‘Forum on DIY Mainstream’ is a panel discussion taking place at Holywell Music Room in Oxford on 22 May. A selection of panellists have been chosen to represent different areas of the music industry, and each will give a short talk about their activity, with it all followed by a Q&A discussion with the audience.

The forum is hosted by 6Music’s Tom Robinson (who has championed many an Oxford band in the past), and the panellists are as follows:

• Fred Bolza: Vice President Creative, Sony Music
• Mike Williams: Deputy Editor, NME
• Jane Abernethy: A&R/Product Manager, 4AD
• Sean Adams: Founder, DrownedInSound.com
• Ian Wallen: Independent record producer and Head Of Audio Production at SAE Institute Oxford
• Gary Smith: Owner, Truck Store/Rapture Records
• Paolo Campana: Film director, Vinylmania
• Graham Jones: Author, Last Shop Standing
• Simon Sellars: Copyright and piracy expert, Manches (international law firm)

Quite a mix of names and specialities there, so it looks like it’ll be an great discussion for anybody that’s interested in music or part of the scene/industry/etc in some form.

The forum begins at 7.00 pm and will last for 90 minutes. Want more? Go on then, here’s some more. The same venue will, following the forum, host acoustic sets from both Kill Murray and Stornoway. A single ticket price gets you access to the whole shebang – forum and concert.

Tickets cost £20, or £15 for students, and are available from the OXDOX website which, obviously, is packed full of more information about this and the other OXDOX events.

Here’s the full track listing for the show. You can listen to it from 9.00 pm on Sunday 20 May at BBC Oxford.

20/05/2012
The Old Grinding Young — ‘Lately I’ve Been Seeing Stars’
Wild Swim — ‘Hard Dust’
Mutagenocide — ‘Fists Of Steel’
Cornbury Music Festival preview with organiser Hugh Phillimore
Neon Pulse — ‘Blue Sky Thinker’
Aurora J Young — ‘Charmer’
Robots With Souls — ‘Watch Out!’
Truck Festival preview with Ralph Broadbent from Y Not Festival
Pixel Fix — ‘Rome’
Jackel — ‘Heart Throb’
Gig guide
Stornoway — ‘You Don’t Know Anything’

The venue was respectably – if sparsely – populated when opening act Komrad took to the stage, but more and more people piled in throughout the course of their set. Pound for pound, Komrad had more musical ideas going on than all of the other bands combined – often in the space of one song. Opening track ‘Robotmen’, for example, sounds like the soundtrack to a broken circuit and could probably be compartmentalised into an EPs worth of material. Watching guitarists Jimmy Hetherington and Russ Blaine shimmy up and down their respective fretboards so nonchalantly is quite disconcerting and I come away with something akin to penis envy. The rhythm section of drummer James Currie and bassist Dave Cranwell lock into some incredibly shifty, tumultuous grooves while James Greene half screams, half croons about parking restrictions in seaside towns and various other gripes. It’s hard to describe what Komrad do really – they’re kind of like Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band meets Faith No More. ‘Cowley Necktie’, their perennial set-closer and the band’s twisted ode to Cowley Road, is the song that finds the band at their most triumphant, head-nodding, crowd-pleasing best. An odd but excellent start to the night.

Oxford’s crowning stoner rock titans Desert Storm waste no time kicking into some mighty sand-swept grooves with frontman Matt Ryan temporarily transposed into the form of a whiskey-soaked and highly volatile Southern deviant. ‘Ol’ Town’, ‘Cosmic Drips’ and ‘Astral Planes’ all contain riffs that are pretty much too good to be true, kicking up almighty dust clouds along the imagined dirt-roads that the band are traversing. Sure there are occasional hints of Clutch, Kyuss, Sleep and Pantera throughout their set but one of Desert Storm’s strengths is being able to balance their influences with their own take on the genre, all with a sly sense of not taking themselves too seriously. They nod in unison, Chris Benoist rocks out with his legs spread dangerously far apart and Matt Ryan riles the crowd into a beer and Orange Goblin sized frenzy. It’s fair to say that the Oxford lot have done themselves proud tonight and Desert Storm prove that no-one in Oxford cuts a groove quite like these guys.

Next up are Orange Goblin’s touring mates, Plymouth’s good-time party band Grifter. One of Grifter’s biggest selling-points is frontman Ollie Styall who is as good an entertainer as you could ask for, the perfect hype man to get the crowd ready for Orange Goblin. In between songs about Guinness, buck-toothed women and “rock n’ roll” Stygall talks about Guinness, buck-toothed women and rock n’ roll, and wins the ever-cynical Oxford crowd over – no mean feat. Musically the band touch base with AC/DC, early Slade, Motorhead, even Spinal Tap on a few occasions (that’s no insult, Spinal Tap fucking rule) and even knock out a damn fine cover of ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ by Black Sabbath. The guys then reveal that one of their songs, ‘Sweat Like Horses’, is going to be used in the new series of Dog: Bounty Hunter. You get the picture – these guys aren’t out to change the world, they’re just making good ol’ fashioned rock n’ roll and the now-packed O2 Academy lap it up.

