CONSEQUENCE OF SOUND: On February 7th, Mark Lanegan Band will release Blues Funeral, the group’s long-awaited follow up to their 2004 album, Bubblegum. We’ve already heard the menacing and bluesy cut “The Gravedigger’s Song”, and now there’s an equally freaky music video. Directed by Alistair Legrand and produced by Jack Richardson, the video pulls bits and pieces from dozens of famous horror movies out there — from scythe-wielding children to taxidermy a la Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. MORE

BY MIKE WALSH In 1951, at age 25, a young woman named Vivian Maier moved from France to New York City, where she worked for some time in a sweat shop. Maier also had a camera, and she spent much of her free time walking around NYC working class neighborhoods taking photos of people, places, and buildings.

She used a Rolleiflex camera, the type you look down into a two-inch lens to aim and focus. It used 120 mm film, a large format that, in the hands of someone like Maier, can capture incredible richness, detail, and depth of field.

In 1956, Vivian moved to Chicago where she worked for the next four decades as a nanny for numerous upper middle-class families. She continued with her photography in Chicago, taking photos obsessively. Lots of them. Tens of thousands.

Photos of wealthy women dressed in hats and furs on their way to social functions; dirty-faced children; roostering adolescents with flamboyant haircuts; a heavyset woman arguing with a cop; homes destroyed by a tornado; a salesman asleep in a car; the working class in action, and bums passed out on a sidewalk or the beach. Unusual buildings, street life, light, shadow, and clothing always drew her attention. She seemed to identify most with immigrants and the dispossessed.

In most cases, the subjects were not aware they were being photographed. Some seemed surprised and scowled at her. Others posed for her. Some glare, some smile. She hardly ever took more than one photo of anything.

Maier had no formal training in photography and no network of peers. She worked by herself. And somehow she became a great artist, but she never told anyone about her photography. She simply didn’t not stop pursuing her obsession long enough to share the results.

She didn’t date. She didn’t marry. She didn’t seem to have friends. She wasn’t interested in that. She showed little interest in human contact but, instead, channeled it into her photography, which is in fact drenched in humanity.

Each time she moved to a different job and a different family, she had more boxes of negatives and prints. Some were filled with home movies and audio recordings she had made. At one employer’s house, she stored 200 boxes of materials. At some point she inherited money from relatives in France and took a trip around the world by herself, taking photos along the way.

She took many wonderfully inventive self-portraits as well, mostly reflections of her and her camera in mirrors, plate glass windows, ceiling-mounted store mirrors, and chrome hubcaps. What we see is a tall, thin, homely woman, usually in drab clothing, the type you’d expect to see on a nanny with little income. Maier has chin-length hair parted on one side, a weak chin, and a nose that angles up. Some self-portraits show only her shadow.

As she aged, Vivian’s financial situation got progressively worse, but she kept taking photos. She could afford to buy film but not to develop it, so she packed hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film in yet more boxes.

By 2000, Vivian was out of work and destitute. She was living on Social Security. Her negatives and other belongings were in storage, but she couldn’t pay the storage bill. By then the children she had cared for in the1950s were adults. When they found out about Vivian’s situation, they got her an apartment and paid her bills.

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In 2007, a 26-year-old Chicago real estate agent named John Maloof was working on a history of his neighborhood. He heard about some old photos from an abandoned storage locker that were being auctioned. He thought the photos might be useful for his book, so he went to the auction and purchased one of the lots for $400. This purchase changed his life.

What he had purchased were some of Vivian Maier’s photographs. He soon realized that the photos would not help him with his book, but he was suddenly a lot less interested in that subject. In fact, Maloof was so inspired, he abandoned the book and took up photography.

Maloof also scanned a handful of Maier’s photos, uploaded them to Flickr, and asked people what they thought of them. Flickr users were amazed by their power and beauty and deluged Maloof with comments, questions, and suggestions. Maloof soon started a blog to publicize Maier’s work.

Maloof then tracked down those who had purchased other lots from the auction of Maier’s belongings, and he was able to buy back most (but not all) of them. His collection of Maier’s work had grown to over 100,000 negatives, 2000 rolls of film, and 3000 prints, as well as home movies, audio tape interviews, and her original cameras. Maloof’s holdings represent approximately 90 percent of Maier’s work.

