For those among you who enjoy a quick flutter I'd advise a tasty yet unlikely ante-post bet. The race isn't on until the second week in May, but if you get your money on early you may be on for some tasty returns. Oh yes pop fans, bet all you can afford on a Ukrainian win, because Verka Serdushka is having a go at Eurovision again.
You may remember her previous attempt back in Helsinki in 2007. A vision in silver, the song Dancing Lasha Tumbai came in a close second to Serbia's Harry Potter-alike balladeer Marija Šerifović. She may not have won, but the following Monday the watercoolers of Europe were alive nothing but talk of this bonkers tin-foil clad trannie with a big star on her head, like some turbofolk Edna Everage from space. And like her antipodean cousin she's become an enormous star in her home country and its associated empire.
The story goes back some 20 years when a teenaged performer called Andriy Danylko created the character of a larger-than-life middle aged railway ticket inspector from the sticks for a local comedy talent contest. His creation became an instant hit, and it wasn't long before Danylko had created a host of other characters and took the whole lot out on tour around the former Soviet republics, creating a massive stir.
Along the way he has put together nine albums of high octane East European oompah disco, plus the occasional collection of more laid back ambient tunes under his own name, but somewhere along the line it became clear that Eurovision was the logical international conclusion for his character's insanely bouncing storyline. It was feared that the character may be too much of a Ukrainian in joke, but those who didn't necessarily get the gag still enjoyed three manic minutes that turned the living rooms of Europe into a carnival of insane thrashing about.
But it nearly never happened. Questions were asked in the Ukranian parliament as to whether such a "grotesque and vulgar" artist should represent the country on an international stage. And their old grumpy uncles across the border were convinced the words 'Lasha Tumbai' - reputedly Mongolian for 'Whipped Cream' were actually the thinly veilled political dig 'Russia Goodbye'. Danylko claimed otherwise, but it was still enough to cause such a stir across that half of the continent that the song was already a massive international hit before that performance in the Finnish capital.
And now she's having another pop. She's only one of the 25 approved finalists as this point, but if the good people north of the Black Sea are still in on the joke and the ironics Eurovision fans of the West are out in force come May 15th, we could well be all back in Kiev come the spring of 2012 - and that would hardly be a bad thing, would it!
Whenever I find myself in a new country I always try to pick up some local sounds, and only having a brief time in Buenos Aires and not having the chance to either hear much radio or see anyone live, I had to resort to the suprisingly reliable method of picking a handful of albums based on the covers alone. So I was digging my way through the shelves in a little record store called The Cave in the pedestrianised shopping neighbourhood downtown when I spied a marvel - a dog in slick sportswear and killer shades mixing a couple of records on a pair of glittery decks. But it wasn't, as you may be thinking, a cartoon - it was a photo. So slightly cruel as it appeared, this was still an album that needed to be bought for the cover alone.
The disc was called Club Atletico Decadente by a massively populated act called Los Auténticos Decadentes. A quick flick to the back of the album displayed a rag tag gaggle of a dozen geezers, all in their thirties and upwards, and every one of them wearing the same kit as the poor pooch on the front of the cover. It didn't need to be any good with livery as cool as this, but what a treat it turned out to be.
The sounds on this collection were as lively as the picture of its creators suggested. A bonkers mix up of traditional Argentinian dance rhythms, pounding rock and roll with a little bit of sk punk thrown in for good measure, this would be what The Mighty Mighty Bosstones might have sounded like of they were all Boca Juniors fans with Diego Maradona tattoos - only with considerably more fluid hips.
There were slices of slinky Latino sounds that your mum could dance to, followed by pokey little punk tunes your little brother wouldn't be afraid to mosh to in public, and a bunch of other mutant hybrids that covered their local traditional musics like cumbia, merengue, canzonetta, murga and a whole bundle more that I'm not entirely sure how to spell.
They guy in The Cave insisted I ought to get their following album, Somos (El Vivo), as he reckoned it was much better - and I rather wish I did now, because these boys have got quite the track record.
It turns out that I'm stumbled across one of the country's most popular live acts. Formed right back in 1986, their first album came three years later, and featured their first hit Veni Raquel. As I was to later find out, their tunes have become ubiquitous on an Argentine night out, and have turned up in the background of practically every contemporary Argentinian movie that I've seen since I first picked up their album. They regularly sell out stadiums across Latin America, being perhaps surprisingly most popular in Mexico, where their anarchic dance tunes sit well within their own unhinged underground music scene.
