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email: [email protected] website: nightshift.oxfordmusic.net Free every month. NIGHTSHIFT Issue 170 September Oxford’s Music Magazine 2009 Richard Walters The troubled troubadour unleashes his inner animal and finds true love at last NIGHTSHIFT: PO Box 312, Kidlington, OX5 1ZU. Phone: 01865 372255 THE RIVER RAT PACK brings its touring boatload of bands to Oxfordshire again this month with NEWNEWSS three gigs in the county over the NEWNEWSS th th weekend of 5 -6 September. The Nightshift: PO Box 312, Kidlington, OX5 1ZU tour, supported by the Phone: 01865 372255 email: [email protected] Strummerville Charity, showcases Online: nightshift.oxfordmusic.net up and coming acoustic acts from around the UK, launching from Camden Lock and finishing off in THE ORGANISERS OF TRUCK FESTIVAL host a special one-day Oxford with an all-day gig at the Isis EVENT next month to celebrate Cowley Road. Farmhouse in Iffley Lock. Last OX4 takes place on Saturday 10th October at venues along Cowley year’s bill included Mumford and Road, including the 02 Academy, the Bullingdon, East Oxford Sons, Golden Silvers and Jay Jay Community Centre, Baby Simple, Trees Lounge, Café Tarifa, Café Pistolet; this year’s bill features Six Milano, the Brickworks and the Restore Garden Café. Bands already Nation State, Wild Wolves and THE FAMOUS MONDAY confirmed include hotly-tipped electro-pop outfit The Big Pink, Beans On Toast, as well as a cast of BLUES celebrates its silver improvisational hardcore collective Action Beat and experimental hip local acts at each stop-off. jubilee this month with a special hop outfit Dälek. Among the local acts playing are Jonquil, This Town The first local River Rat Pack gig is party gig featuring The Honeyboy Needs Guns, Stornoway, Baby Gravy, Dusty & The Dreaming an afternoon picnic at the Abbey Hickling Band at the Bullingdon Spires, The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band, Witches, Dial F For Grounds in Abingdon from 2pm on on Saturday 19th September. Frankenstein, Medicine and Ute. Catweazle Club and the Oxford Folk the Saturday, followed by an The blues club was set up by Festival will also be hosting acoustic music sessions. evening gig at the Stocks Bar at the Philip Guy-Davis back in 1984, As well as live music, OX4 will feature slam poetry with Hammer & Crown & Thistle. The Isis originally at the Red Lion pub in Tongue, while there will be opportunities throughout the afternoon to Farmhouse event runs from 2pm Gloucester Green, which then make a music video, design an album sleeve for The Magic Numbers, through to 11pm. All the gigs are became The Brewhouse, where the record a single in a mobile recording studio, write a film script and make free, with donations to the charity weekly free blues nights flourished fanzines. More acts and attractions are still to be added. welcomed. Other acts playing before the pub was shut down for Tickets for the festival are on sale now, priced £15, from the Academy include Smoky Angle Shades, rebranding. The Famous Monday as well as Videosyncratic and Oxfam on Cowley Road or online at Tristan & The Troubadours, Blues briefly relocated to www.thisistruck.com. 14-18 year olds can buy tickets at a discount £12. Treetop Flyers, Nat Jenkins, The Jongleurs before moving to its Agitator and Lonely Joe Parker. For current home at the Bully. As well more details on the tour, visit as the party gig, The Famous UNDER THE OAK FESTIVAL www.theriverratpack.com. has been cancelled. The one-day Monday Blues runs its regular weekly shows throughout live music event was due to take THE O2 ACADEMY’S place in North Aston on Saturday September, with gigs by Australia’s ALTERNATIVE FRESHERS FAIR th 5th September, featuring sets from Harper Band on the 7 , takes place on Wednesday 23rd Roadhouse on the 14th, American Jonquil, Baby Gravy, This Town September from 11am – 4pm, Needs Guns, The Joe Allen Band bluesman Sherman Robertson on featuring assorted local venues and the 21st and British blues-rock and more, but promoters called the promoters amongst other local festival off due to poor ticket sales. favourites The Hamsters on the businesses. The fair is open to 28th. Visit www.famous everyone. WINCHELL RIOTS host a mondayblues.co.uk for more details. monthly residency at the Cellar AS EVER, DON’T FORGET TO from October, featuring the band TUNE INTO BBC OXFORD themselves as well as a selection of INTRODUCING every Saturday AN INTERACTIVE local music their favourite local and out of night between 6-7pm at 95.2fm. directory is online on the town bands. The first gig is on The dedicated local music show Nightshift forum at th th Thursday 8 October, and then 7 features