Here is a selection of posts you might like to read:
Microhistory, The interruptive society, Aakash Odedra, Swinging Sixties, Language and Evolution introduced. Does Writing Have a Future? Cooking Vegetables
As you can see, I write about a very broad range of topics.
Some of these topics are being gathered together into channels.
Here are some of them that have already been set up:
Channel About (me and this website)
Gig reviews for September 2011
Midnight Wire’s launch at Sub91 on 2nd August 2011
[This page is a copy of an article published on the old Arts in Leicestershire website, in 2011]
Trevor Locke reports, with videos by Kevin Gaughan and photos by Will Poulton.
After a series of secret gigs, used as dress rehearsals, Midnight Wire finally appeared in public for the first time, as the four band members walked on the large stage of the Sub91 venue in Granby Street.
After much publicity, fans and rockerati alike, got to hear what they could do, through the top-notch PA system of the large city-centre venue. A substantial crowd of teenage fans had gathered in front of the stage to cheer them on. Further back in the audience were members of other, established bands curious to see if the delivery would live up to their expectations.
The members of Midnight Wire are no newbies, still wet behind their musical ears. Most of them had previously played in successful bands. So, as you would expect, they delivered their songs with a healthy dose of confidence.
Their forty-minute headline set was filled with exquisitely good songs; catchy tunes, compelling beats and memorable lyrics. From start to finish, the band unleashed one stonkingly good song after another. The crowd lapped it all up with relish.
Here’s the band performing their song Coming Clean.
On the lead mic, Alex Rooster Van Roose. Behind him on the skins Adam Horton. To Rooster’s left, guitarist Chris Merriman and on the bass, Arjan Johal.
The audience soon got into it, as you can see from this clip of Kings of the City.
Link to It’s got that fizz that young audiences love. Watch the kids responding to Alex, raising their arms and clapping in time. Listen to those crackin’ guitar parts. Chris helps out with the vocals.
It made me wish I was thirty tears younger and could get in there and mosh with the rest. To me, it’s all about the let’s ‘ave it, let’s go mental music that teenage music is about.
Their set finished, the kids were not going to let them go. They had to come back for an encore, here they are playing Keep on Falling.
They weren’t short of extra songs. Since their formation earlier this year, they have penned a catalogue of new songs that would have taken most established bands several years to complete. These guys are driven by youthful energy. Songs writers in the band have been doing a great job spinning out new tunes.
With a launch like this, they have a defiantly bright future ahead of them. They are full of ambition, they are insatiably restless and they are dripping with adrenaline-fuelled talent. Artsin will be following their progress with keen interest.
Supporting Midnight Wire were two bands. The well established Leicester boys Weekend Schemers and, also launching their career, the newly formed Vincents.
Weekend Schemers have something in common with the headline band: their ability to fire up a crowd and ply them with intoxicating songs. Frequently likened to MUSE, either in a complementary or in a derogatory way, depending on how you see things, these four lads always lay on a party when they take to the stage.
Photo of Weekend Schemers on stage
They love their sing-along numbers, even if, at times they have a little difficulty in getting the audience to sing the right words at the right times.
Watch this video of Weekend Schemers.
The band has a big asset in the form of Andy Cooper, whose big voice and intense stage presence adds a big slice of dazzle to the band’s output.
With sterling support from guitarist Connor Evans and bassist Joe Doyle, not forgetting the resounding work of Harry Radburn behind them, they know how to wow a crowd.
Talking to me after the show, Andy Cooper was quick to assure me that a clutch of new songs is on their way which definitely represents a move away from their Muse-like origins. “The band has found its own sound now”, he said, confidently.
They were only 16 when we wrote the feature about them. Now, older and more experienced, with an extensive gigography behind them, they have been surprising everyone with their work. They started out as an indie-pop ice cream van of a band. This year, they have shown us their new side, their ability to metamorphose into a bunch of guys that can rustle up some nouvelle cuisine musical offerings.
Watch this video of Weekend Schemers performing at the show.
The Vincents played their first public gig tonight. The Leicester four-piece delivered an eclectic course of songs, ranging from medium-paced melodies to fast numbers in which individual musicians could showcase their skills.
With Pascal Mowla (ex-Capture the Flag) on lead guitar, they focused intently on playing their instruments, keeping in time and consequently didn’t project much stage presence. It was all rather new-bandish.
It took them a while to warm up. A noticeable lack of backing vocals is something that is being addressed, the bassist was keen to tell me afterwards. Despite their wet-ears newbieness, they punched out some respectable pieces. Drummer Sam got to show off his skills on the skins in a fireworks solo.
Clearly some instrumental talent here but until they get to grips with the vocal layer, they won’t amount to much, unless they decide to follow Maybeshewill down the purely instrumental route, but I doubt that.
What makes the other two bands stand out from the local scene generally, is their ability to manufacture memorable songs. Where samey is the norm, alongside instantly-forgettable music, it’s always exciting when bands turn up with stuff you do want to listen to again and can actually remember on the way home. Pascal reassured me that The Vincents are still developing. Others wondered why they had decided to launch at this moment in time when most other newbie groups would have played multiple smaller gigs to get the flying hours to justify a big venue launch party.
All in all, a magnificently good gig. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something huge. It’s a testament to their ambition that they chose a big venue to launch their act, confident that they could fill it with their reputation and self-confidence.
This page was published on 14/5/19
When this page was published, the magazine was being run by ArtsIn Productions Limited.
From Arts in Leicestershire magazine, 2013
Jazz and blues in Leicester and Leicestershire 2012 to 2013
Jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther was born in Leicester in 1941. In our interview, he talks about his early days in Leicester, playing at Woodstock, The Leicester Jazz scene and his advice to today’s young jazz musicians.
I was born and spent the first years of my childhood in Boundary Road, adjacent to the old Aylestone Road gas works and some of my earliest memories are of the coal heaps behind the red brick wall across the road from our house and of the Victorian gasometers. As a child, I was fascinated by these and also by the little pannier tank railway locomotives that pulled the wagons of coal about. Another early memory is of a lounge area by the toilets in Lewis’s department store where my mother used to take me. There were two rose coloured mirrors facing each other on opposite walls and these created reflections that stretched images to infinity.
