Wales Feed

Kruger magazine 2004-2010

2010-04-30T10:58:13+00:00

Mike Williams and Joe Howden were in to talk about launching their own music magazine, Kruger. It was a great idea at the time, and has continued to be so all the way through to its demise today.

It was halfway between a fanzine and a magazine. Printed matte and with good design at its core, Kruger was a mix of music reviews, interviews with interesting angles (the one I best remember is one with Funeral For A Friend's Matt Davies conducted with him in one toilet cubicle and Kruger in another) and features about music and culture.

It was also FREE. Now, let's just put this in context. Back in the day, let's say the late Seventies, anyone with access to a photocopier could knock together a fanzine and sell it to people standing in queues for gigs. People would fork out 50p to read about Dumpy's Rusty Nuts and an interview with UK Subs. Or something.

Cut to the new millennium and with magazine circulations falling virtually across the board, trying to get music fans to buy into a product that wasn't an established name was brave in the extreme.

So reliant on advertising, Howden, Williams, Michaeljohn Day and their colleagues at Kruger were dependent on businesses and independent record labels and the like to put their faith in the magazine as it went first from a Cardiff-based enterprise then to a national one. That their magazine survived for so long is testament to their sheer hard graft and artistic vision.

Eventually, however, commercial pressures caught up with them. The team wrote on their Kruger Facebook page: "It's with heavy hearts and empty pockets that we announce that Kruger Magazine is dead, and will no longer be produced. The magazine may have been brilliant, but our business model was rubbish, so without any sign of long- or short-term financial improvement, we are unable to continue bearing the burden.

"Kruger as a business is not dead, so keep in touch to find out about our new ideas and projects. In the meantime we'll be re-launching our website as an archive and tribute to everything we achieved with Kruger magazine, so come and say hello.

"We'd like to thank everyone who supported us at the beginning, helped us struggle on to the end, and especially the people who saw the whole thing through with us. It was awesome fun."

Frug! fanzine celebrates John Sicolo's life

2010-03-24T09:44:47+00:00

Editor Andy Barding has brought back his fanzine 14 years after the last issue, compiling memories and tributes to Sicolo from bands, friends, members of staff and journalists.

Barding writes in his introduction, "The passing of John Sicolo has left a huge hole in all our lives. It's impossible to accurately measure the impact which this cheery, mountainous man on me and my friends through the heady 1990s and beyond...

"It was our time. This was our club. And John was our friend. He fed us beer, food and stories."

The other contributors include all three members of 60ft Dolls, Eggsy of Goldie Lookin' Chain, Dean Beddis of Cowboy Killers, Benji Webbe of Skindred, Paul Flynn MP, musician and writer Carlton B Morgan, Rhys Mwyn of Anhrefn, Huw Williams of The Pooh Sticks and members of many of the local Newport bands who created such a vibrant scene in the town in the early 1990s.

Proceeds from the sale of Frug! (which does not have a set price but is instead relying on voluntary donations) will go to a fund set up by Sicolo's son and daughter for "a lasting memorial to John in Newport".

More details

Lostprophets The Betrayed review round-up

2010-01-13T11:06:03+00:00

Q Magazine
4/5
"...as an exercise in skin-shedding and score-settling The Betrayed is brutally effective."

BBC Music
"It sweats hunger and ambition, and while it's not flawless, it's a success on their own, aggressively populist terms: 11 songs of big riffs and earworm choruses that reach over the moshpit to the stands beyond."

Kerrang
3Ks out of 5
"A backs against the wall album."

NME
7/10
"The Betrayed plays to their strengths in that it sounds more like the work of blue-quiffed CGI animated warriors than real people with wrinkles. And on those terms, its melodramatic punk-prog-pop works."

Rocksound
8/10
"With no outside influences to force these leek-lovin' lads' song-writing hand, they've delivered an album that, although not as polished as previous efforts... is purely Lostprophets; and the real sound of progress, for sure."

Mojo
2/5
"Yet in chasing hits, Lostprophets neuter any genuine bite their music may have had with slick, histrionic choruses that render them as impotent as the dozens of other MTV-worshipping derivatives."