But Maloof still knew very little about Maier. Who was this woman? Where did she come from? Why hadn’t anyone heard of her remarkable work?

Then in 2009, he saw a small obituary in a Chicago newspaper. It was for Vivian Maier. She had died in a nursing home at age 83. By the time Maloof understood the value of what he had collected, he had lost the chance to speak with her.

Among the materials he had bought at auction, Maloof found a few names and addresses, and he was able to locate these people. They were children from the families for whom Maier had worked. One contact at a time, Maloof tracked down all of the families Maier had worked for, which included the family of TV host Phil Donohue.

They told him what they knew of Maier. Most described her as a quiet, private, but very opinionated person who did not discuss her photography with them. They said she was a socialist, a feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. She learned English by going to theaters, and frequently wore men’s clothing and a large hat. She was also decidedly unmaterialistic. Through more digging, Maloof was able to piece together a few details of her early life as well. He was not able to find anyone who was familiar with her photography.

In the two years that followed her death, interest in Vivian Maier’s work exploded, and she is now a genuine sensation in the photography world. Maloof has worked to organize, protect, and publicize his collection of her work. He and his assistants are scanning her negatives, but it is a massive task, and many of Maier’s photographs still have not been seen by anyone.

Maloof has put together several exhibits of Maier’s photography that have shown in New York, Los Angeles, London, Norway, Amsterdam, Germany, Denmark, and elsewhere. Articles about her work have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time, The Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and other many other publications. Prints of her photos sell for thousands, and a documentary film about Maier’s life is currently being prepared for release in 2012.

But in 2010, Chicago carpenter and artist Jeffrey Goldstein acquired another collection of Maier’s work from one of the original auction buyers—the one who refused to sell to Maloof. Goldstein’s Vivian Maier collection includes 15,000 negatives, 1,000 prints, 30 homemade movies, and numerous slides.

A book of Maier’s photography, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer (Powerhouse Books, 2011), also came out recently. It contains two short essays, one by Maloof, but most importantly, over 100 pages of Maier’s beautiful black and white photos. Each one is rich in details and tells a story of American urban life in the mid 20th century.

And the attention devoted to Maier is not likely to end soon, especially since so little of her work has been made available publicaly. Expect it to continue surfacing from Maloof, Goldstein, and other sources for years to come. Vivian Maier died in poverty and obscurity. She didn’t get a chance to enjoy the fame and wealth her incredible photography has recently garnered, but she probably would have preferred it that way.

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Forty Photos by Vivian Maier from the Goldstein collection are on display at the Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, New York, until Feb. 25.

CMMNJ: Multiple sclerosis patient John Ray Wilson will appear at the Somerset County Courthouse today at 8:30AM. He is expected to be taken into custody to serve the reminder of a five-year prison term for growing seventeen cannabis plants. The NJ State Supreme Court refused to hear his latest appeal. He was convicted just before the New Jersey medical marijuana law was passed in 2010.

Wilson was arrested on August 18, 2008 and was charged with “manufacturing” 17 marijuana plants that he used to treat his MS. Wilson faced 20 years in state prison for this crime. At trial, Superior Court Judge Robert Reed would not let the jury hear the reason that Wilson grew the marijuana plants, essentially removing Wilson’s only defense. Many members of the community felt this was an injustice and protested outside the court house in Somerville. In December 2009 Wilson was acquitted of the most serious charge, but he was convicted of a second degree charge of manufacturing marijuana. He was sentenced to five years in prison on March 19, 2010.

On July 26, 2011, an Appellate Court affirmed the conviction and sentencing. The Appellate Court agreed with the trial judge that there was no “personal use” exemption to the charge of manufacturing over ten marijuana plants. It did not matter that Wilson was using the marijuana to treat his MS, the Appellate Court ruled. They agreed that five years in prison for this crime was an appropriate sentence.

The National MS Society confirmed in an Expert Opinion Paper that standard therapies often provide inadequate relief for the symptoms of MS and that marijuana helps with MS symptoms such as pain and spasticity and could limit disease progression. An estimated 15% of people with the disease use marijuana for symptom relief, according to the MS Society. MS is a qualifying condition for marijuana therapy in New Jersey according to the two-year-old Compassionate Use Act, but the state’s Medicinal Marijuana Program is not operational yet.

