I’m honoured and excited to be nominated in the ‘Rising Star’ catergory for 2012 Sony Radio Academy Awards !
*cliche alert* … obviously winning would be wonderful, however just being nominated still feels good !
I’ve had and continue to have a great time working at KISS, from presenting shows, the artists I’ve been lucky enough to interview and the great events our team put on !
So on May 14th we shall see what happens !
Voting closing on Tuesday May 1st , if you’d like to vote for me, please do so below !
So last night myself and the KISS crew went down to London’s 02 Arena for the 32nd annual Brit Awards.
It was my first time going down there and after watching the event on TV every year, I can’t lie my inner 13 year old was pretty happy to be attending….inner teen also flipped out a little meeting Lizo Mzimba, he was my Newsround presenter growing up, so it was a sly moment, lol !
We staked our place on the red carpet and got chatting to a bunch of nominees and past winners including man of the moment Ed Sheeran who is still endearingly mortified by his fame, Dizzee Rascal who truly lived up to his name and the super talented Labrinth who’s album I’m really looking forward to hearing.
Performance wise, my favourite has to be Rihanna’s just because it was pure fun, obviously Adele vocally slayed every body and we thank the Doctor who did her recent throat surgery !
After Adele’s Best Album speech was cut short, she addressed us all in the winner’s conference room to explain that her bird flip was aimed “at the suits and not her fans “ ( I like you MIA but take note !) …you’d be pissed off too, especially if you were Brit school alumni !
Really enjoyed Blur’s performance too, need to be getting some tickets for that Olympics gig they’re doing in August. I read Alex James book last summer and knowing what he’s been up to in the past makes listening to their music that bit more enjoyable !
…..anyways I digress ! Check out below for the wrap up video and full interviews with all the artists….until next year !
I was gonna write a big old blog about Whitney Houston’s death but I’d probably state all things that you’ve already read and heard.
Simply put, I’m gutted she passed away. For me the mark of all my favourite ‘diva’ type singers and I’m talking of the Mariah, Aretha Celine *cough*, Beyonce, Tina ….and of course Whitney variety is the ‘in between song chat’ , that special rapport with their fans that leads up to a great performance.
Whitney had ‘in between song chat’ skills and then some !
I’m in pain. I’ve been in pain for the past 3 weeks because KISS have put me on a fitness programme with Virgin Active for their ’ Indoor TRYathlon ‘ challenge, where I’ve exercised more in these past 3 weeks than I have in the past 2 years !
I won’t lie, it’s been a mission dragging myself out of bed before 6am for the training but it has left me feeling better. Some cheeky thing on twitter ( who I shall not expose because I’m lady) dared say I was lying about going to the gym and tweeting from bed. That is not the case, I am on this !
Anyways, I’m not it doing alone, so join me on my mission, as I know you want to look buff in Summer too !
Check out the video and link below for more details on the challenge plus you could win yourself an iPod shuffle, some gym gear and most importantly 1 year’s worth of FREE Virgin Active membership
…oh yeah, don’t laugh at my exercise face, Thanks.
*** Update :
I removed the video, it kept starting automatically everytime a person visited this page !
Whether you take them as a serious marker of what’s going on in the music industry or you just like the TV show, The Brit Awards always get people talking!
I headed down to the nominations launch tonight to chat to the artists who had their fingers crossed for an award nod .
The organisers did things a little differently this year and rather than being told before the event, artists found out if they were nominated on arrival !
Ed Sheeran lead the male pack with 4 and Jessie J is up for 3 ( for the full list of nominees, click here ! )
Two of the biggest shocks for me were Wretch 32 and Katy B who received no nominations, which is crazy as they both had great success last year ( both scored top 5 albums and top 10 ten singles) and most importantly make music that is so quintessentially BRITISH ! I’ll be pouring a little liquor for them tonight !
I’m happy that Pro Green was nominated for Best British Male after he was left out from The Brits in 2010, he’s been working hard for years so it’s nice to see it pay off.
..anyways that’s my 2 cents, check out the round up of the event !
….and for nostalgia’s sake, one of the BEST Brits Performances ever..yeah I said it !
…’cool’ choice below Dizzee and Florence smashed it. I became a Florence fan after this.
I was very grateful to be sent some lovely treats from Nivea recently….
The website picture is a touch more glamourous, but I thought I’d post the real products as I really have been using them!
I definitely recommend the Invisible anti-deo and the SOS Lipsalve is very good in this current climate !
Luckily these treats weren’t a sly hint that I smell and have crusty lips ( well at least I hope not!) but a belated Christmas gift from two lovely ladies who work for Nivea with who I travelled to my motherland of Ghana at the end of 2011.
We made this trip for KISS and the Charity Plan UK for their ’Because I am A Girl Campaign’ .