I've since discovered that they've released ten albums in total, so I'm going to have to start picking my way through them all one by one. But which end should I start at? Now there hangs the dilemma! To my knowledge they've never made it over this side of the pond, which is a shame, because I reckon they're lively enough to clear up. They've fill that Ozomatli/Gogol Bordello/ Manu Chao-sized slot at the more worldsy tinged festivals a treat, and they've been going for so long now that it can only be a matter of time before we see them out this way - so keep 'em peeled for the Decadents!
We followers of Eurovision have to plough through a lot of dubious ballads and lowest common denominator pop in order to drege out one or two pure glistening gems every year. Now I'm sure that most of you will be saying "why even bother?" or "it's all different shades of the same kak!". But when those gems do come along, they're usually pretty special.
Rewind to Spain in 2008. We've mentioned their ground-breaking open application process that debut that year elsewhere in this blog. But one of the acts it uncovered to we strange few Europop fiends was very special indeed. In fact it only just missed out on making it to Belgrade by a few small percentage points. Let me introduce you to La Casa Azul.
Having a quick click and flick through the untold hapless flamenco pop tunes and wrist-slitting ballads, a song called La Revolucion Sexual exploded from the line up like a glass of sparkling pop juice on a hot day. One part Japanese club pop in the style of Pizzicato 5, one part knowing indie pop and a half dozen parts the spaces inbetween the greatest disco pop songs you ever heard, this thing stood out head and shoulders above the rest. Surely it was too good to even make the final selection - I couldn't be that lucky.
But it gathered a head of steam, and in a neck and neck battle came in a close third to a mawkish sailor ballad and a novelty reggaeton song about the recent Spanish elections. And when I finally saw the video I was blown sideways by the pure pop joy of it all.
The conceit of the act is that it's staffed by five beautiful androids from space. That had been the gag all along, from their first album, El Sonido Efervescente de La Casa Azul back in 2000. But as potential international fame drew nearer, the whole thing was finally revealed to be the work of just one man - a prematurely balding and unassuming producer chap called Guille Milkyway.
Indeed, this was perhaps to be the end of the android schtick, as in his very next video, a bizarre clip for the song Esta Noche Solo Cantan Para Mi, he apeared to kill them all off, leaving their lifeless bodies beneath a bush as an array of girls did some nice ice skating on white vinyl records. I told you it was an odd one, but a gem indeed.
He's been known to make to odd appearance on an English shore - the last time at an indie festival in a railway station in Derbyshire last summer - so keep an eye out for him, cos he's supposed to be a pure cracker live. Get some pop in your life and move on in to the blue house!
Once in a while you stumble across a gig that leaves you struggling to remember the last time you had anywhere near as much fun. I had one of those nights a couple of May's ago in a little back room in Moscow, watching a delightfully positive and insanely danceable bunch of Italian squat urchins called Kalashnikov.
I suppose their name was apt enough for the city - even more so as the preparations for the big military parade were going on all around town - and I'm sure the idea for this gig started out as some kind of crazy pipedream for the band. But a couple of flyers scattered around town led us check them out on the web, and we reckoned there might be a half decent night to be had. But it was one of those rare nights where all the ingredients gelled into one heck of a night.
The venue was a tiny little club called Vse Svoi, around the back of the city zoo. As we walked down the dark side street that harboured the venue, the yelps of excitable punk kids mixed in with the squeaks, barks and growls from the other side of the wall to make an exotic runway to the evening's entertainment. But we weren't expecting the place to be quite so tiny. Not much bigger than your granny's front room, and sporting a similar decor, the Vse Svoi was rammed from front to back with wide-eyed 19-year olds nodding their heads to some earnest local screamo band. Every time my other half bought a booze flavoured drink, a gaggle of nippers flocked around her asking if they could have a sip. This wasn't going to be like a normal gig, we could sense it.
