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trouser press: diane cluck, the pipettes and more

in today’s trouser press:

- listen to new Diane Cluck songs. Lots of them!
- remix The Pipettes for upcoming tour CD
- new Stars EP out to download from tomorrow
- Róisín Murphy teams up with Gucci, covers Bryan Ferry
- The Long Blondes to release singles compilation
- lovely new Laura Nyro reissues have bonus tracks galore
- Juliette Lewis to co-host Vodafone Live Music Awards
- Kish Mauve set out to make it on their own
- Amy Winehouse pulls a Pete in Paris

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It’s been quite a while since we heard any new Diane Cluck recordings but our hopes for a new album were unexpectedly given a boost this weekend when we found out that Diane recently played on genius US radio show Phoning It In, literally phoning in nine songs from her home in Stone Mountain, GA. New song titles include ‘Goodless & Badless World’, ‘Cummed Out’, ‘All One Thing’, ‘Hai’, ‘Not Afraid To Be Kind’ and ‘My Right To Lose My Life’. Want to hear it? Hell, you can own it. For free. Download the show here. Or stream it here, whatever. Enjoy! (And check out the archive for other performances by the likes of Laura Veirs, Petra Haden and many many more)

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Having had Tuesday’s free show at Koko cancelled, The Pipettes will now play THREE free shows at the more intimate Fly Bar on London’s New Oxford Street this week, Monday to Wednesday. We wanted to tell you this sooner but, er, didn’t, and now they’re all booked out. Sorry.

But don’t be too disheartened. Only your own laziness (or disinterest) will prevent you from hearing new Pipettes music, now! Well, it’s not really a whole song. For their first recorded output with new girls Anna and Gwenno’s little sister Ani, The Pipettes have opted to bring you only the vocal tracks for their new song ‘The Shoe That Fits’. The point of that is so that fans can use these to apply their own musical textures to flesh the song out. The best ones will be featured on a tour CD, alongside “a few others” that friends of the band are working up. Hurry up though, the band hit the road in late October.

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Amy Millan and her band of boys, Stars, follow last year’s excellent In Our Bedroom After The War this week with the release of a new EP, Sad Robots, out tomorrow. Announced just last week, the digital/tour-only EP features five new songs and a live version of ‘Going, Going, Gone’, a song first released in 2001. You can get that last one for free if you visit sadrobots.ca after today. There’s another new song, ‘Why I Want To Save You’, up on their Myspace. Where it came from and for what it is destined has yet to be revealed.

Sad Robots EP
01 Maintenance Hall, 4am
02 A Thread Cut With A Carving Knife
03 Undertow
04 Going, Going, Gone [live]
05 14 Forever
06 Sad Robot

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Róisín Murphy has always had a thing for fashion so it’s no surprise to hear that Gucci have signed her up for their latest global advertising campaign. If you were a bit miffed that the original single release of ‘Movie Star’ just never happened, be soothed by the promise of a new double A-side release for the song featuring the Gucci ad soundtrack cut ‘Slave To Love’, a cover of Bryan Ferry’s sultry original that featured in saucy film classic ‘9½ Weeks’. The former Moloko singer says she plans to make a new video for ‘Movie Star’ in the coming weeks. The single should be released in October.

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Intra-band romances can be tricky things to deal with, but The Long Blondes are amusingly acknowledging the demise of their entanglements by following their recent album “Couples” (quote marks wholly intended) with a new retrospective, Singles, on October 20th. Featuring the As and Bs of their first four singles, Singles will also include compilation track ‘Autonomy Boy’ and new song ‘Peterborough’, with an iTunes-only extra ‘Picture Of You’ for paying downloaders.

Singles:
01 New Idols
02 Long Blonde
03 Autonomy Boy
04 Giddy Stratospheres
05 Polly
06 Darts
07 Appropriation (By Any Other Name)
08 My Heart Is Out of Bounds
09 Lust In The Movies
10 Separated By Motorways
11 Big Infatuation
12 Peterborough

* * *

Following the long-awaited reissue of Laura Nyro’s long out-of-print studi album Nested and concert recording Season Of Lights by new US label Iconoclassic Records, Sony Japan have announced plans to issue remastered versions of six Nyro albums on September 24th, each one in a special card sleeve and most packed with bonus material.

The Smile bonus tracks are all piano/vocal demos recorded in 1974, while those for Season Of Lights are alternative live takes. Nested and Mother’s Spiritual come with one bonus track apiece, both recorded at a concert in July 1978. The extra cuts for her final album, Walk The Dog & Light The Light, are demos for the planned follow-up, released posthumously as Angel In The Dark in 2001.

Just so you know, there are no bonus tracks for Christmas & The Beads Of Sweat, and the remastering for that one is, according to Laura Nyro vault raider Al Quaglieri, a bit less dramatic due to problems locating an optimal source for the recordings.

Smile (1976) bonus tracks:
01 Someone Loves You [demo]
02 Get Me My Cap [demo]
03 Coffee Morning [demo]

Season Of Lights (1977) bonus tracks:
01 Timer [alternative version]
02 Emmie [alternative version]

Nested (1978) bonus track:
01 Emmie / The Nest [live medley]

Mother’s Spiritual (1979) bonus track:
01 Man In The Moon [live]

Walk The Dog & Light The Light (1993) bonus tracks:
01 Let It Be Me / The Christmas Song [demo medley]
02 He Was Too Good To Me [demo]
03 Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow [demo]

The albums will be available individually or as a six-disc boxset. Did someone say import? 

* * *

Actress-turned-rocker Juliette Lewis will co-host the third annual Vodafone Live Music Awards with ‘T4′ presenter Steve Jones on September 18th at London’s Brixton Academy. Among the awards to be presented, the one for Best Female will go to Duffy, Estelle, Kate Nash or Amy Winehouse. This imaginative shortlist was compiled by a panel of experts and internet and text message fan votes.

Juliette is currently filming Drew Barrymore’s upcoming directorial debut, ‘Whip It!’, starring Ellen Page as an ex-beauty queen who joins a roller derby league in Texas. Juliette plays the team’s star player, Dinah Might. The film, out next year, also stars Oscar-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden and impressionist Jimmy Fallon.

* * *

Having had their largely ignored single ‘2 Hearts’ given a new lease of life by last year’s Kylie cover, British electro-pop duo Kish Mauve release a new single tomorrow ahead of their debut album Black Heart. The single, ‘Lose Control’, is another track that Kylie wanted for last year’s X, but Mima Stilwel and Jim Eliot elected to keep it for themselves. Well, it’s been remixed by French studio whizz Fred Falke, but it’s still theirs. You can hear it on their Myspace, alongside Sei A and Chewy Chocolate Cookies mixes. Mmm.

Black Heart doesn’t appear to have a release date yet – Mima and Jim might well be preoccupied with a more fleshy progeny, their newborn baby – but alongside ‘Lose Control’ it will feature a song called ‘You Make Me Feel’, written for the duo by none other than Kylie herself. They call it a “pop swap”. Aww.

* * *

Amy Winehouse is in trouble, again, after pulling a Pete Doherty-style no-show. Amy left the organisers of French music festival Rock En Seine red-faced after pulling out of Friday’s event in Paris with two hours’ notice, claiming she was feeling poorly at home. Apparently poised to threaten the singer with legal action, the organisers say they received “no explanation of the exact reasons for her absence” and that they “share the disappointment of the festival-goers”.

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Alan Pedder

Written by: Wears The Trousers magazine

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 7:01 pm and is filed under news, the inside leg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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