Last year grime took over the UK: its indelible melodies and whimsical rapping were all over mainstream media. Rude Kid is one of the most renowned and ambitious producers on the scene, although he is hesitant to limit himself to grime. ‘I mix a lot of different sounds: dubstep, funky…I don’t know what I’d call it’. His tracks share an incredible sense of rhythm, with beats which scurry around the bassline, and a fearless use of samples from violins to maracas. Every instrumental features the words ‘are you ready?’. ‘It’s like my trademark – if I didn’t put that in, people wouldn’t know it was by me’.

The tracks are experimental in the best sense: ‘I try to make something that no-one’s made, to be different, because when you’re different people pay attention to you.’ Sometimes a distorted guitar chord replaces a bassline, other times the beat is built from a series of bleeps which sound like a checkout having an orgasm. Clearly, Rude Kid is fascinated by music: ‘I’ll listen to classical, just to hear how the strings are put together’.

He creates songs without a plan. ‘I just sit down and if I like the sound of the instrument, I will use that instrument and work around that. I’m on my own, in my room, and I try to do it to the best of my ability. I name the tunes by what’s around me – if I’ve got aftershave sitting on my desk, that’s the first thing I’ll look at when the beat’s done and I’ll just call it aftershave.’ But he claims that the name ‘Romford Ladies’ wasn’t inspired by the presence of several of Romford’s finest in his bedroom, but by the girls he’d see spilling out of clubs playing the familiar garage track samples.

He broke onto the scene with a track called U.F.O. ‘I used to get ignored a lot, but you have to keep your head down and work hard. I set myself a target, to get played on Logan Sama’s show. I made U.F.O. and that started getting played on Rinse FM. After Logan, people knew my name, and started asking for tunes’. That was three years ago. Now his tracks are on MTV adverts.,and even the latest version of DJ Hero.

With the heavy rotation his songs get on Rinse and at raves, you’d think he’d get sick of hearing them. “You know, I’ve heard them so many times on repeat. But, you know, as long as people like it, and play it, I’m happy.’

If the lacklustre trailer for Tina Fey and Steve Carell’s new film Date Night fails to convince you to fork out money for a cinema ticket, the impressive cast list may well do the trick. Fey and Carell have clearly called in some favours for this project. That’s surely the only explanation as to why James Franco, Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg all chose to partake in such an unambitious production.

In the film, Fey and Carell play Phil and Claire Foster, an ordinary couple from New Jersey with a pleasant but unfulfilling daily routine. As a couple the amusing duo are likeable and believable but the film, disappointingly, is not. We see the Fosters heading out to the new ‘it’ restaurant in Manhattan called Claw. When they arrive at the restaurant without a booking and take the reservation of a couple known as The Tripplehorns they get a great deal more than they bargained for. We soon discover that the Tripplehorns are involved in some pretty sticky business. Thus the rest of the film sees the Fosters (mistaken for the Tripplehorns) desperately trying to avoid all kinds of danger. General hilarity ensues.

To be fair there are actually a selection of laugh out loud moments. These moments tend, however, to be when Fey and Carell are sticking less rigidly to Josh Klausner’s uninspired script. For example when the Fosters return to Claw disguised as ‘trendy’ and ‘alternative’ New Yorkers (with unexplained Siberian accents), they produce a brilliant piece of comedy that had the cinema erupting in laughter. In addition the outtakes at the end display the strong chemistry that exists between the film’s two protagonists. It’s just a pity Fey and Carell weren’t granted more freedom and control over this picture.

My main issue with the film is that I just didn’t buy the story. Why do the Fosters behave so stupidly throughout? When asked to step into a dark New York alleyway by two burly men, they comply. And when offered a way out of the mix up by the NYPD, they decide ‘It’s much too late for police now. Let’s solve this thing ourselves!’ Fey and Carell are a safe bet for the main parts and they should be the key to success for a comedy like this. Instead Date Night ends up using cheap methods for easy laughs.

