else.

Prices on the door are £6, but we can offer you an ultra-special price of £5. Simply clickee the linkee below to add many many tickets to your cart and pay using PayPal; you’ll receive a ticket by return of email.

I’ll post details of the other bands and flyer when I have ‘em!

Yey! We rocked the Big Chill on Sunday! Here’s me & Des…

Here’s me & Lucy!

We had a blast and are grateful to each and everyone of you who bought one or more of our tracks to get us there.

But the true course of rock never did run straight and with only three days to prepare for the gig after finding out that we’d won the comp, we did encounter a couple of exciting last minute problems:

- My synth controller decided to stop working a fortnight ago, and as it was under warranty I sent it back to the shop in Newcastle who promptly sent it straight back saying it was working fine. Obviously they’d never heard of an intermittant fault because at the very next rehearsal it stopped working again. But no probs, I borrowed an equivalent thing from Des and used that instead.

- Des’ lovely Roland SH-101 decided in the penultimate rehearsal to also stop working, which was a real shame cos it’s a lovely sounding thing. Luckily he had enough time to borrow a Korg Prophecy which did the job – but just not quite as analoguely and vintagely as usual.

- We borrowed the Flippers’ laptop to project their awesome visuals as per usual - only this time it was to be on two 20 foot screens, huzzah! But when I decided to check it 30 mins before setting off for the gig, it decided it was broken. This meant calling the Gav and the Jas to work out an emergency plan involving them uploading the 300 meg file to an ftp site and Des bringing a spare laptop. Unfortunately when Des tried to download it later that day, the connection was so ropey it kept corrupting. But for once, fate smiled on us, and the original Flipper Laptop (the Flippertop) miraculously came back to life with the message ‘your system suffered a serious fault but it has now been corrected’. Woo-hoo – visuals are back.

- I’m not even going to mention the drive there, the two hour traffic jam on the M4, getting lost around Gloucester trying to find the venue, and discovering police diversions due to an accident on the tiny country roads around Eastnor…!

Here’s Lili preparing to drive the visual rig:

(note that Lili is smiling bravely here despite suffering the agonies of a bee sting. She is indeed a trooper!)

Here’s a nice shot I took of the moon (top bright dot) and the ferris wheel (the star thing), plus some fairy lights and stuff:

This was taken shortly after arriving at about 9pm at the Big Chill. We had actually left London at 1pm, but got stuck in horrendous traffic and got lost a couple of times once we’d dropped our stuff off at the well dodgy B&B I had booked.

Well it was cheap.

There’s usually a reason for cheap, and in this case it meant having a breakfast fridge doubling as a fire hazard – official!

Here’s Lucy in front of the running order of The Coop where we were to play:

You can see some of the stickers we put on it so people knew who we were and what time we’d be on. Lucy is proudly holding the sheet of stickers, as you’d expect.

Here’s my table at the B&B with sundry items, such as set list, albums, receipts, stickers and heroin spoon.

So on Sunday morning we turned up with all our gear, parked in the artist carpark and unloaded. The Big Chill is an amazingly well run operation. All we had to do was label up our stuff with big green stickers and then it was driven for us over to the stage where we could store in a lock-up until soundcheck/gigtime.

Have to say all the crew were amazingly friendly and helpful. There was Lila and AJ who were the artist management people and looked after us splendidly at the stage itself, Al the sound guy, and all the runners who drove the landrovers all day around the site ferrying artists, crew and kit. All super cool.

The gig itself went really well. Although it was quite early in the day, we had several hundred people watching by the end, which was pretty good. (Incidentally we were playing in the biggest tent in the festival!) We even had a little group of dancers as well.  So we played our stuff and it all sounded really good, and I think we gave a good account of ourselves.

We were actually really pleased when the sound engineer came over to us afterwards and said he really enjoyed the set – those guys have seen it all, so was a nice compliment.

I think next time we need to bring a dedicated photographer, cos the only thing we don’t have too much of is photographs from the event, which is a bit of a shame. The ones above of the performance are by my friend and colleague Mike, who writes for http://www.zapbangmagazine.com/

We noticed that the winners of last year’s Alterhit comp where on before us, so hopefully we’ll be invited back to play next year too. Who knows, perhaps we’ll even camp properly next time rather than the dodgy B&Bs!

In lieu of the full report to follow…

 (This was the screen the Flippers specially created to go on their ftp page that contained the link to the back-up visual set that we needed to download after their laptop failed 24 hours before the gig…long story, will explain in the report…!)

This is just a quick update to say WE ONLY GONE AND WON THE COMP AND WE’RE GOING TO BE PLAYING AT THE BIG CHILL ON SUNDAY!!!

Many, many (many) thanks to all of you who made such a sterling effort last night when a couple of our competitors put on a late surge and threatened our dominance. Yesterday afternoon we were comfortable on sales of £97  with the 2nd place band on £46 – as it had been for days.  Imagine our horror when we saw them leap to £91 in only a few minutes!

But thanks to you we ended on a magnificent £215, with 2nd place going to Winterman Stanton on £190.

If it hadn’t been for all of you fans, friends and family giving us that final bunk up, we would now be drowning our sorrows in absinthe. The British Heart Foundation via Looptron are also the beneficiaries of all this, and we’re grateful to you on their behalf too.

All we  can do now is promise to blog, twit, snap and otherwise record and relay the details of our progress in this awesome adventure on the weekend!

And if you’re going to the Big Chill yourself – I believe we’re on at 2pm on the Coop Stage – hope to see you there!

