Hailing from Chicago, the five piece garage rock band called Twin Peaks played Rough Trade a little while back off a short UK tour before heading off to France and Australia (via Texas…) for more dates. This band tours hard and looks to be lined up for a very busy summer! The three guitarists, Cadien Lake…

I think it was January when Purson played a set for Mark Riley on 6 Music, but I think it was on Gid Coe’s show that we heard Purson for the first time. Their sound was different, 60’s-70’s classic rock but with a fresh feel. About 20 minutes of googling later, and Lampy and I…

Lampy and I always try and make it to Rough Trade East for the soundcheck when were about for an in-store event. The journey from the western margins of this fair city to Brick Lane is often a bit of an epic, involving as it does a bus, the outrageous vagaries of Southwest Trains and…

Vancouver’s Black Mountain rounded off their UK tour by playing a monster of a set at Rough Trade last week which lasted nearly an hour! Many of the songs off the new album, IV, take their time to progressively build and gradually develop each layer of sound before the track shifts step-wise to the next…

One Tuesday night back in early April, Lampy and I went to see the mighty Love Buzzard beat the living daylights of a drum kit (the cymbals did actually come off…) at Indo’s in Whitechapel as they got ready for their upcoming tour. Chatting to Kevin and Al after their particularly frenetic set we got…

M Ward played a spectacular acoustic set at Rough Trade last night. Not only did Matt’s Gibson guitar look spectacular, but it sounded it too. The different textures of chord and note that Matt was able to extract from that good looking beastie was incredible! His playing rolls seemlessly rolls folk and blues in to…

A little while back, I was lucky enough to see Field Music in Rough Trade NYC. I’d missed them playing Rough Trade East and I have to admit I was a bit gutted… As it happens with a cheeky Lampy, and a little help from Ben and Andy (the events managers at RT East and…

DIIV, a five piece from New York played to a packed Rough Trade back in March. The band throws up a huge hazy wall of woozy-reverb underpinned by melodic guitar and driven on by Ben Newman’s drumming. All of which forms the expansive foundations for the vocal harmonies of Zachary Cole Smith and Colin Caulfield….

The garage punk three piece that is Virgin Kids had a rather hard act to follow on Monday night at Rough Trade playing straight after the mighty and fearsome Love Buzzard. But rise to the challenge they did with a tight set with several tracks notable for containing numerous changes in tempo with thumping, raw…

For the record I loved Love Buzzard’s set, part of a double bill with Virgin Kids at Rough Trade East, so I mean absolutely no disrespect by the following muppet-related metaphor… Imagine if you will, what you might expect if Mahna Mahna ditched the Snowths, and teamed up with Animal and a pack of hungry…

  About a year ago I took my new camera to the perfect day out – a one day music and beer festival courtesy of our local Battersea brewery (Sambrooks) and reignited a bit of a passion I’d long given up on – gig photography! Back in my heady Cardiff days I used to photograph bands…

“Wow! What a lot of Pedals!” Was more or less my first thought on arriving at Rough Trade to see Desert Mountain Tribe tooling up the stage for their set. Given there were only three of them on stage they seemed to have enough wiring for a band many times larger… And even brought their…