Saturday July 11 sees the village of Middleton Cheney play host to the annual Middleton Music Festival, a ten hour festival of back-to-back live music. Apart from the music stage, there will be a funfair, bar, real ale tent and a travelling recording studio, The RockHopper. Most familiar act to Oxfordbands.com viewers will be rock/indie/ska act The Keyz. In addition, the show will feature the likes of local indie heroes The Sirens Call and ceilidh band The Quiet Men. Tickets are now on sale from various outlets in Banbury, (see website) and will also be selling in the Castle Quay shopping centre in Banbury on Saturday 4th July from 9am to 5.30pm (look out for the crew in the fluorescent orange polo shirts).

Earlier in the month, David Saw will be performing at Chalky’s on Banbury High Street at 5 p.m on Tuesday 2 July. Saw is a respected singer-songwriter who has worked with Ben Taylor and Carly Simon in the past. The gig, which is free,  is to promote his new album ‘Broken Down Figure’.

Oxfordbands.com and Junkie Brush are teaming up once again to organise an inter-band 5-a-side football tournament to raise money for Audioscope.

Bands wishing to enter should contact stuart AT oxfordbands.com with their 6-man squad, which must include at least 3 members of Oxfordshire-based bands. Deadline for entry is the 31st July, with the tournament to be held on the weekend of the 22nd/23rd August. More news as it comes about the competition.

 Recent Nightshift cover stars International Jetsetters are something of a local supergroup, featuring Loz from Ride, Mark Crozer and Fi McCall, who has guested with the Jesus & Mary Chain.

1.What do you think you sound like?

The Rolling Stones fronted by an angry Karen Carpenter trying to sound like The House of Love

2. What do you do when you’re not making music?

We all do different things. Bert is a big star on the science circuit in Germany as his alter-ego Professor Neuberger; Paul is heavily into Morris Dancing; Loz is studying to be a classical composer; Fi makes sculptures of 1970s Children’s television characters out of papier-mache and I like to garden dressed in a full suit of armour. Only two of these facts are true but I’m not saying which ones.
3. Recommend us a good band or album and tell us what’s good about it.

Well, I’m totally besotted with anything and everything that Bat For Lashes does. Haven’t bought the new one yet but her first album is one I listen to all the time. It’s got handclaps (which I sampled and used in a couple of tracks actually) and minimal instrumentation and her voice just gives me goosebumps thinking about it. I also heartily recommend Paul McCartney’s recent Fireman album. It is ‘well wicked’ as the youngsters say. Oh and Fleet Foxes album is bloody great too. That’s three in case you lost count.

4. Where did you get your band name from?

I came up with it ironically as at the time of conception the band (me and Bert) never went anywhere beyond the Kirtlington village boundary. Very quickly though the irony deepened as we started flying all over the world for one thing and another.
5. What do you like and dislike about Oxford and its music?

I love Oxford for its flora and fauna and loathe it for its pissed-up rich kid students who seem to think they’re the height of original cool when they are vomiting on your car bonnet or throwing bags of flour at each other. Musically speaking Oxford is the bees knees for its eclectic and exciting music scene. In one city alone we have more great bands than most of the others put together.

This year’s Charlbury Riverside Festival takes place over the 20^th and 21^st of June. Saturday’s lineup includes Smilex, Little Fish, Tristan and the Troubadours on the Main Stage, with  Sextodecimo and Winnebago Deal on the Second Stage. On Sunday there are a host of Oxfordbands.com favourites on display, including The Epstein, A Silent Film and Les Clochards (album review coming soonish). For full lineup, transport and accommodation details etc. please click here.

Junkie Brush have supported punk legends Discharge at the Zodiac, headlined the Riverside Stage at Cornbury Festival and co-organised OxfordBands.com’s inaugural 5-a-side football tournament. Despite a Spinal Tap-esque revolving door of drummers, they finally found one alive and breathing after a 2two-year search and started gigging again at the end of 2008. They’re currently recording new material for a mini-album due for release in mid-2009.

1. What do you think you sound like?

Dragging an iron bath full of loose scrap metal uphill, while someone shouts obscenities and outrage at you. In musical terms I guess we’re loosely hardcore punk. Someone called us ’secret prog rockers’ once. We didn’t like that.

2. What do you do when you’re not making music?

Create or recover from hangovers, wrangle computers, take pictures of light refracting through crystals.

3. Recommend us a good band or album and tell us what’s good about it.

Our musical spectrum of tastes and influences is too vast to sum up in a pithy one liner. The fact that we choose to ignore most of them and play nasty punk is neither here nor there. We’d never come to a consensus on one album: however Rabid would say ‘anything by the Ruts or Killing Joke’, Big Tim is a closet hippy and would probably say something by Primus or Frank Zappa, and Jim doesn’t care as long as it’s horrible, loud and aggressive - try Napalm Death’s Time Waits for no Slave.

4. Where did you get your band name from?

A misunderstanding that turned out to be better than the original idea.

5. What do you like and dislike about Oxford and its music?

Great scene, great bands, lots of diversity, but no-one seems to own their own gear and never asks, but assumes, they can use yours.

I don’t think I’ll be alone in my opinion that the acoustic singer-songwriter genre is engulfed by a mire of musical detritus. James Blunt, Jack Johnson, Paolo Nutini, this guy called Chris Townsend I had the misfortune to come across the other day: music would be so much better off without their soppy pap and inane, meaningless lyrics. I will give £10 to the first person who can tell me what this means: ‘Those three wise men/They’ve got a semi by the sea.’ I mean, really Blunt? Really?

Which is why it’s all the more gratifying to come across a band like Bay of Dogs. Their biography tells us that they are 20-year-olds Rob Mead (guitar) and Joe Wilson (vocals), who are ‘influenced by medieval tapestry as well as Nick Drake and Bat for Lashes.’ In fact, to my ears their sound has more in common with the genius of Jose Gonzalez than either of the above. Those unmistakable Gonzalez-esque chords hit you from the start with standout track ‘White Elephant’; soft vocals soar over driving rhythm guitar, while the minor-chord twist between verses is deliciously delicate. In fact, Rob’s guitar playing is really quite wonderful throughout these five tracks. ‘Nostromo’ and ‘Belief’ are built on beds of flowing fingerpicking, while ‘D. Gonzalez’ flits unsettlingly between two brooding guitar lines. The Nick Drake influence only really comes through in the gently melodic ‘Asylum, in which there’s even what sounds like a wood flute in the chorus. The vocals reveal elements of James Yuill, Gonzalez, and even perhaps a bit of Simon and Garfunkel. Occasionally, Joe’s tone slips slightly towards rock vocal melodrama. I’m being picky and it’s very subtle, but it’s something they would do well to avoid. Nitpicking aside, the vocals are accomplished and carry the tune well.

These songs are individual, maturely written, and, above all, just have great tunes. Bay of Dogs have managed to tap into the purity of songwriting that exists in this genre, avoiding the many pitfalls that have trapped the likes of Blunt and Johnson. If there’s one criticism that I would level against the band, it’s that the structure of their tracks is too formulaic and repetitive. Almost every track follows a repeated verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, with little variation within or between songs. The tracks are short so they don’t linger, but it would be great to hear the odd middle eight or chord variation. That said, these guys have only been around for a few months, and in this first effort they’ve demonstrated a flair for writing original, engaging songs. I for one am looking forward to hearing what comes next.

By Alex Lloyd.