the best new Oxford nightshift.oxfordmusic.net. The MAPS headline this year’s th November and 5 December. releases, interviews, demos and gig directory features contact details Audioscope festival on Saturday Winchell Riots have just finished a guide. The show is available to for local bands, studios, venues, 17th October. Audioscope, which recording session at the Manic listen to online all week at promoters, web designers, record has raised over £17,000 for Street Preachers’ studio in Cardiff bbc.co.uk/oxford. labels and more and is free to join. homeless charity Shelter since 2001 with producer Greg Haver. Visit takes place all day at the Jericho www.myspace.com/ Tavern. As well as the Mercury thewinchellriots for Prize-nominated headliners, the more details on the event features The Longcut, gigs. Remember Remember, Bronnt Industries Kapital, Talons, Ute, PETER HOOK will Cats & Cats & Cats and Bitches, be signing copies of with more acts to be announced. his new book, ‘The Tickets, priced £12, are on sale now Hacienda: How Not from wegottickets.com, with all To Run A Club’, at profits going to Shelter. Audioscope Borders on Magdalen also release a limited-edition album Street on Wednesday featuring acts that have played the 7th October from 6pm. festival over the years. Clinic, Four The Joy Division and Tet, Maps, Michael Rother, Dieter New Order bassist Moebius, Blood Red Shoes and recounts the story of Piano Magic are among the acts Manchester’s iconic contributing tracks. The album is venue and the available from iTunes. Visit Manchester music www.audioscope.co.uk for more scene of the times. details. a quiet word with Richard Walters THE ROAD TO POP FAME there. The only thing I really regret and fortune can be long and arduous, is not recording it sooner.” if it ever gets there at all, and Richard Walters has been walking that road RICHARD’S STARK, SOUL- for many a long year, with plenty of bearing style of mostly acoustic pop obstacles along his way. Now, though, comes with a double helping of the prize may well be within sight. melancholy, but it’s a beautiful, bleak, This month Richard releases his romantic sadness he brings, rather debut album, ‘The Animal’, well over than the whining self-pity of too a decade after we first championed many singer-songwriters. Still, if the teenage troubadour who would someone only knew him through his grow up to be possibly the finest male music and lyrics, they might assume singer Oxford has ever produced. he was a fragile creature. How close to the truth is that? RICHARD WALTERS BEGAN “I have my moments. It’s fair to say his singing career at 15 in local band that the period in which the album Polysoul in the late-90s (along with was written was pretty up and down future members of Witches) and later for me personally. I lost myself for a Theremin, but for the most part his while: too much drinking, too many has been a solo journey, his voice the late nights, too little thought for a lot focus. And what a voice. Pure, limpid of other things and other people. So and able to convey the extremes of of course the songs are confessional emotion with singular clarity. and personal to some extent, but Unsurprisingly he’s regularly been they’re personal to me then. It’s like compared to Jeff Buckley and Thom reading diary entries aloud two years Yorke – both acknowledged after the event – you can look at influences – but as ‘The Animal’ things with hindsight and reason.” amply demonstrates, Richard is a That said, the sleeve to ‘The stunning vocal talent in his own right, Animal’ is uncharacteristically a singer who towers above the aggressive – a cartoonishly grotesque teeming morass of bleeding heart picture of Richard chewing through a buskers that make up the majority of plate of electrical wires as if it were the singer-songwriter fraternity. spaghetti. Even the title suggests When Richard Walters sings of something beyond the delicate sorrow, regret or loneliness, you sit in emotional excavation within. rapt awe at how something so simple “I love the front cover. We did so can sound so extraordinary, so vast many portraits, trying to find the and so effortlessly intense. right image. I saw that photo and it instantly stuck, and I think it stands A SEEMINGLY PERMANENT on its own as a great picture. I don’t fixture on the Oxford gig scene since Richard has moved to Paris to be with where I convinced myself that I must believe in the idea that the album those early years, Richard has had his his girlfriend, regularly returning be cursed; there was a ridiculously cover for a set of sad songs has to brushes with musical success along the home to Oxford to perform, but now unlikely run of bad luck at one point.