Young Legionnaire are back! Something of a supergroup from the UK’s post-post punk scene, YL consists of Bloc Party’s Gordon Moakes, drummer Dean Pearson and frontman Paul Mullen, formerly of yourcodenameis:milo (one of our few sources of North East pride), and now the leader of the brilliant Berlin-based-ish electro rockers Losers. Young Legionnaire are writing news songs (yay!) and will be threatening to blow Idlewild off the stage at Lido this Sunday, March 1st. Come get some.
DNA BLNis kicking off Berlin Music Week with an epic night of live music from hot new artists, plus DJs, food trucks, visual art and more! The teenage metal fan in us is looking forward to Yorkshire metalcore troupe Backstab Burial(Huddersfield, raise your horns!), while our more sophisticated side will be nodding our heads to the cross-genre electronic soul of Switzerland’s Glitter Wasteland(pictured above).
But the real big news for fans of mid-2000s English indie (like us!) is the return of members of The Cooper Temple Clause and north eastern math rockers Yourcodenameis:milo with Losers, injecting a lethal concoction of prog and emo into post-Soulwax electro rock. Rounding out this first showcase are Janice Prix(below), Those Goddamn HippiesandWe Love Machines, plus DJs like Losers’ own Eddy Temple-Morris (XFM). Scroll down for a taste of things to come, and for full event details.
DNA BLN Launch Party [Facebook event] Wednesday 3rd September, 9pm Magnet Club, Falckensteinstr. 48, 10997 Berlin, Germany
We’ve recently been made aware that the überlin origin story is incomplete. We use phrases like “London to Berlin”, “LDN to BLN” and “London refugees”, but that’s an oversimplification. Yes, we lived there for five years, and it’s convenient to describe Berlin as being so much cheaper/more liveable/awesomer(?) than London, but that’s not where we’re from. No, both Zoë and myself grew up in the North East of England, in a city called Newcastle upon Tyne.
I’m always surprised when Germans have heard of Newcastle. They may only know Newcastle United FC, and sometimes Newcastle Brown Ale, but as football and drinking makes up 90% of our culture, all they’re missing is the details. Apart from one poor girl who’d had the misfortune to spend a year in Newcastle as a student, for whom this VICE article will make for uncomfortable reading:
That article is ostensibly about a new generation of students, The Lads, but it’s really about Newcastle. Our hometown is the *only* choice for lads who want to spend their University years drinking, having their faces tattooed on their arses, and getting rapey with the lasses. But local competition to be “Britain’s Biggest Lads” is fierce, coming from these plucked-and-preened trannies with Schwarzenegger bodies and a thirst for fanny:
The Geordie Shore lads and lasses might be extreme examples, but they’re just at the end of a scale on which almost every Toon-dweller sits. The flipside of the stereotype is that we love to party, have a fucking crackin’ sense a’ humour, and are really friendly (unless you come from south of the River Tyne). That’s why stag and hen dos from all over the country flock to the Bigg Market, a concentration of bars and clubs pegged by VICE as “the roughest part of Newcastle City Centre” but which has also been voted
Great Britain’s no. 1 tourist attraction. In the Tripadvisor Travellers’ Choice Destination Awards for European Nightlife destinations, four of the UK’s nightspots finished in the top 10; Newcastle was awarded 3rd Place behind London, and Berlin
(bold disbelief my own)
Here’s what the Toon’s nightlife is really like:
But it’s not all bad. There’s the Happy Chip, where you can buy poppers with your kebab, and Curry Hell – the world’s hottest curry, free if you can keep it down. There’s a metal club… or there was, until they paved it and put up a parking lot (seriously). In a lot of ways, Newcastle moulded us into the people we are today – Zoë, a true diamond in the rough, and me, just rough. And even though I’d been away to university, went travelling and moved to Edinburgh, it was when I returned to Newcastle that I met Zo – in this very club:
Let’s ‘ave it! I actually went to school with R Kelly in the background…
So that’s us. If you’re still interested in our home toon, here are some FAST GEORDIE FACTS what we’ll lorn ya reet good man:
The “castle” in Newcastle is pronounced like “hassle” not “parcel”. If you really want to fit in, say NEW’ASSIL MAN.
Real Geordies don’t say “Howay” (meaning: come on), we say “Hawez”.
We invented the word “chav“. Seriously, we’ve been calling people “charvers” since at least the 90s, when the tracksuits were way more gaudy.
