1.
The Wombats
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The Wombats are an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 2003. The band comprises native Liverpudlians Matthew Murphy, Daniel Haggis and Norwegian-born Tord Øverland Knudsen, the band is signed to 14th Floor Records in the United Kingdom and Bright Antenna in the United States. The Wombats have sold over 1 million copies worldwide, Matthew Murph Murphy attended Liverpool College, then moved on to LIPA. The three band members met in 2003 at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, soon becoming friends, over the course of 2004 to 2005 the band released many EPs such as The Hangover Sessions, No.3 and The Daring Adventures of Sgt. In 2006, the released their debut album Girls, Boys. This was followed by then bands first full single Kill the Director in late July. Their debut album, entitled A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation, coincided with the release of Lets Dance to Joy Division in October 2007 and it was followed by a European tour ending with a thanksgiving party at Liverpool Academy. The band started 2008 as the act at the opening ceremony of Liverpool. Moving to New York was re-released on 14 January 2008 and reached number 13 in the UK Singles Chart, on 28 February 2008 the band was awarded Best Dancefloor Filler for their single Lets Dance to Joy Division at the NME Awards. In April 2008 the band put out their first US release on Bright Antenna, following this release the band went on a full UK tour, as well as playing dates in Europe and Japan. The band also played for Jo Whiley on BBC Radio 1 where they covered the Take That song Patience, as well as the Postman Pat theme tune, which Tord sang in his native Norwegian language. The summer of 2008 saw the band live at a number of major festivals including Glastonbury Festival in June and T in the Park in July. They also played Reading and Leeds Festival on the Saturday and Friday respectively on the Radio 1/NME Stage supporting Babyshambles, in September 2008 the band were filmed for a cameo appearance on Australian soap Neighbours. The band also announced via their MySpace blog that they would be releasing two singles, a seasonal Anti-Christmas themed Is This Christmas, on 15 December 2008, followed by a track titled My Circuitboard City on 3 March 2009. In September 2010, the announced they were near to completing their second studio album, This Modern Glitch in the MRG Recording Studio in Los Angeles. The band worked with producers Eric Valentine and Jackknife Lee, the accompanying music video was shot in Los Angeles, CA during August 2010 and was directed by The General Assembly. Following the rumoured release of Techno Fan as the single from the album. Anti-D was the single, with the album following two weeks later
2.
Alternative rock
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Alternative rock is a genre of rock music that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular in the 1990s and 2000s. In this instance, the word refers to the genres distinction from mainstream rock music. The terms original meaning was broader, referring to a generation of musicians unified by their debt to either the musical style or simply the independent. Ethos of punk rock, which in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for alternative music, Alternative rock is a broad umbrella term consisting of music that differs greatly in terms of its sound, its social context, and its regional roots. Most of these subgenres had achieved minor mainstream notice and a few bands representing them, such as Hüsker Dü, with the breakthrough of Nirvana and the popularity of the grunge and Britpop movements in the 1990s, alternative rock entered the musical mainstream and many alternative bands became successful. By the end of the decade, alternative rocks mainstream prominence declined due to a number of events that caused grunge and Britpop to fade, emo attracted attention in the larger alternative rock world, and the term was applied to a variety of artists, including multi-platinum acts. Post-punk revival artists such as Modest Mouse and The Killers had commercial success in the early, before the term alternative rock came into common usage around 1990, the sort of music to which it refers was known by a variety of terms. In 1979, Terry Tolkin used the term Alternative Music to describe the groups he was writing about, in 1979 Dallas radio station KZEW had a late night new wave show entitled Rock and Roll Alternative. College rock was used in the United States to describe the music during the 1980s due to its links to the radio circuit. In the United Kingdom, dozens of small do it yourself record labels emerged as a result of the punk subculture, according to the founder of one of these labels, Cherry Red, NME and Sounds magazines published charts based on small record stores called Alternative Charts. The first national chart based on distribution called the Indie Chart was published in January 1980, at the time, the term indie was used literally to describe independently distributed records. By 1985, indie had come to mean a particular genre, or group of subgenres, at first the term referred to intentionally non–mainstream rock acts that were not influenced by heavy metal ballads, rarefied new wave and high-energy dance anthems. The use of alternative gained further exposure due to the success of Lollapalooza, for which festival founder, in the late 1990s, the definition again became more specific. Defining music as alternative is often difficult because of two conflicting applications of the word, the name alternative rock essentially serves as an umbrella term for underground music that has emerged in the wake of punk rock since the mid-1980s. Alternative bands during the 1980s generally played in clubs, recorded for indie labels. Sounds range from the gloomy soundscapes of gothic rock to the guitars of indie pop to the dirty guitars of grunge to the 1960s/1970s revivalism of Britpop. This approach to lyrics developed as a reflection of the social and economic strains in the United States and United Kingdom of the 1980s, by 1984, a majority of groups signed to independent record labels mined from a variety of rock and particularly 1960s rock influences. This represented a break from the futuristic, hyper-rational post-punk years
3.
