The Ranconteurs

Coming at the end of the ‘Broken Boy Soldiers’ world tour, it was actually the first time their new hometown had a chance to inspect them at close quarters.

Since then, though, they’ve become more a part of the social and musical fabric of the city, collaborating with local musicians, attending shows and, in the case of Brendan Benson and Little Jack, dating some Nashville gals.

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Santogold over it

If Santogold was any more ‘of the moment’, she’d be sat in your lap, reading this out loud to you.

Through a mix of furious networking and artistic fearlessness, the former Santi White has become a totemic figure for the current crop of genre-bending acts currently blowing raspberries at the parameters of pop. During her short career as Santogold, she’s collaborated with some of the producers at the frontline of 21st century music, from Timbaland via futurestep visionary FreQ Nasty to Mark Ronson. By sheer dint of these associations, she’d been mentioned in the same breath as MIA, James Murphy and Crystal Castles even before unleashing her first single. Read more

Flight of the Conchords

Music is their radar. And it is forever sending them off in completely the wrong direction. Once you’d pieced together its unconventional concepts (New Zealanders in New York? An Office-style comedy with big musical numbers in the middle of each episode?), last year’s Flight Of The Conchords quickly became cult viewing. Spun out of a BBC radio show and much-lauded theatre act, the songs weren’t just tacked-on either – the Conchords arrived bearing instruments and built their sitcom around them. Bret McKenzie even had a previous 2004 album, ‘Prototype’, released as Video Kid – “a character trapped inside an electronic arena, where love and escape do not compute”. These two believed in the lost art of the spoof song. Read more

Newcastle, Sunderland regions’s top performers

Newcastle and Sunderland Universities have maintained their lead in the delivery of media and communications studies programmes, according to the National Student Survey released today.

While Newcastle fell short of its prized first place in 2008, dropping two and a half points to 97.5, it was even better news for Sunderland, whose overall score for the quality of its provision shot up from 69.5 to 75. This score is an aggregate of all the survey measurements, provided by the Guardian, for the overall student experience on media and communications courses.

Oxford increased its gap over Cambridge as the country’s leading university across all subjects. Bolton remains bottom. Read more