Credit: Found On Internet

Sweet Jesus above, has it finished already? The time has come for Music Towers to cast its collective eye over the past 12 months and see which bits stand out the most, to present to you here in handy bite-size chunks. So in the year a member of McFly set fire to his pubic hair onstage and Meg White didn’t make a sex tape,

behold – the Music Towers Almanac!

THE GOOD

As physical sales continued to slide into the abyss (with most high street shops not even bothering to stock CD singles at all anymore), the digital market repeatedly rattled the industry’s cage. Radiohead shitted everyone us for a while with their ‘pay-whatever-you-want’ release-come-self-leak of ‘In Rainbows’, while The Charlatans and The Crimea put their new albums out to download for anyone who cared to click. Dear old Ash made a bit of a boo-boo, announcing they were going to start releasing albums following ‘Twilight of the Innocents’, to concentrate on just single track web releases. It was just a shame that they apparently lost the ability to write a killer song at the same time. Hell, even Cliff Richard was getting in on the digital innovation game somewhat, with his new album going down in price based on the number of pre-orders made through his website.

From out of nowhere, Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip have been a constant source of surprise. Despite ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ having all the hallmarks of pure one-hit-wonder, their live shows have shown there’s more to them than just scenesters shouting “Just A Band!” without realising the irony. Then there’s their ability to produce killer track after killer track – ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’, ‘A Letter From God To Man’, and the Dizzee Rascal-sampling, UK hip hop-berating ‘Fixed’. The prospect of an album this year has us salivating.

Nine Inch Nails took the Carling Weekend by the scruff of the neck in what proved to be the best live performance of the year. The deviant dwarf, Prince, also proved that he hasn’t lost a thing when Music Towers hustled our way into his exclusive star-studded gig at Koko. Of course, getting the first ever Music Towers Weekender off the ground (many thanks to everyone who played, helped out, or just came and watched) was another live highlight. One of our acts, Eugene McGuinness, has already been clocking up column inches in the national press and getting airplay on BBC 6Music. If the rumour mill is to be believed, you’ll be seeing a lot more of one of our headliners, Ebony Bones, in 2008, and on much bigger stages to boot. The discovery (well, for us anyway) of The Vigours and Knight of the Nine Times Table was an added bonus. Of course, big shout outs to Mariachi, Naughty Jack (aka Adam Morley), 4tRECK, Louis Hall, Kania Tieffer, and lastly but not leastly to White Russians, who stepped in to fill a headline slot at very short notice.