The balance of ‘power’ in music seems to have shifted back to the South again. Though you might argue that it’s disappeared completely to be replaced by the factory farming that X Factor etc., seem to have give us. Thank Zaphod for 6 Music and electronic distribution, or we’d all be stuck with garbage I vantage even begin to think about.

Anyway, I tend to like to return to Northern music when I’m out and about. It’s my anchor in life when I’m a long way from where I’m probably supposed to be. This article from The Guardian has a bit of the back story on I am Kloot and may well, if you’re very, VERY good, actually have a link off to the new album for you to listen to. You can get it on Spotify here:

If I were you, I’d give it a whirl…

This article was written by Luke Bainbridge, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 3rd July 2010 23.05 UTC

It doesn’t take long in I Am Kloot’s company to feel something has changed. Underrated, despite a fanatical hardcore following, the combustible, hard-drinking Mancunian outfit never seemed like an easy band to be in. But the trio sitting in a north London pub – frontman Johnny Bramwell, softly spoken bassist Pete Jobson and sanguine drummer Andy Hargreaves – are relaxed, joking and upbeat.

For a decade, since the release of their debut, Natural History, in 2001, Kloot have struggled to break through to the wider audience that other Manchester bands have reached. Bramwell has been around for even longer than that. Twenty years ago, in his guise as singer-songwriter Johnny Dangerously, he released the wonderful You, Me and the Alarm Clock, which didn’t fit into the “Madchester” ethos of the era (the Guardian once included it in a list of the “greatest albums you’ve never heard”). Alongside Caroline Aherne in her Mrs Merton role, he presented Granada TV show Express!, too, and formed a band, the Mouth, with Bryan Glancy, a stalwart of the local music scene. (Glancy, who died in 2006, was the figure who inspired Elbow’s Mercury-winning album The Seldom Seen Kid.)

As a songwriter, the 45-year-old Bramwell has long been seen as one of Manchester’s worst-kept secrets, with a reputation as someone who would make sparks fly in any social situation, too. He formed I Am Kloot in the late 90s, and while none of the group’s previous four albums has charted higher than No 68, their fifth is their most accessible yet. Sky at Night is produced by longtime friends Guy Garvey and Craig Potter of Elbow. Many will jump on that connection, but Garvey produced Kloot’s debut, long before his own group’s success, and in their early years, Kloot were the bigger band. Rather than stamping their mark on proceedings, it sounds as if the pair aimed simply to accentuate the nuances in Kloot’s sound. “Very much so,” nods Hargreaves over a pint. “They wanted to give it some colour and texture, but not make it an Elbow album.”

It’s also their most cohesive album yet, loosely themed around late-night drinking. “If one song set the mood it was ‘To the Brink’,” says Bramwell. This deals in fictional form with a couple of watering holes frequented by Kloot and Elbow: “Do you fancy a drink/ I know a place called the Brink/ Do you wanna go there?” According to Hargreaves: “That set the mood that it was going to be a late-night, smoky vibe.”

Bramwell’s songs, however, now hint at hope or the chance of redemption that was often hidden on their previous albums. “People kept saying we can always rely on you to have a right dig – there’s nastiness in your songs, with a play on words,” Bramwell says, “and I just thought if I kept encouraging that in myself I was going to end up, as a songwriter, down a cul-de-sac. I thought it was important to make an album where a lot of the songs are saying, ‘Look, you might be getting worked up about this, but that shit’s not that important.’”

It seems that critics have previously mistaken the black humour of Bramwell’s lyrics – like those for “Twist”, on which he sang: “There’s blood on your legs… I love you” – for something darker. “Absolutely,” he says firmly, “without a shadow of a doubt. But once you start getting written about in that sort of way, it snowballs…”

“It’s like when people call Nick Cave the dark lord,” says Jobson, “and they don’t recognise the absolute hilarity in some of his songs.”

Sky at Night was mainly written in the past 18 months, but contains a rerecording of “Proof” from their eponymous second album; a live favourite, the song was inexplicably not released as a single by the band’s old record label, which left Bramwell thinking: “If you’re not going to release that, I don’t know what I’m ever going to give you that you’ll want to release.”

“It’s hard to even track down the album that it’s on now, so I hope we’re going to reach people who would never have heard it otherwise. So, to me, it’s justified,” adds Hargreaves.

Christopher Eccleston featured in a video that was originally made for “Proof”, and the Salford-born actor also has a cameo in the video for new single “Northern Skies”, on which a reflective Bramwell ponders: “Where shall I go, on that big, black night/ Shall I take the coast road back through my life?”

Like Eccleston, film director Danny Boyle is a long-term fan of Kloot, as is novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce. It’s not hard to see why they are drawn to Kloot – there’s always been a cinematic quality to the band’s music – but Bramwell says he is inspired more by Harold Pinter or Philip Glass than any of his peers. “The power of melody and rhythm and space in music, and how we play, does a tremendous amount for how a lyric affects you. You might think it’s the lyric but it’s the whole effect of the song and that’s the trick really.”