Uncut
3/5
"Still present is a populist edge that, while occasionally somewhat saccharine, shakes out some great choruses."

Musicnews.com
4/5
"The album marches through catchy, dancy hooks mixed with full on hard rock, a difficult art to master, as proved by many a failed pop/rock band currently struggling in the UK scene. There's even the odd ballad adding favourably to the album's diversity."

Disorder magazine
"It takes time but when you've separated this album into the three tiers it eventually inhabits, it's the lower echelons, of being trapped in an emotional dungeon with the bones of the past, that make them and the corresponding songs the most interesting, audacious and decisive of their 10 year career."

Punktastic
4/5
"The Betrayed isn't a compromise for Lostprophets - it's an exercise in catering for the masses while leaving their own integrity firmly in tact, and it's a job well done at that."

Drowned In Sound
"The Betrayed doesn't reveal anything new about Lostprophets, and if we look to the future then it might be worthwhile for the band to continue to rearrange the furniture a little rather than attempt a markedly different makeover. Consolidation has never sounded so good."

Gigwise
"Boasting a fresh take on their radio friendly hooks and mixture of emotional power and mosh ready riffs, The Betrayed is a solid, if not progressive, move for the band and will no doubt give their hordes of fans a whole new raft of favourite songs."

Look magazine
3/5
"A riotous mix of Rock and Pop."

The Guardian
"...there are intimations of an edgier band still waiting to emerge, but anaemically populist anthem-dom remains their preferred modus operandi, with slick melodies and epic choruses struggling to conceal an absence of soul and ideas."

Financial Times
3/5
"Yet for all the Sturm und Drang... The Betrayed turns out to be a vigorous exercise in beefy riffs, hooky choruses and stadium-grabbing anthems."

Lostprophets on BBC Music

Future Of The Left in NME's top 50 of 2009

2009-12-09T14:20:55+00:00

Not content with appearing in Adam Walton's top 10 albums of the decade with Travels With Myself And Another, Cardiff's Future Of The Left have scooped number 18 in the NME's top albums of 2009 list with the album.

Check out the NME's list.

theABSURD

2009-10-21T09:36:06+00:00

Regular visitors to the likes of Theatr Clwyd, the North Wales Theatre, or Y Galeri in Caernarfon are probably banging their mugs on their desks at this point. No doubt those places are cultural honeypots, as is the Eisteddfod when it visits the north, but I'm particularly referring to the bristling leftfield of Welsh culture, where new things are created rather than old things interpreted.

I'm talking about places like the Anglesey Arms and the Victoria Inn on Anglesey, the Dudley Arms in Rhyl, Yales/Central Station in Wrexham, Morgan Lloyd in Caernarfon, and, in particular for this piece, TheABSURD in Mold.

TheABSURD is a free online publication that celebrates cultural and artistic expression in North Wales. It's an open and welcoming community of artists, musicians and poets begun by two residents of Mold, Andy Garside and Sophie McKeand. They host monthly nights at Y Pentan in Mold and staged the inaugural Y Ffin Festival in Mold last summer. This coming Thursday night (22 October) they will be hosting acclaimed and controversial poet Patrick Jones and sing-a-long guitar pop from the Loose Kites.

To coincide with this event, I thought I'd conduct an e-mail interview with Andy (mostly) and Sophie.

This is what they had to say:

When and why did theABSURD start?

theAbsurd.co.uk was the beginning of it all. It started as an experimental art project about two years ago. Sophie was already writing and performing poetry and I was designing - originally it was a totally obscure website with some quite random poems and artwork. We loved it but it was completely inaccessible and nobody looked at it.

We then progressed to organising theAbsurd events 18 months ago. This was for completely selfish reasons - we were going to gigs in Liverpool, Manchester and Bangor because Sophie was performing, or to see other artists, but there were no spoken-word gigs local to us in the Flintshire/Wrexham area so we decided to start our own, but combining music in with the event to broaden our audience. Then we decided to re-launched the website in January this year as a platform to promote Welsh art, music and writing.

What is your philosophy?

If you build it they will come. Also we have a philosophy of only publishing or promoting art that inspires us. Yes that means that we are totally subjective and biased and that's the way we like it, thanks.

