Category: Features
‘Confessions Of A Female Tour Manager’: The BIG Über Rock Interview – Kim Hawes
Kim Hawes can rightly be regarded as one of the true groundbreakers for women in the music industry, someone who broke through the glass ceiling of perceived prejudice and proved that anyone, if they put their mind to it, can achieve virtually any goal they seek to score. Having survived ten years working with Motörhead – an achievement only one other person could boast about – this former swimming instructor became one of only six female tour managers working anywhere in the music industry, bringing with it the equal amounts of grit and glamour which makes up life on the road with some of the biggest bands on the planet, from Rush to Black Sabbath. Last year, having ended her journey and stored her suitcases away for the last time, Hawes shared her experiences in her autobiography, the rather cheekily titled ‘Confessions Of A Female Tour Manager’.
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The Über Rock Singles Club – Febrile February (Part One)
There may be storms raging outside the window, but it’s nice and cosy inside ÜRHQ, where the bar is open again for our Singles Club feature: so, it’s time for you to come on in from the cold and warm yourself up with our pick of the best new singles doing the rounds at the moment. It’s DJ Astrocreep back behind the wheels of steel, with one of the hardest jobs around, cutting down almost 250 tracks to the shortlist below. Place your orders… it’s time to spin the music!
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VIDEO OF THE WEEK – BOWLING FOR SOUP (FEAT. ALEXA BLISS)
To be honest, the choice of our latest ‘Video Of The Week’ was something of what we believe the cool kids refer to as a “no-brainer” – although it did have some pretty stiff competition…
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VIDEO OF THE WEEK – DROPKICK MURPHYS
As usual, we received almost 100 submissions vying for the coveted industry title of our ‘Video Of The Week’. And it takes a lot for the winners to fight their way to the top. We do apply a number of criteria, of course: these include no straight-to-camera performance pieces, while lyric videos also tend to be be relegated to the bottom of the heap. Not that this is to dismiss the worthiness of the songs or the format in which they are presented, as all unsuccessful submissions are added to the longlist for our hugely popular Singles Club feature… Having said that, who proved to be the creme de la creme and grabbed the honours this week?
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The Über Rock Singles Club – Jivin’ January (Part Two)
Well, it didn’t take the rock ‘n’ roll industry too long to kick out the post-New Year blooze and get back in full effect, as we had more than 200 singles sent our way over the past couple of weeks. Now, we’re going to let you into a little secret. Are you ready? We actually listened to them all! Well, snippets of them all, at least. And, believe us, there was some quality stuff sent our way – but then, the bands, labels, etc know not to send us any old shit, as that will go straight in the bin… Anyway, here is chief pack mule Monk’s choice of the ones that appealed most to him, or deemed worthy of sharing with our loyal fans out there in the rock ‘n’ roll Überverse…
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VIDEO OF THE WEEK – SVART CROWN
Welcome to our ‘Video of the Week’ feature and it was another bumper week of submissions, with some seriously good quality clips hitting our inbox, making our selection slightly more difficult than usual. Fortunately, this week’s feature coincides with the latest edition of the ‘Singles Club’, so you can check out some of the other contenders there…
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VIDEO OF THE WEEK – BLACK STAR RIDERS
This week’s feature had a bumper selection to choose from, almost double our usual number of submissions, so it needed a lot more than usual to make it omtp the final shortlist. Judging on song, video quality and the something different required to make it this week was our resident gig maniac, DJ Astrocreep.
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THE ÜBER ROCK SINGLES CLUB – JIVIN’ JANUARY (PART ONE)
It’s time to gather at our Singles Club bar for the first session of the year. The stools are dusted off, the beers are on the house for tonight and the music is a smorgasboard of the kind of thing we like to listen to across the Über Kingdom of Rock ‘n’ Roll! So without further adieu, it’s time for DJ Astrocreep to get his music head on and start to spin the tracks!
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VIDEO OF THE WEEK – MOTIVES
Welcome to the first ‘Video of the Week’ feature for 2020! As the bands were seemingly still keeping it low key after Christmas and new year, we gave last week a miss, rather than present only a couple of videos, instead saving them for this week as we have another bumper list of submissions to wade through.
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ÜBER ROCK’S ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2019 – THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
Over the course of a year, our Über team listens to literally hundreds of albums, and once again we set them the onerous task of selecting what they feel to have been the best new releases of the past 12 months. In total, our crack team submitted almost 160 albums for consideration, with their lists then fed into our state-of-the-art musical abacus to calculate our final top ten albums of 2019. Yesterday, we presented you with our writer’s individual selections. Today, the number crunching has been completed, and we present to you our final list of the ten albums which have most tickled our team’s aural cortexes over the past 12 months… and, in the best tradition of countdowns, we present it in reverse order…
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Out With The Old, In With The New
In the penultimate of our year-end roundups, we asked our writers to share their biggest discoveries/surprises of 2019, as well as their biggest disappointments over the past 12 months. We also asked them to look forward to 2020 with their predictions for the year ahead. And, of course, there is also our perennial award for the biggest cockwomble in rock (although one or two of our team didn’t read the last bit), which this year is named in honour of our esteemed and glorious (cough!) Prime Minister…
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ÜBER ROCK’S ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2019
Over the course of a year, our Über team listens to literally hundreds of albums, and once again we set them the onerous task of selecting what they feel to have been the best new releases of the past 12 months. In total, our crack team submitted almost 160 albums for consideration, with their lists then fed into our state-of-the-art musical abacus to calculate our final top ten albums of 2019. First, here are our writer’s individual selections…
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