HUNKYPAPA
BY: WILL RUSSELL – PUBLISHED IN HOTPRESS ON 27 MARCH, 2020 Warning: Watching this movie is highly addictive. It was a good one, the summer of 1995. A summer of great weather, festivals, endless parties and fine wines all played out to a soundtrack of Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory?, Pulp’s Different Class, Radiohead’s The Bends, Leftfield’s Leftism, Goldie’s Timeless and Continue Reading
Published in Hotpress on 24 March, 2020 Overnight, it seems that the music industry has been transformed, with the shut-down of all live gigs and festivals. But this isn’t the first time that a major societal collapse has rocked the industry of human happiness. Here, we look at the great disruptions that have seen the Continue Reading
BY: WILL RUSSELL – Hotpress, 05 Feb, 2020 Quality stuff from US Indietronica crew. “Snow falls on the tip of my tongue/ Tasting blood of the violence to come,” sings Polica frontwoman Channy Leaneagh on ‘Driving’, the opening number of the group’s fifth album When We Stay Alive. The lines prepare you for another round of Polica’s Continue Reading
BY: WILL RUSSELL – Published in Hotpress on 28 Feb, 2020 Excellent outing for US dream pop merchants Across their previous four albums, Real Estate artfully hid a dark underbelly beneath a conventional indie exterior. Teenage Fanclub and The Byrds have rightly been labelled as their primary influences, but Elliott Smith and The Pixies possess equal Continue Reading
Check out this week’s #Hotpress where my #FontainesDC piece shared the cover with Ireland’s Biggest Ever Pop Star – #NiallHoran (I grant a small corner, but there nonetheless, a few inches from stardom, dizzy) A head of the release of his highly anticipated new album, Heartbreak Weather, this month, Niall Horan graces the cover of the new issue of Hot Press! Post-One Direction life has been Continue Reading
Fontaines D.C.were incredible last night in Brixton. Check out my live review published in Hot Press Magazine – The freezing breeze sweeping the streets of London is a chilly reminder that winter is not yet over but already Fontaines D.C.’s slaying of a sold-out Brixton Academy is a contender for gig of the year. Like Oasis, Continue Reading
Chuffed to see my piece on 2020 in Irish music featuring Junior Brother, The Mary Whallopers and Fontaines DC published in today’s Hotpress. BY: WILL RUSSELL In a shift that history may record as seismic, Irish singers, songwriters and bands are grappling with the big issues like never before. And they are doing it in their Continue Reading
1990? Dublin? An Italian? Toto Schillaci is the next logic in that sequence. After spending the eighties slogging through the lower divisions of Italian football in the yellow and red of hardy battlers Messina, Toto hit his purple patch in 1990. He was scoring plenty of goals with the Old Lady, Juventus, and shone for Continue Reading
The Rise & Rise of Nyege Nyege Tapes I knew what I opened the studio for. I was looking for a higher ground, for what I knew existed in the soul of mankind.” Sam Phillips Man, there is something happening in Kampala, something really special, in a scene reminiscent of Memphis in the 1950s; Liverpool Continue Reading
There’s a giant in my head and it ain’t me. I despise that giant. Every time I fall into the abyss, I have to fight him, he beats me, forever he beats me and then somehow he releases me and I crawl out, wasted but alive. Until the next time. Recently, I read about Leicester Continue Reading