Robert Leeming

Sanity, it seems benefits from the mundane. A happy medium is healthy for ones mental mechanics. But sometimes the mundane isn’t always an option. Dominic Murphy’s new film “White Lightnin” examines the collapsing male mind and uses the rip-roaring, gas-sniffing life of Appalachian trailer dweller, Jesco White, the dancing folk legend and inspiration for many an alt-country song, to do so. It is a re-imagining of his sordid, tragedy ridden existence, with a  fictional ending […]

Joseph Losey was one of America’s greatest gifts to British Cinema. Forced to abandon Hollywood for London with McCarthy’s communist witch hunt baying for his creative blood, his British residency, for the rest of his working life, ensured that such art house cinema classics as The Servant, Accident and The Go Between, were forever enshrined in the British pantheon of film classics. Now in the year in which he would have celebrated his 100th birthday, […]

Remember when it’s revealed on Seinfeld that Kramer’s real name is Cosmo and hilarity ensues? Well this guy’s name is Cosmo for real, Harrison Cosmo Krikoryan Jarvis to be precise, and he looks like a six-inch nail if it had human features. I have the feeling though that Cosmo’s name is potentially made-up, to attract attention and produce a flamboyant go-getter aura, much in the same vein as “Elton John” and “Gordon Brown” have lent […]

It’s been five years since The Boxer Rebellion’s last and only album “Exits“, not the amount of a time an up and coming band ideally wait before launching their sophomore effort. But their’s has been a rocky half decade, full of injury, financial turmoil and record contract foibles. Yet still they’ve managed to make it out the other side and have made a number of gutsy moves during their second run up to the “big […]

Meccano was such a shitty toy, I really didn’t get it, bolting together bits of metal and plastic to make some creaking 1960’s bakery van or a crappy crane. What self-respecting 5 year old would waste his time doing that. I did once, I made a truck and it was one of the major achievements of my formative years, the rest of the time I spent playing in dirt and falling over. Nonetheless Red Light […]

New bands today are always labelled as the new somebody else; School of Seven Bells are no different and have been compared to My Bloody Valentine and The Cocteau Twins. News of these comparisons no doubt helped sell out the Night and Day Café last Friday night for the inaugural appearance of the band in Manchester. They are often compared to the great shoegazers and after spending an hour or so with them I came […]

ToniMarie Marchoni, Paul Nemeth and Jennifer Chu play the oboe, double bass and piano respectively in the New Juilliard Ensemble, a group based at New York‘s Juilliard School. They are a jet setting bunch who have just returned from a Japanese tour and numerous trips across the US and Europe individually. Robert Leeming caught up with them in one of their rare free moments. Muso: Speaking as someone who used to dread auditions to get […]

I’m not sure about dance music, I don’t really understand it and I’m not sure how to. But I do like ambient/techno post dance outfit Dialog. Their work is for the hazy moments in life, the post-drink, post-club, post-party moments, when one’s head feels a bit syrupy, tiny noises seem like nuclear explosions and your eye-lids start to droop. Here Dialog aim to transport your fractured countenance to an underwater world. The beginning of the […]