The show ‘Where We Are’ featured some of the best songs from the album of the same name. They sang ‘What About Now’, ‘Shadows’, ‘Where We Are’ and a jazzed up version of ‘How To Break a Heart’’.

As well as the new tracks, they also played some old favourites such as ‘If I Let You Go’, ‘Uptown Girl’, ‘Tell Me What Makes a Man’, ‘When You’re Looking Like That’ and of course ‘Flying Without Wings’ which had me in tears for yet another year.

As is tradition for a Westlife gig, the boys did a medley of cover songs in the middle section. I look forward to this every time as I never know what they’re going to sing. This year we were treated to ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ (very appropriate for this tour), ‘I Gotta Feeling’ and ‘Sex On Fire’ – all were huge crowd pleasers.

The encore was definitely one of the highlights of the show as it was full of emotion that could be felt rippling right throughout the audience. The lads sang ‘I’ll See You Again’ as a dedication to both Kian and Nicky’s Fathers both of whom passed away last year. They sang with their eyes closed and with images of both of their dads coming up on the screens behind them. The emotion emanating from the stage was incredible and it was such a moving moment that I bet there was hardly a dry eye in the house. It really was a brilliant dedication and a strong testament of their ability to move between up-beat feel good songs and deep emotional ballads.

The scenery on stage and on the big screens for this tour was very varied which wasn’t always a good thing. The props and images ranged from giant multicoloured inflatable balls, an arch of red roses and an enormous robot with lighting and fireworks attached to a scantily dressed woman dancing sexily on the screens (which was obviously there just to keep the men who had been dragged along by their partners interested in the show) my only criticism of the show is that this wasn’t such a great idea as it was hardly a hit with most of the female fans and seemed a little out of context with the songs they were singing.

The vocals from all the lads were spot on as usual and the banter and chemistry between them on stage is great to watch, they really know how to put on an entertaining show; there are very few acts with the ability to make me laugh and cry in the same concert.

This year’s gig at the CIA really was amazing, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world and I look forward to next year. It’s a relief to see them back and doing what they do best.

AM How’s the tour been so far?

BW Fantastic. There’s been a lot of people coming out and supporting live music; it’s been fantastic.

AM How many times have you visited the UK so far?

BW I’ve been over here myself about 10 times but this is our 6^th tour with the Billy Walton Band

AM And when will you be coming back again?

BW We’re coming back in May and we’ll try to come back as much as possible.

AM And is that doing the same kind of venues that you’re doing on this tour?

BW It’s a good mix; we’ve been working our way up the ladder.

AM Do you think that British crowds are pretty responsive to your material?

BW Very; they love their music. What’s cool about it is that they know what part of the country we’re from by the style of music we’re playing; it’s just amazing that they love the blues and rock that much, it’s a great thing.

AM For anyone who hasn’t seen or heard you, how would you describe the kind of stuff you play?

BW Well, it depends on the night, but basically we want to play and jam and do our solos but, more importantly, we want to have a good time. We want to make sure that everybody else has a smile on their face and they had a good time with rock ‘n’ roll because rock ‘n’ roll is fun.

AM Who would you say you’ve been influenced by musically?

BW That’s a good one. Musically, the list’s so long I don’t think we have enough memory on that thing.

AM How about some of the big influences?

BW OK, so we’ve got Johnny Winter, we’ve got Freddie King; I like Little Feat and of course my Jersey roots Southside (Johnny), Bruce and … there’s so many. That’s tough, that’s a good question.

AM It’s a bit like the impossible question “What’s your favourite song?” Do you mean, today, yesterday, 5 minutes ago?

BW The collection on my iPod is so wide that I can go from Louis Prima to Metallica; it’s not so much influence as what you like and it all influences you in the end, you know, if you hear it it’s always gonna be with you. Of course, Jimi Hendrix. How could I not say Jimi Hendrix; come on!

AM Great version of “Little Wing” tonight by the way.

BW Thank you.

AM How different is the discipline of working with your own band to playing with Southside Johnny?

BW That’s a good question too. With my own band, I have the responsibility of putting on a good show and making it happen, making sure everybody has a good time. With Southside it’s a little different; he’s legendary. He’s got these awesome songs, he’s got a fantastic band. He’s the best white soul singer I’ve heard in my life and on tour I got to hear him in my monitor right up close. He is by far the best soul singer I’ve ever worked with. You don’t know what you’re gonna get but it’s always a good time; guaranteed. And that’s a Jersey thing, I don’t think I’ve ever walked out of the Stone Pony without a smile on my face because it’s fun, everybody has fun there.