I grew up in a Salvation Army family and from an early age was surrounded by music and musicians. There were brass instrument players on both sides of my family and I was taught to play the cornet by my father. I was so young when I learnt to read music that I can’t remember a time in my life when I couldn’t. My mother also enjoyed listening to opera. My first jazz playing was also in Leicester, playing with students in the Queen’s Hall at Leicester University.
I played at the famous Woodstock festival in August 1969, with the Keef Hartley Band. We played on a Saturday afternoon. Whether you played or not depended on whether you could manage to get on a helicopter. We were never included in the Woodstock film because our brilliant (sic) manager wouldn’t let them film us without money upfront! What a genius! During the two or three hours we were there I saw Santana and the compere, John Sebastien. The Incredible String Band were playing as we were leaving.
It’s often said that jazz is dead but won’t lie down! In many ways this is true but it is also true that jazz is having a harder time than ever these days. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is a lack of interest and therefore a lack of exposure in the media. One possible effect of this is that, with some exceptions, the average age of the jazz audience is now about my age (in my 60s) and young people are not being attracted to the music. Jazz has always been a bit maverick in the sense that neither the media, the music industry, the broadcasters or the Arts establishment can decide what to do with it. Is it high brow art music or low brow light entertainment? Of course, it’s neither or both, some of it is and some of it isn’t. The present Government has not been supportive either, even obstructive, with it’s insane and irrational Premises Licence Act which came into force in November 2005. I know of a number of venues that no longer host live music events because they couldn’t be bothered with the red tape or weren’t prepared to meet the extra costs involved. On a more optimistic note, there are dozens of wonderful and many outstanding young jazz musicians emerging and they all do it for no other reason than the love of the music. In London there are now one or two venues which these young musicians run and organise themselves and, indeed, they are also attracting a young audience. I wish them all well! They deserve to be supported as much as possible.
I’ve played in Leicester many times over the years, right back to my teen years, in Salvation Army halls, in the wonderful De Montfort Hall (playing the violin with the Leicester Symphony Orchestra), the old Granby Halls (with Manfred Mann), in pubs and in recent years in the Y Theatre. Perhaps the most memorable gig was 30 odd years ago when I played in the Queen’s Hall in Leicester University with a band called the BBC Radio Leicester Big Band. This was led by Roger Eames, who at the time was a BBC Radio Leicester producer. I was a guest soloist along with saxophonist Alan Skidmore and the brilliant drummer Tony Oxley. We were actually the support band for a quintet led by the legendary American bassist and composer Charlie Mingus.
Still Waters is still in existence even though we haven’t been doing a lot recently. We do have a couple of gigs in London in May and will be appearing at the London Jazz Festival in November. This latter gig will also be with the Royal Academy of Music’s Big Band which will be featuring compositions by myself and two other members of Still Waters, saxophonist Pete Hurt and pianist Pete Saberton.
Perhaps the most difficult question, particularly after my earlier comments! My advice would simply be to be determined to play, don’t give up, practice and above all to love and live the music. I’m not a romantic about jazz but Charlie Parker said it when he said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn!” Also, don’t play only for yourself but remember that there are other musicians on the bandstand with you. Listen, learn from and play with them! On a practical note, at one time I would say go to London because that’s where all the musicians are but now an additional problem is that many musicians can no longer afford to live there so they are now scattered all over the place so there is, sadly, less of a community than in the past.
20th November 2018
Previously published in Music in Leicester Magazine
Going to Gigs Round 11
Wednesday 15th November 2017
by Trevor Locke
In this issue: how the rise of the Internet changed the face of music.
I tried to figure out when I first used the Internet. As far as I can make out, it would have been in 1997. That was the year that I started my own web design business. It was before I got involved in Leicester’s live music scene. Around this time I got involved with the Internet service provider AOL (America On-Line). I worked for them hosting live chat rooms. It was not until 2001 that I started to be involved in rock music. That was the year I went to my first ever rock festival – at Reading. I am sure there was a website for the Reading festival that year. So, I can confidently say that by the early noughties, music has found its place on the Internet. In 2005 I launched my first website that included a substantial amount of content about music in Leicester. It was in February 2005 that I registered the domain name artsinleicestershire.co.uk and used it to publish a website concerned with the arts in general and music in particular.
The MP3 file format was introduced in 1993, although some sources trace the origins of the music audio file format back to 1991. However, the first MP3 players did not really get going until 1997. As the Internet became widely available in Britain, people took to downloading music tracks and sharing them with their friends.
December 2010 I wrote this comment:
We are all passionate about live music. We want to see more people attending gigs because we believe it is a really great way to spend an evening. But how do we do it? One solution that is being delivered, is to print a monthly listing of gigs across all venues and distribute it as widely as possible. I support this. Even though I spend a lot of my working day pushing out information about gigs – on the Internet – I realise that there is still a proportion of the population who do not go on the ‘Net every day. Even if they do, they tend to use it just for e-mail and don’t spend time surfing the web sites and social media outlets where they could come across info about live music.
The key point from that was that, back then, it was widely realised that not everyone used the Internet on a daily basis and a significant proportion of people never used the world wide web on their computers – I say ‘computers’ because, even in 2010, mobile phones were not as widely used as the main device for web browsing as they are today.
The growth of the Internet, from 2002 onwards, brought huge changes to the way that music was distributed. It also allowed bands to reach a wider audience through the world wide web. This period saw a huge growth in music festivals and live music venues. The advent of personalised music-playing devices, from the Walkman in the 1960s to the iPhone, allowed listening to become a personalised experience. By contrast, the rise of the big festivals, the raves and the construction of high-capacity arenas, brought back a social element to the experience of music, one not seen since the demise of the music halls in the early twentieth century.
One other thing, that the rise of mass Internet usage brought about, was the ability of bands, musicians and singers to publish their own music. This was challenging the industrial supremacy of the Record Labels. Mass broadband and the popularity of first Myspace and then Facebook, enabled the rise of the DIY artist, those who could record in their bedrooms and reach a market very cheaply, compared to the days when the production of gramophone records was prohibitively expensive for the group or individual. YouTube, ReverbNation and Soundcloud further aided the rise of the self-production of music.
