The Great Escape, the UK’s own version of SXSW, is growing in prominence across the industry, with bands and delegates coming from far and wide to showcase their work in the lovely seaside town of Brighton.
This year, we hosted a showcase at the event for the first time ever and it was a huge success. A queue started forming at 11:30am and the venue — The Hope — was full to capacity by the time The Crookes (pictured) took the stage at 12:15 in the afternoon. Defying their early stage time, the Sheffield rockers produced hit after hit.
People came and went, but the venue remained packed to the rafters throughout the afternoon, with The Big Sleep shredding their way through a noisy set featuring tracks from their recent album, Nature Experiments.
Hey Sholay, a personal favourite, then produced one of the performances of the weekend — with a short but intense set featuring DiS-lauded singles “Wishbone” and “The Bears, The Clocks, The Bees” as well as their upcoming hit, “Burning.”
Headlining the stage, Hollie Cook Soundsystem, featuring the lady herself, Prince Fatty and Horseman changed the rhythm and delighted the crowd with their own unique brand of dub.
As for the rest of the festival, we had a whole plethora of acts represented, from the loud, loud Hawk Eyes to psychedelic rockers Weird Dreams and one of our festival highlights, Devin. The Brooklyn rocker is everything a frontman should be.
Now, for your “Best Of” run down of The Great Escape…
Put your party pants on people. We’re going to Brighton. Yes, you guessed it – to The Great Escape Festival. TGE runs UK’s leading music business conference (programmed by CMU) alongside the Brighton venue-hosted music festival that showcases 300+ new bands from around the globe. Of course we had to get in on this so The Orchard is hosting its very first TGE Showcase. We also put together this Spotify Playlist so you can hear some tracks from Orchard bands attending the festival. Details on our showcase below:
Saturday May 12th
Noon to 4PM
The Hope on Queens Road (Nr Church Street)
*Get in free with a TGE badge or wristband
12:15PM The Crookes
1PM The Big Sleep
2PM Hey Sholay
3PM Hollie Cook Soundsystem
We have some great partners for this event as well. A revolving door of unique and exciting content, Strongroom Alive is one of the UK’s foremost digital radio stations and is a one-stop shop for the latest on music, fashion and art. They broadcast straight from the heart of London’s Shoreditch area. Also on board is Killing Moon Ltd who have become one of the UK’s leading music blogs and are continuously on the pulse of what is what and who is who in indie music, in addition to signing some of these acts to their own singles label. Finally, we have MusicMetric who empower artists by strengthening their marketing, promo and sales through impressive analytics, trends identification and data analysis.
Come out and see us if you’re there. Don’t hesitate to email us if you want to meet up, learn about The Orchard, or touch base! (UK/Liz @ liz@theorchard.com and US/Mollie @ mbrown@theorchard.com)
It doesn’t roll off the tongue with quite the same alliterative ease but let’s call this Freeloader Monday.
If you’re heading down to Austin next week, it’s a good bet that you have started to assemble an elaborate SXSW itinerary that will take you all over the city to see literally dozens of shows, from day parties, to official showcases, to late night performances taking place in weird and wonderful locations like, say, the middle of a bridge at 4 am. (Said itinerary will hopefully also take you to many many delicious Tex-Mex and BBQ joints as well but that’s for another post. Sleep, however, is for the weak).
Navigating the list of artists can be a daunting experience but we’re here to help. Our free Don’t Mess with Texas: SXSW 2012 New Music Sampler contains tracks from 23 can’t-miss-artists.
Click HERE to download the compilation. Starting tomorrow it will also be available for streaming on services like Spotify, Rdio and Amazon.
Check out the track list after the jump.
It’s that time of year again: Reindeers and lights everywhere, and long lists of presents… especially from my children.
For my part, I just want 2012 to be as much of a “party year” as 2011 has been – or better even!
I have a tough job (I may have mentioned this before [wink]) that involves being obliged to go to lots of great concerts in Paris – and I have no intention of stopping…
In honor of this, and in no particular order, here are some of the moments I was privileged enough to witness – as well as all the smiles of the people that were there when it went mental/happy/crazy/lovely and fun.
Charles Bradley first off (OK, you got me, I wasn’t telling the entire truth when I said in no particular order…), because this guy has the capacity to reach out and give the audience a heartful feeling that I’ve never seen anyone else do:
It’s a hard life running the Paris Office for The Orchard – especially when in the same year you have two rising stars gaining serious recognition here.
In a previous blog post, I mentioned Hollie Cook, who will be coming back to play here in Paris in December and throughout the Spring Time.
And this last week I was in Kina Grannis mode – already mentioned in The Daily Rind by our Interactive Marketing Manager in the UK, Mark Denby - as she was invited to perform in the most important French Musical TV Show “Taratata,” along with Lou Reed, Metallica, Axelle Red and Lana Del Rey.
It’s always really exciting to have an artist in town, especially ones like the two I’ve mentioned here, who are really intelligent, charming (as you can tell by the lovely photo above, taken by Remy Grandroques) and articulate artists with a definite gift for communication with their audience.
Just an example: Kina was genuinely excited at the idea of doing the show with Nagui – a famous TV personality here – and just sent him a quick tweet before the show to thank him for having invited her – something no other guest had thought of doing. As a result he came to the first rehearsal of her performance and was so enthralled that he asked her to play three extra songs during his live interview – unheard of to date…
Over lunch in a nice Parision restaurant [it’s a tough job but someone has to do it!], Kina Grannis, her manager Jonathan, our new Interactive Marketing Manager Philippe Giard [previously with Naïve, where he already worked with other Orchard artists like The Black Angels, The Raveonettes and Royce da 5'9"] and I had an interesting conversation about fans and how to connect with them; something that Kina and her team have been doing incredibly successfully through YouTube. Check out her brilliant latest video here:
As it does, the discussion turned to the subject of Jelly Beans. Her team used 288,000 of them for the making of this video, and we tried to think of clever ways of recycling them, perhaps as souvenirs or gifts for her fans. I suggested transforming them into earrings but that seemed impractical and difficult to execute.
Any other ideas are welcome! In this day and age, all the most innovative ideas seem to come from the sharing of different experiments, and no one has the monopoly of all the bright ideas…WITH ALL THOSE JELLY BEANS! And, we know how creative Kina fans are! Leave us your thoughts in the comment section. Oh, the possibilities…