With Southside it was great, learning the parts and seeing how a master can work a crowd and change an audience the way he does. At the end of a show to see these people, their reactions, it’s a wonderful thing.

AM And finally, I heard a rumour that on New Year’s Eve at the Count Basie Theatre , the Billy Walton Band became the only support band ever to get a standing ovation there. What was that like?

BW That was fantastic. Everybody was there to have a good time, to bring in the New Year and we had a great time. It’s a wonderful organisation; the theatre’s fantastic, the people were there and it’s not just us. We were feeding off a crowd of people that were surrounding us and it was going to be a good night.

AM From the pictures I’ve seen on our website it looks like you had a little bit of help from some of The Jukes.

BW Yeah Joey (Stann, tenor sax) came out to jam with us. It was the same thing the other night, the gig before we left, at the Stone Pony with Jeff Kazee. Southside was backstage and we said “Wanna come up and jam with us?”, so he came and played harmonica with us.

AM It strikes me that they’re a very supportive group of people.

BW Yeah, it’s a great community and I’m lucky enough to be involved with it.

AM Thank s Billy.

BW Thank you.

a)want to hear the band play all their recorded material exactly the way it sounds on the album or;

b) want them to hit the stage with the aim of blowing you away with technique, dynamics, showmanship and sheer enthusiasm. If you’re in the b) set then the Billy Walton Band are the band for you.

The 100 Club is a venue with a fascinating past. If you’re interested in the history of rock music, it’s worth a visit just to look at the photos on every wall, where you can see everything from early jazz to The Damned and beyond. The Billy Walton Band set takes inspiration from many of the bands featured here and many, many more.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Billy Walton plays guitar; he started to play professionally at the age of 15 and he’s now the leader of a power trio in the mould of the Jimi Hendrix Experience with William Paris on bass and backing vocals and new drummer John Hummel laying the foundations for Billy’s guitar masterclass.

Billy’s playing developed on the New Jersey scene based around the Stone Pony club whose previous alumni include Springsteen, Southside Johnny and Bon Jovi and he’s highly respected by the members of that scene. That respect was demonstrated in the autumn of last year when Southside Johnny asked Billy to play guitar for him on part of the British tour, replacing Bobby Bandiera, who was on tour with Bon Jovi.

The live set is a mix of Billy’s recorded work (including the beautiful “Soul Song” from the “Neon City” album), ambitious covers (Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and, unsurprisingly, Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch”) and crowd pleasers like the finale “Cannonball”. It’s obvious from the start that Billy (and the band) live for that moment when they walk on stage and start to play. Technically, Billy Walton is a great player and demonstrates a wide range of styles and techniques through the set but there are thousands of players who can do that. What makes this band such a great proposition live is that they are completely fired up and they want the audience to have a good time while they do what they do.

Billy (aided and abetted by William Paris) creates a great rapport with a Sunday night audience which might just scrape in to treble figures but you get the feeling that he would perform the same way with an audience of one. It’s obvious from this set that you have to see the Billy Walton Band live to really appreciate them. The 2 recorded works, “The Billy Walton Band” and “Neon City” are certainly worth a listen, but in front of a live audience is where they really work. The band are back in the UK in May 2010 (details on the website:www.billywaltonband.com) so, if you like your blues, rock (and a bit of soul) served with a bit of fun and showmanship go and watch these guys; I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Alphabeat are special for a number of reasons. For one, they’re from the Danish version of Motown – their hometown of Silkeborg is famous for its huge number of car dealerships. For another, there’s loads of them, six in fact. Anders SG sings, as does Stine, Anders B plays guitar and some keyboards and is quite the whizz in the studio, Rasmus is the band’s resident keyboard player, Anders R plays bass and is another keyboard player while Troels is the drummer – without him, there is nothing. They went to school together and aged fifteen (they’re now all in their early 20s) they formed a band. They first moved to London in the summer of 2007 around the release of their debut top ten album This Is Alphabeat and the huge pop smashes and playlist staples Fascination, Boyfriend and 10,000 Nights. They lived in a big house together. In Hackney. Now, rather sensibly, they live in three different houses

Alphabeat have recently been confirmed as the main support act on Lady GaGa’s Monster Ball tour in the UK in February. In a recent interview with VH1 she picked them as one of her favourite new acts, saying “I really love Alphabeat, they’re great and they’re going to come out on tour with me.”

