Excellent poppers part 6: Mixmaster Henry – our dub overlord

Tell your friends, rouse the neighbours – the most irregular feature ever to grace the side of a blog is back, and this time it’s in stereo. For you see excellent poppers, this is excellent poppers – where we look at some of the brilliant folk who help us, buy from us – or are just generally around the lovely world of Alcopop.

Today – we meet Henry, who’s mashed together two fine mixes for goFASTER>> and latterly Stagecoach… Normally you might think out paths would not cross… Alcopop would be drinking merrily in a dimly lit indie dance club, whilst Henry would be wedged in-between 2 fire engine-sized speakers at a smoky dub session – you’d be wrong though.

Now tell us….

1.) You are Henry and we’ve heard your face is magnificent… How do you plead? That’s a compliment indeed from the glowing visage of Alcopop – this is actually my “game face”, I have a barn full of alternative faces which I interchange for various purposes. I’m like a Worzel Gummidge for the E4+1 generation. I can’t get E4 round our way, reception’s shite.

2.) As a ‘mixmaster extraordinaire’ who recently put together a magnificent re-imagining of stagecoach’s ‘We Got Tazers’… What was your inspiration behind the mix? It was the result of a horrific cultural car-crash involving too many robot movies, the deconstruction of various words and phrases in the lyrics, a bloody-minded determination to crowbar a vocoder in at any opportunity, a creeping sense of impending apocalypse, and too much red wine. The short answer is- I got a bit carried away….

3.) And where else do you ply your musical trade? I work as a DJ in merry olde Oxford, occasionally London “and surrounding”, skipping between the overpriced corporate cocktail-sucking swanky places and the slightly hipper dives, such as the Po Na Na in Oxford. For it is there I play fortnightly Friday’s, which is a lovely mix of old and new indie, electro and eclectic beataroonies of many persuasions. Truthfully though, I’m at my happiest sitting for days on end in front of my funky old PC making beats and getting amazing and freaky sounds out of my lovely machines. They’re me bezzie mates they are.

Part 2, tomorrow…. Where we talk Collapsed Lung, Milli Vanilli and the possibility of a free phat Henry track… Ole!

I got this email… It was lovely

Sometimes emails are awful… Full of dread, demands for money or someone just generally being horrible. Other times though they’re inspiring, lovely and basically a real tonic – re-instilling the belief in what you’re doing, and reminding you that people really do care Yesterday I received such an email… It’s awesome, and fills m full of joy to know that somewhere in a little village in Spain – the kids are digging Alcopopular 3…. Rock on!

Pavilion and Alcopopular 3 on Tour

Sorry dear blog, I’ve rather let you down over the last few days… No updates which I can’t be forgiven for and even now I’m neglecting you to watch the England game. It’s terrible work from myself, but as I settle down for an evening of keeping half an eye on international glory and the other 1.5 on making maps for Alcopopular 3, I should mention that if anyone’s heading out to catch any of the shows on the Tellison (with Johnny Foreigner) or David Gibb tour – you can pick one up with them on the road, or they’re still available from our shop.

Meanwhile, a nice little blog post about Pavilion (who’s single we released way back about a year or so ago) from the lovely Saam at Faded Glory waxes lyrical about their song Clarity. “Although melodically uplifting, its lyrics examine relationship issues. Maybe it’s not all jolly good fun in Wakey? Regardless, this is a pop classic. Seeing as their first single sold out, I’m hoping ‘Clarity’ will be single number two for Pavilion on the brilliant Alcopop label. I’d buy about 3 copies myself.” Which is very nice of him to say…

So I got in touch with Stu from Pavilion today to see what they’re upto and the good news is that the gloriously melodic Wakefield beauties is that they’re planning all sorts of stuff for the end of this year/ beginning of next. Go have a listen on MySpace if you haven’t heard them before… Sadly the single we released ‘Spoils of War’ sold out on 7”, but you can still get it on iTunes if you like.

That’s good of me eh…

Alcopop instore @Pure Groove

It’s taken me a good few weeks to post this update about Alcopop’s recent Pure Groove jam (waiting for photos which have now arrived and are beautiful) – but I thought I’d relay the events of the eve, which were – in truth – bloody ace.

Somehow it was the first time I’d ever been to Pure Groove and it was lovely. Basically an opulent Faringdon bar with a record shop spread amongst shelves around the shop – it’s the ideal haunt for anyone with a penchant for the limited editions and niche formats.

Putting on a bill of Stagecoach *acoustic set* and Stars and Sons with Paul Steel providing a delectable melodic introduction, we all bonded over a small message in a bottle compilation – the bands entertained, and Kev and I (along with a few of the great and good from the indie music industry and plenty of happy poppers) assaulted the bar.

Highlight of the evening for me, for its unexpected appearance as much as highly polished form, was perhaps a delicate Stagecoach cover of The Lemonheads’ Drug Buddy. Awesome… What followed was an evening at the Ish Bar, a high octane Team Stagecoach Vs Team PoP pool match (we’ll get you next time Stagecoach), phantom tequilas (where do they always spring from) and plenty more hi-jinks…

The next one’s on October 7^th for Stagecoach and more… See you there yeah

NME rate Alcopopular 3 the ‘coolest compilation ever’

Nothing like a proud, grainy photo to cheer a Monday morning (Must remember to get a phone without a crappy camera) – and it is with great pleasure I can announce that the cheeky little bottle compilation ‘Alcopopular 3’ has been covered by music rag NME this week.