In Leicester, as in many other cities and towns, the live music venues allowed bands and artists to put on their own gigs. This fuelled the growth in bands; it became unnecessary to be signed to a record label to achieve anything and for thousands of young men and women in Leicester, producing music for their fans became a realistic possibility. The age of the DIY music artist had begun. Hundreds of bedrooms became recording studios. Shops began to sell recording equipment; in Leicester, retail outlets like Maplins did a roaring trade in cheap microphones, amps and mixing devices. As laptops became increasingly affordable, musicians could download software and begin to mix and master their own work in a way that was impossible before.
Arts in Leicester magazine developed a timeline of music history, as part of its series of articles on the history of Leicester’s music.
Some general things that give the flavour of what happened in the 90s.
1991 – formation of the band Cornershop. Cornershop was formed by Tjinder Singh, his brother Avtar, (both of whom lived in Leicester at the time the band was formed), David Chambers and Ben Ayres. Their music is a fusion of Indian music, Britpop and electronic dance music.
1994 – Pink Box opens. Pink Box was set up as a hobby business by record collecting fans Sue and Chris Garland in 1994, not as a record label but to sell rock and indie records at record fairs around Central England. The name Pink Box coming from the record storage boxes. Frustrated by the lack of national coverage to bands from the East Midlands we decided to release a record on our own label [Pink Box Records]
1995 -The Abbey Park Show was axed in 1995, nearly 50 years after its inception.
1995 – Stayfree opens in Conduit Street. Before that, they were in Friday Street.
1996 -The start of Takeover Radio.
1996 – Flat Five records set up by the Potts brothers in honour of their father the legendary jazz trumpeter Mick Potts.
1997 – the formation of Kasabian (previously known as Saracuse, reputed to have played under that name at The Shed.) The original band members were from the Leicestershire villages of Blaby and Countesthorpe. Kasabian has won major music awards and has been nominated 27 times to date. They are one of the biggest indie bands in the country.
1998 – formation of The Young Knives in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Formed in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, the band is known for its energetic live performances and trendy tweed outfits. They broke into the music industry in 2002.
1999 – Forerunner of Kasabian – Saracuse – plays at The Shed.
Kingsize formed in 1999…still going. First gig at the Royal Mail pub.
The noughties – bands and music
2000 – Alan Freeman’s account of bands in the 2000s.
2000 – Darren Nockles becomes a promoter at the Musician. Previously it was called The Bakers Arms.
2001 – the first Summer Sundae festival is held.
2001 – formation of Ist, a Leicester band signed to Pink Box Records.
June 2002 – Live rock music in the city centre. Music Live rocks in Leicester. More than 1,000 performers packed six stages across Leicester city centre this Bank Holiday.
2002 -The Abbey Park Festival, 2003 to 2005
With the birth of Myspace, every band and singer was able to have a presence on the Internet. Fans were able to befriend their favourite acts and original bands could distribute their recorded tracks free of charge or for a small price. Before the rise of Facebook, from 2004, Myspace was the dominant platform on the Internet.
2003 to 2005 – Myspace became the dominant international social networking platform.
Leicester bands were mainly on Myspace from 2003 to 2010, when Facebook began to replace Myspace as the Internet outlet of choice for the majority of bands and artists.
Leicester developed a live music economy as venues, bands and festivals began to grow. As the number of live music venues grew, adding to pubs and clubs as placed where live music could be performed, band and artists began to put on their own gigs.
2003 – Mosh night club opened.
September 2004 – Kasabian release their debut album, having started life as Saracuse, playing one of the first gigs at The Shed, in 2009. The Shed opened in 1994.
The earliest websites made for bands in Leicester. Ictus was one of the first unsigned Leicester bands to have its own domain name and website.
2004 – March – maybeshewill.net registered.
2004 – The old Musician closed its doors for the last time on 31 December 2004. It re-opened in 2005.
2004 – Facebook founded. By 2009 it had become the most used social networking site on the planet. By the end of 2012 over half of the UK’s internet users had a Facebook account.
2004 – The first OBS (Original Bands Showcase).
2004 – Ainley’s record store closed. Wayne Allen was the manager of the store between 1983 and 2001. It was situated opposite the Clock Tower. He is credited with bringing some of the biggest names in music to the Leicester store, including Englebert Humperdinck, Radiohead, Del Amitri, St Etienne, Stereophonics, Shed Seven and Bananarama. He died in 2012.
Several other record shops in the centre of Leicester are remembered, including BackTrack Records and Boogaloo, and in current times HMV, 2 Funky and Rockaboom records. People remember Revolver Records, Cank Street Records, Virgin Records, BPM, Archers, Reef, Chakademas, Pliers, MVC, Village Square, A G Kemble, Archers, A T Brown, Brees, Dalton & Son, The Record Cellar, World Records in London Road, and Carousel.
2005 – the first Glastonbudget festival. To hell and back, Meatloaf tribute band, Ded Hot Chilli Peppers, One Step Behind (Madness tribute), Oasish, The Jamm, were amongst the bands that played.
2005 – Arts in Leicestershire founded. The domain name was registered on 22nd February. Soon followed by the publication of the early version of the Arts in Leicestershire web site.
2005 – The Donkey in Welford Road becomes a live music venue.
2005 – Kevin Hewick started on Facebook.
2005 – The Musician reopened on 1 February, actually smaller than before because of the toilet repositioning, and live music continued unabated until May.
2005 – formation of Leicestershire band Roxum.
2006 – Horus Music established in Birmingham, later to move to Leicester which is where it is now.
2006 – The Glastonbudget Festival starts to put on local original bands such as The Authentics, UgLi, Jack of Hearts, The Stiff Naked Fools, Ego Armalade, Proud to have met you, Platinum JAR, Ictus.
