new bands - 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.

HecklerPlay: Sebastian

August 7th, 2012 By Matthew Laidlow

Feuding individuals can often be a source of amusement, especially if you're the outsider observing a childish argument that has no real point apart from pride for the victor. But from time to time, entire nations can dust off the boxing gloves and throw verbal punches at each other. For the English, they like to taunt local neighbours, France.

An Englishman without any intelligence will associate bicycles, baguettes and garlic with France. Likewise, French inhabitants will go on the assumption that our teeth are wonky, that we have the Queen on speed-dial and dine on nothing but roast beef.

We know that this isn't the case. So what can the two countries actually bicker over whilst not looking stupid? Why, music of course! Are you fan of merry English dubstep from acts like Scuba and Joy Orbison? Or jolly French electro with new comers such as Sebastian?

HecklerPlay: Record Store Day

August 7th, 2012 By Matthew Laidlow

One day, small children will press their oily noses against the glass of a museum display cabinet and marvel at the black shiny disc that comes in 12?, 10? and 7? sizes. Fear not though, this won't be a documentation of the period when pizza bases all went a bit wonky, instead it'll be a memorial to the humble vinyl disc.

The choice medium for music geeks everywhere, there really isn't like the crackly sound of vinyl being played for the first time.

As time and technology has moved on, the disposable culture we live in has seen music fans able to receive tracks a couple of hours after a band has finished recording them, eliminating the need for music to be pressed at all. Digital downloading has hurt the physical medium, but now, there’s a special day to celebrate the wonder of the physical format and the shops that sell them.

Hecklerplay: Melodica, Melody + Me

August 7th, 2012 By Matthew Laidlow

Prior to The Brit Awards in February, folk music still confused and bewildered the majority of people. Say ?folk? and the images conjured up were those of scruffy individuals who camped in fields, sewed carrier bags together to make clothing, lived in caravans and drank nothing but cider whilst huddled round a campfire. Even if the sun was beating down in the middle of the afternoon.

But all of this imagery has been washed away thanks to Mumford & Sons, a band who look like they've come straight out of a church to awkwardly play songs that are now lapped up by the masses.

Go to any trendy hairdressers and amongst the coffee table books by Banksy, you\’ll hear that lot playing in the background. Seeing folk music is the flavour of the month at the moment, we've had a look at another act doing things a little better.

HecklerPlay: Saint Saviour

August 7th, 2012 By Matthew Laidlow

Round the hecklerspray bedsit, there are plenty of things we like to indulge in when we're not writing childish jokes. Amongst watching The Jeremy Kyle show to make ourselves feel better about life in general, we also like listening to music, or as we call it. ?An audio recording combined of multiple instruments to form a collective sound.? And as it stands the entire country is also purchasing more music than ever!

But why?s that? Well dear reader, it seems that the Brit Awards has given certain artists a mini explosion in sales. Most notably is Adele and the flimsy folk act Mumford and Sons. Both acts are subsequently dominating the charts in the UK and America.

Because we like to be different, like a child who demands the crusts to be taken off their sandwich, we want to hear music that isn't popularised through an awards ceremony. This is where Saint Saviour arrives. Literally saving us from overkill of popularised artists.