Winner of countless accolades and worldwide renown, The Warehouse Project has been home to the biggest and most influential DJ’s over its 5 year tenancy in Manchester. Running from the months of September through to January, WHP is “the” electronic music venue to best all others. Situated underneath Piccadilly train station in what is a converted World War Two bomb shelter, the sheer scale of the event is immediate as soon as you arrive. Once you get through the security checks, warehouse thrusts you straight into the heart of the main stage. The pulsing vibrations, the light shows, and the sizes of the dance floors let me know immediately this will be a night to remember.

 

Hypnotic neon lights will be your guide if you want to see the impressive venue as small exploration will find you “Room 2” which features softer electro beats in comparison to the main stages techno fiesta. There is also a variety of bars and relaxation areas featuring foosball tables, air hockey and the first indoor sofa garden I can ever recount seeing. The drinks menu inside is quite limited and pricey with Budweiser’s & Kopparberg Ciders costing £4 per can, and bottled water at £2.

 

Cocoon, the brainchild of German producer Sven Vath is a touring club night featuring the hottest acts on the electronic dance scene and for their last visit to store street they recruited global superstar Ricardo Villalobos to headline the bill. The Chilean-German DJ has spent the best part of 2011 headlining clubs and festivals to his insanely devoted fan base around the world. It only seemed right to have an act the very top of their game for the last Cocoon at warehouse.

 

Villalobos came onto to a rapturous chorus of cheers as he teased the crowd with his trademark minimalistic beats before giving the people exactly what they wanted with classics such as “Dexter” & “Easy Lee” within the first hour. Arguably Villabos’s most popular anthems shook the interior of warehouse, with the bars and smoking areas emptying within seconds of each other. Following on from the good work of Austrian star Cassy, the resident of the legendary Cicrcoloco in Ibiza, Villalobos crafted a mesmerising set which was a master class in building a groove and mood which are as brave and uncompromising as they are entertaining. The set did however seem to confuse and frustrate as it appeared that indecision had crept into the final hour of the night; a trait not to be expected from a DJ of his reputation.

 

Once the final beat of the night had been blasted from the bass, the warehouse was illuminated bright white with what was possibly the most impressive light show of the evening. Having spent seven hours in a neon fuelled rave, to see the venue lit up showed off the ambition of the event. WHP will host its final event on January 1st 2012; rumours of a location shift are rife with many believing a move to Leeds is on the cards.

 

For anybody interested in tickets for future events check out http://www.thewarehouseproject.com/tickets.php

 

My neck is stiff and hurting like it never has before, my knees and arms are completely bruised, my ears are still ringing with echoes of lyrics running through my mind. Last night I went to see a band originally from Stavanger, Norway at the O2 ABC2 venue in Glasgow. 

Kvelertak was founded in 2007, and since their breakthrough in 2009 where their songs at one point were played at Norway’s equivalent to the BBC, their success is steadily rising. On tour now, they have played several places in Norway and Europe, as the headliner. The band’s name means ‘chokehold’ or ‘stranglehold’, and most of their songs are in Norwegian. They are not entirely metal, not entirely rock’n’roll, not entirely punk rock, but they seem to have drawn and blended the riffs, attitudes and musical sense from several genres the band members are attracted too. Although they all are somewhat covered in tattoos, have either a beard, long hair, (or both), as Jenny Kristine Haga Nielsen, Anthine Moen and I interviewed two of them yesterday afternoon, we got the impression the roaring music is not reflecting their personalities at all. Marvin Nygaard (bassist) and Erlend Hjelvik (vocalist) are friendly and welcoming, and very down to earth. We were welcomed into the backstage area, and we started a casual conversation in Norwegian, and blended our questions into it. As we explained before we started questioning them, we did not intend to ask the same old boring journalistic questions like everyone else does and tried to mix it up a bit. We are students from student radio, and during our shows our main goal is to have fun. 

It felt natural to speak Norwegian and I did not put the recorder on, it may seem silly now in the aftermath of writing this interview, but it felt like a conversation you would have with friends, and I did not want to ruin the casual feeling of it all. Therefore, this interview is from what we remember, and the notes Anthine wrote down, translated into English. 

We started off hesitantly with the first question, which undoubtedly is the most unserious one.
Air3 Radio: What’s your favorite color?
Erlend: Black! If that counts as a color, that is... Yes, black. 
Marvin: I don’t know. [Erlend points out that Marvin has a yellow T-shirt somewhere.]
Marvin: Yellow, I suppose then. 

