It’s already been established that if I was a Frenchman I’d spend my days traversing the streets of Paris draped in YSL, sucking on Marlboros and listening to early Kills in an effort to get mistaked for Roman Duris.

Naturally an interest in culture would have to be incorporated into such a identity scam and thanks to the French arm of Red Bull Music Academy and the ever excellent 12 Mail event space I could spend my evenings admiring the photography of Sophie Bramley – one of the first to visually document the nascent hip hop scene exploding out of the Bronx in the early 80s.

More photos and information in French here and also a Facebook event page for fans of social networks

The debate over vinyl vs digital will rage on as long as people still make records – which I hope is a very long time!

Personally, one of the  many joys of record purchasing is ambling through the discarded records in second hand stores and marvelling at the artwork of vinyl from days gone by. A recent spare hour or so in Brighton was spent rifling through the record boxes of the excellent Snoopers Paradise thrift store, with the surrounding images the most memorable finds.

A couple of Friday’s back I was invited to play at Superdisco at the small but perfectly formed Gold Bar in Stoke Newington. Painkillers, copious amounts of booze and kebebs were consumed, disco music was played, lots of fun was had by all and  like Boswell to my Johnson, Tom was present to record it all with his magic soul capturing lantern.

If you ever want to stalk our own Tom Medwell, then a good place to start is Dice Club, seeing as he’s always going on about just how good it is.

Hosted by Heidi Heelz, it all goes down on the third Thursday of every month at The Legion in Old Street and is possibly the only club in London where you can let the roll of a die decide both your choice of drink and how much you pay for it.

Last month saw The Vichy Government and Joy Rides tread the boards and Tom was there to record it all for future generations of Shoreditch anthropologists.

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As you have hopefully noticed we’ve had a bit of a relaunch this week. Never ones to miss a chance to drink  free beers and have a party we took over Cargo last Saturday to celebrate.

Thankfully whilst our memory of the night might have been obliterated by the aforementioned free booze (except oddly enough one curious Frankie Goes To Hollywood nipple tweaking incident), Tom Medwell was on hand with his trusty camera to record the night for historians to ponder over.

Big thanks to everyone who came down, to Cargo for hosting us and especially to Trevor Jackson, Leo Zero, Grovesnor, I Haunt Wizards and Kinema (new favourite band!) for playing.

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Personally here at the Fringe we like nothing better than to kick back on a Sunday and check out the latest crop of hard faced strippers sliding down the greasy pole of success at London’s finest gentleman’s clubs.

So you can only imagine our horror last weekend to find our live grumble show at Metropolis had been given the boot to make way for  the not particularly erotic sounding Margaret and her arty electro  mates.

Hard to believe I know, luckily Tom Medwell was on hand to capture the filth. I’ll be writing to my MP you know.

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Whilst Sunday’s siren call of sofa and post roast snooze is busy seducing most of London, those looking for a truly decadent end to the weekend have been flocking to a refurbished Victorian bath house in the city where the likes of Roxy Velvet, Miss Vicky Butterfly, Kitty Bang Bang and friends hold court at the Boom Boom Club each week.

We dispatched Tom Medwell down camera in hand to catch the action.

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Last Saturday Vice threw themselves a ‘warehouse’ party in Shoreditch with the likes of LA hardcore punks The Bronx, (also moonlighting as El Bronx), Crystal Fighters, Lovvers and Lovefoxxx from CSS playing. Slutty Fringe photographer-in-chief Tom Medwell braved the moshpit to report back.

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