Copy and Content
James Grimshaw
Copywriter // Freelance Journalist // Creative
United Kingdom
West Yorkshire-based writer and musician, with fingers in many editorial pies.
United Kingdom
West Yorkshire-based writer and musician, with fingers in many editorial pies.
Copy and Content
A commission for the London Evening Standard's ES Best section, rounding up the best electro acoustic guitars under £500.
A commission for the London Evening Standard's ES Best section, rounding up the best electronic drum sets for beginners.
A commission for the London Evening Standard's ES Best section, rounding up the best keyboards for beginners.
Outreach content piece, completed for digital agency WMG.
Outreach content piece, completed for digital agency WMG.
Music Journalism
Album review for Post-Trash.
EP premiere for Post-Trash.
It's a nerve-wracking five minutes as this interviewer ping-pongs between the disparate denizens of Belgrave's mid-sound-check Music Hall in search of the elusive 'Joe', ostensibly in charge of whisking me backstage to meet the evening's headline. Anonymous Records-signed electronic duo Polo are triggering samples on the stage while I get rebuffed by the third not-Joe...
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart stand strong as indie-pop's bastion of sincerity; each release and every song blisters with an open-ness that brings to mind a group of friends, together on tape, hearts on sleeves - eliciting something of that first feeling on listening to Neutral Milk Hotel's first.
We arrive at Duke Studios' little-known Sheaf St. Cafeteria after a 45-minute wander through the fresh squabble of Wednesday night's hopeful drunks and yet-to-bes. The squawk of Fibre's hen-party smokers fades to nothing as we cross the Aire, and even the reliable shunt-and-wheeze of Leeds' constant bus traffic gives way to silence by the time we reach The Tetley.
Aleks Podraza sips haltingly from the Sgt. Pepper mug I've handed him, filled to brim with scalding tea. We're sharing a pot over my vaguely-scuzzy kitchen table, the surrounding worktops all cluttered high with the instruments of preparing to move out.
Perhaps as a sort of counterweight to the Spotify generation's general obsession with vapid electronic artists sitting pretty on a bed of weekend-at-Kos synth lines and pure sub-bass, there's been an upwelling in what I like to call "honest music"; indie bands D-I-Y-ing their way through the swathes of mindless marketables with the music they want to make, however they want to make it.
The debut album of Nate Brenner, polymath instrumentalist best known to date for his work as bassist in tUnE-yArDs, is one to which I have been looking forward for some time.
PR and Bio Copy