YouTube
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YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005, Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, YouTube now operates as one of Googles subsidiaries. Unregistered users can watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos deemed potentially offensive are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old, YouTube earns advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program which targets ads according to site content and audience. YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. YouTube began as a venture capital-funded technology startup, primarily from an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006, YouTubes early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name www. youtube. com was activated on February 14,2005, the first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23,2005, and can still be viewed on the site, YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005. The first video to reach one million views was a Nike advertisement featuring Ronaldinho in November 2005. Following a $3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in November, the site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. The site has 800 million unique users a month and it is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. The choice of the name www. youtube. com led to problems for a similarly named website, the sites owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www. utubeonline. com, in October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13,2006. In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, according to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event. On March 31,2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface, Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented, We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter. In May 2010, YouTube videos were watched more than two times per day. This increased to three billion in May 2011, and four billion in January 2012, in February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube was watched every day
4.
United Kingdom
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The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom or Britain, is a sovereign country in western Europe. Lying off the north-western coast of the European mainland, the United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland, with an area of 242,500 square kilometres, the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world and the 11th-largest in Europe. It is also the 21st-most populous country, with an estimated 65.1 million inhabitants, together, this makes it the fourth-most densely populated country in the European Union. The United Kingdom is a monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. The monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who has reigned since 6 February 1952, other major urban areas in the United Kingdom include the regions of Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. The United Kingdom consists of four countries—England, Scotland, Wales, the last three have devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in their capitals, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, respectively. The relationships among the countries of the UK have changed over time, Wales was annexed by the Kingdom of England under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. A treaty between England and Scotland resulted in 1707 in a unified Kingdom of Great Britain, which merged in 1801 with the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, there are fourteen British Overseas Territories. These are the remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in the 1920s, British influence can be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former colonies. The United Kingdom is a country and has the worlds fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP. The UK is considered to have an economy and is categorised as very high in the Human Development Index. It was the worlds first industrialised country and the worlds foremost power during the 19th, the UK remains a great power with considerable economic, cultural, military, scientific and political influence internationally. It is a nuclear weapons state and its military expenditure ranks fourth or fifth in the world. The UK has been a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council since its first session in 1946 and it has been a leading member state of the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since 1973. However, on 23 June 2016, a referendum on the UKs membership of the EU resulted in a decision to leave. The Acts of Union 1800 united the Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved self-government
5.
