Inspiral Carpets made their first ever visit to Margate in December 2025, several decades into their career. The gig took place on a cold Sunday night in the Dreamland Ballroom, a venue notorious for bad sound quality. In terms of a long overdue seaside jaunt, it wasn’t exactly the most auspicious of gigs. Tonight, they’ve returned to Dreamland, but they’re playing upstairs in the Hall By The Sea, a far superior, steampunk-ish gig space where everyone sounds (mostly) brilliant.
In 2025, Avery Friedman released the excellent ‘New Thing’, a debut album steeped in a very nostalgic sound. The bulk of the release’s tracks hit upon a swooning indie tone, blending elements of dream pop into a light jangle which served the artist’s breathy vocal tones perfectly. The material wasn’t always about immediacy, but for those listeners willing to spend the time, it eventually became the kind of record that really rewarded those repeated listens.
The Cog Sinister label has been responsible for a huge number of Fall products over the decades. The label, founded by Mark E. Smith in 1987, was dissolved a few years later and the name was subsequently adopted by the Voiceprint group in 1997 for the purpose of reissuing various Fall items and sharing official bootlegs. These have ranged from the terrible (‘Live 1977’) to the average (the lop-sided sounding ‘Band On The Wall, 1982’), to the absolutely essential (gigs recorded at Cedar Ballroom, Birmingham in 1980 and Derby Assembly Rooms in 1994).
Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting tracks that have landed in our inbox over the past few weeks. This time around, we bring you a couple of superb singer songwriters, an interesting remix, an unmissable slab of alternative metal, a jaunty country number and more besides. As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy.
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Steak’s ‘Acute Mania’ (released via Ripple Music in 2022) presented a brilliant dose of stoner rock. Just as important as sharing some great riffs, the album boasted the kind of production job that made the London based heavyweights sound even heavier. The guitars adopted a tone somewhere between doomy and fuzzy – often making the band’s Kyuss influenced roots more than obvious – and the drums punched through everything with a genuine intent. In stoner terms, it offered the kind of professional sound you’d expect from a major label band a quarter of a century earlier. In short, ‘Acute Mania’ was a contemporary stoner classic.