On the global political stage, storm clouds are gathering. In the face of Trump, Brexit, Isis etc, what can a poor boy do…but sing in a rock ‘n’ roll band? Amid these trouser-soiling conditions, antipodean psychedelic rockers POND aren’t so dumb as to try and offer cloud-busting solutions, or even a long-range forecast.

Instead, they serve up ‘The Weather’ – their own baffled, if ever madcap barometric reading of the geo-political situation (amongst others), in mind-bendingly excellent album form – all this, from their vantage point in Perth, the Western Australian city referred to "as the most remote city on earth", characterized on the album in, ‘Edge Of The World’. 

                  “A lot of the songs are fairly West Australian self-reflective,” explains the band’s singer-guitarist, Nick Allbrook, “about the weird confused place that our white Australian demographic has found itself in – not belonging to this country rightfully, and also being as sure as hell not English – and about this completely empty, confused moral dilemma that seems like it’s everywhere in the world right now.”

                 POND who came into being amid the Perth scene which also spawned Tame Impala, have perhaps thus far been perceived to inhabit a hazy world of daily hallucinogen ingestion and all-eclipsing stoner apathy. Not so.  In ’15, Allbrook penned a thoughtful essay entitled ‘Creative Darwinism: Pretty Flowers Grow In Shit’, revealing how geographical isolation had fired his peer group into making inspirational music together. 

Technically the bands seventh long-player, though only the fourth to be properly available worldwide - their uniquely skewed vision finally, urgently snaps into focus on this long-player. It opens with ’30000 Megatons’, a despairing meditation on the nuclear threat, its spiraling synth-prog hysteria mirroring the escalating unease we all feel around the world right now.   

Ironically, in that context, ‘The Weather’ also packs some of the outright poppiest POND tunes to date. The Track 2-3-4 whammy of ‘Sweep Me Off My Feet’, ‘Paint Me Silver’ and ‘Colder Than Ice’ finds the band at their most melodically direct and synth-pop-loving, if forever with a wryly-subversive twist. If these be the hits to make POND a rightful household name, then arrive they must with a dark undertow of drug chaos and genital indiscretions...

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At the turn of the 2010’s, Western Australia was going through a boom, counter to the general economic downturn, thanks to the discovery of fresh seams of mineral deposits in its deserted expanses. Perth’s music scene shared in the wealth via government arts funding, so, consciously or not, their collective post-millennial take on sunshine-psych channeled that positive energy locally.

                 POND was formed during those years, as “a Royal Trux-cum-Cream power trio”, fronted by Allbrook with Jay Watson and Joe Ryan.  Their rhythm section at any time was fairly ad-hoc; Kevin Parker was their drummer for a bit, while he launched his own project, known as Tame Impala.

“We dedicated ourselves to being these brain-burrowing, commune-dwelling psychedelic lunatics,” says Nick, who relished the idea of feeding the whole history of pop into a giant blender as an experiment. Though majoring in “strobe light-strapped-to-your-forehead, chain-me-to-a-bed psychedelia”, he says there were other key influences; as diverse as Michael Jackson, Beastie Boys and Led Zeppelin – “hip hop, super-pop and ’70s metal”, he chuckles.

                POND started off by releasing three digital/limited-vinyl albums in quick succession circa 2008-10 (‘Psychedelic Mango’, ‘Corridors Of Blissterday’, and ‘Frond’), which few people got to hear outside Australia. POND only went genuinely public with 2012s ‘Beard. Wives. Denim’ – a pulsating psych-rock epic, whose alive-in-the-room methods diametrically opposed Parker’s circa ‘Lonerism’.

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 Kevin Parker has, of course, long since moved on to concentrate on Tame Impala, but he returned to produce this new record, at his studio in Fremantle, Western Australia.  “It’s really close to the beach there,” says Nick, “so for three weeks in early ’16, we made an everyday work schedule of going in and fucking about with the songs, and layering and using all the shit that we had, then going to dip our bodies in the ocean, then coming back and doing some more”.

Jay, Joe and Nick all bring songs to the table. In terms of their internal chemistry, Ryan “writes the more country-balladeering type of things and comes up with these cooked ideas that make everyone laugh – we call him The Wild Card.” Watson, by contrast, “is the hyper-paranoid ringleader of the music, and the tightness, and the chord-structures. And the man’s a machine for plastic ’disco-pop”. Allbrook himself, apparently, supplies “all the weird stuff in between”.