Governor Chris Christie could intervene, but so far he has ignored appeals from State Senators Scutari and Lesniak for a pardon for Wilson. State Senator Raymond Lesniak issued a press release yesterday also renewing that call: “I am disappointed by the recent decision of the Supreme Court to deny the appeal of John Ray Wilson. Mr. Wilson was not selling drugs on our streets. He was merely trying to alleviate the symptoms of a dreadfully painful and regressive disease. It is unconscionable that this Friday he will be behind bars. MORE

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BY JONATHAN VALANIA Portlandian indie-folk antiquarian Laura Gibson plays JB’s tonight in support of her just-released La Grande, a mesmerizing collection of otherworldly torch songs, ghostly Americana and haunted folk/blues. La Grande is Gibson’s third album and features cameos from Joey Burns of Calexico, members of The Dodos and fellow Portlandians The Decemberists, is hands down our favorite album of 2012 thus far. We are not alone — Mojo, Uncut and Q gave it rave four star reviews. Earlier this week we got Laura on the horn to discuss love, death, math, folk music, cataclysmic genocidal tsunamis, the secret to being the state high jump champion and why she ‘put a bird on’ her first two albums.

PHAWKER: So you were the Oregon state high jump champion for a time?

LAURA GIBSON: Yeah, good research.

PHAWKER: What was your secret? Flubber?

LAURA GIBSON: I worked really hard, I practiced and worked out a lot and think I had a bit of determination in me.

PHAWKER: What was your highest jump?

LAURA GIBSON: I went 5′6” in high school and almost 5′7” in college then I started to have ankle problems.

PHAWKER: This is the thing where you run and turn around backwards and flip over the bar, right?

LAURA GIBSON: Yeah it’s such a strange skill to spend so much time perfecting, it often seems really strange.

PHAWKER: I don’t think it’s all for naught, I am sure that skill comes in handy all the time. So you went to college on a math scholarship, now you’re playing spectral indie-folk. What happened along the way? Most people become musicians precisely because they suck at math.

LAURA GIBSON: I feel like math somehow is really connected to making music, that part of my brain that loves math and loves putting puzzles together is the same part of my brain that’s making words and sounds add up.

PHAWKER: At one point you decided to turn away from math and high jumping and pursue music…

LAURA GIBSON: I got injured and needed ankle surgery. I started learning to play guitar because I had all this free time on my hands and started writing songs. I decided to take a year off from school and moved to Portland. I always wanted to do some volunteer work with either hospice or a hospital, and I had this idea I would play music for people who were sick or dying rather than play shows at clubs. So I started playing music every Tuesday night at this residential care facility for people in the late stages of AIDS.

PHAWKER: That’s very noble and a beautiful story, but I can’t say that’s a good career move in terms of building a long term fan base. I mean, the dying only buy so many albums…

LAURA GIBSON: That’s true.

PHAWKER: You grew up in the small town of Coquille, Oregon?

LAURA GIBSON: Yeah, it’s a little logging town near the coast. Coquille is a French word which means “shell.” A lot of towns in Oregon were named by French-Canadian trappers. The native people in the area all wore shells around their neck and so when the trappers came in they said, “these are the coquille people, these are the shell people,” and so they named the town settlement Coquille.

PHAWKER: Are there any Native Americans living there currently?

LAURA GIBSON: Yeah, there is. A lot of that population was supposedly wiped out long long ago by a giant tsunami but then it grew back up.

PHAWKER: There was a cataclysmic tsunami that wiped out hundreds or thousands of people?

LAURA GIBSON: That’s what they think, there aren’t official records but that’s from the writings that have survived. I’m not actually sure when that was, quite a while ago before the white man came and settled the area.

PHAWKER: I read that during a month-long visit back to Coquille, you intentionally didn’t bring any music and instead vowed to just rely on music you could find in the public library. It was there that you discovered Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, and Elizabeth Cotten, all of whom I can actually hear in your music – a lot of people say they’re influenced by them but I don’t hear it – but with you I do.

