Up to his knees in mud, Peter Moore discovers that The Duke Spirit are still playing rock music the way that it is supposed to be played

There is little better to raise the pulse than a big, thick guitar riff. Now, I am thinking of the kind of thing that used to exist before Thatcherism, when shaggy haired men in skinny denims and unbuttoned shirts used to dispatch a flurry of notes that would cause the fillings to shake in your teeth and your eyes to water as if you were at a funeral.

Apart from a handful of notable Americans, the majority of today’s musicians seem to have forgotten the importance of such a musical device. We get pastiches of pop and this, and rock and that – dance and rave mix with disco and rap and whilst the gloomy indie drudge is incessant, the riff seems to have become somewhat maligned.

This is why, stood knee deep in a field of mud about three weeks ago, I was glad to discover The Duke Spirit. Clad in miserable tight leather jackets, the engine room of the band was equipped with two guitars, a bass and a drummer, the kind of thing of which a traditionalist like Noel Gallagher would utterly approve. In front of this was Leila Moss, a hopelessly attractive blond parody of what Baby Spice might have looked like if she’d been raised in the north of England, inhabiting a role at the front of a rock and roll band that was always going to draw glib comparisons with Nico.

Still, as the rain held off, The Duke Spirit proved to be about the best thing I saw during the weekend’s music. Moss, with her ballerina’s gestures and cheerful conversation, whipped a half drunken crowd into action and behind her the band chopped away at their instruments like woodcutters in the forest – finding just enough groove, just enough edge and throwing in a few damnably good riffs.

So, thanks to The Duke Spirit for rekindling my hope for the British rock bands, the majority of which seem to have got lost recently on the musical highway, caught in odd musical alleyways that distract them from the essential characteristics of a good rock song.

Tags: BBC, Digital TV, Music by Peter Moore
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Tags: Digital TV by Peter Moore
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Peter Moore decides that the BBC’s latest mini-drama is a welcome improvement on Sunday night timetables of old.

I’ve got rather bad memories of Sunday night television. As a child I came to despise the horribly cheerful theme music of the Antiques Roadshow, whose merry pipes always seemed an ironic reminder that the weekend was almost over. Apart from that it was The Last of the Summer Wine, with its stale plots and successions of old men roaring uncontrollably through the Yorkshire countryside in bathtubs.

My Sunday nights around the television never properly recovered, and since I’ve tended to reserve the evening for the pub or a book. Last night, however, whilst waiting for the scheduled broadcast of Match of the Day Two and a satisfying victory against West Brom, I decided to sit out an hour beforehand – coming across Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

According to a recent poll Thomas Hardy’s late Victorian novel is amongst our favourite, ranking 26^th on the BBC’s recent ‘Big Read’, flanked by The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and Middlemarch by George Eliot. That said, I’ve never managed to plough my way through Hardy’s story of a country girl with a desperately cursed love life – probably scared away from the bookshelf by the thickness of Hardy’s tome that numbers 592 pages over 40 fat chapters.

Luckily for me the BBC have taken a kitchen knife to the novel and reduced it to a more digestible size – last night’s episode was the second instalment of a four part series. In the lead role is one of the most talented young actresses in Britain, Gemma Arterton. Only graduating from RADA last year Arterton has barely paused since, first making her debut in Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary and subsequently appearing in Guy Richie’s RocknRolla and Oliver Parker’s St Trinians. A promising future is expected for Arterton who not only possesses the industry’s essentials of being young, beautiful and talented – but has already completed an outing as a Bond-Girl in the forthcoming Quantum of Solace.

It’s a rightful treat for all of us when the BBC gets around to producing an adaptation like this. The costumes, the script and the quality of acting usually tend to surpass the standard of a Hollywood film and what’s better is that you can enjoy it for free (forget about the license fee for a moment). If you want to revisit or catch the first two episodes of the drama, then they are currently available on BBC iPlayer and they come with a Select Digital recommendation. Sunday nights all of a sudden are looking a little better.

Tags: BBC, Digital TV, Films by Peter Moore
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Untried and untested?

The video that is doing the rounds on the Internet this morning is one of the Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon. The star of Good Will Hunting and the Bourne series of films stated that he felt that the nomination of Sarah Palin as the running mate for John McCain felt like a ‘bad Disney movie.’

Having gone from a position as governor of a small town in Alaska, Mrs Palin has risen quickly through the ranks in American politics. Two years ago she was elected Governor of Alaska and at the end of August she was nominated by McCain for the position of vice president.

Tags: Digital TV, News by Peter Moore
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Arriving with the advent of a new political season, comes a wonderful political scandal from Australia

If you feel the urge, then today is a fine day to take a stroll along Whitehall and up to Parliament Square. The area is buzzing with action and colour as MPs drift back into the city after the summer holidays, fresh with the latest briefings under their arm and whispering hushed plots of betrayal and ambition.

Now is the perfect time to start turning our attention back to politics; and although we have to wait a little while yet for Black Rod to start knocking at the doors to the Commons, we haven’t been kept waiting for a new political scandal – and this is a rather amusing one which has arrived by way of Australia.

Newspapers and blogs around the world are reporting that just three days into his new job as the Police Minister for New South Wales, Matt Brown has been forced to resign by the state governor after he decided to dance atop a sofa dressed in just a pair of underpants.

The Guardian reports that Mr Brown was only appointed to his role at the beginning of the week, and decided to celebrate his new employment with an impromptu party. Doubtless swept along by something strong in a glass, Mr Brown danced away ‘to techno music on a leather couch in “very brief” underpants.’