From his ‘unusual’ perspective, Nick thought ‘The Weather’ was their most all-over-the-place waxing to date: “it was like a conscious decision to take great scoops of pop culture – from R&B pop, and noise-punk, to epic prog stuff – and just kind of throw it willy-nilly and abstractly into a big pile.” Its chief producer, though, thinks otherwise: “Kev kept telling me that it was actually really focused, so I’ll just have to believe him.”

 ‘Sweep Me Off My Feet’, the first single, has a delectable air of romantic expectation and sophistication, it feels like a great lost synth-pop hit from the Trevor Horn mould.   

“It’s real poppy sounding,” Allbrook agrees with a worrying smirk, “but it’s far more slack and self-loathing a subject matter than any Top 40 pop hit would in its right mind be. It explicitly says the word ‘penis’, so, you know, it’s not straight-up pop. And ‘penis’ is the least cool way to say it, isn’t it? We use the anatomical term. We’re not very cool guys.”

                  ‘Next up, ‘Paint Me Silver’ is another gleamingly alluring song, constructed by Jay around a pitch-shifted sample from Todd Rundgren’s ‘Utopia’, which the three of them duly jammed on, and Allbrook then topped off with a lyric based around something his friend Amber Fresh had said.

“She plays under the moniker ‘Rabbit Island’, he explains. She said, “Paint me silver and call me Hermann Hesse, if I ever ask for your pouch again”, because she’d sworn to not smoke, then I added a bit of other shit about materialist ideology, and the drawing together of humanity – whether it’s a good thing or not – through globalisation, but it’s all expressed in stupid whimsical little phrases.”

                Completing that triumphant triumvirate upfront, the infectiously juddering ‘Cold As Ice’ guest-stars eccentric Australian alt-ledge Kirin J. Callinan on what Nick calls “Michael Jackson-on-meth expulsions”. Which totally fits the bill, because, Nick reveals, “that one’s about the meth crisis in Western Australia. It’s a pretty trashy song, so it’s making a bit of a cheese of the whole meth crisis, and the way it’s being covered so sensationally in news things. Also, it’s half coming from the point of view of someone who’s off their gourd, struttin’ through the suburbs feelin’ like a million dollars. Yeah! But as with most of the shit on the album: if it does get into social issues, we definitely don’t pretend to offer any resolution.”

                  After those three tunes, any right-thinking listener would cut POND the slack to do as they please – and this they pretty much do, from ‘Edge Of The World’s’ dreamy speculation on Perth’s out-on-its-ownness, via ‘A/B’s’ skittering mania, through to the title track’s unnervingly blissful eco-conclusion. Perfectly measured in its lurching between moods, relevant in its synth-pop/guitar-psych balance, and bang on the money in its polemical anxieties – here, at last, is the classic killer POND album. 

As UK Foo Fighters embarked on their 10^th Anniversary Tour, they found themselves at the centre of a BBC documentary celebrating Tribute in homage to Glastonbury’s 2017 headliners, Foo Fighters.

Another milestone in a long list of epic achievements, placing them firmly amongst tribute’s elite to arguably one of the biggest rock bands of the last two decades.

Featured in Classic Rock, Rolling Stone, Kerrang, NME, Q, MOJO and Planet Rock magazines.  UK Foo Fighters’ meteoric rise continues in 2018 with their ‘Banging on the Ceiling Tour’, a name inspired by Foo Fighters 9^th studio album ‘Concrete and Gold’.

Piling through hit after hit, the band performs set lists containing all the classics - such as ‘Everlong’ and ‘Best of You’ alongside brand new material from the Foo’s new album ‘Concrete and Gold’ including ‘Run’, ‘The Sky is a Neighborhood’ and ‘La Dee Da’.

They absolutely nail the true vibe of a Foo’s live experience, all performed down to the closest detail making it a truly unmissable show for any Foo Fighters fan.

Be sure to catch them live in 2018.

Billy Bragg, is an English musician known for his blend of folk, punk-rock, and protest music.

