With V last weekend, and Reading zooming up on the horizon, we're feeling quite the festival goers at the moment and looking forward to the mighty Bestival in 3 weeks. Set up by Rob Da Bank in 2004 as a spin off from his Sunday Best clubnight at Tearoom Des Artistes in Wandsorth, it combines an anything goes (albeit it slightly leftfield) music policy with a whole bunch of fun from a fancy dress......

London Pride is back! And what better way to see in the celebrations, than getting to know the brilliant and frankly rather pretty DJ Cautious. She's on the women's stage from 3.40. So, DJ Cautious, What Do You Do In The Real World? I drink tea and make a mess in my bedroom. Sometimes I do the creative concepts and marketing for sustainable design projects. Describe Your Sound To Us: Ooh, funky, happy dancy......

Buttoned Down Disco is fast becoming a London phenomenon. It's practially free if you sign up for the secret venue invite. More importantly, for a club night in London it's always really friendly. You could walk up to anyone and start talking to them if you felt like it. These are things we really don't see enough of on a typical London night out. But then, Buttoned Down Disco was never meant to be......

Lucky Soul, a band we love so much we're afraid we'll be served with an injunction if we gush about them any more, play their biggest gig to date when they headline at Bush Hall on 16th May. Tickets are a bargainous £7 (available online at We Got Tickets). It's a great opportunity to catch a band very much on the up, as they celebrate the rave reviews being served on their debut album,......

Crowds of angry young people clad in black will descend like bats from the musty corners of a tumbledown gothic cathedral on The Brewery in the East End tomorrow night. No, it's not yet another Goth club night - make way for the Kerrang! Awards 2006. Touted by the magazine as being "the most debauched rock 'n' roll event of the year", expect sordid tales of excess the next morning as boys and girls......

As you can imagine, we get a fair few e-mails to the Londonist Music mailbox asking us if we'll plug something so it takes something pretty special to make us sit up and pay attention. "Just wondering if you might be able to mention the London dates for the world's favourite Argentinian ex-clown turned experimental singer, Juana Molina?" is a pretty good opening, for instance. And so it is, we hereby draw to your......

A week or so ago, we were trundling down Tottenham Court Road underground station dreading the face-sweating levels of heat that were about to hit us when we heard something we thought was rather wonderful. While buskers have got much better since the Underground introduced their licensing laws a few years ago, most of the time we don't pay attention to them unless they're drunk and they're the bongo man at Bank. This time......

It's a funny old world. When Sleater-Kinney announced they were no more, we had a nostalgic look back at the unprecedented double review we put up for their album, The Woods. One of the albums it beat to that week's coveted Londonist Album of the Week award was Bang Bang Rock & Roll by Art Brut. Would you believe it (and we would, since coincidence isn't really all that spooky), we received an e-mail......

Once a month Londonist sits down with a pile of the months releases that have dropped through our letterbox. Since we're almost at the end of April, we'd better get on with it. The Victorian English Gentlemen's Club - Amateur Man (Single released 3rd April on Fantastic Plastic) A double jab of schizotic art punk on the VEGC's second single. It has all the energy of a rendition of Knees Up Mother Brown in an......

Formed out of members of Art of Noise & The Auteurs, we first came across Infantjoy while wallowing in 'OMG SARAH NIXEY IS BACK!!!111!!' induced glee a few months ago. Guest starring on their working of 'Silent Night', we were intrigued by this duo who seemed to produce mesmerizing, elegant instrumental music. Almost cinematic sounding, their concept album Where The Night Goes is based on the idea that 'each track takes place at a......

You know when you hear a new band and you immediately love their songs. You wait and wait and finally you see them live and it's all ruined. Live they were absolutely rubbish. Well screw all that, because we finally saw Dead Disco live on Saturday night in Blackpool and they blew us away. Tight, professional and with one of the most impressive front people we've ever seen, we stomped around the dancefloor like......

This day in London’s History 1900: The future Labour party was founded. A jamboree of like-minded lefties gathered at the Congregational Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street (building long since demolished and currently a construction site near Ludgate Circus). To the rumble of passing LCDR trains, the delegates created the Labour Representation Committee, which evolved into the party we know and deride today. Perhaps more importantly, on this day in 1957 Adrian Smith of Iron......

It's a curtailed Troll this week, as, frankly, there isn't much exciting news in the world of TV. That predictable crowd-pleaser Brat Camp (Wed 9pm C4) is back, and the little treasures this year are just as toxically obnoxious as ever. Somehow, the tantrums of the kids in Rock School (Sun 9pm C4) are harder to take - mainly because for the kids involved, reality TV is giving them a path out of Lowestoft......

So what do you think was the most 'popular' Londonist post of 2005? The July 7 bombings? The whole NME controversy? That 90% of cabbies think blogging is the same thing as dogging? Nope. The clear winner of 'The Most Popular Londonist Post of 2005' award (if you count the number of hits each entry got on its individual page) is (drum roll) Happy Slapping Hits London from back in February, with a massive......

Roadrunner United - The All-Star Sessions (Roadrunner) Musicians seem to love playing away from home, and no we don't mean Gene Simmons having slept with every woman on the planet. Spin-offs, side projects and supergroups, not to mention the guest appearance keep the creative juices flowing and allow for all kinds of bad behaviour (or shit records) outside the familial home. So kudos to the folks at Roadrunnner records for breathing new life into......