Although Kloot are relaxed when I meet with them in London, on the two weekends either side of the interview I happen to run into Bramwell out on the town in Manchester – not at the Brink, but looking like he might later be heading to that metaphorical place. But it’s reassuring to know some things never change.

Towards the end of the new album, on “Radiation”, Bramwell sings: “Everything we ever thought we’d ever want, me and you, well, it just came through”, words that feel as if they may prove prophetic. Elsewhere, there are wry reflections on broken dreams and love lost. “There’s still plenty a lot of that,” smiles Bramwell, “combined with plenty of alcohol.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

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Today is different. I’m delayed by a few hours because of pretty spectacular thunderstorms outside. It’s apparently the hottest day of the year here so far, and so the imbalances in the atmosphere is to be expected I guess. So, given that I’ve now been awake some 17 hours, with probably another 10 to go before I hit sleep, it’s probably a reasonable stance to partake in a pint of something or other. As it turns out, there’s a very decent Sam Adams Summer Ale on at the Heineken Bar.

Again with the storms! I think I might be here some time.

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There’s a 3AM now? Who knew?

Heading out to the USA via LHR started early, or late – depending on your viewpoint.

Terminal 4 has so far failed to make me buy anything. I’ve just seen ‘farmhouse’ breakfast being offered for £9.50, which I will leave to your own imagination to consider whether that might constitute value for money.

I could do with coffee, but given that there’s only Starbucks or Costa, the extent to which coffee is available is also questionable. Bring on the grey, warm, in-flight liquid!

Today’s new experiences so far:

1) Being surrounded by Cubs and Scouts in the Delta bag drop. I think I’m on a jamboree flight. (Please let there be a singing nun too!)

2) Being the winner of random selection for the oft-reported full body scanner.

I passed whatever kpi I was supposed to pass anyway. My only failure was in being able to use the pen they provided to fill in their survey afterwards. I blame too many years in IT for that.

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One thing I was surprised by was the Swiss obsession with quality coffee in the home. At this point, the whole pod system was still in it’s infancy on the international scene, but had a strong domestic presence in Nestlé’s home market. The Jura Impressa range of bean-to-cup machines consistently come out well in consumer tests. The downsides is the price. Unless you happen to shop at John Lewis or Selfridges for your main shop, it’s almost certain that this would be seen as a ‘big ticket’ item – after all, £1000 buys quite a few lattes, doesn’t it?

You could reason that for the £1000, you get a robust machine and quite often a 5kg supply of beans to go with it. That’s enough for probably around 250 double espressos. If you take the average cost of a chain latte as around £1.90, then you’re talking about an approximate cost avoidance of around £450. That may help with the economic argument (vut this still doesn’t take into account the cost of other materials and power). What would milk cost for 450 lattes? Well, if you take 100ml as be wing the average input, then at Tesco prices you’re probably talking about 7.5p per serving. However, given that Tesco are to all intents and purposes an unchecked monopoly, let’s make it 10p per serving for ease of calculation and to ease our conscious by cutting the dairy farmer a bit more slack. That leaves us with approximately £400 cost avoidance. Still not ‘cheap’.

On the other hand, you could just get yourself a much cheaper machine and a decent burr grinder to much the same effect. I’ve been using a De Longhi machine for the past month or so that produce a really good quality espresso – and all for the princely sum of £79.99. The steam wand is also very effective at producing thick’ rich froth for topping off cappuccino – with a bit of practise. There’s also the minor bonus of it being slightly more satisfying to make than just pressing a button.

De Longhi EC330S Pump Espresso Machine with cup warmer stand

And here’s the product of a couple of minutes of work

Might have over indulged on the froth

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So our hopes of salvaging any sort of sporting pride this summer now rest on Wiggins and Cavendish in the TdF.  I’m really hoping that Team Sky can put in a good team performance and Wiggins can be a contender.  22 days of cycling to look forward to, starting today, and finally a break from vuvuzelas and a return back to cow bells.

For Team Sky this year’s Tour de France is all about one man, Bradley Wiggins, and how high up the standings he can finish in Paris. But there is a bigger picture as well. Doing everything feasible and legal to help Wiggins finish in the best possible position in 22 days’ time is only one stage in a five-year quest to win the Tour with a British cyclist.

Sky, British Cycling and Wiggins’s quest for Tour success is founded on the celebrated philosophy that took Team GB’s cyclists to eight gold medals in Beijing: aggregation of marginal gains. Put simply, you aim to be as good as you can in as many areas as you can: put together, a 1-2% improvement in all those areas amounts to a considerable gain in performance.

Starting from scratch, Sky have been able to look at every area of cycling and ask the question: can we do it better? They have the resources – the Murdoch millions, Dave Brailsford and his coaches’ ability to think outside the box, and the expertise that took the track cyclists to all those medals – and they are using them to the full.

