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‘You guys are really quiet,’ says a slightly bemused Conor O’Brien to the enrapt O2 Academy. Such is the respect in the room for the lyrically rich and atmospherically crafted songs that constitute Villagers’ debut album, Becoming A Jackal. Written by O’Brien, who, for all intents and purposes, is Villagers, Becoming A Jackal is an album that began as a sketch (the same sketch which went on to become the album artwork), and whose chief themes combine everything from transfiguration to death. It has seen Villagers nominated for last year’s Mercury Prize and honoured with an Ivor Novello Award for the lead single ‘Becoming A Jackal’, cementing their place on Britain’s musical scene and O’Brien’s reputation as a song writer.

When we talked earlier in the day, O’Brien commented that ‘it’s a weird thing about awards. It’s nice to be nominated, particularly for the less commercially driven ones like the Ivors because it’s voted for by other musicians. But I’m just trying to not let it go to my head and concentrate on writing.’ The success that the last year has brought should certainly be enough to enhance any band’s confidence. Coming off the back of a tour supporting Elbow in arenas across the country, O’Brien felt that ‘our songs seemed to fit in that bigger environment. They’re kind of cinematic and because of that they have the potential to fill the large spaces.’ Asked if that meant he preferred playing the big arenas to the more intimate venues he replied: ‘Not really. You can never pre-determine whether a show is going to be good. It depends entirely upon the atmosphere of the room and the people. It differs from venue to venue.’

There was certainly no sign of any stadium hangover as Villagers took to the stage. O’Brien began the set solo, playing a new song about statues which revealed the humorous side of his song-writing and immediately captured the attention of the crowd. His live renditions differed saliently from the studio versions; ‘The Meaning of the Ritual’ featured the kind of breakdown ending that we are more used to hearing at the end of the album version of ‘Pieces’, whereas ‘Pieces’itself was performed by O’Brien as another simple acoustic solo number.

O’Brien confesses to be ‘too much of a perfectionist when recording. I recorded all the instruments on the album myself and then taught them to the other guys in the band the way that I played them. It’s nice to take the songs on tour because they develop; the guys in the band are all my friends from home and they each develop their own take on the songs.’

The show itself featured four or five new songs including ‘The Bell’ and ‘Memoir’, the latter of which was recently released in collaboration with Charlotte Gainsbourg for Record Store Day. On the possibility of a new albumO’Brien remained elusive: ‘I can sort of see the shape of the new album but it won’t be out for a while – maybe not even next year. Sometimes I go through phases, like now, where I wonder if I’ve lost the ability to write songs just because I haven’t written one for a couple of weeks. I want to be sure that I have a set of songs that are ready to be released and sound like an album. I just hope people will wait around long enough to hear it.’ Judging by the attentive silence of the O2 audience, I am sure that they will.

The music of Haydn floats through the University Church of St Mary’s. Each note is spoken with impeccable diction, voices plucked out to sing brightly over flurried layers of sound. Four musicians are seated before the altar, slowly coaxing glowing lines of song from their Stradivariuses. Suddenly it is brought to a halt. The cellist throws a glance at the vaulted ceiling. ‘What I’m really concerned about is how the articulation is going to sound in here’ he mutters as the quartet launches into a process of democratic consultation, broken only by the sound of a violin or viola testing the church acoustics. The legendary Tokyo String Quartet is warming up.

Founded in 1969 at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, the Tokyo Quartet have come to dominate a position of unparalleled respect. With seven Grammy nominations, the Grand Prix du Disque Montreux and numerous Gramophone magazine nominations, the four musicians truly are the nobility of the classical music world – no mean feat in an obsessively competitive art form. The quartet are in Oxford to play a Japan benefit concert for victims of the earthquake and tsunami. ‘It’s our way of helping out, perhaps not financially but at least in spirit’, explains Kikuei Ikeda, second violin in the quartet. ‘Japan is a country that has experienced many problems. It’s a country that we feel a close connection to. It’s a country to which we often return.’

The quartet’s shifting relationship with Japan is one that has come to define its character. ‘We started off as four Japanese who went to the same school and who were rooted in the same background,’ says Ikeda. Over four decades on the quartet has faced striking cultural changes, not least the arrival of its first non-Japanese member in 1981. ‘There was huge pressure from our management to stay completely Japanese’, Ikeda recalls, ‘after all, we were the Tokyo Quartet! We had been Japanese for twelve years and that had created a culture where we always had to be the same. We tended to hide our personalities in the early years.’ Now composed of a Canadian, a Brit and two Japanese, the quartet seems remarkably free of any cultural tensions. ‘It was a huge change and above all it was a striking language change,’ Ikeda observes of his Western colleagues. ‘But it was what we needed. Cultural differences played a big part in removing us from an insular framework and granting us four independent minds.’ 

The quartet nevertheless remains something of an anomaly within classical music. Four Japanese creating a successful string quartet in the 1970’s within a tradition revolving around “dead white men” was always going to be surprising. While classical music has increasingly found a hungry market in the Far East, the old prejudices still remain. The recent signing of the Seoul Philharmonic to the great German label Deutsche Grammophon caused an uproar among conservative circles earlier this year. Ikeda acknowledges his quartet’s unique position. ‘We were certainly a significant change from the very beginning. To see four Japanese on stage playing classical music shocked many audiences! And we were lucky to emerge at just the right time. Any earlier and we may not have made it.’