State governor Nathan Rees demanded Brown’s resignation after the minister first attempted to deny the claims, later claiming that: ‘Embarrassment doesn’t begin to describe it.’ Meanwhile, Mr Brown himself was a little less forthcoming, only responding with the cursory reply, ‘I made a mistake and I am going to cop the consequences of that mistake.’

Clarifying the situation, Mr Rees revealed that, ’ I subsequently put it to former minister Brown late last night that there are too many reports of you in your underwear for me to ignore. He (then) conceded that he’d been in his underwear, and that gave me no option but to demand his resignation.’

Perhaps the antics of Mr Brown could be a harbinger of what’s to come from Westminster over the next few months. The prospect of our Mr Brown donning an elephant thong and grinding away in the cabinet table may be a little too much to hope for, but there is bound to be a political scandal or two brewing beneath the surface.

Whilst the politicians purport to be concentrating on the important issues and getting down to the grit of society – there is always going to be a scandal to fuel the tabloids and knock them off course. Australia’s Mr Brown has lit the way: who’s going to topple next?

Tags: Digital TV by Peter Moore
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Another north eastern gem

Elbow are yet another glittering band to emerge from the north east of England, and last night, in a career that has more resembled a marathon than a sprint, they scooped one of the biggest prizes in the British music industry: the Mercury Music Prize.

Congratulations to Elbow, you can find out much more about their music by clicking here. In the meantime, here is one of the songs taken from their award winning album, ‘The Seldom Seen Kid.’

Tags: Digital TV, Music by Peter Moore
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Having survived the rain, the wind and the mud, Peter Moore muses as to why British people are drawn to muddy music festivals

Like it or not, us Brits just have to put up with the fact that we are no longer one of the global big boys. In the event of Russia or China sending up a few scuds, or the Indians taking a fancy to skittling us with some carpet bombs, the best we can hope for is hiding behind the skirts of the Americans.

These days we gather our self respect from rather different quarters. Because whilst the mines of Wales have been trumped by Middle Eastern oil, English factories have been squashed by the Chinese and Scottish shipyards have fallen empty with the emergence of Eastern European ports, there are few countries in this galaxy or any other that can keep pace with the British music scene.

I’ve just returned to my clean, cheerfully furnished office from the deepest throes of the English countryside, where all weekend the mud sat around my ankles, the wind ripped through my ears and the rain collided viciously against my face. That is to say, that I have just returned to London after a music festival.

What is it, you might ask, that compels otherwise sane individuals to such levels of insanity as a stint at a festival with 30,000 others dangerously close to the beginning of autumn. Some tents flooded, others collapsed, a number of people were hospitalised with hypothermia, mobile telephones faltered by the thousand, and those who forgot their Wellington boots have now got trench foot.

Indeed, by the time I left our ramshackle campsite yesterday it resembled a cross between an African refugee camp and the Third Battle of Ypres. I half expected to see Field Marshall Haig on the way out asking me ‘how it went.’

The reason we Brits put ourselves through such horrid conditions is quite simple: we love our music and we are passionate about it. Over the past half century we have given the world a million bands from the Shadows to the Klaxons and for all their cultural superiority the Yanks have never come up with a band that is half as good as The Beatles.

Indeed, the British musical legacy only begins with our bands. Just think of the dance music, the funk and the punk, there are singer songwriters by the bucket load, we’ve more indie bands than we have NHS doctors and the urban music scene has gone off in an atomic mushroom.

All of these wonderful things have sprouted, quite literally, from the minds of those that are willing to spend a weekend of their lives getting drenched in a field. If you think of it, music festivals combine many of the things that us Brits hold dear: our unpredictable weather, vast quantities of drink, silly dancing and music that is fit to rock the world.

Tags: Digital TV, Music by Peter Moore
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With a new season of television programmes imminent, Sky One have decided that the time is right to change their style. Peter Moore explains more

Just as September heralds the start of a new academic year, it also ushers in the beginning of a new wave of television programming. The nation’s most prominent channels frequently use the autumnal season to promote their latest series and, of course, with the full fanfare of an elephant parade the top sports providers unveil their all-new coverage of the new sporting seasons.

Along with the barrage of new programmes, new presenters and new action, one of the leading digital channels, Sky One, has undergone a thorough makeover. Traditionally considered an afterthought in Sky’s programming selection, suffering in the shadows of Sky Movies and Sky Sports, Sky One has undergone something of a renaissance during the past eighteen months.

The catalyst for this change seems to have been the appointment of Richard Woolfe, the former controller of Living TV, as the channel’s boss in early 2006. During his tenure, Woolfe has re-organised the rather cluttered schedule of Sky One, which traditionally hid behind thousands of Simpson repeats, and encouraged a rich blend of new programming: from the return of the clinging lycra of The Gladiators, to the exploits of Ross Kemp with the British Army in Afghanistan.

Woolfe’s achievements at Sky One were recently recognised that the ‘Broadcast Digital Channel Awards’ where they received the winning accolade as the top digital channel. As a reward, it seems that Sky bosses have bestowed a thorough paint-job on the Sky One image, which has seen the website and logo disappear under a new colour scheme of midnight blue and black and punctuated by floating airborne ice cubes.

So, times look exciting at Sky One, and a cursory look over their programming schedule reveals a host of autumnal treats just waiting to be dispatched. There is a second series of The Gladiators, a new series of Ross Kemp on Gangs, a new series of Lost and the musical Hairspray. All in all, it seems that the return to the office, the school or the university can be stomached much better with the return of quality British broadcasting.

Tags: Digital TV, Sky by Peter Moore
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