The big wheel keeps on turning On a simple line day by day The earth spins on its axis One man struggle to write the Midweek Music News introduction while working out his taxes So wrote Massive Attack about the struggle to keep up Londonist duties while pressing matters involving HMRC are at hand. HMRC wait for no man, however, so without further ado, here's your Midweek Music News. Tonight NME tipped electro boy......

It's proper gig going weather now, so no 'it's a shame to waste the nice weather' rubbish, get thee to a venue and immerse yourself in the glory of music. And then come back stinking of cigarette smoke because the girls next to you spend more time holding their fags in a posey manner near your face, instead of actually smoking them. Anyway, more details of a gig we mentioned on Wednesday. The Sways......

Neil Young - Prairie Wind As prodigious as he is unpredictable (this after all is a man whose record company once sued him for not sounding like himself), Neil Young's 41st solo record, just shy of his 60th birthday and recovering from an aneurysm that almost killed him earlier this year, finds him in a gentle, reflective mood on his strongest and most affecting album in ten years. Returning to his country folk roots,......

Rolling round again for 2005, tonight sees the 10th annual MOBO awards taking place at the Royal Albert Hall. Famously dogged with controversy last year for the revoking of homophobic reggae artists nominations, the 2005 awards should run a bit more smoothly with the only controversy so far surrounding whether Joss Stone really fits into the ethos of the event. Former Fame Academy student and oft top 20 charter, Lemar, is the front runner......

If, like Londonist, you're incredibly impatient when it comes to visiting websites that are running v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, added to which you have a memory like one of those thingummies through which you sift flour, then you may have tried to download the latest Warchild album on the day of release, only to be frustrated by the downloading experience. Well, this is just a little reminder for you that Help: A Day In The Life......

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed recurring mention of The Broken Family Band in our mid week gig listings. So after taking a listen to Song Against Robots and deciding that they were really quite brilliant; DiS described them as country-flavoured rock 'n roll and sound not unlike Pavement being buttfucked by the Anthology Of American Folk Music which we couldn't really argue with. Then we heard a copy of this year's......

Adverts for horrors like Barbra Streisand's Guilty Pleasures are polluting the airwaves with increasing regularity now, so it's time to prepare ourselves for the terrors of music aimed at the non-discerning Christmas market. We've still got enough interesting releases to bring to you this week, though. It's a bit guitar-y this week. Shout Out Louds - Howl Howl Gaff Gaff Shout Out Louds are from Sweden, they play guitars, and they've just released an album......

Help: A Day In The Life Anyone else spend the weekend battling with War Child's servers, trying to download Help: A Day In The Life? Frustrating as it was at times getting on that golden free server, the end result was a mostly satisfying always interesting collection of 22 tracks, recorded and released in just over 24 hours, that will make it's physical appearance in the record racks on the 26th September. Stripped of......

Lightning flashes around Londonist Towers. A heavy-leather-gauntlet clad fist pounds the boardroom table as our Editor screams: Controversy! I want controversy you two-fingered-typing Pitman-pushing hacks! An invisible grip tightens around our throats. And down here in the Londonist Music Dungeon who are we to argue. If you want controversy you've got it. Album of the week: Coldplay's X&Y. What's that sound? Ah yes, the rumble of a thousand angry fingers on keyboards... Coldplay -......

In a reversal of the usual pessimist's view that the sun only shines once you're back at work, this weekend was full of sunsheeeeine but the view from the tiny little air hole provided for us in Londonist Dungeons shows a distinctly gloomy Monday. It's particularly fortunate because Londonist spent the weekend chasing the sun around our postage stamp garden like a cat and any continuation of the good weeather would have kept us out......

Ahh, a lovely weekend (ignoring the occasional isolated spots of rain), we sincerely hope our loyal readers spent the time outdoors slathered with liberal dosages of factor 80 sun cream. Londonist, on the other hand, spent the weekend checking out new music for you. That's how much we love you. Today we bring you a new improved Monday Music Review on Tuesday in that we dare to give you our opinions as well as letting......

When Mark Oliver 'E' Everett decided to share his thoughts and fears with us on 1994's Beautiful Freak he set a template of off-centre, fuzzy lullabies for the chronically frightened which he would follow succesfully for another 2 albums until 2001's jarring Souljacker. 2003's Shootenany! saw them heading back to familiar territory but it never quite hit the mark. So a celebratory Londonist Album of the Week award then for the satisfying 33 track......

Looks like the sudden change in the weather has led to the nation's broadsheet music reviewers ignoring the bulk of this week's new releases and heading out into the sunshine, or writing up some of next week's records ahead of time, obvioulsy hoping to bag a long weekend out of it. Anyway, we'll bring you these next week when they come out, although we're going to be slighlty biased towards the Eels: Blinking Lights......

A disappointing night at the Brits for London acts, unless you count the Brummie with the faux-Cockney accent Mike Skinner aka The Streets, who won the Best British Male Solo Artist award. The Londonist office is divided on The Streets so we won't say any more lest a fist-fight break out. In the international categories, the entertaining Scissor Sisters cleaned up in the Best Group, Best Album and Best Newcomer categories. The Brits site......

NME reports that Razorlight will play another night at the Ally Pally, after selling out their original gig there. The new 12th February gig is apparently the last chance to see the band before they head back into the studio to record their Difficult Second Album. Check the usual suspects for ticket availability but do it soon, as tickets are bound to sell out quickly. We're not really massive fans of Razorlight here at......