Bastille (band)
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Bastille are a British indie pop band formed in 2010. The group began as a project by lead vocalist Dan Smith, but later expanded to include keyboardist Kyle Simmons, bassist Will Farquarson. The name of the band derives from Bastille Day, which is celebrated on 14 July, after an independently released debut single and a self-released EP, the band signed to Virgin Records. Their first studio album, Bad Blood, was released in March 2013, the band was nominated for four Brit Awards at the 2014 ceremony, winning the British Breakthrough Act. As of November 2014, Bastille have sold over 5 million records in the US and 2.5 million records in the UK, Bastille debuted in July 2010 with their limited edition 7 single that featured the two tracks Flaws and Icarus. Released through London-based independent record label Young & Lost Club, only 300 copies were pressed, one of those copies found its way into the hands of Alex Baker, presenter of the unsigned/independent artists radio show on Kerrang. Baker immediately started heavily supporting Bastille on air, and the band began to find an audience and this was followed by the self-release of the EP Laura Palmer later in 2011. After debuting further tracks online through sites such as YouTube and MySpace, in December 2011 Smith signed a contract with Virgin Records. The band also recorded and released a two part mix-tape titled Other Peoples Heartache for free, on 27 April 2012, their first official single release, Overjoyed, was released through Virgin Records, as confirmed by EMI on the 1st of May 2012. Following its video premiere in November 2011, popular music publication, the second single to be released from the upcoming debut studio album, Bad Blood, was the eponymous track, Bad Blood. An accompanying video for the single was released on the bands official VEVO channel on 29 June 2012, Bastille were also named New Band of the Day by British newspaper The Guardian in July 2012. The song charted moderately at number 90 in the United Kingdom, in August 2012 the band performed at UK festivals like Reading and Leeds, as well as supporting British singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé. They later played a headlining tour, titled Flaws Tour in October 2012. In November 2012, the performed at Hong Kongs Clockenflap Music and Arts Festival. Their third single, a re-release of their first 7 non-album single Flaws, was a success, earning the group their first position in the UK Top 40. The song Oblivion was featured in Season 4 Episode 9 of The Vampire Diaries in December 2012, in February 2013, Bastille confirmed the release of the fourth single to be taken from Bad Blood, Pompeii. The song was reviewed by critics, reaching number two in the United Kingdom and number five in the US. Their debut album Bad Blood was released on 4 March 2013, on 11 March, Bastille were announced to be playing at Leeds and Reading Festival in August 2013
6.
Marionette
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A marionette is a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings depending on regional variations. A marionettes puppeteer is called a marionettist, Marionettes are operated with the puppeteer hidden or revealed to an audience by using a vertical or horizontal control bar in different forms of theatres or entertainment venues. They have also used in films and on television. The attachment of the strings varies according to its character or purpose, in French, marionette means little Mary. One of the first figures to be made into a marionette was the Virgin Mary, Puppetry is an ancient form of performance. Some historians claim that they predate actors in theatre, there is evidence that they were used in Egypt as early as 2000 BC when string-operated figures of wood were manipulated to perform the action of kneading bread, and other string-controlled objects. Wire-controlled, articulated puppets made of clay and ivory have been found in Egyptian tombs, Marionette puppetry was used to display rituals and ceremonies using these string-operated figurines back in ancient times and is used today. Puppetry was practiced in Ancient Greece and the oldest written records of puppetry can be found in the works of Herodotus and Xenophon, archimedes is known to have worked with marionettes. Platos work also references to puppetry. The Iliad and the Odyssey were presented using puppetry, the roots of European puppetry probably extend back to the Greek plays with puppets played to the common people in the 5th century BC. By the 3rd century BC these plays would appear in the Theatre of Dionysus at the Acropolis, in ancient Greece and Rome clay and ivory dolls, dated from around 500 BC, were found in childrens tombs. These dolls had articulated arms and legs, some of which had a rod extending up from the tops of their heads. This rod was used to manipulate the doll from above, exactly as is today in Sicilian puppetry. A few of these dolls had strings in place of the rods, some researchers believe these ancient figures were mere toys and not puppets due to their small size. The Indian word sutradhara, from sutra, refers to the show-manager of theatrical performances, the sides of donkey carts are decorated with intricate, painted scenes from the Frankish romantic poems, such as The Song of Roland. These same tales are enacted in puppet theatres featuring hand-made marionettes of wood. A great place to see this marionette art is the theatres of Palermo. In the 18th century, operas were composed for marionettes
7.
