A popular music festival is cancelled

Sob! Not only is the legendary Sweetwater club in Mill Valley (temporarily) closed due to a funding delay, but now The 2009 San Francisco Blues Festival has been cancelled due to lack of money.

'We may well have seen the last of the San Francisco Blues Festival. The combination of rising production costs and lack of sponsorship support leaves me no choice but to cancel this year’s show," says founder Tom Mazzolini, "I’m sad to say this, but we may well have seen the last San Francisco Blues Festival."

It will be a crying shame if the longest-running blues festival in the United States, which has been held in the bay area for the past 36 years doesn't get resurrected. Over the decades, It has been host to blues music legends like B.B. King, Etta James, Taj Mahal, Junior Wells, and John Lee Hooker, as well as rocksters like Johnny Winter, Los Lobos, Austin de Lone, Steve Miller, Taj Mahal and Little Richard, to name just a glittering few.

Music loving protesters in the SF Bay area are already clamouring for the festival to be reinstated, so if solvent IT workers buy T shirts from the San Francisco Blues Festival site, maybe enough cash will be raised to fund the festival for an encore next year?

Rotten Hill Gang - woweee zoweeeee!

Richard Young and Jeremy Zimmermann

I almost blew my eardrums out tonight at the most sensational gig I've been to in ages. The Rotten Hill Gang's gig at the packed-out, purple hazed Movida club club underneath the London Palladium was a riot. If they don't get signed to a major label after their exhilerating performance tonight, there is no justice in this world.

Jeweller Stephen Webster, one of the band's co-managers grabbed the microphone and made a passionate speech about managing this exciting band. Unfortunately, as I was standing at the side of the stage next to the speakers, I couldn't hear his dialogue, but he was incredibly enthusiastic, just like his glamorous looking band.

Mick Jones, who guested was riveting to watch. The rest of the band (Gary Stonadge: bass, Arran Ness: drums, André Shapps: guitar, Alexia Collen: vocals, Krysten Cummings: vocals, Redskin: rap) was incredibly tight and everyone leapt up to dance seconds into their first number. I'm delighted I saw them play in such an intimate club.

The Rotten Hill Gang's future gigs include one at the Inn On the Green, Ladbroke Grove on Friday 13th at about 9ish, and one on February 18th at the fabulous sounding Cuckoo club in West End's Swallow Street. Can't wait!

Transfigured Nights Scores!

Jed Town, one of New Zealand's leading audio-visual artists has 'flitted between punk, video-art, ambient electronic and film scores" throughout his fascinating and versatile career. He has provided the score for David Blyth's ahead of its time Transfigured Nights, and also other iconoclastic scores for several of David Blyth's extraordinary films in the past: the documentaries, Fish Tank Telly and Our Oldest Soldier. And parts of Jed's 'original, haunting and evocative' album, Music for Dungeons, features as the soundtrack of David's Bound for Pleasure controversial documentary.

Transfigured Nights had its MANGA MAD New Zealand premier on Thursday February 26th at the Moving Image Centre, Galatos off K Road, Auckland at 7.30 p.m. The evening, which 'evocitically explored Exotic Sex Fantasy Media' was a sell-out. It was definitely worth attending for David 's futuristic visuals and Jed Town's sensational sounds.




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