Nestled in next to some Adidas sneaks (that look a touch dull in truth), a nice King Blues T-Shirt and a waterproof video camera (?!) on page 64 – you won’t be able to read the text from the image below, but it goes a little something like this…

‘Proving that music can still be presented in interesting ways, labels like Alcopop are keeping homegrown UK music alive. This compilation comes in a bottle – the included treasure map ends with a code so you can download the likes of PABH, The Computers and Unicorn Kid. Which makes it the coolest compilation ever.’

Nice stuff NME and specifically pensman Ben Patashnik – cheers for that.

Alcopop @Pure Groove this Wednesday w/ Stagecoach, Stars & Sons and Paul Steel

*Excitement*

It’s the first Alcopop Pure Groove instore (I was so excited to see us on the listings ), and coincides with the stocking of Alcopopular 3 ‘map and bottle compilation’ by said emporium… Great times, free entry and 7pm (ish) start to see:

Stars and Sons (full band) play “Big brash intelligent indie pop” – Huw Stephens
New Alcopop signings Stagecoach (acoustic) rock out “a sumptuous slice of Wilco-esque alt.country” (The Fly)
- with Paul Steel provideing a melodic piano ballad interlude with his “veritable masterwork of pop brilliance” – Under the Radar

And we can all get boozed too in London’s finest record shop – winner? Winner! See you there…

Alcopopular 3 on Popjustice –

I’ve always had PopJustic down as more pop than Alco – Girls Aloud, Britney, Calvin Harris – but during a recent foray to a Unicorn Kid concert (as any sane popper is liable to do on occasion – I myself took one in last week at The Borderline) they happened upon a copy of Alcopopular 3 on his merch table – and promptly snapped it up.

What followed is this rather hilarious, if tongue in cheek, write up of our hard labours – questioning the value they got for their five pound purchase. 14 tracks popjustice! – on iTunes that’d cost you bloody eleven quid, never mind the hand-burnt/ tea-bagged map and bottle.

Still – their irreverent words including “The piece of paper will be instantly familiar to anyone who has studied history at Year 7 or above as ‘a teabag job’” and “Don’t ever give us your cow to sell at the market – we’ll come back with magic beans” did delight us so. Cheers for featuring chaps! Take a look over here.

Twitter update: The third!

Thanks so much for all your compilation orders. They’re still coming in and my beer consumption is still v high – in no doubt partly thanks to the erstwhile heros still twittering about the compilation – I haven’t updated the blog daily with everything that’s coming in (it would leave me no time for anything else) but here’s just some of my very favourite tweets from the past few days. Take a look below, oh and if you want to be entertained with delightful tweet after tweet on the nation’s favourite micro-blog network… You could do worse than to follow these champs…

Alcopopular 3 officially ‘launched’ (into the sea)

Wow – sorry about the lack of blogpost yesterday either thanking the many Twitter reviewers who are continuing to smash home awesome tweets about Alcopopular 3, tell you about all the lovely folk who have mentioned it online – or even to suggest that godamn… That message in a bottle is out, launched – Alcopopular 3 is officially available!

Sure mail-orders are a nightmare, my hands are singed from burning maps – and Pop HQ currently resembles some kind of bubble wrap laden warehouse – but this is all good! And to celebrate this state of affairs, do let me share with you the video carefully crafted by expert Hollywood director type, Kev, to celebrate the release of Alcopopular 3 into the wild.

Picture the scene – a treacherous Sunday morning 9am at Brighton beach – winds raging, ocean crashing tumultuously against the rocks – and two hungover, bedraggled husks of men emerge from post Great Escape carnage… Their mission – to spread the word of Alcopopular 3, the world’s only message in a bottle compilation, to far off foreign shores through the only possible means… Casting it into the waves!

Soundtrack courtesy of Stars & Sons and Town Bike….

Twitter reviews: Update 2

Firstly let me apologise.. I realise everything I’ve written about over the last few days on the blog has been very compilation focussed. The message in a bottle has kinda gotten hold of me, and I’m no doubt boring everyone I talk to about it about now… But with such awesome feedback, and most notably – heroic Twitter reviews producing such great reviews – ah, I just can’t help it. So after having bits and bobs about the release featured on Die Shellsuit Die, TLOBF, Free the Press, Punktastic – ah well… Tis very pleasent.

Anywhoo – just a quick update on the muy awesome reviews that have come in from our Twitter folk over the last couple of days. Search the band names in Twitter Search to read all the well chosen words… But I just had to share these two, about Apples and David Gibb respectively. Firstly – from the resplendant @Minorityof1…

and secondly this… From the rather excitable @colinmercer, clearly pleased his county is getting a mention – and hungry for campfires and a tinny or twain!

More over the weekend…