Friday, January 12, 2007

Croydon Now

Following my recent critique of Croydon, I thought it only fair to check out if there's anything interesting coming out of there now, at least musically.

Well, for a start there's The Noisettes (pictured) who have been making a lot of, er, noise lately - even saw them on TV last week while eating my breakfast. New single Sister Rosetta is a catchy bit of poppy rock, and let's face it not many current bands in their position would take the risk of writing a song name checking an old gospel singer.

I was going to say something about Do Me Bad Things, but they apparently split up last year, leaving the Xfm airwaves without a Croydon 9-piece.

I was also going to say that at least there's still The Cartoon as a venue for up and coming Croydon bands, but then I checked and found out that it closed down last November (read heartbroken Croydonites laments here). Still The Ship is still going, so alternative Croydon has not died a death yet.

Anyway leaving behind the rock scene, we should also acknowledge the contribution of Croydon to dubstep scene in London, hilariously and erroneously described as 'Croydon techno' in the Daily Torygraph. Tracing the South London connections of this is a whole other post, but we will get round it at some point - in the mean time check out Drumz of the South.

2 comments:

Tim said...

Do Me Bad Things were a great band and it's sad they never really came to anything. If you check their myspace page they've all formed new bands so they may be worth checking out!

Anonymous said...

dubstep was called simply "Croydon" by some members of the scene for about five minutes in 2004. Witness the "Croydon" t-shirts sported by Loefah and one or two other people at early DMZ nights.

Most key dubstep people actually come from Norwood rather than Croydon proper, however.