LAURA GIBSON: Definitely, the way I approach playing guitar is from teaching myself Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt songs. I’ve always been inspired by folk music and the stories of those people that really played music for no other reason than, you know, there’s music in their bones. I think that is folk music in the truest sense of the word.

PHAWKER: I was gonna ask you what you learned from each of those people but I guess you just answered that question.

LAURA GIBSON: Definitely guitar style and I also think that definitely I’ve always been inspired by folk music and the stories of those people that really played music for no other reason, you know, there’s music in their bones. So I think that’s ‘folk’ in the true sense of the word.

PHAWKER: So I’m guessing you’re familiar with Elizabeth Cotten’s story? How she wrote her most famous song, “Freight Train,” when she was a teenager then put music aside for many, many years. She wound up being a maid for Pete Seeger’s family…

LAURA GIBSON: Yeah she was a maid for the Seeger family and they kind of discovered her, really quite late in her life — like in her 60s or 70s.

PHAWKER: That’s such a special song.

LAURA GIBSON: Yeah, I love that song. I do that at sound checks a lot to warm up my fingers for playing guitar, I just love that song so much.

PHAWKER: Is there a recording of you doing that anywhere in existence?

LAURA GIBSON: Yeah there is actually. I did a limited edition tour EP of old blues and traditional songs called Six White Horses, I think it’s on iTunes.

PHAWKER: Also, during that same visit back home to Coquille, you read a lot of the old love letters your grandparents sent to each other for inspiration. I’m curious why and what did you learn from that you didn’t know before?

LAURA GIBSON: This all happened right around when I was making my first record If You Come to Greet Me. I don’t have a lot of extended family, my grandparents all passed away, my grandma had Alzheimer’s when I was young so I never got to know her. My father passed away when I was in high school and I never really got to know his story. It came at this time that I really wanted to know where I came from, I was talking to my mom about family and she said, “Well you can always read the boxes of letters,” and I said, “What? What letters?” and she said, “They’re up in the attic.” She never told me there were these two boxes full of letters between my grandmother and grandfather back in the 1930’s when they were first dating as teenagers and lasting a 20 year span.

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THE WRAP: Robert Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein on ’70s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter, died Thursday, the New Jersey Star-Ledger reports. Hegyes, who died of an apparent heart attack after suffering chest pains at his Metuchen, New Jersey home, was 60. Hegyes had not been in good health for the past two years, his brother Mark Hegyes told the paper. The actor had suffered a previous heart attack in recent years. Police responded to an emergency call from Hegyes’ home at approximately 9 a.m. He was transported to JFK Medical Center in Edison, New Jersey, but at that point he had gone into full cardiac arrest. Though Hegyes also starred on the detective series “Cagney & Lacey” (as Det. Manny Esposito) and, in later years, guest-starred on shows such as “NewsRadio” and “Diagnosis Murder,” Hegyes was best-known for his role as Juan Epstein — full name: Juan Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos Epstein — on the 1970s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter” from 1975 to 1979. Perpetually scheming and always ready with a self-written note signed “Epstein’s Mother” to explain his school absences, Epstein stood out among a group of characters that included the super-cocky womanizer Vinnie Barabarino (played by a young John Travolta) and hip but beleaguered high-school teacher Gabe Kotter (played by Gabe Kaplan). MORE

RELATED: A fiercely proud Puerto Rican Jew (his father was Puerto Rican; his mother’s name was Bibbermann), and one of the toughest students at Buchanan High, despite his short stature. He normally walked with a tough-man strut, wore a red handkerchief hanging out of his right back pocket, and was voted “Most Likely to Take a Life” by his peers. In the season one episode, “One of Our Sweathogs Is Missing”, Epstein was shown to be the sixth child in his family, although his mother had 10, while in the episode “I’m Having Their Baby” he mentions that his mother gave birth 8 times. The only names of his siblings mentioned in the show are two brothers, Pedro and Sanchez (”One of Our Sweathogs Is Missing”) and a younger sister, Carmen (”A Love Story”). Epstein’s toughness was downplayed later on, and became more of a wiseguy. He was also known to have a “buddy” relationship with Principal Lazarus as he often referred to him by his first name, Jack. On a few occasions, when Kotter would do his Groucho Marx impersonation, Epstein would jump in and impersonate Chico Marx or Harpo Marx. Epstein’s diminutive height and large hair are common jokes associated with him. MORE

