Every June sees the annual music, film and interactive festival NXNE takeover venues around downtown Toronto. This year the sun came out to shine on the 17th event with over 300,000 people enjoying the fun (110,000 of them filling Dundas Square over 4 days to see bands like Fucked Up, Descendents, DD/MM/YYY, Cults, Devo, Digable Planets and The Pharcyde). Team Fused headed out to check out the action, catch some rays on a boat, take in some bands and films and enjoy the Toronto way of life. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

While Kasabian’s visit to Wolves doesn’t strictly represent a homecoming, there’s a heightened sense of expectancy in the sold-out Civic for the rock ‘n’ rollers from Leicester. There’s a lot of love in the build-up to the band’s intro and even more as they rattle through their hits; the reaction is the type reserved for bands returning to their hometown or, in Kasabian’s case (despite being Midlanders of the ‘East’ variety), bands that have transcended their origins to become a band of the people – wherever the hell they play. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

Tom Tom Club were formed by Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth in 1981, off the back of their other band Talking Heads, which featured guitarist and singer David Bryne. This project was on hiatus at the time, and so Tom Tom Club was born. Their funky music style provided a landmark to the dance music scene, while first single Wordy Rappinghood contained an unusual mix of schoolyard rap over a funky groove. Topping the charts in over 17 countries, the single brought mainstream attention to the new spirit of hip-hop. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

Bear with me on this one, I *am* going somewhere with this. When I ran a bar me and my best friend who also worked there started messing around with the drinks. Necessity may be the mother of invention but boredom is the absentee father. Soft drink served in bars are what is called ‘post-mix’, which basically means what I delivered to the pub is a thick syrup base which contains all the e-numbers colouring, flavour and caffeine, this is then dispensed through the taps mixed with fizzy water. Now we worked out that if you could dismantle the machine you could reap the warm thick syrup by angling a shot glass under on of the valves. As I sad we were bored. We dubbed the mixture ‘Cracksi’ it was an acquired taste but got us through some hard shifts with the nervous paranoid energy I’ve only really seen from really good cheap Speed.
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Echo & The Bunnymen have announced the release of a deluxe limited edition box set of ‘Ocean Rain’. The CD will contain the live performance of this seminal album recorded at the Liverpool Arena last November. This will be accompanied by a DVD featuring visuals of the iconic band images projected at the show and a twenty minute behind the scenes documentary, including unseen footage of rehearsals for the show, alongside Mac and Will’s reminiscences and recollections. There will also be an eight page booklet that includes exclusive photos of the show taken by the official tour photographer.

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