Rehearsal last night at Des’ place a mixed bag – mainly cos I forgot that I’d accidentally wiped a load of backing tracks from my laptop in a fit of madness a while ago, so we could only rehearse K7, 8-Bit, No Knowing and Feels Good, and some of those were a bit ‘all over the shop’.

Still, it was a necessary session given that we have only two weeks to prepare for the possiblity of the Big Chill gig. We have booked in as many rehearsals as we can ahead of that and are even considering a warm-up gig for next Friday or Saturday if we can find somewhere to put us on at that short a notice.

Session was fuelled by pizza and beer like all proper rock rehearsals, but I had to make a sharp exit at 9pm to beat the darkness as I had to cycle from Camden to Brockley without lights (complicated story – see  my de railleur failure blog post on oliolioli blog to find out why I’m currently riding my old Raleigh road bike without any lights…) Made it in 35 minutes though which ain’t bad.

 -> We are still way in the lead in the alterhit big chill charts, so fingers crossed we stay there…and we’re also number one in their sales charts, which is a rather nice achievement too!

Gonna try writing daily stuff about Cassette, music industry, good stuff I’ve heard recently, etc. See how it goes. Got to rant about crap R’n'B somewhere don’t I? Oh, and keep you all posted on album progress…

Yesterday saw a successful studio session in which Lucy and worked on a several tracks for the album:

Rubicon
This a cool track, similar in vibe to Presets, Justice, maybe.  Vocals working really well, just needed to tidy up some intro structure and shorten the ending after the final chorus. Bit of tidying up and mixdown and it should be done. I need to find a wa y of posting tracks in progress otherwise that stuff isn’t going to mean very much to you…
Interesting fact: I just named it Rubicon because I liked the word, but have since found out that ‘crossing the Rubicon’ means going past the point of no return. Named after the river Rubicon in Italy that Caesar crossed with his army in 4AD (ish?) that commited him to a battle with some insurgents there. Cleverly, Lucy has incorporated some of the sense of this metaphor into the lyrics.

Too Much
Finalised the structure & ‘problematic’ middle-8. All fixed now, recorded some new end vox and is now ready for mixdown.

Roller Coaster Love
New acoustic demo from Lucy. Strong song – going to just supply some simple plinky plonky electrobeats underneath and basically let the song speak for itself.

And Or Not And
I forgot to ask Lucy if she had written any lyrics for this one yet!! It’s a piece of electropop that I think people will dig.

Big Chill Festival
Is it too soon to think we might actually win this???!!
http://www.alterhit.com/comps/BigChillFestival2009
We’re beginning to think we should perhaps at least make some tentative logistical plans on how we’re going to get there, in case we actually do get to go!

Well, it’s been a little while in the making, but is well worth the wait. With our track ‘The Smartest Bomb’ in the honoured position of #3, preceded by Client, we urge you to purchase this collection of brand new female fronted electropop.

Available from MusicNonStop.co.uk

Unlike Little Boots, Lady GaGa, La Roux, et al, this is music written, produced and promoted by the artists themselves – without the help of major labels. (eg, Little Boots co-writer is Greg Kurstin – look him up and decide for yourselves how much Victoria Boots actually wrote herself….Greg on Wiki)

Anyway…I digress slightly! This is a collection of new electro produced by people with a passion for what they do and is the brainchild of Orac of League-Online, a man with a passion for all things electro and prepared to release an album to prove it!

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EMI Press Release:

Here it is – the release of Electronically Yours “EY Volume 1″, possibly the most significant collection of new electronic pop music since 1981’s “Some Bizzare Album” which launched the recording careers DEPECHE MODE, SOFT CELL, THE THE and BLANCMANGE.  Featuring synthly the best new acts on Planet Earth, “EY Volume 1″ has been pre-programmed for your listening pleasure!

Electronically Yours started life as a blog in tandem with Secrets Online, both in celebration of synthesizer pioneers THE HUMAN LEAGUE.  The thrill of electronic music merged the two sites into one.  But then in late 2006, the discovery of Greek electro-maidens MARSHEAUX changed everything…

EY webmeister Rob Windle (AKA Orac)’s belief in the duo’s wonderful analogue synchronicity and Eurocentric charm led to them headlining the first ‘EY Night’ for their live UK debut in London and the aftermath was an enthusiastic union with Undo Records to bring you this CD.   Only one condition was specified…all the tracks had to be ‘really good’!

“EY Volume 1″ perfectly captures a fantastic moment in time. The last 24 months have seen a resurgence in what is known to many as ‘electropop’.  In the past, it was the mainstay of boys with their toys who were prepared to play the role of ‘outsider’ in yesterday’s tomorrow.  What has revitalised the genre without a doubt are the feisty, glamourous ladies who are not only fronting the music but are helping to create it too. No electropop puppets here! 21st Century electro is fresh BECAUSE of the female voices… 80s synth pop never sounded this sexy!

So taking the lead from 21st Century female-fronted electronic acts LADYTRON, GOLDFRAPP and MISS KITTIN, this brilliant compilation brings together the best of ‘neu musik’ for those who still love the sound of synth.

No guitars here and frankly who cares?

Took a screenshot in case something happens:

Just gotta hold out till Aug 5th…if you haven’t yet been kind enough to purchase the track…please do!!

Go here: alterhit.com

Full details on previous post:
http://cassetteelectrik.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/help-us-get-to-the-big-chill-festival/

Latest News: WE ARE AT NUMBER #2!! #1!!
Thank you one and all…we just gotta hold out till August 5th…

Watch our progress in the competition chart: http://alterhit.com/comps/BigChillFestival2009

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Hi Cassette Electrik gang!