KISS THIS.........

By Sophie Cox • May 14th, 2009 • Category: Music

For those of you who are as freakishly crazy about the “power pop” phenomenon as yours truly, you simply have get involved with this. Lights Go Blue are the sexiest new electro-pop duo on the scene and are teetering precariously on the brink of stardom. A little push is needed methinks…

It utterly baffles me and to be frank, it is an absolute travesty that these guys are yet to be signed but the future looks bright for Alex and Raj, who have just (literally just!) been asked to tour with Enter Shikari as their main support act this summer. They are playing a matinee show at Brighton’s Great Escape festival this Saturday and the gig promises to be a scorcher. Lights Go Blue have shared the stage with other fabulous acts such as You Me At 6, We Are The Ocean, Tonight Is Goodbye, The Mission District, Canterbury, Data.Select.Party, We Smoke Fags, Luke Pickett and Saving Aimee to name but a few!

The pair from Gravesend, Kent, write, record and produce all their own tracks in a “makeshift garage studio” which adds an essence of pure originality to their music. Their sound is an irresistibly sythy pop guaranteed to make you move and soothe the soul. Think “happiness” personified throw in some edgy undertones and this could well be the soundtrack to your summer. Following in the footsteps of seriously hot ”power-pop” icons such as La Roux, Esser and Coco Rosie, Alex and Raj have definitely got what it takes to make it big. POW!

9th December. Radio Package. With regard to subject matter for my radio package I took a long time think of an idea. I had trouble finding a story which I thought I could represent well through the medium of radio. I had several ideas for stories which I gathered information for and set up preliminary interviews for but these all seemed to fall through. My last option was something of a miracle which was suggested to me by Laurence. He had had a fantastic idea for a story but hadn’t followed it through, he was going to talk to Mark Coreth, a sculptor who was to carve a polar bear in ice in Trafalgar Square to represent the effects of global warming. I decided that it was such a fantastic story that it would be a waste to let it go. I contacted Mark Coreth and he was more than happy to do an interview with myself. He talked in depth about the inspiration behind his project and his time in the Artic, I had ample material to use for my package and to be honest I found it very hard to cut down to 1’40”. I decided that although he was an ideal subject for a Radio 4 audience, I wanted to accompany the feature with Moby’s Porcelain, as I just thought it really brought out the atmosphere of the Arctic and Mr. Coreth’s inspirational artistic characteristics.

8th December. Assessed Radio Day (South Coast Radio). Once again our team met up the day before our assessment so that we were prepared for the assessed news day. I found this really helpful as there was slightly more involved with the South Coast radio news day, in that we had to do a live two-way and a lunch time court story. Once again I offered to present as I felt that I had had ample practise and we all wanted a role that we felt comfortable doing. This was by far our most successful radio news day as we managed to gather all of our headline stories and produce them with plenty of time for rehearsals. Once again I thoroughly enjoyed the day and thought that we all very much earned our first!

1st December. Assessed Radio Day (Talbot FM). Following the practise radio days I felt confident that our assessed news day would go well. I was really happy with our group, I think that we were all able to work together well and each offered our own preferred skill to the team. Lucy and I chose to work together sharing the responsibility of presenter. She opted to present in the first bulletin and I did the second. We each read through each other’s stories and the finished script to make sure that it read fluently. I was really impressed with all of our stories for this day and also the way in which we built upon them in the second bulletin. My only criticism would be that we didn’t leave quite enough time for ample rehearsals. However, this didn’t impact too greatly on the finished bulletin. I was very happy working as part of a radio news team and felt that we worked very professionally together, I much prefer radio news days to the television ones, I personally feel much more relaxed presenting for radio.

Thursday 5th. Documentary filming. During the last couple of weeks Laura and I had decided upon a subject for the documentary and had managed to set up a series of meetings and interviews with our subjects. I was very happy with our choice, using the comedians, Jim Cross and Dan Gaine and their production of ‘Mother and Dad’ gave us alot of room to get our creative juices flowing! The subject matter was very interesting and we could adapt a really good angle with the use of shots in and around the Little Theatre and layer their amusing banter over the top. I think both Laura and I had the same sort of vision when it came to how the final piece would look so we took it upon ourselves to sort of direct the whole piece. As a group we filmed over 3 days and nights whilst the performance of Mother and Dad was taking place and gathered absolutely tonnes of footage which meant that we were spoilt for choice when it came to editing. Whilst editing I personally wanted to get a real feel for what it felt like to be a performer and I think we really managed to capture the essence of nervousness and tension that an actor feels before going onstage. I also believe that our documentary leaves the viewer with a sense of wanting to know more...as the boys used our work for a promotional piece for their website I think they thought the same!

Tuesday 3rd. Newsday. Having been assigned the role of presenter again I felt very prepared for our newsday this time around and a little less nervous. We all arrived first thing to gather appropriate headlines for the day and were able to make a selection of oovs for our opening sequence. I was very impressed with Jenny and Allana’s graphics skills and thought that our opening and ending credits were very suited to the nature of our show. I think that this week our style was much more appropriate for that of a serious news show and was happy with the running order of our stories. Was slightly disappointed when I glanced into the studio whilst another group was doing their youth news show and saw how creative they had been. I feel that we were a little conservative with ours and it was far too serious!

Tuesday 27th. Newsday. We had already decided who was playing each role and had all of our material ready to send to studio and put into tricaster. We left ourselves plenty of time for rehearsals and run throughs which allowed us to cut our package down to the right time. (5m32secs). I think we all worked very productively as a team and co-operated to ensure that our package ran smoothly. As presenter I was nervous, I didn’t want to let the team down in the live show as we all worked very hard on our individual packages, oovs etc. Need to remember to smile! Thought that the only criticisms were that it was a little formal for a youth news show but our content was good.