NME
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New Musical Express is a British music journalism magazine published since 1952. It was the first British paper to include a singles chart, in the 1970s it became the best-selling British music newspaper. It started as a newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s and 1990s. An online version of NME, NME. com, was launched in 1996 and it became the worlds biggest standalone music site, with over seven million users per month. With newsstand sales falling across the UK magazine sector, the paid circulation in the first half of 2014 was 15,830. In 2013, the list of NMEs The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, NME magazine was relaunched in September 2015 as a nationally distributed free publication. NMEs headquarters are in Southwark, London, England, the brands editor-in-chief is Mike Williams, who replaced Krissi Murison in 2012. The paper was established in 1952, the Accordion Times and Musical Express was bought by London music promoter Maurice Kinn, for the sum of £1,000, just 15 minutes before it was due to be officially closed. It was relaunched as the New Musical Express, and was published in a non-glossy tabloid format on standard newsprint. On 14 November 1952, taking its cue from the US magazine Billboard, it created the first UK Singles Chart, the first of these was, in contrast to more recent charts, a top twelve sourced by the magazine itself from sales in regional stores around the UK. The first number one was Here in My Heart by Al Martino, during the 1960s the paper championed the new British groups emerging at the time. The NME circulation peaked under Andy Gray, Editor 1957–1972, with a figure of 306,881 for the period from January to June 1964, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were frequently featured on the front cover. These and other artists appeared at the NME Poll Winners Concert. The concert also featured a ceremony where the winners would collect their awards. The NME Poll Winners Concerts took place between 1959 and 1972, from 1964 onwards they were filmed, edited and transmitted on British television a few weeks after they had taken place. The latter part of the 1960s saw the chart the rise of psychedelia. During this period some sections of pop music began to be designated as rock, in early 1972 the paper found itself on the verge of closure by its owner IPC. Alan Smith was made editor and in 1972 was told by IPC to turn things around quickly or face closure, according to The Economist, the New Musical Express started to champion underground, up-and-coming music. NME became the gateway to a more rebellious world
8.
Record producer
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A record producer or music producer oversees and manages the sound recording and production of a band or performers music, which may range from recording one song to recording a lengthy concept album. A producer has many roles during the recording process, the roles of a producer vary. The producer may perform these roles himself, or help select the engineer, the producer may also pay session musicians and engineers and ensure that the entire project is completed within the record companies budget. A record producer or music producer has a broad role in overseeing and managing the recording. Producers also often take on an entrepreneurial role, with responsibility for the budget, schedules, contracts. In the 2010s, the industry has two kinds of producers with different roles, executive producer and music producer. Executive producers oversee project finances while music producers oversee the process of recording songs or albums. In most cases the producer is also a competent arranger, composer. The producer will also liaise with the engineer who concentrates on the technical aspects of recording. Noted producer Phil Ek described his role as the person who creatively guides or directs the process of making a record, indeed, in Bollywood music, the designation actually is music director. The music producers job is to create, shape, and mold a piece of music, at the beginning of record industry, producer role was technically limited to record, in one shot, artists performing live. The role of producers changed progressively over the 1950s and 1960s due to technological developments, the development of multitrack recording caused a major change in the recording process. Before multitracking, all the elements of a song had to be performed simultaneously, all of these singers and musicians had to be assembled in a large studio and the performance had to be recorded. As well, for a song that used 20 instruments, it was no longer necessary to get all the players in the studio at the same time. Examples include the rock sound effects of the 1960s, e. g. playing back the sound of recorded instruments backwards or clanging the tape to produce unique sound effects. These new instruments were electric or electronic, and thus they used instrument amplifiers, new technologies like multitracking changed the goal of recording, A producer could blend together multiple takes and edit together different sections to create the desired sound. For example, in jazz fusion Bandleader-composer Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, producers like Phil Spector and George Martin were soon creating recordings that were, in practical terms, almost impossible to realise in live performance. Producers became creative figures in the studio, other examples of such engineers includes Joe Meek, Teo Macero, Brian Wilson, and Biddu
9.
