SpideWriter

Mama Oh No at Voodoo Daddy's Showroom, Norwich, 23rd Jan 2026 Rock and roll history is studded with family bands, married couples, partners making sweet music together, you can insert the name of your favourite examples yourself easily enough.  Norfolk's own four-piece family band, Mama Oh No , purveyors of swampy guitar, clanging bass, fuzz and spring reverb have pulled together a show for Friday, 23rd January 2026 at Voodoo Daddy's Showroom, London Street, Norwich. The band is Jack Gascoigne (vocals and guitar), with siblings Issy Gascoigne (bass) and Tordy Gascoigne (vocals, keys and omnichord) and Rhi Swift  (drums). Mama Oh No's original line up produced a very listenable and atmospheric album 'Mamasaurus' which I have been playing a lot in the post-festive season.  It is an album that catches you unawares, gets you humming along while doing the washing up or driving through interminable, slow traffic. The latest configuration of musicians have been bu...

Dry January? New Musical Releases & Discoveries It is a tricky time of year. All that cosy time with close family, all the expense, all the food. Did you eat it all? Is it humanely possible to eat it all? The record store sale discounting music that some would have paid a higher price for just a few hours earlier. Well, at least daylight in the Northern Hemisphere is with us for a little longer, every minute counts.  As snow drops shimmer in the breeze and daffodil shoots appear, The Biz launches itself into the new year's calendar with a broad range of releases and tour announcements. I started the musical year by buying a fresh re-release from HMV of Nico 's second album, which was produced in collaboration with John Cale , still-living Welsh legend, once of The Velvet Underground .  The Nico album is without doubt, worth hearing.  Cale's musical education in Classical music is brought to bear on this collection of haunting songs, which has Nico's folksy, whimsica...

Rochdale Town Hall Square 7 th  August 2026     Exciting news for fans of electro-pop, (and I don't know anyone who does not love synth-driven pop), a big gig at an unlikely location has come through.   The architectural majesty of Rochdale Town Hall will be watching over a special night’s entertainment with OMD, electro-pop, synth pioneers, who launched as Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark in the late-1970s and are still going strong.  They released a likeable album of new material in 2025, Bauhaus Staircase , which had all of the duo’s signature sounds.   The band have been concentrating on releasing a 40 th  Anniversary edition of their album Crush, which features a striking Edward Hopper style cover and includes the OMD hit single Secret .  This was an album in which the band had pulled together all their early experience of electronic music experimentation to produce a finely-defined synth sound.    Songs from this album ...

Love-Hate Relationship With London Laid Bare I n his brief, hard-edged new video single, using just a few simple verses, Eugene McGuinness captures London's affect on his soul, heart and wallet.  "And you only want me for my money," the native-Londoner asserts, money that is so hard to come by and flows even quicker out the door when you are trying to find work and somewhere to live in The Smoke. It's a brief, quirky number, coming in at just over two and a half  minutes, which one would instantly dismiss as bitter were it written about a fellow human-being.  However, the singer-songwriter has produced a little gem here. In the accompanying video, McGuinness has produced a document for our times of the UK's capital city.  Much of the footage comes from around the concrete South Bank of the Thames, an area famous for brutalist architecture, once acclaimed as 'modern'. Take a look at the video to enjoy this tidy take on the love-hate love song theme - can...

Bodur Plays it By Ear at Cinema City This was a show with a strong basis, neatly executed: a concept album, with accompanying arthouse film, sync'd with the singer and her band playing in the near dark, to a very comfortably seated audience, in Norwich's classiest fleapit.  The musical heart of the show uses music known as Maqam. This is an Arabic music form that gives a structure of scales for building a melody, within which each musician is free to improvise.  It is how melody developed in Mesopotamia and Persia, absorbing influences from indigenous Arabic practise, Ancient Greece and Byzantium. It is the music of Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey and throughout Central Asia. There has been the usual ooohing and aaarghing about a young musician bringing new music into the ageing Hipster world of North London, but maqam is older in origin than London itself and is why, when we travel eastward musically, we hear marked differences to western European originated melodies, which evolved ...

Wild Paths: Day 4 Part 3 Hipology Sounds After around an hour at the flicks, it was time to traverse cobbles and enjoy a lighter environment. Up the wooden stairs to a beer and a period of de-compression with Lloyd Jones (cables, knobs and buttons) and Simon Taylor (saxophone), in the company of a few good people amongst the solid oak beams of the pub, once notorious for wild pub-rock Friday nights, which is as far from Hipology Sounds laid back, Valencian inspired vibes as you could get. A quiet pint, enjoyed to electro tracks and improvised,  bluesy sax on max reverb. Beam me up, Hip-Hoppy I'm delighted to have discovered this duo and will look out for more of their live sets in the coming gloom of winter. They have a few recordings out on the ether at the moment, with more to follow.  Not much more to say about it really. Just a damned fine moment in time. Memorable.  Spencer Ide 18/10/2025