In 2007, the London International Documentary Festival (LIDF) started as a one day event. Now in its fourth year, the festival has grown rapidly into a 16 day event spread across the capital. Playing host to not only films from all over the world – including a retrospective of the inimitable Don Boyd – but also presenting photography and multimedia events, the LIDF looks set to be one of the most diverse and exciting film festivals of the year.

Cherwell spoke to Patrick Hazard, LIDF organiser, about this year’s festival.

How do you go about selecting the films for the festival?
It’s an enormous job. The number of submissions that we get is extremley high…this year we got many more direct submissions from directors and distribution companies who would like to choose London over another festival.

Since the 2007, how has the festival changed?
Not much is different really, I think the ethos of the festival has remained the same which is this idea of ‘Conversations in Film’; we want to try to eke out the issues and subject matter of the film by working very hard on the debates and discussions that we hold around the screenings. We try to link the films to notions of social change, critical debate and try to satisfy the documentary audience…we wanted to get a little bit away from the notion of just a director’s Q&A and more towards an ideas event.

There’s a multimedia event on at the Hub, can you explain more about that?
We’re calling it ‘The Invisible City’ and its focusing upon the King Cross where there’s been a big regeneration programme and people have been recording those changes in various ways with photography,radio and film.
So we’re looking at the area specifically, but we’re looking more generally at the way we look to describe urban life…we’re bringing together film, photography and radio which is the other distinguishing feature about the festival this year in that we’re looking at ‘documentary’ in the wider sense of the word now and seeing how documentary narratives are being produced in all these different types of media.

Do you organise any events beyond the sixteen days of the festival?
Yes, I think it’s quite important that the festival is a highlight of the year for us because we do work all year around.
We do a monthly Docspot screening at the Barbican… and we do work in Pakistan, so we’re quite heavily engaged in other activities.

Are there any films this year that you’re particularly looking forward to?
A big one is by Abel Ferrara which is already sold out. We’ve got a French film about music in China, it’s very experimental…There films which are quite inspiring stories about people who have taken things into their own hands.

Next week sees the release of The Disappearance of Alice Creed, a thriller that follows two criminals as they carry out a meticulously planned kidnapping with the hopes of securing a large ransom.

Having previously made short films, The Disappearance of Alice Creed marks writer-director J Blakeson’s first foray into feature film-making. Knowing the difficulty of breaking into mainstream films, Blakeson explains that he was fully prepared to make the film on his own and as such, he wrote the script for an extremely low budget.

Despite this, Blakeson makes it clear that he did not want to make a film that was apologising for its low budget, explaining ‘necessity is the mother of invention so you take the limitations you’ve got and make them into a bonus.’

In fact, without giving away the budget, Blakeson hopes that the end product ‘looks much more expensive than it cost and obviously having the actors we do automatically makes the film a better, more expensive looking film.’

And one of those actors is Gemma Arterton who plays the film’s eponymous hostage. Having been previously cast as a troublesome student, Bond girl and a princess, Arterton admits that this character was quite the departure. ‘Usually you have to serve the style…or make the guy look good but this was the first role that I’d taken on that I needed to really do work on.’

Despite her roles in big releases such as Prince of Persia and Clash of the Titans, Arterton concedes that she’s more interested in smaller films and that she took the role because it was ‘challenging and a little bit risky, not your average Hollywood movie.’

And the part certainly is challenging. In the film, her character is forcibly tied down and stripped, a fact which has received much press attention. However, both Arterton and Blakeson are keen to downplay the importance of the female nudity. They explain that they spoke at length about the scenes in question and neither consider the nudity to be in any way exploitative with Arterton reiterating that her character ‘is not a victim and if she was a victim I wouldn’t have done it.’

Having recently finished a run at the Garrick Theatre in The Little Dog Laughed, Arterton is also keen to continue acting on stage. ‘I loved it and I learnt so much more about acting so hopefully I’ll do at least one a year.’

Arterton had to turn down four roles to make time for the play and she’s keen to continue making similarly bold decisions about her acting career, hoping that her strong performance in The Disappearance of Alice Creed will allow her to have more of a choice in the roles that she takes. Arterton also reveals that her director, Blakeson, is receiving a multitude of job offers on the back of hisdebut feature.