Check the dates after the break.

18-Feb-10 Manchester MEN Arena
22-Feb-10 Belfast Odyssey Arena
24-Feb-10 Liverpool Echo Arena
26-Feb-10 London O2 Arena
27-Feb-10 London O2 Arena
1-Mar-10 Glasgow SECC
3-Mar-10 Cardiff International Arena
4-Mar-10 Newcastle Metro Radio Arena
5-Mar-10 Birmingham LG Arena
7-Mar-10 Sheffield Arena
8-Mar-10 Nottingham Trent FM Arena

This is David Saw’s second album and the publicity surrounding it focuses on the fact that David’s best friend is James Taylor’s son, Ben Taylor and that one of his early songs was covered by Carly Simon who is Ben Taylor’s mum and ex-wife of James Taylor (the singer-songwriter ,not the English jazz organ player of JTQ fame). So Carly Simon covered a David Saw song. Why?

If you want to know why the singer/songwriter/troubadour genre vanished after a period of huge popularity in the early to mid-70s, this is a great demonstration. The genre became so popular that even the most mediocre acts managed to get record deals (a bit like Scottish bands in the mid-80’s). This album sounds like it came from the butt-end of the 70s troubadour boom.

David Saw has a reasonable voice and is a reasonable guitar player but the songs sound like they were written by an angst-ridden year 11 music student; musically they’re simplistic and lyrically it’s all a bit naïve. It’s frustrating to hear someone with a sliver of potential fail to deliver because they’ve pinned themselves into an out-dated frame of reference.

The singer-songwriter genre has undergone a dramatic shift since peaking in the mid-1970s. The style and the subject matter of artists like David Gray, Newton Faulkner and Jason Mraz is a world away from James Taylor, Carole King and Carly Simon. Unfortunately David Saw is firmly rooted in the 70s school of songwriting, concentrating on melancholy songs of lost love with the occasional lightweight, uptempo song (“Buy My Record”, for example) and that just isn’t enough for a 21^{st century singer-songwriter.}

If you want to hear a good contemporary male singer-songwriter, listen to some of the people listed at the start of the previous paragraph, or maybe Neil Young if you want to hear someone who was part of the original scene which influenced David Saw’s songwriting. For a real wild card comparison, you could try the 2000 album “Northern Songs” by Lee Griffiths (also influenced by James Taylor) which is a much more gritty version of the British troubadour’s art. Alternatively, you could just listen to anything by Malcolm Middleton or Richard Hawley.

If David Saw can move away from the obvious 70s influences, then he may have something interesting to sing about but it doesn’t look good on the evidence of this collection.

?

This is one of those albums that creates an instant impact from the dirty opening synth intro of “Detroit” and leads you through a kaleidoscope of musical styles. The arrangements feature electronic and acoustic instruments blended together with a batch of songs which ranges from ballads (“After The Flood”) to widescreen epics (“Plans And Reveries”) and everything in between.

Black Gold happily admit to incorporating their many musical influences into the patchwork quilt of “Rush” and invite us to identify the original sources of their sonic petty larceny if we can. There are various species of musical magpie: the “Jeff Lynne”, which steals audaciously and produces a wonderful song which is original and makes no attempt to hide the theft; the “Guy Chambers”, which uses a phrase which you recognise but you have to think about for a while before working out that it’s from “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” or “Dear Prudence”; and the species on display here which, like The Avalanches in 2000/2001, steals a couple of bars at a time from anywhere they can and throws them all in to the blender (you can spot a reference to Ronnie Wood’s playing on The Faces 1971 single “Stay With Me” if you listen carefully) . There is another species, the “Mika”, but we won’t go in to that.

Erick Ronick’s voice is strong enough and versatile enough to deal with an incredibly wide dynamic range, effortlessly moving from the solo acoustic arrangements to big electric and electronic songs and throwing in some interesting falsetto for good measure (and great vocal harmonies as well), while the varied styles and instrumentation make this an album that grabs the attention from the opening synth riff and refuses to let go.

