Eliades Ochoa

The Last Grandmaster of the Buena Vista Social Club
Everyone treasures their very own special musical moments and I can locate one of mine quite specifically. It was early April of 1998 and the Buena Vista Social Club had just edged their way, in that pre-gig gloom, upon stage at Le Carré in Amsterdam. With the [...]

Robots in Disguise

European Vibe Magazine, November 2007
Supersonic Madrid
Sue Denim is sitting cross-legged, in the back room of Supersonic, one of Madrid’s hip backstreet hangouts, in Argüelles. Her hair is bleached into a thousand different colours and she is wearing a glittering belt that sits on top of a black and gold dress. There is, as I am [...]

Klaxons

European Vibe Magazine, October 2007
Mercury Music Prize
And the winner is,” blurted out Jools Holland in his awkward, inimitable style. “The Klaxons!” All of a sudden the vast hall of the Grovesnor House Hotel was lit up with lights streaming from all angles as the sound of the band’s successful single Golden Scans filled the room. [...]

The trouble with Tanzanian cinema

Published in Fat Controller Magazine, 2005
Batman
Man should try everything once, apart from incest and Morris dancing. Well, this is the point of view I was dragged around to, when someone suggested that we go and watch ‘Batman’.
I am not a particularly fierce critic of Batman. In fact I distinctly remember wearing my y-fronts outside [...]

The mysterious death of a musical magician

Published in Fat Controller Magazine, 2004

On Tuesday 21st October in 2003 with his enraged girlfriend Jennifer Chiba locked out of reach in one of the rooms at his home in Silverlake, Los Angeles, it seems that Elliott Smith decided that enough was enough. In the wake of the last in a series of increasingly [...]

Meeting the Lazy Beggars

In Madrid, July 2007
If hedonism is an art form then The Lazy Beggers are its high priest. In June of 2007 I sat down on the street for a beer with them.
Occasionally when you stop and think about it, you have to be impressed with the spread of capitalism. City slickers hang out in London [...]