All About ...The 12th Swindon Shuffle

Yes, it’s that time of year again. With the 12th Swindon Shuffle making its way over the musical horizon lets look at a few of the main attractions. Taking place between 11th and 15th of July, occupying five venues in Old Town and hosting nearly 50 artists and other musical events, doing The Shuffle is the perfect blend of eclectic musical programming, cool venues and geographical proximity. A weekend of mixing and matching, new musical experiences and old favourites, friends, socialising, fun and frolics, all the while raising money for mental health charity Mind.

You will need to check out the website to properly plan your route through the weekend (http://www.swindonshuffle.org.uk) but here is a taster of its sonic scope and musical range. Thursday sees local heroes Slagerij make a rare Swindon appearance for a night of boisterous pop punk, whilst Canute’s Plastic Army play a more folky-blues hand at The Tuppenny. There is also a live band driven hip-hop session at Baila.

Friday sees incendiary blues infused alt-rock from The Harlers at The Victoria, SNDubstation doing their ska-pop-dance thing at The Castle and Baila being the final destination for the DJ after-party.

On Saturday mercurial post-pop wonders and 6 Music favourites Wasuremono head a very cool, cutting edge session at The Victoria, Sex Jazz fly the flag for the strange and the groovesome at The Beehive and Josh Wolfsohn leads the gentlest of acoustic charges at The Tuppenny. As always it’s all back to Baila to round off the night.

Finally Sunday sees more acoustic music at The Tuppenny including the brilliant Emily-Jane Sheppard before the now legendary finale Beehive session puts the weekend to bed with a bang courtesy of country-folk troubadours True Strays.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg, and if you can’t find lots to like over such a celebration of live, original creativity, then maybe music isn’t for you. - Dave Franklin