L&Q Weekly
Our own nostalgia festival, Squid's new cannibalism track, Ludovico Einaudi at the Palladium, How I landed the lead role in the new Robbie Williams biopic
Supported by Because Music
Podcast
As Kaiser Chiefs announce shows for 2025 celebrating 20 years of their debut album, with support from Razorlight, We Are Scientists, The Cribs and The Coral, on this week’s podcast we put our heads together to come up with an alternative bill of artists who released records 20 years ago. The Carling will be served warm and the weather will be terrible. Welcome to the inaugural Midnight Chats festival! Available on podcast apps now. Or listen on loudandquiet.com
Track of the Week
Talk about timing. Bristol one-time post-punk band Squid have announced that their third album is called Cowards (released 7 Feb 2025) and is about evil people, reckoning with cults, charisma and apathy. Dear god! The first track from it is ‘Crispy Skin’; a song about cannibalism in a dystopian world, and what we might all be driven to in times of desperation. Having said all that, it’s motorik drive and sparkling electronics make it one of the band’s more “jaunty” singles yet, which at one point hints at an arena band deep within the group’s black anxieties, while singer Ollie Judge has smoothed out what was previously a sandpaper bark.
3 Sentence Live Review
LUDOVICO EINAUDI – LONDON PALLADIUM, 12 NOV: As BBC 2 trailer or High Street Bank “By Your Side” as the Italian neo classical pianist’s fluttering pieces are, flutter he does, and it’s hard to not be comforted by the familiarity of each composition (all of them building from minimal piano to orchestrated crescendo), even if you’ve not heard them before. It’s a strange West End crowd of couples with no self-respect aggressively snuggling and others causing “shhhhh”-offs in black outs to boil over into language as strong as “if you shush me one more time!”. Thankfully everyone shushes up for ‘I Gironi’, which may be like picking out ‘Gold’ from a Spandau Ballet show but you weren’t there and you don’t know just much I needed a piece of music so text book pretty and romantic and full of unpretentious joy to beam at like a child watching a magic trick. Stuart Stubbs
Money
Mark Zuckerberg has added another thing to the list of bad things he’s done in his life, by recording a song with autotune maniac T-Pain. It’s a cover of Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz’ crunk hit ‘Get Low’. An acoustic version, naturally. They’re calling themselves Z-Pain for crying out loud. I know this could be kinda funny, but I’ve listened to the song so you don’t have to, and it’s not. To answer the why on it, it’s Zuckerberg’s anniversary present to his wife. But that’s the thing about billionaires, isn’t it – they’re incapable of doing anything quietly.
The new Squid single absolutely bangs. I genuinely think they are the sonic equivalent of an omni-present Adam Curtis documentary unfolding in real time.