2007 – many more local original bands (‘new acts’) play at Glastonbudget, such as Ictus, Patchwork Grace, Skam#, The Mile, Subdude, Jack of Hearts, Black River Project, Utopians, Squid Ate Lucy, Codes, C*Bob, Purple and the Rains, amongst many others. Playing at Glastonbudget was for many of the new, original bands a premium achievement when this was one fo the new local festivals of any importance.
2008 – July, the Heroes win a competition to be opening band on the main stage at Summer Sundae.’ Thousands of you voted and the results are in… The winners are… Leicester band The Heroes are to open The Weekender in Leicester.’ Guitarist Alex Van Roose went on to form Midnight Wire and lead vocalist Alex Totman went on to form Selby Court band.
2009 – May, Glastonbudget Festival.
2005 to 2014
The growth of Facebook saw the demise of Myspace, as the new social networking platform took off in the UK. Now bands set up a page as soon as they start. Music venues and festivals depend on social media to attract fans and ticket sales at a minimal cost. Previously paper-based music magazines and newspapers begin to close down in favour of online versions. Record label A&R scouts work more on the Internet than at music venues. Contemporary music of Leicester’s bands, singers and rappers as presented on Facebook, Twitter and other parts of the Internet. Leicester bands and singers that have made it on the national and world stage. Through YouTube, Soundcloud, Reverb Nation and Beat 100, people all over the world can listen to Leicester’s music. Twitter becomes a social media outlet for most bands and music artists.
2006 – the launch of Twitter.
2006 – Trevor Locke joined Facebook
2007 – The first gig reviews published by Arts in Leicester.
2007 – Val McCoy joined Facebook
2008 – Pick of the gigs for 2008 published by Arts in Leicester.
2008 – gig reviews for the year 2008.
2009 – Leicester rock bands in 2009 and earlier published on Arts in Leicester.
2009 – Alan Freeman publishes an online list of Leicester bands.
2009 – Dawson Smith is on Facebook
2009 – Pick of the gigs for 2009 published on Arts in Leicester.
2010 – Reviews of gigs in 2010 published on Arts in Leicester.
2010 – Videos released by Leicester bands in 2010 published on Arts in Leicester.
2011 – A list of all known Leicester bands was published by Arts in Leicester.
2011 – January, The Donkey puts up a page on Facebook
2011 – a list of bands known to exist in Leicester in 2011 was released as a PDF document.
2011, 25th August, By The Rivers band register their domain name.
The first decade of the new millennium saw the Internet become the default platform for all things to do with bands and music.
The growth of Facebook saw the demise of Myspace as the new social networking platform took off in the UK.
Now bands set up a Facebook page as soon as they start.
iTunes started as a multi-national platform when Apple bought it in 2000. iTunes store started in 2003. It was not until 2007 that iTunes started to become available for Windows computers.
Myspace was launched in 2003. Up to 2008, it was the most visited social media site in the World, when it was overtaken by Facebook.
The rise of the search engines and Google.
In 2004 arcticmonkeys.com was registered. The band, which formed in 2002, was signed in 2005 but before that they had established a sizeable fanbase on Myspace.
YouTube was founded in 2005 and taken over by Google in 2006.
ReverbNation was launched in 2006, as a site for the independent music industry.
Soundcloud was started in Germany in 2007. Between 2007 and 2009 it began to challenge Myspace as the main site for distributing music tracks.
Bandcamp was founded in 2007.
Music venues and festivals depend on social media to attract fans and ticket sales at a minimal cost.
Paper-based music magazines and newspapers begin to close down in favour of online versions.
Record label A&R scouts work more on the Internet than at music venues.
Contemporary music of Leicester’s bands, singers and rappers as presented on Facebook, Twitter and other parts of the Internet began to take off from 2006 onwards.
In Leicester, there were some early adopters of customised domain names and websites.
Many bands took advantage of free social media platforms, especially Myspace. In the list of Leicester rocks bands, published by Arts in Leicester in 2009, links were given to each band’s website and the majority of these were on Myspace, most of them having dedicated addresses, e.g. www.myspace.com/bandname.
Kasabian.co.uk was registered in 2002. One of the earliest domain names to be used by a band originated in Leicester. Someone in Leicester registered thescreening.co.uk in 2004.
Trevor Locke joined Facebook in 2006 with a personal account in his own name. He added a photo album to his account called ‘Leicester rock stars’ in 2007.
Andrew Stone of the Displacements and later Little Night Terrors joined Facebook in 2007.
James Shaw and Jason Westall of The Utopians joined Facebook in 2007.
The Utopians set up a group on Facebook in 2007 and has a single release at The Shed, on 9th October. In July 2007. The Utopians played a ‘guerilla gig’ at a warehouse in Leicester. The band set up a band page in January 2009. They also had a page on Myspace.
Luke D’Mellow (The Utopians) joined Facebook in June 2007.
2007 – An events page for the Utopians at The Shed on 20th December 2007 showed 17 guests going, including Raj Mohanlal, the members of the band and some of their close friends.
2008 – August, Connor Evans (Weekend Schemers) joined Facebook.
DJ Lisa Lashes joined Facebook in May 2009.
2009 – Trevor Locke creates a photo album called “Leicester rock stars” on his Facebook account.
Next time on Going To Gigs: we trace the roots of rock by going back in time to the early days of popular music.
Home page for the section
This page provides links to the series of articles about the history of popular music in Leicester and Leicestershire.
In the old magazine, we published several pages that plotted the history of popular music from Roman times to the present day.
As these pages are added, links to them will be published on this page.
Arts in Leicester magazine archive
In 2013, Arts in Leicester magazine published a great deal of content about bands (from the local area) that played all styles of rock music, including pop, metal, punk, hip-hop and several other flavours of sound.
Here is a facsimile of the home page for the Bands Section of the magazine from 2013.
At this time, Leicester and Leicestershire had around four hundred working bands. All of them played live at gigs held in the local venues, pubs and festivals.
The magazine had thousands of photographs of bands performing at gigs and festivals.
As our archive project develops, we hope to post extracts from gigs reviews, to provide examples of what the magazine published about the shows and gigs its reporters attended.
