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.

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.

We’re reinstating a version of the old ‘profiles’ we had on the site back in around 2005, in which any local band worth their salt answered the same set of questions, with a new quick interview feature.

If your band would like to take part, email your answers to the questions below, along with a one-sentence band biography (and a photo if you like) to stuart at oxfordbands dot com and we’ll put the interviews up on the site. What are you waiting for?

1.What do you think you sound like?

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

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

4. Where did you get your band name from?

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

Jack FM and FM107.9’s ‘Next Big Thing’ competition has reached its semifinal stage - 20 acts have been chosen from a total of 127 entries, who will now each record a new studio track at SAE Oxford. These 20 acts will then be cut down to five, who will perform a show at the O2 Academy in April, after which a panel of judges will select an overall winner. The overall winner of the ‘Next Big Thing’ competition will win a spot at the Wychwood Festival and a recording session worth £2,000. Tune into Jack FM or FM107.9 for more details, and to hear all of the bands over the coming weeks.

The final 20 bands are:

1. The Keyz
2. Moon
3. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
4. Beck Lanehart
5. Coco and Sparks
6. International Jetsetters
7. Foxy
8. Hangman Charlie
9. Quadraphobe
10. Walter Pico
11. Secret Rivals
12. From Light To Sound
13. Motion In Colour
14. Spiral 25
15. The Scholars
16. InLight
17. Liddington
18. The Medicin
19. Templars
20. Vixens

The lineup for this year’s annual showcase of new musical talent, the Oxford Punt, has been announced by organisers Nightshift. The show takes place across five venues on the evening of Wednesday 13 May, and is your one-stop shop to discover the bands to listen to in Oxford for 2009.

The full lineup looks like this:

 Borders
6.15 Matt Kilford

7.00 Bethany Weimers

Purple Turtle
7.30 Pistol Kixx

8.15 From Here We Run

9.00 Beaver Fuel

9.45 Winchell Riots

Wheatsheaf
8.15 Phantom Theory

9.00 Mary’s Garden

9.45 Response Collective

10.30 Black Hats

Thirst Lodge
8.30 Hearts In Pencil

9.30 Dr Slaggleberry

10.30 Desert Storm

11.30 Dial F For Frankenstein

The Cellar
9.00 We Aeronauts

10.00 From Light To Sound

11.00 Spiral 25

12.00 Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band

All-venue Punt passes are on sale now for £7, with only 100 available, either from Videosyncratic on Cowley Road or online here.