folk - HecklerSpray

HecklerPlay: Musicians, Famous For The Wrong Reasons

August 4th, 2012 By Si Sharp

On this week in 2000, Yusuf Islam (previously known as Cat Stevens) joined the campaign to fight the government?s repeal of Section 28.?Section 28 was the ban on homosexuality being ?promoted? in schools. By ?promoted?, what it really meant was ?being told that it existed?.

Those that sought to keep Section 28 thought that it was an essential piece of legislation that was all that stood between the bottoms of our innocent schoolchildren and a queue of 2000 predatory gays with unquenchable erections, such is the uniquely paranoid perspective of the bigoted mind.

Luckily the Section 28 thing has been forgotten and despite his high-profile religious conversion he is still mainly famous for writing some pretty ditties. Other tunesmiths have not been so lucky though and have become better known for other, similarly embarrassing behaviour.*

HecklerPlay: Top 10 Songs About Masturbation

August 4th, 2012 By Si Sharp

Musicians think about sex a lot.?They must do, it's almost the only thing they write about. Popstars live to defile their young screaming fans. Rockers know they've made it when there are aspiring muses knocking on the dressing room door.

Hip-hop has a frankly terrifying capacity for the horn.

Frankly it's a miracle they get any work done at all with heads overflowing with images of baps, flaps and todgers. In fact such is the unstoppable high-pressure filth fawcet in their addled brains that doing it with others doesn't fill their schedules and sometimes they combine their libidinous obsessions with their other favourite pastime- loving themselves.

HecklerPlay: Our Favourite Songs About Drugs

August 5th, 2012 By Si Sharp

On Monday, in an interview with Guardian Music, The Shamen?s Mr C revealed that their 1992 hit single Ebeneezer Goode was about ecstasy. Who would have thought it?

To celebrate this revelation, we were going to have a list of our favourite songs that seem to be about one thing, but are actually about another. We soon realised that almost all pop music is actually about sex whilst pretending to be about ding-a-lings, lollipops, divine hammers, relaxing, and the banging of gongs.

So we thought it would be easier to list our favourite songs about drugs.

Top 10 Instructional Training Raps

August 4th, 2012 By Mof Gimmers

Bless the dung-minded simpletons who look at hip hop and think, “Ah! That looks easy! Its just talking over a hip hop beat! What idiot couldn’t do that? I talk all the time! I was pretty good at thinking of words that rhyme too!”

Some of these people often take this very silly notion and apply it to learning. “Kids love rap! I need them to learn! Rapping? Learning? INSTRUCTIONAL RAP! It’s a schooling miracle!”

And so, throughout the 80s (and regrettably beyond), there has been a spate of instructional rap videos, designed to be ‘educational’ and ‘fun’, usually falling way short of both marks. Sadly for them, they didn’t realise that rapping is one of the most insanely difficult things to do. Mercifully for this post, this didn’t stop them. So welcome to a world of rap-audits, fried chicken flexidiscs and martial arts rhymes (and not in a Wu Tang way).

HecklerPlay – Top 10 Favourite Opening Lyrics

August 4th, 2012 By Si Sharp

Making a good first impression is important. In books it sets the tone, in social surroundings it allows busy idiots the chance to judge us, and in job interviews it provides a useful opportunity to explain that whilst, yes, you are technically on the sex offenders? register it was all a terrible mix-up and could have happened to anyone.

In music, the first line is underrated. We barely even notice them unless they're clunky or funny.

The best first lines can, like the opening of Kafka?s Metamorphosis, throw you right into the action or they can, like A Tale of Two Cities, set a vivid scene. They can provide an aggressive statement of intent or they can be just plain funny.

HecklerPlay: The Case Against… Post Dubstep

August 5th, 2012 By Si Sharp

In the late eighties, the UK was home to the most exciting music culture movement since punk as a mutation of house music,? born in Chicago but exported to the warehouses and fields of Britain, re-wrote the relationship between artist and audience.