When looking at the African continent, Ghana has always maintained a good reputation for being generally peaceful and welcoming to visitors, however one issue that I was totally oblivious to being a big problem there is gender discrimination.
Thousands of young women in Ghana suffer from a number of issues including, sexual harrassment at school, genital mutilation and practice called Trokosi where young girls are essentially enslaved and work for shrines as a religious sacrifice for the wrong doings of a family member.
Plan have been doing some incredible work to help combat the hardships females face in Ghana by starting the ‘ Girls Making Media Project’ a great initiative that teaches girls ( and a fair quota of boys!) in secondary schools journalism and radio skills.
It encourages them to express themselves, understand that they deserve a right to live equally to their male counterparts as well as prepare them for future careers in the media.
We visited schools where the local sects of the project gave us presentations on their work, we also visited the radio stations where they get to practice their skills and discuss their daily issues.
The young people I met were really impressive and it was great to hear and more importantly see how ’Girl’s Making Media’ had impacted their lives positively. I interviewed some of the girls and the recurring theme was the notice in change of attitude in behaviour from their male peers towards them since getting involved with this project and more courage to share their opinion on general things, something I believe we take for granted here in the UK.
Check out this short film of our trip….
If you want find out more about what Plan is doing click here !
Since January of 2011, I’ve had the pleasure of doing the voice over for The Official Top 40 for MTV. This job finds me standing in delightful little recording booth on a weekly basis letting people know what the state of the chart is.
Doing this has allowed me to learn about the Great British public’s music buying habits and along the course of this year I have learnt that ….
a) Songs from adverts featuring little boys preparing for Christmas are always a winner.
b) David Guetta just needs to make a tune with your mum and then he’s worked with everyone.
c) People like Adele, a lot.
In no particular order, here’s the 6 tunes that I’ve enjoyed saying “…and at number X is… !”
# 1 …The first time I heard this song, I specifically remember thinking ”who the hell is this ?” and ironically, it was a girl singing about heaven. Such a strong but sincere voice and the way the strings hit you from the start is incredible. I’m glad that she’s the winner of The Brits Critic’s Choice award, we need more women like Emeli Sande in the charts…. oh yeah check 02:06 for my friend Sharma’s gorgeous baby boy!
Chart Position : 2
#2… After ‘ that incident’ I thought Chris Brown was done, but he came back hard with the ‘F.A.M.E.’ album which spawned a tonne of hits. This year saw a lot of R&B artists jumping on the Euro house sound, some doing it well… A LOT doing it not so well ! Breezy pulled it off, it’s a vibesy track and an admitted guilty pleasure amongst many of my friends !
Chart Position : 4
#3…. ‘ On A Mission’ is my favourite album of 2011. I like Katy B because she’s just any girl from South London who likes to sing and go out with her mates and you really feel that in every song. ’Easy Please Me’ is my pick as lyrically it just made me and other females I know smile, too many quotables ! Look forward to hearing her second album.
Chart Position: 25
#4… You know I had to put a Beyonce tune in here ! ‘Love On Top’ is the most recent release from her ’4′ album. It’s standard feel good business, there’s multiple key changes and gold suits in the video, so I was sold.
Chart Position : 22
#5… Okay so technically it didn’t come out in 2011, it was originally released in 1996 ( ’97 in the UK), but thanks to the ladies of Little Mix ( and Kelly Rowland’s well taken advice) performing this on the The X Factor welcomed the original by En Vogue back into the Top 40. I went to their gig at Indig02 at the end of last year and left a bigger fan, those women can really sing. Dawn, Terri, Maxine and Cindy , salute!
Chart Position : 23
#6 According to Q Magazine’s award show and various other publications Lizzy Grant aka Lana Del Ray is ’ The Next Big Thing’ and understandably so. Her voice and songs are refreshing. I wanted to post ’Blue Jeans’ but it reached #119 respectively. So here’s the equally wonderful ‘Video Games’ .
Chart Position : 9
If you want to keep up to date with the chart in 2012, check out when you can catch the next show right here . Have a great new year. X
Amy Winehouse sadly died in July of this year, her posthumous #1 album ‘Lioness : Hidden Treasures’ was released around 3 weeks ago and I’m only just writing about it now.
Mainly because at the time, I didn’t have this blog and 140 characters on twitter weren’t always enough for the Amy lyrics I kept obsessively tweeting for the first few weeks after she passed away…. and simply because, like all the millions of people who invested in her music, I will forever be gutted about her death.
I first heard her sing on a late night TV show called Heavy TV that used be presented by Radio 1′s Nihal and a group of assorted industry heads. She was promoting ’Stronger Than Me’ from her debut album Frank, accompanied by just her guitar, she sang and after watching her perform I was a fan.
Here was a girl singing with honesty and humour that you couldn’t help but like which was refreshing, considering at that time The Cheeky Girls had scored at top 3 hit and the nation was becoming obsessed with Katie Melua.