Air3 Radio: During our show we talk a lot about food. What’s your favorite food?
Erlend: Home made pizza! 
Marvin: I’ve eaten a lot of Thai food recently, but sushi is the best. 
Air3 Radio: We love sushi too! We always have to go to Glasgow or Edinburgh to get hold of proper sushi...
Marvin: Where, where in Glasgow?! 
[He looks desperate for a moment.]

Air3 Radio: Do you wear earplugs during your own shows to not go completely deaf?
Marvin: Yes and no... I do but...
Erlend: ... I’m...we are waiting for a couple of specialized earplugs. My ears are ringing a bit. 

Air3 Radio: What’s your favorite festival to play?
[They say a range of big festivals in Norway, like the Øyafestival.]
M&E: Let’s say Slottsfjell, so that Kjetil will be happy. 
Jenny and I say we saw them at Øya, and I saw them at Slottsfjell in 2010. 

Air3 Radio: We were discussing guilty pleasures during our last radio show, do you have any?
[Both struggle to come up with something, I mention Justin Bieber but Marvin is cringing. Erlend mentions the playlists Marvin has for their parties, with a sly smile. Marvin retorts that that “den musikken er jo kjekk då” (that music is nice though). They finally come up with something.]
Marvin: I’d say Tears For Fears... that kind of 80’s rock. 
Erlend: I don’t know, really, Dire Straits. 


Air3 Radio: So, you’ve been touring for a while now, played shows in Norway and Europe. What was the best moment of the tour so far?
M&E: Phil, the bassist of Toxic Holocaust, keeps lighting his farts. The first time was really funny. Definitely the best moment.

Air3 Radio: What’s your favorite fictional character?

Erlend: Conan, he’s a proper man.

[Marvin hesitates.]
Erlend: You were about to say Donald Duck, right?
Marvin: Well, yes. No. Goofy is cute!

Air3 Radio: What’s your favorite animal?
Marvin: Chimpanzee!

Erlend: A dog. They’re easy to get hold of. 

Air3 Radio: The most brutal moshpit you’ve ever been in yourself, as a part of the crowd? 
Marvin: Purified in Blood, many years ago. 
Erlend: Gallows was really cool, not that brutal of a moshpit, but still a really sweet show. 

[Whenever we have been to their shows in Norway, the crowd is merely a mixture of people from all kinds of musical styles and age groups. So the question leads to their fan base:]
Air3 Radio: Weirdest fan you know of?
Erlend: This one guy made us mead once. [One of Kvelertak’s songs is called “Mjød” which means mead]
Marvin: One guy gave us a “fenalår” once.

Erlend: Same guy who keeps tweeting us, sending us thank you letters, giving us whiskey... 

Air3 Radio: What’s your least favorite thing of being on tour?

E&M: The tiredness, not being at home, missing our families. [Still, when we mention homesickness, Erlend denies it’s not so much homesickness, just the fact that they are not at home, at least after a while on tour.]

[Kvelertak is not only probably, but is in fact one of the biggest bands in Norway at the moment. They are played on the radio, songs are used for commercials, and they have a huge fan base.]
Air3 Radio: What’s the difference between the crowd here and in Norway?

Marvin: It differs from country to country, doesn’t it? Some crowds and nationalities are more like the Norwegian crowds.
Erlend: We tend to play for the underground-scene a lot more abroad than in Norway, though. Leather vests and Jean-jackets, those kind of people. 

[More into the Norwegian aspect of the band, most of their lyrics are in Norwegian, although not always understandable when they do perform their songs.]
Air3 Radio: What’s it like to sing in Norwegian abroad?
Erlend: It works well, who’s able to understand it anyway?

Air3 Radio: Does the name Kvelertak create any difficulties abroad?
Erlend: There have been some misspellings... Other than that, not really!

Marvin: It’s cool; we are that band with the weird name. 
[In fact, O2 ABC had spelt their name wrong on the big poster with all the upcoming gigs. “Kvelerta”.]

[I had asked people on Twitter if they had any questions for Kvelertak, and this was asked:]
Air3 Radio: How did you come up with the name Kvelertak?
Erlend: I don’t really remember, we all kind of contributed I guess. 
Marvin: I think it was Bjarte.

[They released their debut album in 2010. As fans, we are eager to know what is going on in the future.]
Air3 Radio: What are the plans for the next years?
Erlend: We are going to have some time off and relax at home in Norway, a proper Christmas vacation. We’re going to Australia in February to play a small tour there with a festival that travels around, and two gigs in Asia. Then we will hopefully record songs for our new album during the summer. 