What effect has the recession had on you and the artists you support? Have these harder times been inspirational to them?

We run the website free of charge; we don't get funding for it or sell advertising. It's free. It's our hobby; it's what we do in our spare time. We also run the events as not-for-profit; we get some funding towards poets' fees from Academi, pay the musicians with money donated from the audience and take a small amount for running costs. We are not a commercial venture in any sense of the word; this allows us total artistic freedom and means that we're not really affected by the recession.

One of the main reasons we have a 'pay what you can afford' pricing policy is even if you are skint you can still get to see incredible live performances at theAbsurd. It's worked so far, so we're sticking with it.

Being freelancers there's been plenty of gigs we've missed purely because we haven't had the ticket money.

Creativity is definitely encouraged by adversity. Like you say, focuses the mind, makes people realise what's really important in their lives.

What do you think is unique about culture in north Wales?

Ah, where do you start? North Wales especially seems to be managing to escape the homogenisation, capitalisation and globalisation of its art. Perhaps it is because the area is so fragmented. There are any number of small towns where artists are holed away creating something completely unique. There is a rich cultural history to Wales as a whole, and it certainly seems to be in the blood of the people who live here to create, to push the boundaries, to keep on producing exceptional and diverse art.

Do you get much support from local populace?

Yes we do. Yr Wyddgrug is only a small market town so we had no idea about how well our events would be received. But after 18 months we're now seeing between 50-100 people at each gig - which for a Thursday night around here is great. Also we operate 'pay what you can afford' pricing and the majority of people will happily put a few quid in the hat for an interesting evening with some great performers.

With the website we get a much wider audience; about 40% of our visitors are from Europe and America. We've also got some really talented contributors who support us by giving up their time and words for free.

Given your experience with so many talented artists from north Wales, why do you think so few go on to get wider acclaim?

Sophie: We suppose we would ask why people seek wider acclaim? More isn't better, it's just more. The way in which art, music and poetry are now sold across the globe is ludicrous. People are forgetting about their local communities and moving to the city to 'make it big' but it's just the same old stuff in a different town unless you hit the 'big time'.

That's why we work hard to promote the arts and culture of this region - why shouldn't the artists who stay here be applauded for their hard work, innovation and artistic vision? Why should they be encouraged to move elsewhere? We're all sold the capitalist dream that money=happiness='a better life' and artists succumb to that as much as anybody else. But rather than ask why people don't get the acclaim they seek, ask why we've created a system whereby artists seek acclaim from a bunch of corporate city types who'll suck every last bit of creativity out of them, treat them like nothing more than money making machines, and drop them at the first sign that they're no longer 'the next big thing' - whatever that is.

Andy: When asked by friends from outside Wales what music I'm listening to, my reply is "predominantly Welsh music". and before I can list the bands or styles they presume I'm listening to just folk. There seems to be very little knowledge of Welsh music outside of Wales, why this is I've no idea, probably just laziness. People seem very afraid to stand up and admit they like something unless it's been verified by mainstream media.

What's coming up?

We've got quite a bit in the pipeline for the rest of this year. We'll be running three or four nights in Y Pentan soon, and these are starting to build as we speak. theAbsurd cabaret will still run on the third Thursday (or thereabouts) every month.

Next week (Tuesday 3 November) we launch our new night - (SSHH!!) - an altogether quieter affair... that will run on the first Tuesday of every month. This first event is supported in part by Menter Iaith Sir Y Fflînt and Academi.

We'll also be running some more traditional 'band nights' with just one band headlining - the first of these started with Redstripe who played this week and we've got a few others planned - you'll hopefully be seeing Racehorses in Y Pentan in the new year.

Also 2010 is already proving to be really busy for us - we're organising an avant-garde anti-fest in March with Parking-Non-Stop, Pecker Shorts, Rhys Trimble, Childe Roland and a shed-load of other acts TBC.

We've been approached by a guy who owns a forest and we're running some very secret, invite only, events and workshops there over the spring/summer. We've been approached by the Royal International Pavilion in Llangollen to work with them next year on some festivals and events, and Sophie has been invited to work with them as a community poet. Finally of course there's Y Ffin 2010 to organise.