The first time I heard her sing live was in a record shop off Carnaby Street, London called Deal Real. They used to have open mic nights for MC’s and singers with artists like Lowkey and Estelle being regulars.
On one of their ladies night, Amy rolled through to perform and I became a bigger fan… you might recognise the girl with the red head band
Fast forward 8 years . 2 albums, 1 Brit Award, 3 Ivor Novellos and 5 Grammy’s later, on July 23rd 2011, she sadly died. Linked to her well publicised battle with alcohol and drug addiction, although her Dad had maintained that she was clean at the time of her passing.
She hadn’t released a new album since 2006, so fans and media looking to her record label and family to allow any new material to see the light of day was inevitable.
Bring forth ‘ Lioness : Hidden Treasures ‘ a collection of Amy’s songs chosen by her family and notable producers/close friends Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson as well as Phil Ramone and Paul O Duffy respectively.
In the week of it’s release I had a conversation with a friend who was understandably sceptical about it. Questions being, should she just have been remembered with ‘Frank’ and ‘Back To Black’ ? Was the album going to sound mismatched and hurried? Was it just an extra money spinner for the label ?
All of them valid questions …and since I bought my copy I’ve listened to it often, trying to remain unbiased with no expectation. I’m not gonna do a song by song review but I will say this album is a joy to listen to, as I believe it catches Amy at some of the best phases of her career.
Original songs ‘Like Smoke’ (ft. Nas) , ‘Half Time’ and ‘Between The Cheats’ instantly make you see her at home with pen to paper or belting it out in a studio . Whether she’s effortlessly scatting on standards like ‘ The Girl From Ipanema’ or exalting classics like ‘ A Song For You’ and ‘ Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ , dead or alive, make no mistake this is a consistent Amy record.
Her father Mitch has recently said that even though he and her mother Janis helped to curate the record, they still can not bring themselves to listen to it from start to finish.
Incredible as her music is, it does feel kind of selfish to grieve about the loss of her talent, as with all the hype that surrounded that day in July it’s easy to forget the primary event of two people unnecessarily losing their child.
With ‘Lioness : Hidden Treasures’, I say purchase and be reminded of why you first got hip to The Winehouse, £1 from you doing so goes to the charity set up in her name
The first single from the album, ’ Body & Soul’ a duet with the legendary Tony Bennett has been nominated for the ’best pop duo/group performance’ at The Grammy Awards , which will take place in February next year.
Black Keys, Coldplay, Foster The People and Maroon 5 & Christina Aguilera, have also been nominated and with all the bias in the world, I think her and Tony should win.
The music is beautiful and their vocals blend perfectly. The video shows Amy looking the best she had for a minute, in unashamed awe of her new mate ’Tone’ and most importantly, happy to be singing.
I’m a slight Beyonce stan. Not the type to call her ‘Beysus’ or punch someone for not liking her but I shall defend her as the best contemporary ’commercial’ R&B star music has seen for a long time.
So imagine the joy when these treats were delivered to the office yesterday!
I would like to think that the card was freshly signed by the hand of the lady herself with her saying …*Texan accent* ” I like that Clara, I’m gon’ send her a gif’ “….delusion aside, let’s talk about the DVD, that came with it, ’Beyonce : Live At Roseland, Elements of 4′
It’s been well documented that Beyonce was exhausted after the release and subsequent touring of the ‘ I Am..’ project, so she took a year long break (kind of) and came through with her latest album ’4′.
Fans had been hungry for new material from her and she definitely came through with great music, if not her best to date.
All the singles released so far whether ballads or party tracks have been bangers.
Around the album’s release she became the first woman to headline The Pyramid stage at Glastonbury as well as put on an incredible show at The Shepherds Bush Empire, all off which are featured in this DVD as well as her main performance at New York’s Roseland Ballroom.
Bear in mind she was secretly in the early stages of pregnancy, performing at more than 100% and to be honest better than most of her peers, it’s safe to say Beyonce does not play.
She may be on maternity leave but she doesn’t want us to forget her, hence this DVD release.
I promised a friend, that I won’t watch the DVD without her, she’ll hurt me if I do. I’ve behaved by watching preview snippets, like this one below, probably my favourite song from the album, ‘ End Of Time’ .
She said she was inspired by all things African making this track and you can really hear that, the beats sound so similar to the Ghanaian pop music aka ‘Highlife’ I heard when I was in Ghana recently.
So enjoy and if you’re a borderline or closet Beyonce stan, treat yourself to the DVD, it may just tip you over the edge….
Must say those people who make whatever 'statement' it is they do by following nobody annoy me as much as #teamfollowback...there I said it! 12 hours ago
Timeline cull, missing out on too much funny stuff. 12 hours ago