Orange Goblin. Got to be honest, not a massive fan – some of their stuff I can listen to, some of their stuff I tend to tune-out for. Last time they played in Oxford at the Regal I thought they were abysmal and over-hyped beyond belief. Tonight, in the smaller, cosier confines of the O2 they actually came across far better in contrast. Frontman/giant Ben Ward spends the first five to ten minutes of their set stomping around the stage, drinking beer, pushing the microphone stand out into the crowd and shaking his beefy arms in the air (presumably to appease/arouse the gods of rock or something) before the band cut into a set heavily composed of the new album with a handful of oldies thrown-in for, y’know, the oldies in attendance. The new album, apparently something of a return to form for the band after a few misses, is best represented by ‘Red Tide Rising’, a song designed to get the crowd moving. But it’s one the evening’s mellower moments that really wins me over – ‘Time Travelling Blues’, one of the band’s most beloved songs, a sort of homage to the lazy, nostalgic rock n’ roll of Lynyrd Skynyrd et al. But if the best that be said about your set is that it’s highly derivative or ‘alright’ then something is clearly off. The musicianship throughout is excellent but the content is too safe, too stale and too predictable to warrant the heroic reception these guys receive.

By Tom McKibbin

There’s a whole lost of live music on offer, as follows…

Saturday 2 June: 3.00 pm-12.00 am

• Wild Swim
• Black Hats
• Deer Chicago
• Dance a la Plage
• Hot Hooves
• The Old Grinding Young
• Jess & Ness

Sunday 3 June: 3.00 pm-11.00 pm

• The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band
• The Lampost Gullivers
• Matt Winkworth & the Winkworthers Originals
• Co-Pilgrim
• Flights Of Helios
• We Aeronauts
• The Cooling Pearls
• Swindlestock
• The Yarns

As well as the live music there will be DJ sets from Truck Store people and Anyone Can Cue Up CDs and, if the weather is good (or even if not), afternoon tea, a BBQ, arts and crafts stalls and a charity auction raising money for Fusion Arts and The Gatehouse.

Tickets are £8 per day (£6 per day for NUS), and a weekend ticket is available at an early bird price of £14. Buy tickets here and check out the Jubilee Jam Facebook event page.

The first night will run from 10.30 pm to 12.30 am on Wednesday 16 May, and feature acoustic folk from Elliott James, ‘Barefoot Busker’ John Ruddock and a performance from Fuller herself.

Find more information at the Facebook event page for Turl Street Tales, and check out Kate Fuller’s website.

Saturday 12 May, 4.30 pm: Northern Sounds and Cellar gig
This is the world premiere, at Oxford’s Ultimate Picture Palace, of Alain Boegner’s Northern Sounds, a two-hour ‘road trip’ through the Nordic music scene. Ticket buyers can also get a combined ticket including entry to gig at the Cellar that evening, which starts at 7.45 pm and features Listing Ships, Nøught and Wild Swim.

Tuesday 15 May, 7.00 pm: Anyone Can Play Guitar
The final Oxford screening (for a while, at least) of Jon Spira’s Oxford music documentary Anyone Can Play Guitar, at the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford. To be followed by a Q&A with Spira at Truck Store on Cowley Road, and Alphabet Backwards playing live instore.

Sunday 20 May: Vinylmania and Marley
Two screenings on this day, both at Oxford’s Ultimate Picture Palace – at 4.15 pm it’s Vinylmania, exploring the persistent passion for the vinyl format. There’s a Q&A with the director at Truck Store afterwards. At 6.00 pm, back at the UPP, it’s Marley, Kevin MacDonald’s comprehensive history of Bob Marley.

Tuesday 22 May, 7.00 pm: Music forum on DIY Mainstream and Stornoway Concert
A discussion taking place at Holywell Music Room in Oxford, which will see panellists from NME, Sony Music, 4AD, DrownedInSound, Truck/Rapture Records and more talking about the state of ‘DIY Mainstream’ in this country. Followed up at 9.30 pm by an acoustic Stornoway concert at the same venue, also featuring an acoustic set by Kill Murray.

Thursday 24 May, 9.00 pm: Turksib and Bronnt Industries Kapital
Turksib is a 1929 Russian silent film charting the building of the Turkestan-Siberian railway: “one of the most breathtaking documentaries ever shot”. Bronnt Industries Kapital – who you may have seen at Oxford festival Audioscope in 2009 – will be performing a live electro-acoustic soundtrack, mixing melody, drone and rhythm to complement the imagery.

Tickets for these events and, of course, all of the other OXDOX happenings, are available through the OXDOX website.