And when the headliners from Milan finally took to the stage, we were proved correct. In keeping with their name, Kalashnikov imediately belted into some turbo-fuelled Russian-style jigs, sending the place universally bonkers. Singer Milena had every last one of them (and us) in the palm of her hand from the outset. Despite being the oldest people in the building by some 20 years, we were compelled to dance to their punchy romantic punk and skittish high-speed ska retreads - partly because the place was pakced like sardines and we had no option, but partly because our feet commanded it. Kalashnikov@Moscow 2 May 09
But the the real lunacy began. A young lad down the front had falled totally for Milena's charms, guarding her from all other invaders, and seemingly offering to marry her on a song-by-song basis. Puj the guitarist was being passed above the heads of the now-steaming crowd, walking his feet along the ceiling, while Don's keyboards were falling off their plinth and knocking the PA into the crowd at the stroke of each minute. By now the crowd and band had become one pulsating entity, and the only way it was ever going to end was by exhaution, invasion or explosion. It turned out to be the latter, as the bass amp finally gave up after being at the brunt of its operator Nino's constant flinging of water into the crowd. It was an apt end to the amplified noise, but the crowd just kept on whooping and hollering for a good twenty minutes.
Rarely do you see a show where every last person in the room is going absolutely batchy dance-o. There wasn't even the little enclave of cool kids at the back of the room nodding with their arms folded - which is perhaps what we were expecting of a city like Moscow. Before leaving we shared our love of the night with Puj, who seemed like he'd just had the best night of his life. It wasn't far off for us either. Kalashnikov @ Moscow (RUSSIA) May '09
It's always then a worry when you track such a band down in the real world. You fear that the energy of the night has addled your judgement of the quality of the actual music. But there's no such fear with Kalashnikov. When I finally found their site, I found each of their tunes to be throbbing with the same scratchy power and all-round loveliness as we witnessed in that tiny backroom in Moscow. Go find out for yourself, 'cos every last one of their songs is free to download. A top, top band that Kalashnikov!
If any place on earth has earned a politically motivated rap act it's Palestine. And in DAM, Palestine have one of the finest examples on the planet. They've been going since 1998, when Tamer Nafer and his younger brother Suhell used to rap around the slums of Lod - a mixed town of Arabs and Jews around 15 miles outside of Jerusalem. The heard that a fella called Mahmoud Jreri had been writing rhymes, so they banded together and DAM was born.
Their tunes are a genius blend of classic western hip hop and Arabic melodies and percussion. But as laid back as that can sometimes sound their words are an entirely different matter. Steeped in the daily difficulties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for once this really is music from the frontline, and their songs reflect their daily experiences. But they don't just rap about issues surrounding Palestinian freedom, but many of the other knock-on effects, like terrorism, drugs and women's rights.
Their debut collection of songs, the apt and emotive Stop Selling Drugs, was an instant local hit in 1998, but they first came to wider attention when the title song of their next collection, Min Irhabi? (Who's The Terrorist?) was downloaded over a million times globally from their website. the song's lyric dealt with the after effects of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, and Israel's heavy-handed response in dealing with it.
This opened the international doors for them, and since then they have toured extensively in America and right across Europe, principally on the back of their stunning album Dedication, a laid-back, low-slung selection of songs with biting rhymes, dark, intelligent humour and a brutally positive outlook, despite the privations them and their people might be suffering.
This month has seen them blow away the staid world music event WOMAD festival, and with any luck it's their breakthrough performance to garnering a wider audience in the UK. Dedication isn't an easy album to get a hold of, but it's certainly worth the effort of tracking it down. Here is a rap band who aren't bragging about girls and guns and ostentatious wealth, they're keeping it real in a way that most of the hip hop world could never even begin to understand. In their world the sinple act of speaking out or filming a video could get them into the kind of trouble that us in the regular West don't even have the capacity to understand. And for that alone they're one of the greatest bands on the planet.
What a stroke of luck that they sound fantastic too!
I just got a MySpace friend request from some girl from Peru. She didn't send a note, but it looked like she was part of a band. So I clicked about her profile and discovered that she's the new singer of a fantastic electro-techno band from Lima called SonoRadio, and I was hooked in seconds. Their squelchy, bouncy take on the European electroclash beats that are currently littering the lower regions of the charts were complimented perfectly by Amanda Veneno's breathlessly reedy and naive voice. It sounded familiar, yet completely from another planet.
I had to know more. Turns out SonoRadio formed back in 2004 as a slightly more traditional four-piece alt-pop act. They had guitars and regular song shapes, but were also instilled with a healthy slice of utter bonkersness that made them look a good prospect even back then. They played their first show two years later at the Bear Bar in Lima's up-and-coming Miraflores neighbourhood, causing an instant stir. The following year they were voted breakthrough band of 2007 by the local newspaper El Commercio, and their debut EP sold out immediately, earning them slots on both local TV and South American MTV.
