The lovely people over at Sonic Cathedral, who some of you may know from their Rock n Roll Soul summer specials on the Island over the last couple of years, are out on a small tour with Mark Gardner, who used to sing for the very wonderful Ride back in the day. There are three dates but of particular interest to us is the Liverpool gig as Paperlung are playing, which is Sice from the very wonderful and sadly lamented Boo Radleys’ new band. You can download their demos from Paperlung website, it starts at 10pm goes on till 3am and it’s at Korova, a very nice new bar/venue co-owned by Ladytron.

Sad to see that our friends Dave Metaxas and Sandra will be leaving the Island next week, they are moving to Prague to live after some travelling, sure everyone who knows them (who could forget Teccy’s fine Lobster Boy costume from the Ballagroove party at the Creg Malin some years ago !!) will join us in wishing them all the best for the future, have fun folks !!

Download | Songbirdnest.com:

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox’s browser engine. It’s is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions.

Ars Technica have some great coverage, as ever. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out, think they’re trying to pitch it as a competitor to the iTunes monopoly. I agree with what Ars say about the difficulties of multiple online stores, though perhaps a well-written plugin for stores to share a common payment gateway such as PayPal may overcome this, or, as Ars suggest, someone may step up and create a new one. At any rate, it’s worth keeping an eye on Songbird, she might well grow up and sing?