WIKIPEDIA: Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James (June 9,^[1] 1902 – October 3, 1969^[2]) was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter, born in Bentonia, Mississippi, died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His guitar playing is noted for its dark, minor sound, played in an open D-minor tuning with an intricate fingerpicking technique. James first recorded for Paramount Records in 1931, but these recordings sold poorly due to the Great Depression, and he drifted into obscurity. After a long absence from the public eye, James was “rediscovered” in 1964 by three blues enthusiasts, helping further the blues and folk music revival of the 1950s and early 60s. He is hailed as “one of the seminal figures of the blues.”^[3] James was known to be an aloof and moody person.^[9] “Skip James, you never knew. Skip could be sunshine, or thunder and lightning depending on his whim of the moment” commented Dick Spottswood on James’s personality.^[9] He seldom socialized with other bluesmen and fans. Like John Fahey, James loathed the so-called “folkie” scene of the 1960s. He held a high regard for his own work and was reluctant to share musical ideas with other performers. Though the lyrical content of some of his songs led to the characterization of James as a misogynist, he remained with his wife Lorenzo (niece of Mississippi John Hurt) until his death. He is buried with his wife at a private cemetery (Merion Memorial Park) just outside of Philadelphia in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. MORE

MSNBC: Mitt Romney could face new questions about his overseas investments after a campaign official acknowledged to NBC News that his campaign is revising his financial disclosure forms to report more than a half dozen offshore holdings, including income from a multi-million dollar Swiss bank account that was not disclosed last year. The tax returns released by the Romney campaign this week showed that the Ann Romney Blind Trust had reported $1,783 in interest income from a bank account held at UBS in Switzerland in 2010. But the Swiss bank account — as well as other offshore investments in the Cayman Islands, Bermudas and Ireland that appear in the trust fund’s tax returns — were not disclosed in Romney’s financial disclosure form filed with the Office of Government Ethics last August. A Romney campaign official emailed Thursday afternoon that Romney’s financial disclosure form is now being amended with the government ethics office “to address this minor discrepancy” and “to deal with some other minor issues.” MORE

RELATED: A Rasmussen poll conducted on Sunday, the day after the South Carolina primary, showed Newt Gingrich leading Mitt Romney by 9 points — 41 percent to 32 percent — in Florida. Rasmussen’s poll conducted on Wednesday now shows Romney leading Gingrich by 8 points: The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Florida Republican Primary Voters, taken Wednesday night, shows Romney with 39% support to Gingrich’s 31%. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum earns 12%, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul runs last with nine percent (9%). MORE

Read more at: http://times247.com/articles/new-polls-mitt-surges-ahead-of-newt

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel released an album of hallucinatory folk-rock called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea that is, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, nothing short of a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, it is lightning caught in a bottle, one of those rare perfect albums that come along maybe once a decade.

Or once a lifetime.

In 1999, Jeff Mangum — Neutral Milk’s singer, songwriter and primary guitarist — disappeared from public life without explanation, declining all entreaties to perform or discuss the album or record a follow-up. Over the course of his decade-long Salinger-like hermitage, succeeding generations have discovered and come to revere the album, and as such it has become something like The Catcher In The Rye of indie-rock.

Two years ago he emerged from seclusion and started performing again, refusing to offer any explanation for his mysterious disappearance or sudden return. No matter. The ambiguity only seems to heighten the intrigue of his legend. Thursday night’s performance at the Irvine Auditorium, at Penn, sold out in 35 seconds.