See also:
This is the home page for the
16th October 2018
This section will contain articles written about music in the city of Leicester and county of Leicestershire (in the UK.) This material was previously published in the old Arts in Leicester magazine.
There will also be a series of postings about the History of Music in Leicester. This was an ambitious project to plot popular music in the city from Roman times to the present day (2016)
Music formed an important part of the art coverage of the magazine, ever since it started in 2005. Most of the music covered was rock and pop although we did sometimes also review classical music. Towards the end of the magazine’s period of publication, over half the entire content was about music. It was for that reason we decided to split the music content off to a separate website – which still exists – Music in Leicester.
This is what the home page of the music section looked like in 2012. (requires a PDF reader.)
(NB. Even if your browser does show the links in this PDF, please DO NOT click on them because they are no longer valid. The PDF is an archive document from 2012.)
As you will see from the image, there were many genres of music, each of which had its own landing page, and these were indicated by logos.
Look at the boxes outlined in red borders. They list pretty much all of the pages in the music section.
The art website also set out to list every known band in Leicester and Leicestershire that existed at the time. Over 400 working bands had been identified (within the area) from 2012 to 2013. Many of them also had their own pages on the website. If any band performed in the city or county, the chances are that the arts magazine reviewed them.
The problem facing me in compiling this archive is that the original Arts in Leicester website had written in HTML code. That means it cannot simply be copied to this WordPress blog either as a whole or in part. At present, the only method I can find of replicating pages is to print PDF files of them. It was much later in the magazine’s existence, that it was converted to the WordPress CMS format.
The problem of starting a new band.
New tracks and records from Leicester bands in 2011.
See also:
This is the home page for the dance section
This page is all about the art of dance and dancing and dancers in Leicester and the East Midlands.
The link below opens a PDF file in a new browser window
Dance in Leicester 2012 and 2013
This page reports on various forms of dance in Leicester in 2012 and 2013
The PDF document will show links but few of these will be likely to work.
News about dance from 2010 (requires a PDF reader. Links are no longer valid)
Dance and dancers in Leicester 2010
News about dance from 2011
News about dance in Leicester for 2011
See also:
by Trevor Locke
This article forms part of a series called The History of Music in Leicester.
Chapter 1 of this series Music Today has already been published and covered the period from 2014 back to 2005.
This is part 1 of Chapter 2.
Part 2 looks at the 1990s.
In this chapter, we look at the period from the early noughties (2000 to 2005) to the 1990s (taken to be the start of the Internet, roughly speaking.) As was noted in Chapter 1, all music of a particular period had its roots in the past; the music of an era cannot be understood without looking back at the roots that nurtured it at that time. Hence, our journey back through history to see how music has changed and how people’s musical tastes have been shaped and formed by what was happening to them and the people before them. The outstanding feature of the period 1990 to 2014 was the growth of the Internet.
All kinds of music has depended for its growth, development and distribution on the technologies available; music in pre-technological society was exclusively live and its distribution was dependent on the printing of sheet music. Before that, it was all about oral traditions being handed down from one generation to another. All this changed with the invention of the gramophone player, the radio, television, the CD player and then the Internet. Technological development changed the way people listened to music but it also changed the musical tastes of the majority of people by giving broader access to music. This is covered in more detail in our article Music and Technology. Peoples’ access to the Internet had two parts of it: email and the World Wide Web. In the early days of the Internet, these were the two services that most people used.
The growth of the Internet, particularly from the late 90s onwards, brought huge changes to the way that music was distributed. It also allowed bands to reach a wider audience, through the medium of the world wide web. This period saw a growth in music festivals and live music venues. The advent of personalised music-playing devices, from the Walkman in the 1970s through to the iPhone’s launch in 2007, allowed listening to become a personalised experience. By contrast, the rise of the big festivals, raves and the construction of high-capacity arenas, brought back a social element to the experience of music, one not seen since the demise of the music halls in the early years of the twentieth century.
One other thing, that the rise of mass Internet usage brought about, was the ability of bands, musicians and singers to publish their own music, challenging the industrial supremacy of the record labels.
Mass broadband and the popularity of first MySpace and then Facebook enabled the rise of the DIY artists – those who could record music in their bedrooms and reach a large market, usually very cheaply. This revolutionised the means of musical production, compared to the days when the production of gramophone records was prohibitively expensive for the unsigned group or individual. YouTube, Reverbnation and Soundcloud further aided the rise of self-production of music.
In 2005, Arts in Leicestershire was founded. The domain name was registered on 22nd February; this was soon followed by the publication of the early version of the Arts in Leicestershire website, which later became a magazine. The site published content on all forms of art but half its content was about music. By its heyday, over 600 pages existed on the site (covering all genres of music) and, at the height of its popularity, it had over 28,000 readers per month. The first gig reviews were published on it in 2007. This was made possible by the availability of inexpensive hosting services. In 2013 the music content was transferred to a new site called Music in Leicester. When the music content of the old Arts in Leicester website was removed from the Internet, I began making plans to re-publish the gig reviews as a book. Fortunately, I archived the whole of the Arts website to disk and then extracted all the gig reviews, hundreds of them, to a separate file and arranged them into chronological order. The resulting ‘book’ was given the working title A compendium of Leicester gig reviews; it contains a year by year account of many of the music events that took place in Leicester from 2007 through to 2013 when Music in Leicester started. The only other publication to comprehensively record live music over a period of time was The Monograph. Live music is an ephemeral phenomenon and evidence of what happened quickly disappeared. Anyone wishing to research music will find it difficult to extract material from verifiable sources.
At Leicester University, the Oral History Archive has recorded over a thousand interviews with local people and in some of them, they talk about music, gigs and the shows they went to. Music journalism often misses an important side of life – what people remember about their experience of music events. Today, music fans post their thoughts and experiences on social media every day but this rapidly disappears and there is no easy way to gather and store it for use by the researchers of the future.
Apart from social media platforms, independent websites were set up that provided information about the Leicester music scene. In 2009 Alan Freeman published a list of Leicester rock bands on his website. Arts in Leicester maintained a listing of local rock bands for many years; this captured the names of bands that were playing and sometimes where they came from and style of music they played. Analysing this data enabled Arts in Leicester to claim that ‘Leicester had more bands per head of population than most other cities of comparable size.’
