6 DAY RIOT
In an East London cafe, 6 Day Riot’s Glaswegian singer/songwriter Tamara Schlesinger decides that her hot chocolate isn’t quite sweet enough. As she empties out a sachet of sugar into it, she confides, “If I’m to be honest, the prognosis wasn’t too good this time last year.”She has a point. When you’ve written songs with the same person for several years and you form a band together, only for them to leave on the eve of your biggest tour (and take the bassist too) it’s hard to stay positive. But, as John Lydon famously put it, anger is an energy. “More out of bloodymindedness than anything else,” 6 Day Riot regrouped and boarded a plane to Toronto where they were booked to play a music festival. Whilst 15,000ft over the Atlantic, Tamara even wrote a song in the wake of it all, Go! Canada. Performed on their arrival to a rapturous response, its presence on 6 Day Riot’s new album tells you that Tamara is made of stronger stuff than most immaculately-dressed, thriftstore-frequenting, ukelele-plucking frontwomen.
But then, she has had to be. As a teenager, Tamara was on course to be an internationally successful gymnast. Between the ages of 14 and 18, she performed all over the world as part of the Scottish gymnastics team. A fractured ankle, exacerbated on recovery by “a rubbish mat” in a Polish tournament put paid to her Olympian dream. “That was the end of my world,” she says, in a manner that suggests the puddles left by any attendant emotional downpour evaporated a long time ago. Fashion design briefly seemed like her calling. She was accepted at Central St Martin’s School of Design, but when she got there, Tamara realised that her approach to fashion didn’t quite fit in with what was happening around her. “Perhaps it was naive of me to design shirts with two arms when people around me were designing them with five,” she recalls.
It was at this juncture that Tamara’s occasional song-writing developed into something more serious. Various musical collaborations followed before she released a debut solo album, the charming “From Home To Home” in 2004. A strong musical alliance with the guitarist on this project led them to forming a new band together and ‘6 Day Riot’ was born…Through this collaboration they quickly developed a distinctive musical identity, incorporating aspects of klezmer and bluegrass into Tamara’s catchy folk pop to create a new sound perfectly captured on ‘Folie a Deux’, the band’s debut L.P. National radio airplay and excellent reviews followed before internal divisions within the band led to the founder members going their different ways.
2008 saw the band reborn; recording the outstanding ‘Bring On The Waves’ E.P. with the ensuing year seeing no shortage of new songs lovingly brought to life. And ceaseless gigging – in environs ranging from the Cambridge Folk Festival to, on one occasion, a childrens’ birthday party, and “a million indie support slots” in between – has made them the toast of the blogosphere. Drummer Daniel Deavin from the original line-up has been crucial in fleshing out the arrangements of Tamara’s latest batch of songs with tom-drum heavy tribal rhythms and they have been joined by bassist Edd Harwood, guitarist Caspar Riis and Sophie Loyer on violin. Asked to attach a handle to what 6 Day Riot do, Tamara says, “I never had a problem with the word pop. It’s just that our sort of pop music happens to be played with the help of melodicas, accordions, cello, violin, trumpet and whatever else we have hanging around.”
In the light of the recent success enjoyed by the new wave of UK folk acts perhaps it really isn’t so fanciful to refer to 6 Day Riot’s do-the-show-right-here approach as that of a great pop group. Certainly on their second album ‘6 Day Riot Have A Plan’, they have effortlessly transcended the sum of their parts, creating an elegant carnivalesque fusion of elements of folk, afrobeat, calypso, mariachi, Eastern European and gypsy swing into a ‘melting pop’ that reflects our multicultural existence and completely defies physical resistance. Imminent Glastonbury and Green Man appearances should place the band in their absolute element.
“On this album,” explains Tamara, “I decided to explore some lyrical ideas beyond just your straight-ahead love song. It’s not a big deal, but you do notice a difference in the reactions people have when a man writes a love song and when a woman writes one. With men there’s a tendency to applaud their ‘bravery’ for showing their feelings – whereas with women, it’s seen as more of a sentimental thing.”
Besides, it’s not like there’s a shortage of decent material to draw on Out There. Inspired by John Darwin – the “missing” canoeist who turned up in Panama with his wife, who had told their children he was dead – O Those Kids casts a no less bewildered eye over the things that people do for money. “I think it’s incredible, that story, on a number of levels,” smiles Tamara. “I mean, you’ve not only got the fact that they did it, but then that they squandered it all by agreeing to have their picture put up on the web.”
For all of that, however, Tamara’s lyrics seem to exist primarily as a means by which to help make sense of a life in which senseless things sometimes happen. Breakdown sees her coming to terms with a series of panic attacks which afflicted her between the first album and this one. No less affectingly, Be With Me was the result of nights spent beside herself with worry after her boyfriend had been rushed to hospital – the desolation of its first half redeemed magnificently by the cascading harmonic uplift of its rousing finale.
Even as she lays herself bare lyrically through the writing of this album, her dual role as music industry mini-mogul allows no such room for weakness. Releasing the album under her own Tantrum Records label, Tamara has generated the funding, designed the album artwork and hand-picked her collaborators from producer to PR team while maintaining absolute creative control.