Around this time they started to take a more electro turn and ditched the guitars and a couple of members to embark on a much more beatsy outlook. Now manned by singer Joy and sound demon Danny eM, although the VJ Xomatok joined the fold this year to make some cracking dynamic visuals to back up the pulsating uber-pop sounds.But then just as it was all about to take off, Joy left to see the world on a cruise, and Amanda Veneno was drafted in to add a whole new sultry flavour to the SonoRadio sound.
Anyone who's been to Peru will know that there's a lot more to their music scene than the endless panpipe bands that get sent over here to busk in the shopping centres of Europe. They've got an enormous fluro-techno scene - indeed I've been to some fabulous lung-draining raves up in the oxygen-lite heights of the Andes - and their metal scene is dark, violent and intense. But this is the first bit of pure and pounding pop that I've heard from this mountainous and exciting country - and I'm sure I've only just scratched the surface with SonoRadio.
So you see, when you get those random MySpace add requests from folks you've never heard of, at least give them the benefit of a quick look, because you never know what joys that may uncover.
Whenever I spend any time abroad I always make sure I try and find the local punk scene and catch a show. However Oslo, despite its eighties heritage as one of the world capitals of gnarl, proved a tricky nut to crack on the underground scene. Gigs were few and far between over the two weeks we were there, and those that were featured major international touring bands asking for a minimum of 20 quid to get in. Not very punk rock at all.
So thank heavens we got to hear about a show by the a fabulously politicised bunch of new wave funkers from Macedonia called Bernays Propagandaat the historic Blitz squat on Pilestredet. But this being Oslo, it wasn't simply a case of just turning up and watching the band.
Blitz has long been on the European squat circuit, and I've seen many evocative pictures from down the years of a reassuringly crumbling building covered in grafitti and surrounded by baracades. Well it would appear that since those days someone has decorated, at it was the cleanest, most well kept squat that I've ever seen. Not that there's anything wrong with cleanliness of course, it's just not what we were expecting. Then there was the timing issues. Now I'm used to shows running on punk time, but this bordered on the silly. After arriving at 9pm, we were told to come back in an hour, and then when we did there was clearly no one but us and the residents there, so got asked to try a bit later. A little after eleven we returned, concerned that we'd miss the last tram if things dragged on any longer, and bless if Bernays themselves didn't see our plight, get up and go in to play - despite there being little more than three dozen people in the building.
But despite the sparse attendance and the cavernous backroom we were led to, it was quite a show. I was aware of drummer Dzanno and guitarist Vasko's previous band, the speedy hardcore thrashers FxPxOx, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this new outfit was an entirely different beast.
Cranking out the disco drumming and a deeply funking groove from the fresh-faced bassist Nenad, this was more reminiscent of old time British post new wave bands like Gang of Four, The Slits and The Pop Group. But that wasn't the best of it. Singer Kristina was an unsettling beast, prowling the front of the stage like a cadged cat, part vulnerable, part confrontational, looking every bit like a hollowed out Uma Thurman with a grudge. You were wary of catching her eye, just in case she caught you with a steely gaze and you melted in some kind of frightened rapture.
But this is not just unabashed turn-your-brain-off dancing. This is a band infused with anarchist ideals and deep human politics. Named after Freud's nephew, andinventor of modern propaganda Edward L Bernays, every beat means something. The labrynthine rhythms driving vital messages under your skin with every funky lick. This lot means business, winning your heart and your brain by moving your feet first.
With each new tune the dance notches cranked up, and before we knew it, every last person was dipping and diving in a hotch potch of difficult dancing styles, our feet infected by the chunking groove. It didn't really matter that we were crowded into the corner of what looked like a massive gym - that corner was the funkiest corner in the city, we were there to dance whether we liked it or not.
As I travel around our funny old globe I'm constantly discovering all sorts of amazing music - fabulous regional rebendings of punk rock, hip hop, bonkers techno pop, hectic folk, doomy metal and all sorts of other amazing local business that we back home can scarcely imagine.
So how come the music that gets sold to us under the banner of World always ends up being either some drearily worthy yoghurt weaving Sting-alike, or every country's version of Peter Gabriel and not all the good stuff? You know, the music people actually enjoy.
In my own tiny little way I want to help introduce you to some of that good stuff. If you're up for it...