With Acid House, the crowd and the DJs were a partnership, both there to make equal contribution to the euphoria of the rave. As BPMs got faster in the nineties acid house begat rave which in turn begat jungle.

With the help of pirate radio, jungle (which was starting to be known by the less exciting but seemingly more popular name of ?drum and bass?) became a dominant underground force. The importance of the crowd wasn?t the only way in which dance music challenged a comfortable and complacent music industry. The music may have been disparagingly called ?faceless? but rock?s cult of personality was a tired hangover from its heyday and certainly nothing to aspire to for a generation who had found a genuine alternative.

Mumford & Sons Go ‘Doom Folk’ And We Demand An End To This Awful Music And Their Awful Fans

December 14th, 2011 By Mof Gimmers

Terrible breakfast of shit, Mumford & Sons, want us to listen to them talking about their next album. As if it wasn’t enough that we had to endure their beige, tepid, tuneless, flaccid music in the first instance. And don’t say ‘Don’t like it, don’t listen’ because they’re bloody played EVERYWHERE, ALL THE STUPID TIME.

Anyway, they’ve got some new, awful material to release. You’re probably wondering what it sounds like.

Well, according to the self imposed trampery that makes up the band, the new album will sound like “Black Sabbath meets Nick Drake”. Forgive us while we puncture the vital, thick veins that run down our necks, now.

Pentangle’s Bert Jansch, RIP

August 7th, 2012 By Mof Gimmers

According to various reports, Bert Jansch has died. He may not have been hugely famous, but this is sad news all the same… and we’re going to tell you why.

Jansch was a titan of the folk scene who inspired many artists ranging from Led Zeppelin to Blur’s Graham Coxon to The Smiths’ Johnny Marr. He’s arguably one of the finest guitarists the world ever saw, mercifully eschewing awful axe-wielding and 30 minute guitar solos.

The legendary Scot has suffering from lung cancer for a good number of years now and it would appear that he’s finally succumbed to the disease (although, everyone is awaiting confirmation of his death, thereby potentially making us all look a bit stupid with these pre-emptive tributes). Either way, this is a perfectly good time to look at some of his best music.

Liam Gallagher Reveals Dislike Of Mumford & Sons’ Style In Unfortunate ‘Pot, Kettle, Black’ Incident

June 22nd, 2011 By Michael Park

Liam Gallagher, a man who facially resembles a cross between a Dickensian henchman and a brain damaged howler monkey, is well known for holding certain controversial views on the world around him. He’s the kind of gent that, if he were punch a GPS satellite out of the sky for ‘looking at him funny’, most people wouldn’t be 100% surprised.

Now, the former front brother of Oasis has decided to launch into a fashion crusade in an effort to clean up the image of some of music’s biggest stars. The bowl-cut-toting funster’s love of the finer fashions have often seen comparisons drawn between him and some of the most flamboyant characters in modern celebrity and fashion.

Who can forget that parka that he wore at Glastonbury 1996, T in the Park 1998, V Festival 2005, Knebworth well, actually… pretty much every live show that Oasis have done**. Still, it had a nice furry hood and was very practical in the winter, according to his mummykins.

Album Review: Arborea ‘Red Planet’

August 7th, 2012 By Mof Gimmers

Folk music has been taking a bit of a kicking of late with bands and artists claiming folkiness by virtue of the fact they bought themselves an acoustic guitar and couldn’t find someone to drum for them.

And so, the circle jerk of self-confessional, mewing horsepiss continues as acts open their hearts to the listener with imagined woes and vague interested in Olde World topics such as hangmen and infanticide, when really, they’d rather be listening to the awful Florence And The Machine or something.

However, some folkies get it just right, channelling the ghosts of music past and recreating that echoing eeriness of mountain music without trying to sound like a revivalist act. One such group are Arborea who have two impressive LPs to their name already, and here we are, faced with their third, ‘Red Planet’.