A couple of tracks from this album (including “Plans And Reveries”) have already been used as incidental music on US TV shows and the rest of the album is strong enough to suggest that you could be hearing a lot of Black Gold in the next year or two.

There are albums which you can listen to once and all of their secrets are revealed; “Rush” isn’t one of those. This album rewards perseverance because each time you listen to it, you pick out another reference (or two, or three) to songs or styles which don’t necessarily jump out at you on the first listen.

And the bad news; maybe the programming of the tracks isn’t quite right. Towards the end, the album falls off dynamically, but this is minor criticism of a great debut album.

The new album, which was two years in the making, is quite different to their previous ‘Decemberunderground’ and while it isn’t as strong as it’s predecessor, it’s still a great listen and will be huge with AFI fans everywhere.

Lead vocalist, Davey Havoc said: “Honestly I’ve never been more proud of an AFI record. We are thrilled to hear it come to life.”

The single ‘Medicate’ is a really catchy and memorable song with a good sound and lyrics; it’s easy to see why it was chosen as the first release from the new album.

‘End Transmission’ is a great track and is one of my favourites; you can really imagine dancing along to this one at a gig and ‘Beautiful Thieves’ is another highlight of ‘Crash Love’ as it’s a catchy song with a really strong chorus.

‘Veronica Sawyer Smokes’ is definitely another one of the standout tracks; it’s a brilliant song with memorable lyrics that would make it a great next single.

‘Crash Love’, which is available now, is a really good album and some of the tracks will be excellent for getting the crowd going for their 2010 tour which will hit the UK on 5th April in Rock City, Nottingham and finishes up in Newcastle on 11th April.

In October The Maccabees headlined the Lake of Stars festival in Malawi, Africa and are currently on tour with Editors in Europe. Both bands return briefly to London to play a Little Noise session at the Union Chapel in Islington in aid of Mencap on Monday 16th November.
 
It’s been a great year for The Maccabees with career-defining sets at Leeds and Reading Festival this summer which had The Observer dubbing them “festival heroes” and NME reminding us “they’re probably the best home-grown indie rock band the UK has to offer right now”. In Wall of Arms they have released one of the best-received albums of the year. The record entered the UK album charts at number 13 in May, winning praise across the board from fans and critics alike.

Recorded in Paris and England with producer Markus Dravs (Bjork, Arcade Fire, Coldplay), they blasted the myth of the “difficult second album” out of the water with songs like the epic No Kind Words and brilliant singles Love You Better and Can You Give It.
 
SHOCKWAVES NME AWARDS TOUR

FEBRUARY 2010

Thursday 4th – Newcastle O2 Academy
Friday 5th – Glasgow Barrowlands
Saturday 6th – Manchester Academy
Sunday 7th – Leeds O2 Academy
Tuesday 9th – Nottingham Rock City
Wednesday 10th – Norwich UEA
Thursday 11th – Birmingham O2 Academy
Saturday 13th – Cardiff University
Sunday 14th – Bristol O2 Academy
Monday 15th – Brighton Dome
Tuesday 16th – Bournemouth O2 Academy
Thursday 18th – Portsmouth Pyramid / Portsmouth Guildhall
Friday 19th – Cambridge Corn Exchange
Saturday 20th – Brixton O2 Academy

JAN 26: SOUTHAMPTON, Joiners – 0238 8022 5612 / www.joinerslive.co.uk
JAN 27: CARDIFF, Clwb Ifor Bach – www.ticketweb.co.uk
JAN 28: LONDON, Borderline – 08448 472 465/ www.ticketweb.co.uk
JAN 29: NOTTINGHAM, Rock City – 0871 3100 000 / www.alt-tickets.co.uk
JAN 30: BIRMINGHAM, Academy 3 – 0844 477 2000 / www.ticketweb.co.uk
FEB 01: SHEFFIELD, Academy 2 – 0844 477 2000 / www.ticketweb.co.uk
FEB 02: LEEDS, Cockpit – 0113 245 4650 / www.lunatickets.co.uk
FEB 03: MANCHESTER, Night & Day – 0161 832 111 / www.gigsandtours.com
FEB 04: NEWCASTLE, Digital – 08444 771 000 / www.yourfutureisdigital.com
FEB 06: GLASGOW, ABC – 08444 999 990 / www.gigsinscotland.com