A special gift for our friends…
December 12th, 2011As a special Chrimbo gift to our friends, we are holding two VIP shopping events at our London stores in Covent Garden and in Westfield, Stratford. Join us for DJ’s, mince pies and bubbly and a cracker of a time with 40% off full price products during the event only. Check below for details.
SAMPLE SALE
December 6th, 2011
Artrocker New Blood Award.
December 6th, 2011As all you Original Penguin fans know we’ve been bringing you some of the best new bands with our New Blood downloads in association with Artrocker. So this year of course we were sponsors of the Best New Band – New Blood Award at the inaugural Artrocker Awards last Friday. The nominees included Ringo Deathstarr, Teeth, The Chevin,DZ Deathrays, The Neat and our winners Mojo Fury!
The awards were held in one of East London’s best music venue’s XOYO, so of course we went on down to have a chat with some of the bands and give away some special Original Penguin goodies. Needless to say there were many great bands in attendance and luckily we managed to grab a few minutes with New Blood Award nominees The Neat and winners Mojo Fury.
We had a nice little chat with our well deserving winners Mojo Fury. The 4 band members met and formed in 2004 at music college in Belfast and recorded their debut album Visiting hours of a traveling circus last year. Talking to frontman Mike Mormecha at the awards, who describes the bands music as “Heavy, energetic and Saucy” he tells us this year has been a big year for the band after a lot of touring and new single El. released in November. With musical influences ranging from The Beatles to Nine Inch Nails and Elliott Smith, we also asked Mike if he could work with any artist in the world who would it be? “Prince” he tells us. Highlights of the bands career so far have been “touring with Biffy Clyro!”. Mojo Fury’s UK tour with Amplifier kicks off in Nottingham on December 4th and ends December 12th in Bristol. Check out their Facebook for tour dates. After beating bands such as Teeth and The Chevin to our Best New Band award on Friday, they are well on their way to even bigger success in 2012!
New Blood award Nominees The Neat formed three years ago, meeting at Hull University. After much gigging around the UK they consequently signed to the Kaiser Chiefs record label, Chewing Gum records. With releases such as In youth is pleasure and Good in Bed drawing a lot of positive attention, the band were serious contenders for the New Blood Award.
As the New Blood Award confirms recognition from the music scene of the bands success so far, we wanted to know a bit about who the boys saw as their musical influencers. Frontman Merrick Saunders told us ” It’s different for every member, maybe my Bloody Valentine, but it changes all the time. At the moment I listen to a lot of the Rapture.” and of course Original Penguin wanted to know who’s style they were fans of to which we got a range of different answers from each member from Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg and quite oddly Mary Poppins! With a tour planned for February 2012, the boys told us that the Best New band nomination just about wraps up the year for them! they may not have won but they were a good bunch of lads to chat with! keep an eye on the bands Facebook page for news on upcoming shows.
We’d like to thank Artrocker for a Fantastic evening at the awards and of course for introducing us to all these awesome new bands, and also Zoe Jade for being our wonderful photographer very excited to see how Mojo Fury get on in 2012!
Nominees: Artrocker New Blood Award
December 2nd, 2011It’s today…this afternoon sees the 1st ever Artrocker Awards. We are sponsoring the NEW Blood award and have been profiling the nominees. Today are the last two:
DZ Deathrays
Regular listeners to the Artrocker radio show should already be familiar with noisy Brisbane-ites DZ Deathrays, albeit maybe under the simpler guise of DZ. Having been together as a band for three years, the musical duo of singer / guitarist Shane Parsons and drummer Simon Ridley have recently felt compelled to extend their name: “We felt we had to do it. There is another guy called DZ who is bigger than us, a dubstep DJ. Dubstep is huge now,” explains Simon shortly after they have finished playing a raucous set at SXSW. The primary reason for the name change may have been to stop confusion, but it also signifies that the band are looking to make an impact beyond just their native land; with performances in Austin just under their belt the band is also embarking on a tour that stretches across the land with heavy noise-niks Cerebral Ballzy.
The Neat
We’re looking at doing our own release and getting an EP out with the six new tracks we’ve done at a house three doors down from where I live in Hull.
It’s hard to get an album deal these days. Things went so fast for us and then it leveled out and we’ve gone away and are doing our own thing again, building on from where we started.
We didn’t produce the Chewing Gum releases and we didn’t have a lot of control over them, but these new ones are more like live recordings and we just want people to hear it now. We’ve always got an idea of what we want to sound like and we’re just trying to experiment a bit more. We’ve all got better and have grown up with out playing.
Images and text courtesy of Artrocker Magazine