Taking the stage dressed in a white cranberry-checked cowboy shirt and a droopy gray Mao cap, the 41-year-old Louisiana-born Mangum waved hello, took a seat, strapped on an acoustic guitar and tore into the slashing, Who-like opening chords of “Two-Headed Boy,” blaring the agony and ecstasy of the lyric with his trademark, heart-tugging yelp like it was 1998 all over again. MORE

ROLL CALL: House conservatives head to Philadelphia today for the annual Heritage Foundation Conservative Members Retreat as their movement faces a critical test of its ability to shape the Republican Party agenda. It also comes at a delicate time for House Republicans, who pledged that their Conference members were unified coming out of their own retreat last weekend but still bear the scars of last year’s intraparty battles over the debt ceiling and government spending. “I am much more confident this year that you’re not going to be in a reactive mode the way you were last year,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said at the House GOP retreat in Baltimore. The Virginia Republican also predicted there would be no government shutdown fights this year, a nod to the fact that a large part of 2011 was consumed with such battles, distracting from other parts of the new majority’s agenda. MORE

PHAWKER: Dear #OccupyPhilly, it doesn’t say so in the above story, but we have it on good authority that they are at the Four Seasons. You would be remiss if you didn’t send the welcoming committee over to greet them. Just sayin’.

We’ll have a full report, look for it tomorrow on a Phawker near you!

SALON: Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner, is now the poster boy for what’s terribly wrong with our campaign-finance system. Adelson, you may recall, had, before the South Carolina Republican primary, donated $5 million to the pro-Gingrich Super Pac “Winning Our Future” – giving Newt a pile of money for negative advertising against Mitt Romney in South Carolina. Adelson has done it again. He and his wife Marian have cut another $5 million check for Gingrich to go negative on Romney in Florida. The money won’t go as far as it did in South Carolina – TV ads cost a lot more in Florida – but it’s enough to give the Grinch a solid footing. And, who knows? The Adelsons are billionaires. They might decide to put in another $5 million or perhaps $20 million into Gingrich’s Super Pac. The point is, there’s no limit. Do you know who Sheldon and Marian Adelson are? Do you know what Gingrich has promised them, or what they think they’ll get out of a Grinch presidency? I don’t. Never before in the history of American politics has a single couple given more money to a single candidate and had a bigger impact – all courtesy of the Supreme Court and its grotesque decisions that speech is money and corporations are people under the First Amendment. MORE

RELATED: Two years ago, Justice Scalia cast one of the five votes necessary to unleash unlimited corporate money on American democracy in the Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision. Yet, at a panel in South Carolina this weekend, Scalia tried to lay the blame for the absurd campaign finance system he created at everyone’s feet but his own:

Super PACs have raised more than $30 million just three races into the 2012 presidential race, according to the website opensecrets.org, run by The Center for Responsive Politics. TV advertising alone in South Carolina, which is voting Saturday, is estimated at $12 million, or nearly $27 per voter when calculated using the 2008 Republican primary turnout numbers. […]

Scalia said the blame for this type of system shouldn’t fall on the Supreme Court, which he said decides merely whether the system is legal under the U.S. Constitution. Instead, he said the ones who have to change things are the politicians who created the system and the voters who often reward the candidates who spend the most money. “If the system seems crazy to you, don’t blame it on the court,” Scalia said, during a discussion in front of South Carolina lawyers that lasted for more than an hour. MORE

RELATED: Last year, in perhaps the “most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades,” the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) invalidated a sixty-three year-old ban on corporate and union money directly funding individual candidates in federal elections. The SCOTUS decision sent shockwaves throughout our democracy, with many fearing that it would lead to an overwhelming amount of corporate money flooding out the voices of ordinary people. Now, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has put out a comprehensive analysis to assess the flood of campaign money in last year’s election. One of the most shocking results of the analysis finds that the decision appeared to have a sharply partisan and ideological result. The group found that spending by Super PACs and all outside spending strongly tilted towards conservatives, and that spending by undisclosed donors actually was eight times higher for conservatives than liberals, with conservatives spending $119.6 million to liberals’ $15.7 million. MORE

They play Johnny Brendas Feb. 15th with Air Waves and locals Hurry.

THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT: Could they be the UKs answer to The White Stripes? Charles And Rebecca Are Slow Club. They hail from Sheffield and are a sort of one man band. Only with two people. He strums guitar and sings and she plays drums and all sorts of weird instruments, like water-filled glass bottles, spoons and the back of a wooden chair. And sometimes an organ called MIles. Not something you get to see and hear every day. The effect is rockabilly and somewhat folksy but thankfully their songs are fairly jolly affairs without a bit of teenage angst in sight.