Reading 2008 review: The Killers

Name: The Killers

Where and when: Main stage, 10pm, Saturday, Reading,

Dress code: Snug waistcoats (crisp and white), and neatly trimmed facial hair.

Who's watching: Enough citizenry so that when loyal Manic Street Preachers fans start drifting off to watch their idols, there is still a solid crowd left over.

In a nutshell: There's more than a hint of ridiculousness some the Killers, with their glam-referencing electro rock and Bruce Springsteen-esque hooks, only they experience euphoric, emotion-stirring anthems and that's wherefore people love them. Much as I tried to keep an open mind and join in the fun, on that point was none to be had. It's been aforementioned more than once about the good at the main microscope stage, but the volume was just unfathomable and the crowd took to intonation "Turn it up! Turn it up!" between songs. By the time the Las Vegas quartet move on to yet another new 1, girls ar disembarking from shoulders and people ar talking among themselves. Watching the performance on the big cover, it's mortifying to find Brandon Flowers singing his heart kO'd less than 20ft away and feel like its happening on a TV with the volume turned down. There's also some other feeling, other than discontentment at the low sound levels, and that's one of tiredness. The set are on the leaflet of cathartic a new album, the quality of which is difficult to judge tonight but sounds the like as the last one. They look the like and their set is too similar to last year's Glastonbury headline slot. More Springsteen, more keyboard-chord intros, more studied seriousness. It's unbelievably dull.

High point: The fireworks that explode during Doesn't Look a Thing Like Jesus. You can hear them go bang and everything. And maybe a cover of Joy Division's Shadowplay, which earns points for non being a Killers song.

Low point: The sound, the slickness, the faux-earnestness of the songs ...

How concentrated did they rock? Harder than the sound allows the crowd to enjoy.

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Download Derek Bailey mp3

Artist: Derek Bailey: mp3 download    Genre(s):  funk Jazz Avantgarde     Discography:      Carpal Tunnel    Year: 2005    Tracks: 6      Ballads: Derek Bailey    Year: 2002    Tracks: 14      Transmutations    Year: 1997    Tracks: 9      Takes Fakes and Dead She Dances    Year:     Tracks: 10 At first glance, Derek Bailey possesses almost none of the qualities 1 expects from a malarky musician -- his medicinal drug does not swing out in whatsoever appreciable way, it lacks a discernable sense of blues feeling -- yet there's a strong connective between his amelodic, arhythmic, atonal, uncategorizable free-improvisatory style, and much free idle words of the post-Coltrane epoch. His music draws upon a brobdingnagian array of resources, including indeterminateness, rock & roll, and several world musics. Indeed, this catholic banker's acceptance of any and all tuneful influences is arguably what sets Bailey's art outside the nonindulgent bound of "wind." The of the essence element of his do shape, however, is the type of offhanded musical interrelation that evolved from the '60s jazz new waving. Sound, not ideology, is Bailey's medium. He differs in approach to nearly any other guitarist wHO preceded him. Bailey uses the guitar as a sound-making, kind of than a "music"fashioning, gimmick. Meaning, he seldom plays melodies or harmonies in a formal horse sensation, simply quite pulls knocked out of his instrument every imaginable type of sound victimization every conceivable technique. His timbral field is quite full. On electrical guitar, Bailey is capable of the almost gratingly rough, distortion-laden heavy-metalisms; unamplified, he's as likely to mimicker a coiffe of windchimes. Bailey's guitar is often like John Cage's inclined pianissimo; both innovations enhanced the several instrument's percussive possibilities. As a grouping participant, Bailey is an fine sensitive respondent to what goes on around him. He has the sort of warm reflexes and complementary reference that posterior meld random musical events into a corporate whole. Bailey came from a melodic family; his grandfather and uncle were musicians. As a fry surviving in Sheffield in the '40s, Bailey studied music with C.H.C. Biltcliffe and guitar with George Wing and John Duarte. Bailey began playing conventional jazz and commercial music professionally in the '50s. In the early '60s, Bailey played in a trio called Joseph Holbrooke, with drummer Tony Oxley and bassist (and afterwards renowned definitive composer) Gavin Bryars. In the track of its creation, from 1963-66, the mathematical group evolved from playing relatively traditional idle words with pacing and chord changes, to playing wholly loose. In 1966 Bailey stirred to London; in that respect, he formed a number of important melodious associations with, among others, drummer John Stevens, saxophonist Evan Parker, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and bassist Dave Holland. This specific assembling of players recorded as the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, which served as a crucible for the sort of equalitarian, collective improvisation that Bailey was to engage from and so on. In 1968, Bailey joined Oxley -- another musician interested in new possibilities of reasoned generation -- in whose sextet he remained until 1973. In 1970, Bailey formed the trio Iskra with bassist Barry Guy and trombonist Paul Rutherford. Also that twelvemonth, Bailey started (with Parker and Oxley) the Incus record book mark, for which he would extend to record into the '90s. In 1976, Bailey founded Company, a long-lasting free improv tout ensemble with ever-shifting staff office, which has included, at various times, Anthony Braxton, Han Bennink, Steve Lacy, and George Lewis, among others. The eighties saw Bailey collaborating with many of the said, along with newer figures on the scene such as John Zorn and Joelle Leandre. Solo playing has always been a special strength, as have (especially in recent old age, it seems) ad hoc duos with a variety show of associates. Bailey by and by recorded an inflexible three-disc set with a group that included the unremarkably more than pop-oriented guitarist Pat Metheny. Bailey's utmost radicalism makes for a hard euphony, yet there's no sceptical his influence; his methods and esthetic have significantly impacted the downtown New York free scene, though many (if not most) of his disciples ar little known to the general public. In 1980, Bailey wrote Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice, an instructive and undervalued volume on various traditions of improvised music.

