The 900 are a cover band. So, what bands music do they cover? Well, they don’t cover one band; they instead do covers to songs from the soundtrack to the Tony hawk pro Skater games. The Tony Hawk games are well-known for having absolutely amazing soundtracks since the very first instalment back in 1999. Plenty has been written over the years about just how important and impactful these soundtracks were. Tens of thousands of kids grew up and the THPS games and their soundtracks influenced the music tastes of those kids forever I was one of those kids, and so when I saw that the 900 were playin ..read more

This is a pretty simple question with a weirdly complicated answer. And I will say now that the song you probably think is officially the shortest song ever… well, I don’t think it actually is. Shortest ever charting song Before we get on to the actual shortest song, let’s begin with the contest for the shortest song to ever chart in the UK. The Unites States of Whatever In 2002 the award went to Liam Lynch and his song ‘The United States of Whatever’. This is a spoken-word song about a teenage edgelord telling people he doesn’t care about them, and always just responds to anything they say wi ..read more

Bands that are just starting out may change their name for many reasons: perhaps their style changed, they lost a musician and wanted to change the name to reflect the new band line-up, or they want to be more marketable. But after a band reaches a certain point of success, changing their name becomes more and more of a risk. Once you start to build up a fanbase, changing your name means changing a fundamental part of who the band is, and there is a chance that some fans may drop off. It may seem trivial, but a band name is the most prominent and front-facing part of the band.  Some peop ..read more

Two things to know about me: I am a heavy metal fan, and I love Christmas! Normally these two things are kept very separate. After all, Christmas isn’t exactly the most metal of Christian festivals, is it? (Come to think of it, I think the most metal one might be Easter? With the Crucifixion and zombie Jesus and everything…) Anyway, when it comes to music, Christmas has got so much to choose from. First off, there’s the Christian hymns that got turned into songs (O Holy Night, Joy to the World, etc.) Always quite popular songs that are often rather slow and subdued. Then there are the classi ..read more

Have you ever realised that a song you love and have listened to over and over again, doesn’t actually have the lyrics you thought it did? Sometimes you can listen to a song hundred times before realising what one lyric actually says, and it feels like you’ve like discovered the song all over again! On the other hand, there are those songs that you know word-for-word and will sing along to it without actually knowing that the lyrics mean. In this blog post I will discuss some confusing, misunderstood or misheard lyrics from 3 songs by Blink-182. All of these are some of my all-time favourite ..read more

Ska music has been around for a very long time and it’s one of those rare genres that gets described in terms of waves or generations. So… Why is that? What do the waves actually mean?  Why aren’t more music genres defined by waves? Well, let’s start at the beginning. Ska music 1st wave The beginning of ska music was in the late 1950s, when sounds from different cultures started to be combined together and developed into something new. American rhythm and blues started to be heard in the Caribbean, specifically Jamaica, and eventually combined with calypso and mento music, creating a wh ..read more

Bloodstock Open Air festival, often shorted to just Bloodstock, or BOA, is a heavy metal music festival that takes place every year in August, currently situated in Walton-on-Trent, England. The festival is known for more extreme heavy metal and has a smaller capacity than other festivals in the UK, but it also has a more dedicated following. Festival Origins Bloodstock was originally created by Paul Gregory and his family.  The festival began all the way back in 2001, two full years before Download Festival, 6 years before 2,000 Trees and 8 years before Boomtown. Bloodstock began as an i ..read more

An Easter Egg is a hidden reference or message in a piece of media.  Normally easter eggs are hidden in things like tv and movies, like how Disney hides hidden mickeys in a lot of their shows and films. The original name comes from, maybe unsurprisingly, Easter Eggs! The original Easter Egg in a video game was credited to Warren Robinett, who his his name in the Atari 2600 video game, Adventure, as a form of protest because Atari was not crediting their developers.  The term Easter Egg was then coined by another Atari Employee, Steve Wright, who liked the idea of having hidden thin ..read more

Download Festival 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the festival! Sorry, lets back up a bit and start at the beginning: What is Download Festival? Download Festival is a rock and metal festival held at Donington Park in Derby every year since 2003.  Over the years it has moved from being a 2-day, to a 3-day festival, and this year marks 4 full days of music. Download is my annual festival destination, and so in this blog post, I just wanted to talk about it; the history and some notable events from the festivals’ history. History and origin  Download Festival didn’t just burst onto ..read more

Nowadays the UK has two big rock and metal festival: Download Festival and Bloodstock Open Air. There are other rock and metal festivals around like Damnation and Hammerfest, but they aren’t a tenth of the size of these other behemoths. But once upon a time, there was a third serious contender: it was like Download festival but with some changes – mostly for the better! I am talking about Sonisphere. Sonisphere was a world-wide festival, taking place in 7 countries.  It existed in the UK from 2009 to 2016 and was held in Knebworth. But eventually the festival stopped happening in the UK ..read more