If early critical response is anything to go by, The Disappearance of Alice Creed is likely to boost the careers of both its director and stars.

Volcanic ash clouds, the death of Malcom Mclaren and the dreaded return of Kate Nash just around the corner; Trinity 2010 begins with a flurry of portents. In these authors’ opinion, this is just as it should be. As we move in earnest into the new decade we will see a musical sea change, an end to the bland retrospectivity which characterised the latter half of the past decade. America is rising again, Europe is producing its hottest music in years and the occasional British artist is daring to suggest that maybe not all music needs to sound like it was made in the early 80s.

In this guide, we’ve put together a few bits and pieces to point you straight and true into the unknown waters of the 2010s. Go forth on the good ship Cherwell and explore! (or something).

Impress your friends with:

Perfume Genius

Underground credentials as watertight as these are rare. Otherwise known as Mike Hadreas, Perfume Genius fled his smalltown home for a few catastrophic years in the Seattle gutter. Eventually retreating to his mother’s house in the suburbs, he sequestered himself in his bedroom and spent three years alternately “lying face down on the bed” and crafting a series of waiflike piano ballads devastatingly gorgeous enough to make Antony Hegarty look about as fragile as Eamonn Holmes. Start with debut single ‘Mr Petersen’s reflections on the premature death of the teacher who seduced him, and you’ll be desperate for the album release this summer. Unless, of course, you haven’t even the meanest vestiges of a soul.

www.myspace.com/newmagik

Welcome Back:

LCD Soundsystem

A month’s time will see This is Happening, the third release from James Murphy’s sardonic dance group, hit record shops. However, this being the 21st century, and all industry values and certainties thus being entirely obsolete, they’ve uploaded the whole bloody thing for every chubby scheister in the blogosphere to pore over for a week and then discard before anyone’s thought of paying for it. That notwithstanding, it’s a fine effort. In advance interviews, Murphy described himself as being ‘less afraid of a tune’, and that certainly shows: the record is a little more crystalline without losing any of the band’s trademark chutzpah. Whether you think this points to the influence of obscure mid-80’s Detroit Techno cuts or media darlings Hot Chip, however, will depend on how generous you’re feeling.

www.lcdsoundsystem.com/

Leave the Country With:

Buraka Som Sistema

If you’re interested in fleeing the shaggy haired indie-pop vortex of the transatlantic area, check out Buraka Som Sistema, the Portuguese electronic music collective pioneering a progressive ‘kuduro’. For the uninitiated, ‘kuduro’ is a brand of Angolan music originating from the 1980s, blending African percussive samples with basic calypso and soca rhythms and, eventually, incorporating European and American electronic music. Echoing their colonial relationship with Angola, the Portuguese were quick to adopt kuduro, and, thus, Buraka Som Sistema was born. Yah! ft. Petty is an excellent introduction to the group’s refreshingly eclectic sound, with a simple yet infectious dance beat accompanied by the monotone rapping of Angolan hip-hop MC Petty. Written in Portuguese, the lyrics are, naturally, somewhat obtuse. Nevertheless, Petty’s incessant exclamations of “Yah!” ensure that the song will be remembered as an anthemic dance song and an ode to Angola’s vibrant musical heritage.

www.myspace.com/burakasomsistema

Buy your 7″s from:

Transparent Records

Evolving from a promotion collective at the heart of the London ‘underage scene’ circa 2006-7, Transparent Records’ Sahil Varma and Jack Shankly cut their teeth working closely with mid-decade trendsetters Way Out West. Now a bit more grown up and eager to look outside the Capital’s collapsing bubble, the duo are blogging their hearts out and working to bring out a series of impeccably chosen limited run singles, including a good number of otherwise unheard of cuts from across the pond. Current staple signings include Chicago lofi-ers The Smith Westerns, as well as the aforementioned Perfume Genius. Upcoming releases include [former Video Nasties member] Lonely Galaxy’s excellent debut EP.

transparentblog.com