He has been active for over thirty years since his early career as a regular contributor to anarchic U.K. live rock show The Tube. His music is a combination of poetry and political comment, with a dash of romance. He has collaborated with many other musicians, including Johnny Marr of The Smiths, protest folk singer Leon Rosselson, R.E.M., Less Than Jake, Kirsty MacColl, Kate Nash, Milburn, and Wilco. He obtained a top-twenty hit with the song “We Laughed” in a band called The Rosetta Life band (with Bragg, Helena, Robbie McIntosh, Ady Milward, and Chris Lonergan). It was a cancer-based charity song written by Bragg and Maxine Edgington. Bragg was influenced by his brief experience in the British Army as a trooper in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars of the Royal Armoured Corps. He, along with Paul Weller and others, was a leading member of UK left-wing musicians’ pressure group Red Wedge in the Thatcher-dominated 1980s.

In recent years he has broadened his audience thanks to his involvement with Wilco on the album Mermaid Avenue and its follow-up Mermaid Avenue Vol. II.

Billy Bragg, is an English musician known for his blend of folk, punk-rock, and protest music.

He has been active for over thirty years since his early career as a regular contributor to anarchic U.K. live rock show The Tube. His music is a combination of poetry and political comment, with a dash of romance. He has collaborated with many other musicians, including Johnny Marr of The Smiths, protest folk singer Leon Rosselson, R.E.M., Less Than Jake, Kirsty MacColl, Kate Nash, Milburn, and Wilco. He obtained a top-twenty hit with the song “We Laughed” in a band called The Rosetta Life band (with Bragg, Helena, Robbie McIntosh, Ady Milward, and Chris Lonergan). It was a cancer-based charity song written by Bragg and Maxine Edgington. Bragg was influenced by his brief experience in the British Army as a trooper in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars of the Royal Armoured Corps. He, along with Paul Weller and others, was a leading member of UK left-wing musicians’ pressure group Red Wedge in the Thatcher-dominated 1980s.

In recent years he has broadened his audience thanks to his involvement with Wilco on the album Mermaid Avenue and its follow-up Mermaid Avenue Vol. II.

Billy Bragg, is an English musician known for his blend of folk, punk-rock, and protest music.

He has been active for over thirty years since his early career as a regular contributor to anarchic U.K. live rock show The Tube. His music is a combination of poetry and political comment, with a dash of romance. He has collaborated with many other musicians, including Johnny Marr of The Smiths, protest folk singer Leon Rosselson, R.E.M., Less Than Jake, Kirsty MacColl, Kate Nash, Milburn, and Wilco. He obtained a top-twenty hit with the song “We Laughed” in a band called The Rosetta Life band (with Bragg, Helena, Robbie McIntosh, Ady Milward, and Chris Lonergan). It was a cancer-based charity song written by Bragg and Maxine Edgington. Bragg was influenced by his brief experience in the British Army as a trooper in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars of the Royal Armoured Corps. He, along with Paul Weller and others, was a leading member of UK left-wing musicians’ pressure group Red Wedge in the Thatcher-dominated 1980s.

In recent years he has broadened his audience thanks to his involvement with Wilco on the album Mermaid Avenue and its follow-up Mermaid Avenue Vol. II.

Airbourne is possessed by the spirits of rock’n’roll. These Australians have always gone where the beers are cool, the girls are hot and the music can never be too loud and proud. There have been some hellraising rock ‘n’ roll bands, but Airbourne have taken the good-times, bad-boys, party-animal strut to a new level.

For more than a decade, Theory Of A Deadman has been among the most distinctive and popular bands in hard rock, combining frank, earnest lyricism and extraordinary melodies with massive power and electrifying dynamics. With singer/songwriter Tyler Connolly at the helm, the Vancouver-based band has earned a fervent fan following as well as a long line of multi-format hits, among them the No. 1 hit “No Surprise”.

Like any hard rock outfit worth its weight in salt, Theory Of A Deadman has spent much of its existence on the road. In addition to innumerable headline dates, and festival appearances the band has shared stages with Alter Bridge, Stone Sour, Mötley Crüe and many other like-minded acts.

Manchester’s legendary Happy Mondays have announced a twenty-five date tour of the UK and Ireland for November and December 2017.

The ‘Twenty Four Hour Party People – Greatest Hits Tour’ announcement comes on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Happy Mondays’ debut album ‘Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)’.

Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder said, “I am really looking forward to the ‘Mondays’ shows leading up to Christmas 2017. We're performing better than ever and I love getting together with the band, blasting out all our great tunes we've made together over the decades. It's gonna be great.”

Bez, the group’s dancer and percussionist, added, “Just as I thought it was all over, the party's starting again. Look forward to seeing you all.”

Oliver Tree