SVENGALI

Svengali is a pilot mini-series based on the music industry in london. Hapless band manager (Dixie) is looking to get a deal in london for his band 'The Premature Congratulations' (21st century happy mondays). He bumps into an old friend who's now 'made it' where the program begins to highlight the idea of how everyone thinks they 'have to be cool' to make it big. The series features a number of industry faces such as; Alan Mcgee, Carl Barat, Maggot (goldie lookin chain) and so on. The pilots were a success and it's now been announced that its gonna be made into a full TV series for some time in 2010. There's currently six episodes available on youtube.

New Bands Able To Use Abbey Road Studio

The legendary Abbey Road studios are to offer the mastering facilities that the likes of and The Last Shadow Puppets have used to new bands via the internet.

The studio, famous for recording seminal albums by the likes of The Beatles and Pink Floyd, have launched an online mastering service which will allow new acts to submit their recordings via a secure server.

Engineers at Abbey Road will then mix the tracks using the studio's mastering suites.

”It’s easy for new bands to undervalue the importance of quality mastering, but it really is the final stage of the recording process and getting it right makes a huge impact to the sound of your recordings," Alex Wharton, Mastering Engineer at Abbey Road, told NME.COM.

"Abbey Road's been responsible for mastering some of music industry's most influential albums but in addition to Pink Floyd and The Beatles, we've also worked with new talent like Babyshambles, The Last Shadow Puppets and Lightspeed Champion, and we're so excited to be able to offer this same level of quality to the young bands out there that could be the bands to watch in the future."

Story from NME

Skinner Goes Twitter

So Mr Skinner has released his second tune via twitter, after quoting last week "I am going to tweet 3 new songs this week. I can’t be bothered with all this trying to sell you music. It wastes valuable time"... It goes to show that the honesty of times having changed with record sales is out in the open with artists, and Skinner is clearly adapting to it. Anyway, I was gonna post this when the third song was released but I'm bored waiting to go to work. I'm not overly keen on 'I love my phone' but 'Trust me' is by far better than any song on 'Everything is borrowed'. His lyric style has staggered back to the days of original pirate material, and with an epic orchestra sample inbetween each verse. TOP tune.

UPDATE: Just released: 'David Hassles'