It was in the mid-noughties that Facebook began to challenge MySpace as the ‘must-have’ presence on the ‘web for bands, singers, rappers and music artists, alongside countless thousands of music fans who followed them. There were some early adopters, from Leicester, such as the singer and songwriter Kevin Hewick who opened an account on it in 2005. Trevor Locke also joined Facebook in the same year. Val McCoy, who was the promoter of the OBS, joined Facebook in 2007. Twitter was launched in 2006 and as its presence grew in the UK, bands started to open accounts to tweet about their activities.
Bands too began to register domain names and to use them for their own websites. Kasabian was one of the earliest UK bands to register its own domain name, in 2002, as we noted in chapter 1; Leicester bands like ICTUS, Autohype and The Screening were early adopters of free-standing websites with their own tailor-made web addresses (i.e. domain names.) Maybeshewill band registered its own domain name on March 2004.
Stayfree music, then based on offices in Conduit Street, was home to a web hosting service that its own servers in the same building. Many local bands used this service at that time.
Whilst there were a few content management platforms, a lot of websites, in those days, had to be hand-crafted using HTML code. Software, such as Dreamweaver, made the task of designing websites easier. Having been created in 1997, Dreamweaver was taken over by the Adobe corporation in 2005. It’s killer function was its ability to write code whilst presenting the page in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get format. Also at that time, Microsoft provided its own proprietary software called Frontpage. There were plenty of people around who could make websites for bands and artists but some musicians were savvy enough with the Internet and computers to do it themselves. The Internet provided people with a means to communicate on a mass basis, something which, in previous periods, was limited to the printed page and newspapers, along with the broadcast media.
This section looks at the period we call ‘the noughties’ before moving on to the 1990s (in part 2)
The period 2000 to 2005 saw much activity on the Leicester music scene as bands formed, gigs and events took place on a regular basis and there was a high level of activity across all areas of the city’s music industry. The growth of the Internet, from 2002 onwards, brought significant changes to the way that music was publicised and distributed; it also allowed bands to reach wider audiences, through the world wide web. This period saw considerable growth in music festivals and live music venues. One other thing that the rise of mass Internet usage brought about was the ability of bands, musicians and singers to publish their own music, challenging the industrial supremacy of the record labels. The mass use of broadband and the popularity of first MySpace and then Facebook enabled the rise of the DIY artist – those who could record in their bedrooms and reach a market very cheaply via the Internet.
Leicester developed a vibrant live music economy as venues, bands and festivals began to grow. The number of live music venues increased, adding to pubs and clubs as places where live music could be performed or listened to. The small venues allowed bands and promoters to put on their own gigs, hiring the venues and selecting their own line-ups of acts. Gig promoters were usually individuals who had a passion for live music and would hire bands to play in a variety of local venues. Some of them also secured bookings for bands to play outside of Leicester.
Apart from the weekly round of gigs, several large-scale events took place in Leicester, including One Big Sunday, which was organised by the BBC’s Radio 1 and took place on Victoria Park on 20th July 2003. It attracted an audience of over 100,000 people.
In February 2000, a big show was held at the DeMontfort Hall ‘featuring the very best bands from Leicester’ and ran from 2 pm to 11pm. On the advertised line-up were Saracuse (later to become Kasabian), Pendulum, Last Man Standing, The 13twelve, Marvel, Slider, Fusion, The Incurables and several others. The first Original Bands showcase was held in 2004. The band that won that year was The Dirty Backbeats. The OBS is still going today (2015). In 2006 we saw the beginnings of the Fringe Festival with its mammoth Fringe Thursday, an event that had its beginnings as the Summer Sundae Warm Up party. On Fringe Thursday, buses transported music fans around all the live music venues in the city.
It can be argued that such series of shows supported the local music scene and encouraged people to see bands, who might not otherwise have bothered. The value of serial events, such as the OBS, is unclear, in a long-term perspective, but each year they have created live music opportunities for large numbers of acts and the fans who went to see them. Taking part in something like the OBS is enough reward in itself, it could be said. Leicester has not developed any kind of awards recognition institution to celebrate the best of its local music; in fact, as far as amateur local music is concerned, only a handful of cities in the UK have established annual awards ceremonies. Awarding music band and singers is something that was done at the national level. This might seem odd given a large number of TV programmes devoted to singing and entertainment competitions that enjoyed massively big audiences. Perhaps local recognition is not so valued as that conferred at a national level. Things like Battles of the Bands have occurred regularly in Leicester throughout the noughties and 90s. As a way of organising live music, such series of gigs attracted considerable controversy from bands and fans alike. Leicester bands participated in the national competition Surface Unsigned, often with considerable success.
Compact disks and vinyl records were popular in the noughties and Leicester supported a range of retail outlets for them. Ainsley’s record store, once a popular retail outlet, closed in 2004. It was situated opposite the Clock Tower. Wayne Allen was the manager of the store between 1983 and 2001. He is credited with bringing some of the biggest names in music to the Leicester store, including Englebert Humperdinck, Radiohead, Del Amitri, St Etienne, Stereophonics, Shed Seven and Bananarama. He died in 2012.
We looked at record shops and stores in Chapter 1. With the growth in digital media, sales of plastic sources of media declined but many fans still value the ability to own CDs and vinyl records and bands continue to provide them for their fans.
Leicester has never been noted for its music industry agencies but in Horus Music, established in Birmingham in 2006, later moved to Leicester which is where it is now. I ran Get Your Band On from June 2005 to November 2009; it acted as an agency for rock bands, providing training, bookings, management and bookings. GYBO worked with a number of bands from Leicester as well as supporting bands and artists from all over the UK. During this period, several people became promoters, putting on gigs and events; in most cases they were individuals. Alongside those who worked with rock bands, there were several entertainment agencies that provided a range of artists for music-related clients. What Leicester lacked in modern times was band management; people or agencies specialising in providing management, bookings and publicity services have been few and far between, given the very large number of bands and artists that have existed in the city. The majority of bands and artists had to do all these things themselves.