Single (music)
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In music, a single or record single is a type of release, typically a song recording of fewer tracks than an LP record, an album or an EP record. This can be released for sale to the public in a variety of different formats, in most cases, a single is a song that is released separately from an album, although it usually also appears on an album. Typically, these are the songs from albums that are released separately for promotional uses such as digital download or commercial radio airplay and are expected to be the most popular, in other cases a recording released as a single may not appear on an album. As digital downloading and audio streaming have become prevalent, it is often possible for every track on an album to also be available separately. Nevertheless, the concept of a single for an album has been retained as an identification of a heavily promoted or more popular song within an album collection. Despite being referred to as a single, singles can include up to as many as three tracks on them. The biggest digital music distributor, iTunes, accepts as many as three tracks less than ten minutes each as a single, as well as popular music player Spotify also following in this trend. Any more than three tracks on a release or longer than thirty minutes in total running time is either an Extended Play or if over six tracks long. The basic specifications of the single were made in the late 19th century. Gramophone discs were manufactured with a range of speeds and in several sizes. By about 1910, however, the 10-inch,78 rpm shellac disc had become the most commonly used format, the inherent technical limitations of the gramophone disc defined the standard format for commercial recordings in the early 20th century.26 rpm. With these factors applied to the 10-inch format, songwriters and performers increasingly tailored their output to fit the new medium, the breakthrough came with Bob Dylans Like a Rolling Stone. Singles have been issued in various formats, including 7-inch, 10-inch, other, less common, formats include singles on digital compact cassette, DVD, and LD, as well as many non-standard sizes of vinyl disc. Some artist release singles on records, a more common in musical subcultures. The most common form of the single is the 45 or 7-inch. The names are derived from its speed,45 rpm. The 7-inch 45 rpm record was released 31 March 1949 by RCA Victor as a smaller, more durable, the first 45 rpm records were monaural, with recordings on both sides of the disc. As stereo recordings became popular in the 1960s, almost all 45 rpm records were produced in stereo by the early 1970s
10.
Indie rock
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Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Originally used to independent record labels, the term became associated with the music they produced and was initially used interchangeably with alternative rock. In the mid-1980s, the term began to be used to describe the music produced on punk and post-punk labels. Some prominent indie rock record labels were founded during the 1980s, during the 1990s, Grunge bands broke into the mainstream, and the term alternative lost its original counter-cultural meaning. The term indie rock became associated with the bands and genres that remained dedicated to their independent status, by the end of the 1990s indie rock developed subgenres and related styles including lo-fi, noise pop, emo, slowcore, post-rock and math rock. In the 2000s, changes in the industry and in music technology enabled a new wave of indie rock bands to achieve mainstream success. In the early 2000s, a new group of bands played a stripped-down. The commercial breakthrough from these scenes was led by four bands, The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, emo also broke into mainstream culture in the early 2000s. By the end of the 2000s the proliferation of bands was being referred to as indie landfill. The term indie rock, which comes from independent, describes the small and relatively low-budget labels on which it is released, the influences and styles of the artists have been extremely diverse, including punk, psychedelia, post-punk and country. Allmusic identifies indie rock as including a number of varying musical approaches compatible with mainstream tastes, in fact, there is an everlasting list of genres and subgenres of indie rock. Many countries have developed a local indie scene, flourishing with bands with enough popularity to survive inside the respective country. However, there are still indie bands that start off locally, Indie rock has been identified as a reaction against the macho culture that developed in alternative rock in the aftermath of Nirvanas success. However, Cortney Harding pointed out that this sense of equality is not reflected in the number of women running indie labels. The BBC documentary Music for Misfits, The Story of Indie pinpoints the birth of indie as the 1977 self-publication of the Spiral Scratch EP by Manchester band Buzzcocks, Indie pop and indie were originally synonymous. In the mid-1980s, indie began to be used to describe the music produced on post-punk labels rather than the labels themselves. The indie rock scene in the US was prefigured by the rock that dominated college radio playlists. In the United States, the term was associated with the abrasive, distortion-heavy sounds of the Pixies, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr
11.
Moving to New York
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Moving to New York is a song by the Liverpool band The Wombats. It was originally released exclusively on 7-inch, in limited packaging, on October 26,2006. The song is taken from the bands album A Guide to Love, Loss and it was used in the end credits music on E4s comedy show The Inbetweeners. The song has also remixed and released as a single by trance music DJ Paul van Dyk. Moving to New York was classified Silver by the BPI in 2015, track listings of major single releases of Moving to New York. The Unreality Music website described the song as one of those joyous, frenetic noise-fests
12.
Backfire at the Disco
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Backfire at the Disco is a single from Liverpudlian indie band, The Wombats. It is from their album, The Wombats Proudly Present, A Guide to Love. It was originally released on April 9,2007, but was re-released on April 21,2008, track listings of major single releases of Backfire at the Disco. It is also said to be one of three singles in a row from The Wombats. The video contains a pastiche of the famous derided 1979 video from Cliff Richard Wired for Sound and this involves people in lurid spandex outfits on roller skates. The Cliff Richard video is currently in the Top 5 Worst Videos ever made on VH1