So what are the quartet’s plans? ‘The music always comes first. That is very important,’ Ikeda reflects. ‘We‘ve spent the last three years working on Beethoven and it’s been an amazing journey. The musical life of Beethoven was unique – still so full of triumph to the very end’. But it’s time for a shift in the quartet‘s focus. ‘We’d love to revisit the Bartók quartets,’ enthuses Ikeda, ‘our record label, Harmonia Mundi, seems to be the only company that allows us the freedom to record what we want. That’s a wonderful thing. Revisiting works we have recorded before is always an interesting challenge. Tradition is always open to so many interpretations.’

I leave the musicians as they launch into a Schumann quartet, filling the church once more with delicately crafted sound. Classical music has increasingly been struggling with accusations of complacency and stagnation, not least in the unhappy era of arts cuts. The Tokyo Quartet seems to offer up an uncompromising proposition. The old school focus on the established string quartet repertoire is defiantly traditional. Yet the quartet’s supranational history is far from orthodox. In these times of crisis the Tokyo Quartet is a reminder of classical music’s heritage as well as a symbol for its potential to adapt.

Long since dethroned from the position of sound-of-the-moment, the genre of chillwave has taken a sharp downturn in recent times. Over four years since Panda Bear’s seminal Person Pitch helped shape the genre in its infancy, chillwave’s artists have done little to develop their core aesthetic, content instead to rework and refine rather than drastically rethink their sound. And with its washed out textures and dreamy vocals, it would be easy to label Chad Valley’s sophomore EP, Equatorial Ultravox, as yet another unnecessary addition to the already bloated chillwave canon.

Indeed throughout Equatorial Ultravox, Hugo Manuel (the Oxford based musician behind Chad Valley) does not shy away from any of the usual clichés. On ‘I Want Your Love’ and ‘Fast Challenges’, Hugo’s vocals are buried beneath swathes of reverb and swooning synths forming a shimmering bed of sound which is certainly pleasant if slightly anonymous. What’s more, at points throughout the EP the production strays from merely bland to somewhat sickly with gratuitous amounts of autotune layered atop Hugo’s voice.

On occasion, however, Hugo makes a strong case for his relevance alongside his contemporaries; the fleeting moments where his vocals are allowed to take the spotlight are simply spellbinding. Comparisons to the vocal style of Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear) have been numerous, and not entirely misplaced, but Hugo’s voice carries so much more depth and brute force than Lennox’s choirboy delivery. The soaring vocal melodies of standout tracks ‘Acker Bilk’ and ‘Shapeless’ display Hugo’s talents in all their glory; as he moves seamlessly between a full baritone and a glorious, pure falsetto one is struck with a distinct impression of what might have been if only the vocals had not been so obscured elsewhere.

As one of Oxford’s most consistently exciting musicians of the last few years, both as Chad Valley and with the 4 piece Jonquil, it is surprising to see Hugo Manuel so in awe of his influences on Equatorial Ultravox. Whilst this record does display a considerable amount of promise, Hugo is going to have to focus on what makes his project unique if he is going to save Chad Valley from slipping politely into the background in the future.

When I was asked to review an anthology by ‘The Failed Novelists’, I was slightly apprehensive. I’ve been burned before by attempting to appreciate amateur creative writing (my primary school writing club – brrr), and any group actively embracing failure didn’t exactly entice me. Was this going to be some kind of clever-clever ‘ironic’ mess, representing the decline in modern fiction? Or was this going to be some self-righteous postmodern look at the craft of the novel? Either way, I wasn’t anticipating a very fun Saturday morning.

Oh how wrong I was.

Before I get onto the anthology, I should say a little bit about the novelists themselves. The Failed Novelists’ Society is probably the biggest, and certainly the most inclusive, creative writing society in Oxford, allowing anybody to join regardless of experience or accomplishment. The name comes from the idea that all novelists are failed novelists, no matter how well they sell, because what you eventually write will never match the original conception in your head. The importance is to keep on trying, and not be afraid of failure. Many of the society have been published, and the Failed Novelists’ anthology is the only student writing book to be produced in Oxford.

This anthology is a nice mix of styles, taking in poetry and prose and variants within those classifications. Selena Wisnom’s Underwater Archaeology is a skilfully structured piece, following the thoughts of an archaeologist reminiscing about her time at Oxford. As she dives into the silent seas she is more concerned with finding relics of an ancient past than preserving her own, letting happy memories fade like a peeling photograph.

Another narrative by James Benmore, Bitter, is a fascinating character study. As Terry consoles his recently jilted friend, we grow to realize the unreliability of our narrator and the simmering, unspoken bitterness that comes from Terry’s treatment by his friends. The whole piece rings true, with a striking maturity considering the age of the author. In fact, I’d say that about many of the works within the anthology, such as the poem Giraffe in a Palestinian Zoo, by Tom Nailor. Opening with a quotation from the Qur’an, the piece tackles the thorny subject of the Israeli-Palestine war by looking at the death of a truly innocent bystander: the giraffe of the title. The Giraffe has no concept of war, but is a casualty of the conflict just the same with his death described in grim medical detail. The poem is an inspired take on the cost on innocent life in war, and on forced sacrifice.

My favourite piece in the anthology has to be Ling Low’s She Danced the Robot, an achingly realistic take on first love. The story follows the young protagonist’s realization about the fickle nature of attraction, and is full of wry observations and laugh-out-loud moments. Anyone who’s been in love, been to a club or even just been a teenager will find much to love in this very sweet story.

I don’t have enough space here to mention all the authors, but I would like to say that while some pieces are a little rough around the edges, the varied writing in the anthology is of a very high quality. Some of the poetry was a little over my head, but there’s something here for everyone. One word comes to my mind now thinking about the Failed Novelists:

Success.