The year 2000 saw Darren Nockles take over the Bakers Arms in Wharf Street South, a public that had been active since the 1970s, turning it into the venue we know today as The Musician. The old Musician closed its doors on 31st December 2004 only to re-opened in 2005. The Donkey, a pub in Welford Road, became a music venue in 2005. In the following year, Gaz Birtles began work there as a promoter. Many will have fond memories of the small venue in the city centre called The Attik. It ran from 1989 to 2006. Andy Wright, who ran The Charlotte remembers that on “16th January 2009, the police shut the doors to stop any more people getting in and shut the bar down .. was fun that night.” Concerts were held at the University of Leicester, mainly in the Queens Hall and the DeMontfort Hall continued to put on performances by rock bands and orchestras playing classical music. Several large music events were held at The Granby Halls (demolished in 2001 to make way for a car park serving the nearby Tigers Rugby Club.) The Who played there on the opening night of their 1981 tour on 25th January 1981. Churches, including the Cathedral, also provided music-lovers with concerts of music; they kept alive Leicester’s choral tradition which started in the middle ages. It was not just venues that grew over this period. Nightclubs were also popular for those who wanted to hear DJs playing recorded tracks. MOSH nightclub opened in 2003. ‘Red Leicester’ was The University of Leicester Students’ Union Wednesday official night out from 2004 – 2014.
The first Summer Sundae festival was held in Leicester in 2001. It became one of the most important events both for national bands and artists as well as for the many local acts that played. It attracted an audience from all parts of the country. A festival was held in Abbey Park in 2002. The Abbey park music festivals played a seminal role in the development of Leicester’s music, from1981 until their demise about twenty years later. In 2009, Leicester band Autohype played to a crowd of over 20,000 at Abbey park’s bonfire night. A similar-sized crowd was present in 2014 when rising pop stars The Vamps were the headline act, supported by local artists Jonezy and Curtis Clacey. Glastonbudget Festival started in 2005 (as mentioned in the previous chapter) and has continued to run every year up to the present day. Strawberry Fields festival started in 2010. Quite a few small local festivals were organised, sometimes on a one-off basis. In 2009 and 2008 Arts in Leicester reported on Summer Sundae, the Big Session festival held in Victoria Park, Glastonbudget, Fristock, and regular events that included music in their programmes, such as Gay Pride, Diwali, Caribbean Carnival and the Belgrave Mela. Just over the Leicestershire border, Download attracted large numbers of people from our local area and Arts in Leicester listed the bands that played there. Batfest took place on 21st August 2010 near Ibstock and was organised by Elliot O’Brart. Batfest was an annual event held for charity in the tiny but pretty village of Battram. The festival was primarily a music festival with a couple of stalls selling homemade cakes and a raffle stall [Arts in Leicester magazine] This was typical of a large number of local music events that took place in the city and county during the noughties. Other examples included Cosby Big Love, the Braunstone Carnival (which usually featured a music stage), Glastonblaby, and the Oxjam festivals.
I cannot speak from personal experience about Leicester’s live music scene much before 2005. My very first reporter’s notebook goes back to 2006. I did not start writing about local music much before 2001; in that year I started a website called Travel to Leicester which had a section about the entertainment which visitors to Leicester could find and which mentioned gigs, bands and venues. During the 1990s I wasn’t living in Leicester; my home was outside the city in Blaby district and in those days we didn’t come into the city at night – unless we had to. It was not until November 2002 that I went to The Shed for the first time. Hence, I missed out on music, as far as Leicester was concerned, in the ’90s. I did, however, attend One Big Sunday, on Victoria Park on July 2003.
It was in 2005 that I started Arts in Leicestershire, a website that took over the content about the arts, including music from the Travel to Leicester website. I have written about the history of this Arts website, now called a magazine [Arts in Leicester] and have covered its history [Arts in Leicester]
From 2005, I really got to know the local bands. Under a heading ‘2007’ I noted many of the bands that were popular at the time. In May 2007, an extensive listing of gigs was well underway. This page showed some of the promoters that were active at the time, such as 101 Promotions which was run by Paul Matts (who previously managed the Attik live music venue.) As far as I know I wrote my first gig review in 2006, the same year that I joined Facebook; in just ten years the Internet had gone from being a fairly limited system to one that offered an array of services, many of them multimedia, and new platforms were coming on stream on a regular basis. I started to write gig reviews for Arts in Leicester magazine, together with collaborators such as Kevin Gaughan; at one time there were as many as 600 amateur bands based in the city and the county. ‘Leicester is home to over 400 working bands, playing all styles of music. Here we give a guide to our pages that are about bands in 2012’ [Arts in Leicester magazine, 2012]
The magazine also featured local bands in its Band of the Month, pages and listed all known bands in the East Midlands from 2011 to 2013. Here is the list of bands that were given featured (band of the month) status:
The Manhattan Project, Backline, Messini Assault, Beat Club, The Utopians, Breek, Subdude, Full Circle, Forty More Autumns, Razmataz, Smoking the Profit, The Heroes, The Truth, The Chairmen (Oct 08), Kids in Cars (Nov 08), Formal Warning (Dec 08), The Steptoos (January 09), The Pennyhangers (February 09), Project Notion (March 09), Skam# (April 09), Shortwave Fade (May 09), The Waits (June 09), Kill The Batman (July 09), The Fazed (August 09), Autohype (Sept 09), Weekend Schemers (Oct 09), AstroManiacs (Nov 09), Azidify (Dec 2009), Kicking Habits (Jan 2010), Drive By Disco (early Feb 2010), The Stiggz (late Feb 2010), Iziggy (Mar 2010), Third Time Lucky (May 2010), Neon Sarcastic (June 2010), Silent Resistance (Jul 2010), Ashdowne (Aug 2010), Go Primitive (Sep 2010), The Black Tears (Oct 2010), Us Wolves (Nov 2010), Maybeshewill (Dec 2010), Skam# (Feb 2011), Glassfoot (Mar 2011), Aphtershock (April 2011), The Boobytraps (May 2011), SuperEvolver (June 2011), Rassoodocks (July 2011), The Chairmen (August 2011), Midnight Wire (September 2011), Muleta Smiles (October 2011), By The Rivers (November 2011), Arms of Atlas (January 2012), Raptusound (February 2012), Resin (March 2012) No band of the month in April, May and June 2012. Vengeance (July 2012). Smokin’ The Profit (August 2012), Axis Mundi (September 2012)
The very early Band Of The Month entries have been lost but were very limited (just a highlighted mention and not much more). Covers and commercial bands were listed separately. The magazine also published pages about new bands that had started and young bands. The news sections reported on local bands, venues and music events. Two sections specialised in coverage of African and Asian music (the latter being edited by the late Harjinder Ohbi.) There was also a page about underground and alternative music. The old website – Travel to Leicester – included details of where karaoke evenings took place. In those days these frequently featured high-quality singers who attended them and sang for fun; some of them were professional artists and others were simply very good vocalists. Rock was not the only type of music to be covered; the website also had a page about jazz in Leicester and this content was carried across to the new Arts in Leicester web site when it was created in 2005. Bands mentioned in 2007 included The Eaves, Tommy’s heroes, My Amour, Taste The Chase, Ictus, Quaternary Limit, The Iconics, The Jack of Hearts band, The Beat Club, M48, Drumlins, Screwloose, The Chairmen, NG26 (from Nottingham), Proud to have met you, Manhattan Project, The Utopians, 1000 Scars, Killquicks, Sub-Rosa, Firstwave, Kid Vicious, The Codes, Aisle 13, The Elite, Backline, Silent Devices, September Flaw, Messini Assault, Half of Nothing, Rise as one, Black River Project, Internal Conflict, The Authentics, Pink Strip, Blue Light District, Breek and many more. Most of these were local bands, a few were out of town bands that regularly came to play in the city.