At the most basic level, most professional cycling teams are unstructured. The riders are left to get on with training, told when to race and are expected to turn up fit. Sky have turned that on its head by employing a “race coach”, Rod Ellingworth, the inspiration behind British Cycling’s Under-23 academy, and Mark Cavendish’s mentor. His role is specifically to supply coaching support where needed.

“I think it’s pathetic, teams not caring for their riders, they expect the best every weekend but don’t talk to them,” Ellingworth says. He has found that, curiously, some of the riders actually need to train less. “For most riders, training is a panic thing, they need to test themselves constantly. But they don’t have to do it alone, I can help them make that call.” One rider on the Tour team, Michael Barry, said it all earlier this year: “The riders are treated like adults.” It is well known that the riders have been encouraged to draw up their own rules, such as what to do if one of them is late to the bus in the morning, and what clothing to wear outside the race.

Which brings us to those black jerseys. They are not just a platform for the sponsor’s logos, although, as you would expect for a team backed by a TV company, they were examined from every camera angle during design to ensure maximum exposure. They are intended to be easily distinguished when the helicopters show the peloton from above: that helps the team managers work out how many riders are in each group when the race splits up.

The jerseys are a motivational tool, personalised with each rider’s name down the side. Good for media and fans, but it also gives the cyclists a sense of ownership. When each one joined the team, they took part in a presentation ceremony in which they were introduced to the other riders and handed a folded jersey. “It was quite powerful,” Ellingworth says. “We took it from international rugby, when getting your first cap is such a big thing. It’s pretty unique.”

Sky are the only team to employ a dedicated “head of apparel”, aiming to improve performance in every clothing-related area. They have worked out that each cyclist’s clothes can hold up to a kilo of water, be it rain or sweat on a hot day, and will no doubt be working to eliminate that. The cyclists can choose from two kinds of racing glove, and they have two kinds of crash hats, one of which has closed off air vents giving an advantage of about 1sec per kilometre.

Performance analysis is set to become central in pro cycling as teams at the cutting-edge employ Formula One techniques. Sky are not alone here: at least one other team have hooked up with a Formula One team, while Cavendish’s HTC-Columbia are doing interesting things with Google. Already, most teams send a gofer to look at the final kilometres of the stages and report back, rather than just relying on the sketch maps from the race organisers. Sky are going further by videoing each day’s key locations before the stage starts so that the footage can be streamed into the team’s bus as the manager gives the pre-race briefing.

Performance analysis has extended to training as well. “The analysts looked at racing style on climbs, they took all the attacks, how long they lasted, the speed, the watts produced, the moves they made, left or right of the road, how far they got,” Ellingworth says. This meant that in training Wiggins could be made to replicate certain climbs on last year’s Tour. Additionally, the use of GPS meant that climbs near Wiggins’s home in Spain could be found to represent the major ascents on the Tour.

Rest is critical during the Tour de France, so Sky have found a commonsense solution to a problem as old as the Tour itself: the need to adapt to new surroundings every day when in an advanced state of fatigue. They will be taking their own beds with them to each hotel, duvets, pillows and all. “It’s just nice getting into your own bed at night. At the Giro I didn’t have a single bad night’s sleep,” the Tour rider Steve Cummings said.

Diet is the other key. Cummings underwent a three-day sweat analysis test in Manchester before the Tour started, as part of a long-term plan to produce custom-made race drinks for each of the riders depending on their physiology, something that may happen next year. The team bus has a rice cooker, which is switched on half an hour before the stage ends, so that immediately after the finish, the riders can begin refuelling.

Sky employ a chef, an idea that goes back to Lance Armstrong, but with a twist: as well as ensuring the best quality nutrients, with variety to keep the riders interested or simply to fuel them if they are tired out, their chef will ensure that their riders eat no hotel food at all. “It allows us to control the types of food, the way it is cooked, for example so it’s not kept on a hotplate for five hours,” says their nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell. That’s part of their amusingly entitled gut health plan, aiming to eliminate the stomach problems which can force a rider out of the Tour at the drop of a hat.

Sky have worked on the radio systems that link riders and personnel in a race, and have looked at other sides of communication. Eyebrows were raised when the riders were given team issue iPhones at their first get together. But the thinking is simple: they have no excuse for being late for anything. The team has an internal newsletter to keep everyone up to speed, particularly with technical developments.

Disconcertingly, for all the breadth and intensity of Sky’s quest for marginal gains, this Tour is only an intermediate stage in the search for perfection, following the research that took place as the team was put together last year. This is only Sky’s second Grand Tour, and while enabling Wiggins to “be the best he can be”, it is also a testbed for them. Worryingly for the opposition, there could be much more to come.

William Fotheringham is the author of Roule Britannia, a history of Britons in the Tour de France, published by Yellow Jersey

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

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