LIVE REVIEWS
Live At Leeds
Leeds: home of Everything Brilliant since 2006. Hence the sixth incarnation of Live At Leeds – crammed with talent, way drunk. It went like this: The on-way-too-early band Surefire chart-chargers Citizens! are expounding their...
Simple Things Festival
The arteries of the festival season have slowly started pumping party blood around the UK. Who’ll be giving us life this summer? Well, there were seven acts at Bristol’s multi-venue Simple Things Festival who laid down a marker for special...
Camden Crawl
Saturday Camden used to be a Mecca for the wonderfully weird, the Crawl the place to discover them, but today’s sparse line-up and crappy crowd hints at a loss of mojo. Veronica Falls pack the Barfly with a load of people who, it seems,...
Bombay Bicycle Club
The notion of four of the most unassuming blokes in indie selling out a 10,000-capacity enorma-venue might seem a bit mental, but from the army of lads necking Jägerbombs to the girl squealing “I can’t even look at it!” at the Portaloo,...
Foster The People
He does the Travolta On Ice. He does the Moonjerk. He does the Funky Thom Yorke. Once in almost every song, FTP frontman Mark Foster floats away from his keyboard on silky heels, clicking his fingers or bashing a cowbell, and gets lost in his own...
Palma Violets
OK, yes, you might think we at NME have a tendency to get over-enthusiastic about bands sometimes. But listen: we’ve been down here, to this strange house in south London, a few times now, and kept our mouths shut for a couple of months. We...
Noah & The Whale
From the first time we saw them – four years ago, in a small tent at Cambridge Folk Festival – Noah & The Whale have done nothing but surprise us. But tonight, watching Charlie Fink and the boys lope suavely onto the stage of one of the...
Jack White
So here he is, back from nowhere land, in front of a UK audience for the first time as a solo artist. Around him is an all-female band on drums, double bass, steel slide guitar, violin, tambourine and organ. Jack’s in black, the band are in pale...
Lana Del Rey
Outside the Jazz Café in Camden, there’s little to suggest we’ll soon be in the presence of a superstar, as a small huddle of paps and three fans wait by a velvet rope for a glimpse of 2012’s biggest singer. Inside, 150 people squeeze into...
Graham Coxon
Fast-forward four months to Blur’s Olympics gig in Hyde Park. Imagine the hordes of Stella’d-up lads “ woo-hoo ”-ing, the burger vans cooking up cheap meat and the people hollering for ‘Parklife’ outnumbering the quiet souls hoping for...