In September 2004, Kasabian released their debut album. Having started life as Saracuse, they played one of their first gigs at The Shed, in 2009. The name Kasabian became associated with Leicester, in much the same way as Arctic Monkeys was associated with Sheffield and Oasis was associated with Manchester. Engelbert Humperdinck said ‘It’s so wonderful to know that we have another up and coming big name on the horizon from Leicester. I am proud to be from Leicester.’ [Shooman, 2008] Five musicians, most of them from Blaby and Countesthorpe, formed a band called Saracuse which made an early appearance at The Shed in September 1997. The band also played at the Three Nuns pub in Loughborough and later performed at the town’s University. They also played at Princess Charlotte in Leicester, in 1999, the same year went back to play again at The Shed. In 2005 the band performed at Glastonbury festival on the ‘other stage.’ It was Kasabian’s third single Club Foot that brought them chart success in 2004. The band won the best live act award at the 2007 NME ceremony. The band became signed to Sony Music. [Shooman, 2008]
Leicester band Roxum formed in 2005 and went on to become a very popular act on the local scene. The year 2008 saw the formation of a clutch of local bands including Neon Sarcastic, Little Night Terrors, The Chairmen, Axis Mundi, The Boobytraps, and many others. In 2009 we saw the emergence of Formal Warning, The Furies, Arms of Atlas, The Weekend Schemers – all of these bands went on to become popular on the local scene and had active careers in music. Because Arts in Leicester was an arts magazine, it could cover a much wider scope of music than rock and pop; concerts of classical music, opera, ballet and musicals were also reviewed and it made some attempt to report on music from ethnic communities, such as the Indian community. Several local bands achieved national notoriety and success. Among these, we would include By The Rivers, The Displacements, Midnight Wire and These Furrows. Many other acts achieved notable successes. For example, The Heroes played at the Glastonbury festival in 2009. Other Leicester bands to play at the coveted Glastonbury festival included By The Rivers.
In July 2008, The Heroes won a competition to be opening band on the main stage at the Summer Sundae festival. ‘Thousands of you voted and the results are in… The winners are… Leicester band The Heroes are to open The Weekender in Leicester.’ Guitarist Alex Van Roose went on to form Midnight Wire and lead vocalist Alex Totman went on to form Selby Court band. [Locke, 2015]
Several recording studios have come and gone and some are still open today. Deadline Studios, in Aylestone Road, started in 2001; others include Quad Studios, in Friday Street, Yellow Bean Studios (from 2010), in Western Road, (another studio Western Studios, operated in the same premises in around the year 2006). HQ in Charles Street opened in 2012, providing a small recording room. Some Leicester bands went to Nottingham to record their music and some even to London and places further afield. In 2011 Flat Five Records was set up by the Potts brothers, in honour of their father the legendary jazz trumpeter Mick Potts. They published the work of many important bands of this period, such as Kenworthy.
Trevor Locke
References
References are given on a separate page.
See also
Introduction to the series History of Music in Leicester
Chapter 1 – Music in modern times
Music and technology
Pictures from the origial article have been removed fromthis version.
Introduction
Chapter 1 : Music of Today
Chapter 2 –
Chapter 2 Part 2 – The 1990s
Chapter 2 Part 1 – 1990 to 2005
These references are referred to in the articles of The History of Music in Leicester
Berners-Lee, Tim, 1999, Weaving the web, The past, present and future of the world wide web by its inventor, Texere.
Jones, Rhian, 2015, Small venues are under threat, but what does it mean for the music industry?, iMusician web site.
Locke, Trevor, 2015, The Heroes… in golden times. The story of a band. Book. ArtsIn Publishing, Leicester.
Miller, Colin, 2012, A degree of swing – lessons in the facts of life; Leicester 1958-64, Derby Books.
The Music Venue Trust, March 2015, Understanding Small Music Venues, a report published by the MVT, London.
Shooman, Joe, 2008, Kasabian: sound, movement & Empire, Independent Music Press.
Spellman, Peter, 2002, The Musician’s Internet: on-line strategies for success in the music industry, Berkless Press.
Freeman, Alan, 2009, Local Band and Artists, blog article.
Harris, John, February 2013, Can the UK’s ‘toilet circuit’ of small venues survive? The Guardian.
Music and Technology, 2015, Arts in Leicester magazine.
Links have been removed.