It’s a remarkable cottage industry a million miles away from the bloated excesses of major labels struggling to adjust to the fundamental changes in the consumption of music. The album’s opening track, first single and mission statement is Run For Your Life- a ’state of the nation’ summary which gazes on at a Britain in the throes of a collective panic attack, with much the same expression Tim from The Office might have reserved for one of David Brent’s more exceptional shows of buffoonery.
“It’s really just about the perpetual state of media-inflamed panic we all seem to be in – be it because of the recession or this post-Big Brother habit of treating everything that happens, no matter how tragic or trivial, like a soap opera.” Lyrical allusions to the media’s obsession with Princess Diana and/or Madeline McCann could just as aptly apply to the recent death of Jade Goody and demonstrate the skills of a writer capable of capturing the zeitgeist. The fact that these ideas and more are contained within a ridiculously catchy two and a half minute folk-pop song that makes you want to dance around whichever room you happen to be in only serves to underline what an intriguing proposition 6 Day Riot present.
It seems fair to say that 6 Day Riot really do have a plan…
LITTLE MY
Little My are made up of 8 to 20 people from various Cardiff bands playing instruments ranging from guitars & stylophones to violins & wooden spoons. Expect layers of melody and 4 way vocals in short bursts of chaotic delight.
They have released a series of e.p.’s in fairly chronological order ‘Little My’s First’ through ‘Eighth’ on weepop! uk, little pocket usa & most recently Cardiff’s very own businessman records.
PUZZLE MUTESON
“an Isle of Wight guy who frames elements of Yo La Tengo, Cat Power, and CocoRosie in a slightly folkier setting.”
MEN DIAMLER
“Men Diamler is a young man with a cult reputation in the South West who will not be tamed by the powers that be, reconfiguring a English/Welsh soul music through woozy operatics and wild and weird song/stories. Sweet and darkness have never sounded so close or so intense in such performer. Despite his tender age he is a channel for old thyme ways – footstompin’ blues, two string serenades, backwoods drinking hollers, horse play and pagan folk all get exorcised. Psychosis never sounded this good and people clap” Qujunktions
” .. tears away at your singer/songwriter preconceptions, replacing them with black humour and visceral gore” Rottenmeats
“imagine Roy Orbison with a two punctured lungs and John Fahey with a fractured hand?well, he sounds better than that”
“Mr. Diamler’s music seems to carve its initials somewhere between Son House & Syd Barrett on the musical park-bench. That said, this is fiery and unapologetic music that lives in a fucked up, peculiar world of it’s own. Lopsided folk music that leaps at you, sometimes very literally” Thora Zine
12 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT MEN DIAMLER…
1.Men Diamler is from the Southwest of the Northeast.
2.Books tours with a bucket of cement and a mechanical drill – ie DIY
3.Sells tickets for tribute acts,spiritualists and retired cricketers when he is not Men Diamler.
4.Dislikes London, he has now quit playing there for good.
5.Likes the fact somebody once described his singing voice as akin to “Roy Orbison with two punctured lungs”, and is glad it wasn’t an iron lung.
6.Has covered Jacques Brel, Elvis, Son House, Trad Arr & Swans live. He likes all those acts quite a bit, too.
7.Has a song about a horse who is starved by his owner so that he can use it’s ribs as a xylophone. The horse gets naturally gets revenge.
8.Makes drone/noise/improv musick under the name FRANZ REICHELT. If you don’t know who the inspiration behind FRANZ IS, look on youtube.
9.Men Diamler divides the audience. Sometimes this happens right down the middle, which is good as it makes it easier for him to walk around while singing a spiritual/hymn.
10.Considers the dead poets are better than the living ones, and the gulf increases everyday.
11.Can’t tell if the glass is half empty or half full – because it is a can.
12.Doesn’t like writing his own press releases. The code is chilly.
SILVER GOSPEL RUNNERS
Silver Gospel Runners are a group of 7 musicians who play indie pop songs. They have been described by Huw Stevens as ‘lovely’ Bethan Elfyn as ‘ace’ and Kruger magazine as ‘important and irresistible’. They are often described by other people as ‘fey’ or ‘twee’, though Silver Gospel Runners themselves perhaps dispute these accusations.
They formed in the Summer of 2008 mainly through adverts placed on that little know social institution ‘the internet’. They played theirfirst gig in Cardiff in November 2008 and almost managed to insult the audience by implying everyone was there to see just them and only them. Lesson learnt, SGR have since played a number of venues in Cardiff and London (including the slightly well known ‘Heavenly social’) and have displayed increasing levels of ingenuity in fitting all the members and instruments onto smaller and smaller stages
In January 2009, Kruger Magazine released “Would You Settle For Less/We Sang Old Punk Songs” as part of their online singles club and more recently they recorded four tracks for a live session on Radio One Wales introducing with Bethan Elfyn. They have been played a bit on Radio One and XFM and quite a lot on Radio One Wales. They are currently working on an E.P which may eventually be released in some form.
Co-promoted with Gathered In Song and Alt Twist. Also featuring DJ Steve Honeywill.
for full into regarding the month festival in association with The Joy Collective, see http://www.mezefestival.co.uk