By the end of the interview, Marvin managed to get hold of sushi and left, and it was time for us to leave and wait for the actual gig. I certainly look forward to the next concert with Kvelertak, as this was one of the highlights of my semester.

 

When I was growing up, most musicals didn’t come to Glasgow on tour. I still managed to see a few – in fact the shows I saw as a kid in Glasgow shaped my love of musicals in to what it is today, but recently the amount of popular musicals coming to Glasgow has increased dramatically. All of a sudden, us Glaswegians don’t have to go to Edinburgh just to see a show!

Most recently I attended South Pacific at the Theatre Royal on the 17th of November. South Pacific is a popular Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set on an island in, you guessed it, the South Pacific! It’s World War II and young U.S. Navy nurse, Nellie Forbush, played by Eastenders actress Samantha Womack, has fallen in love with a middle-aged French plantation owner Emile De Becque, played by Paulo Szot, despite only having known him for a few weeks. The main plotline of the musical follows their relationship as well as bringing in subplots focusing on some of the minor characters such as the U.S. Seabees eagerness to visit the nearby island of Bali Ha’i which is off limits and Lieutenant Joseph Cable’s relationship with a Tonkinese girl from the island.

 
The production had transferred from Broadway after winning multiple Tony awards and opened at London’s Barbican Centre on the 24th of August 2011 before beginning its UK tour in October. The production is very well designed with lots of oceanic back drops, palm trees and slatted blinds that drop down to give the audience a sense of difference between being outside and being inside. Samantha Womack was good but not as spectacular as I had expected, singing and dancing well enough but lacking the emotion needed for the difficult situations her character finds herself in. Paulo Szot had transferred from Broadway alongside the production but I found his thick accent and deep, operatic baritone hard to understand at times. However I may be alone in this opinion since he won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for his performanceas Emile – one of the three most coveted theatre awards! The star of the show is without a doubt, Loretta Ables Sayre as Bloody Mary – a street vendor who enjoys some good flirty banter with the boys on the island. Her large personality brings a much needed spark of life to the show since Womack often appears subdued when she isn’t washing men out of her hair and proclaiming that she’s ‘as corny as Kansas in August’.
The enchanting score cannot be argued with however and timeless classics such as “Some Enchanted Evening” fill the theatre with so much emotion that audiences rush to see this show just for the songs. Having never seen South Pacific before, I was surprised by how many of the songs I was familiar with already. My favourite numbers were “There is Nothin’ Like a Dame” sang by the sailors when complaining about the lack of woman on the island and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” sang by Nellie and the nurses which has been part of my singing in the shower playlist for years now.
Overall I found the plot a bit dry, some of the subplots had very little relevance to the main storyline apart from to increase the idea of the racial issues in that kind of community. I found myself switching off during the dialogue but paying attention during the songs – especially the fast numbers. Most recently I’ve been going to see more modern musicals so maybe the fact that this musical was originally written in 1949 gave it a bit of a different feel to some of the newer ones. It’s always a joy being able to experience a show in my home city, something I’ve done a lot of in the past few months I must say, but the atmosphere is never the same as in a London show. At South Pacific the audience talked through the overture (a terrible crime in my opinion – it’s my favourite part), there was an outbreak of coughing over the opening dialogue which made it very difficult to hear the actors on stage, the average audience age was about 75 and someone’s zimmer frame fell over during the second act making a loud clatter and then, finally, people began to exit the theatre before the cast had even taken their bows which I think is extremely rude and disrespectful and just as bad as talking through the overture! I do wonder if this is due to the specific audience that would go to see South Pacific as I experienced none of these problems during the last show I saw at the Theatre Royal. However that audience would probably have been younger and the show (Legally Blonde the Musical – a must see by the way) was a much more modern and upbeat show than South Pacific.

 
I think I might enjoy South Pacific more if I’d seen it in London or on Broadway as the atmosphere in the theatre really had an impact on me. I don’t know if it is very well suited to regional theatres where I feel the bigger the show, the better the show. Obviously a lot of people love South Pacific so it’s going to sell tickets but I definitely enjoyed it much less than anything else I’ve ever seen on tour. My next stop on my South Pacific journey is to watch the 1958 film of the musical. I’d never been interested in watching it before but now it’s definitely on my list. Make it on yours too; I think it’ll be worth it.