Mark Beaumont

6 June 2008

If we learnt one thing from the five nights of Road To V mania in London and Liverpool this May, ...

If we learnt one thing from the five nights of Road To V mania in London and Liverpool this May, it was to never underestimate the unsigned talent beating down the music industry’s gates. Sitting around a judge’s table listening to songs entered by bands to the competition and choosing our Top Fourteen (a difficult enough process as it was, leaving us with fourteen bands all of whom I really wanted to win for one reason or another) is one thing, but whether those bands can come onto a stage in front a venue full of cameras and deliver with the power, pizzazz and passion of a V Festival opener is another matter entirely. The thing is, pretty much all of them did. Bands that seemed out of their depth were a remarkable minority; most of the bands I saw were well drilled gigging machines. Situationists, The More Assured, Alexis Blue, The Idle Lovers, The Wireless, Matt Trakker (who’d amazingly only had his impressively Pavement-esque band together for three weeks)… they all tore the place up with rampant self-belief and pummelling tune frenzies, and would all make worthy winners. And the acts bringing something different to the contest fared well too: Floors & Walls had the angriest frontman V Festival might ever see at 10am, Mama Chamone had the sultry electro-funk of a barrelful of Santogolds and The Rebs, as I suspected when we put them through, tweaked Carl Barat’s ear with the bluesy take on The Libertines. For me personally, two acts stood out though. In Liverpool, Walk. Don’t Walk were a sensation; with a crowd flinging themselves, their friends, their clothes and their dignity to the four winds, they roared through an impassioned set of funky Futureheads dancefloor anthems that made girls not just dance but spin on their heads like MDMA crazed maniacs. And in London, Imperial Leisure owned the Islington Academy from the second they took the stage – with a stage-diving trombonist, a representative from every musical genre since punk onstage and a righteously melodic toe in everything from hip-hop to ska to hard rock to soul to ultra-cool indie, they simply nailed your eyes to the stage. One thing’s for sure – they’d certainly wake up V. Those might be my picks of the bunch, but it’s far from an easy decision. As the final night ended and the panel convened on some upstairs sofas for a light-hearted on-camera overview of the nights we’d seen, one question from our interviewer – ‘What did you think of the bands?’ - set off a twenty-minute argument over the vastly varying opinions of the judges that made it clear that no one band was a shoo-in to the winner’s slot. We’ve all got strong opinions on which bands deserve to win, and there’ll probably be bloodshed over the final panel round-table before the winners are announced. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sharpen my fingernails.

3 April 2008

And so the levee breaks. The first few weeks of any unsigned band contest predictably sees a torr...

And so the levee breaks. The first few weeks of any unsigned band contest predictably sees a torrent of pub acts, hair rockers, aging punks and new combos from the ex members of Echobelly threaten to drown out the real talent beneath the frothing masses. So thank the lord for Road To V’s uber-clever filtering system, giving the bewildered judge the chance to check out the bands that are getting the most ratings and views between strapping on the waders and diving into the ever expanding ‘Band A-Z’. Believe me, an hour or two in there and you’ll know how Uma Therman felt in the Chinese restaurant scene of Kill Bill. They just keep on coming and coming and coming… Dipping into the entries so far, however, there’s clearly an overwhelming wealth of impeccably turned out demos on offer (thank you GarageBand!), so the possibility of being turned off by songs that sound like they’ve been recorded in the bassist’s outside lavatory on wax cylinder is at an all-time low. In fact, if a demo like that turned up it’d be a fascinating piece of work since the act in question would’ve had to try REALLY HARD to sound that grotty. For me, the appeal of an unsigned band lies in the quirk, the spark of originality, the tweak of unexpectedness. No matter how polished and studio-shiny a song sounds, if within the first five seconds – as I have several times already today in perusing the entries – I can tick a box marked ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’, ‘The Libertines’, ‘My Chemical Romance’, ‘Arctic Monkeys’ or any other major contemporary band then my interest is rarely engaged beyond the first chorus. It’s important in picking finalists to consider the sort of festival they’ll be opening: V is perhaps the most mainstream of the major UK festivals but has one foot in the indie left-field. So a band that would most benefit from winning Road To V would be a commercially minded band with a strong original element: a generic mainstream band would merely blend into the background while anything too obtuse, arty or full-on death metal is going to scare the V Fest horses. So whether you sound exactly like Sepultura or exactly like The Feeling makes little difference to me – if I’ve heard it all before you’re not getting my vote. So far my earlobes have most been tweaked by the electro-savvy demos, those bands who clearly have their ears to the sizzling post-new rave underground and are out to drag its sparking wires into the charts. Promisingly, there’s a fair smattering of them in the Road To V pot, once you scoop away the thick layers of formulaic mop-haired guitar bands. So drop the crud-encrusted denim, burn the copy of Franz Ferdinand’s first album, attack that classic three-chord progression from a dangerous new angle. Come on, surprise me.