Music Blogs

The nominations are in for next month's ShockWaves NME Awards. And guess what, the Arctic Monkeys have swept the board. It's hardly a surprise that our readers and users voted for them so spectacularly. They continue to be Britain's most essential band.

A lot of people doubted that the Monkeys could sustain their momentum after such death-defying initial success. And they did the best thing they could, they didn't even try--they stood their ground, made the album they wanted to make in the dazzling and inventive Favourite Worst Nightmare, and they remain indie rock's ethical conscience, wise beyond their years and young enough to not give a f**k. Except that now they're doing it from the hot tub. And they're dancing harder.

Tnose nominations in full: Best British Band, Best Live Band, Best Album (for Favourite Worst Nightmare, obvs), Best Track (for the skyscraping "Flourescent Adolescent"), Best Video (for "Teddy Picker"), Best Dressed (for Alex, but with Helders in the band, this was no shoo-in) and Best Album Artwork.

But today we'll mainly be talking about the Best Album Artwork Award. To fulfil the band's of "urban psyechedlia," Liverpool-based design agency Juno took a house on a condemned estate, and let hot graffiti crew 54 loose to paint--well, you'll see just what--all over it. Then they took the whole front of the house off to make the inner-sleeve artwork. Apparently the house was due for demolition, but still stands.

Here's Graham Hughes, my pop-video making college mate, and occasional contributor to my Too Much Information NME blog, given exclusive access to the house itself as the whole thing happened:

The nominations, incidentally, were announced to the U.K.'s media at the annual "Beat The NME" pub quiz, where each paper/radio station etc. forms a team for a music quiz that Team NME is always disqualified from. Because apparently we know a thing or twelve about music. The winners are those that get the closest to our score. This year was a tie between Radio 1 and The Guardian. The winner was decided by a sing-off at DJ Steve Lamacq's Punk Rock Karaoke. So you can imagine, we're trawling the Internet for video evidence, if only for our own amusement.

What else? A good half the NME Office was out at London's Soho House last night for the U.K. press debut of Juno, and we're roughly evenly divided between thinking its an Oscar-worthy screwball masterpiece or a try-hard piece of kook-by-numbers. But we do all know we love the soundtrack a lot more than we ever used to like the Moldy Peaches.

As for me, last week's trip to Cardiff to see Get Cape Wear Cape Fly's gig-in-a-living-room never happened. God intervened with heavy weather and the transport links to Cardiff were blocked with landslides. Instead we visited his Manchester show, where a bloke called 24-year-old Mike Wood had his dreams come true. He told me that no album had meant as much to him than The Chronicles Of A Bohemian Teenager since the Manic Street Preachers' debut Generation Terrorists when he was a a kid. Sam (Get Cape's real name) made his day still better by burning him off a copy of his album Searching For The Hows And Whys there and then. And it's not out until March. We suspect that Atlantic Records won't be happy.

And Get Cape Wear Cape Fly's next trick? Tomorrow, Sam becomes the first ever act to perform live on British teen soap Hollyoaks. Hollyoaks is kind of like Hannah Montana but with emo characters and anorexia storylines, and up until recently, was about as cool as tetanus. He's to perform a song in their Student Union Bar. These are strange days indeed.