Posts by Sam Wolfson

Platform’s online TV column. This week we’re bullying Radio 1 DJs, Spooks gets street, Jedward rap Rap! and Lost meets Skins

It just took us a while to upload it.

Chess Club are the perfect summer indie label. They pretty much only sign bands whose guitars are jangling as they walk in the door. We asked them to compile a list of stuff that they liked at the moment, and chuck in a YouTube video or something too, seeing as this the internet. Did they come through? Did they ever.

Norway’s Casiokids are supposed to be HAPPY. They make energetic, infectious electro-pop with casio keyboards (who’d have thought it?), and sing exclusively in Norwegian. In their live shows they’re surrounded by props, paper-mâché heads and shadow puppets with big grins plastered on their gig-faces. But when Platform caught up with the band as they lunched in Hoxton recently, we were pretty surprised to find them miserable as sin.

The Smell is LA’s all-ages hipster community centre (but you’re a trendy Platform reader, you already knew that, right?) and has spent the past few years in the music press’ marsupial pouch, and fresh off The Smell’s vegan-punk production line of dreams™ are Mika Miko. We’d have loved to meet them on Venice Beach, but the Platform budget only stretched to getting drunk behind the gravestones in a Camden park.

Remember the aching disappointment you felt after listening to the second Killers album? We think we might have found the remedy: their mates. Love Like Fire use to be buddies with The Killers back in Vegas and while they share their passion for indie music on an epic scale, they aren’t fronted by a raving egotistical Mormon who wouldn’t know a decent live show if one was shouting “turn it up you miserable git” from the bottom of the Reading mainstage.

Another series of Britain’s second favourite freak show (holla @ Big Brother) is over. But across the world the sob stories and looped opening bars of R.Kelly’s The Worlds Greatest are just beginning. Platform takes a look at how Britain fares at a little game we like to call TALENT.

Excuse me for a moment while I use the Platform blog as a mouthpiece for my infatuation but I am IN LOVE with Solange: her music, her face, the way saying her name makes me curl my tonuge.

We had an immediate hatred for Trailer Trash Tracys. Their band name conjured thoughts of of guys wearing Von Dutch caps and white vests that reveal tribal tattoos. We had to listen to their music straight away, in sheer hope that it would be slightly less annoying then the sound we’d made up for them in our heads.

Experienced festival-goers take you through their festival pitfalls and poo falls in Platform’s guide to Summer 2009. If you’re going to Download, Glastonbury, Benicassim, Reading or Bestival and don’t want to end-up knee deep in your own bodily fluids you should give this a read.