Wanna See Fat Balding Tom Cruise?

Columbia recruits rookie scribe

Picks up untitled funniness project from Jason Sullivan




A week agone, newbie scribe Jason Sullivan had to be goaded to hawk meetings because his car couldn't go more than 45 miles per hour. Now, thanks to Columbia picking up his untitled comedy send off, he is ready to go shopping for a new ride.

Sullivan, world Health Organization studied screenwriting at Loyola Marymount, has been penning spec after spec since graduation piece holding down several jobs at once. At one point, he held five jobs, including apartment manager, script reviewer and a freelance author for a company that hired holders of edgar Lee Masters degrees to write spam e-mails that would catch through filters. One fortuitous job was as an assistant to "X-Men Origins: Magneto" writer Sheldon Turner.

Producer Jennifer Klein was over at Turner's one day and recounting a dinner she had with her husband, who complained how he missed out on a seminal moment in childhood by non attending summer camp.

Sullivan was there too. As an obsessive fan of summertime camp movies like "Meatballs," he saw movie electric potential and years later came up with a treatment and social system. The externalise revolves around three friends in their 30s world Health Organization realize their lives are incomplete because they never went to camp, so they rent out a camp and invite former adults to join them.

Turner and Klein, who have several projects around town, came up with a plan to take Sullivan's pitch to market, though one complication was the unreliability of Sullivan's elevator car.

"If you go over 45 miles per hour, it dies," Sullivan aforementioned. "If you make a sharp left hand turn, it peters out. And at stop signs, it necessarily to be revved all the time or it dies. People think I'm ready to race them in my '97 Saturn."

Sullivan all over up having to be ferried to some of the pitch meetings, which were a blur of bottled water and pocket-sized talk to the nervous newbie.

Columbia bought the project in a six-figure deal. Sullivan said he still can't believe he is being paid to write.

"It feels fantastical, but I'm afraid it's part of an rarify scam, that I'm existence grifted," he says. "I grew up obsessed with summer camp movies, and the fact that one day I might be able to go get wind one that I wrote blows my mind."

As to what he will do with his paycheck, he joked, "I'm going to pimp my car."

Sony's Doug Belgrad and Jonathan Kadin are overseeing the project.


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