Red Stripe Music Award

The Red Stripe Music Awards Final

The count is in; the people have spoken… smoke at the Vatican! The four finalists for the 2008 Red Stripe Music Awards have been decided and short of flapping around; here’s the winning artists… in no particular order.

Klaus Says Buy The Record
This Brighton based songsman is already renowned for his elastic live show, the rousing poet combining the utterly pop with the fantastically theatrical. His Jamie T spliced with Paul Heaton manner is a jocular and whimsically lyrical feast of menacing adolescent excitement with well-nourished flashes of Get Cape Wear Cape Fly.

Kiddo
This Edinburgh four-piece makes music so mischievously charming you’re as carried away on their songs as you would be Good Shoes or dare we say, The Cure. Uber-catchy pop songs, delightfully delivered with a refreshing sense of on-stage cohesion.

The Down and Outs
Like Vampire Weekend, The Down and Outs know how to make a melody that wraps around your life, itching the sun-loving inner Beatles fan with a vocal jumble of lyrical whips so sharp they pierce the British weather with massive beams of musical sunlight.

O Fracas
We’re still not a hundred per cent sure how to pronounce their name, but we do know that they make a different sound to most other bands in the UK. From the outlandish catchiness of their weirdo dark-pop to the undertone of vaudevillian vocals and pianos, they meet the oddball with the custom and make it sound belligerent.

The bands will be playing live at the Kentish Town Forum, London on May 12th along with headliners Dirty Pretty Things, The Wallbirds and last years RSMA winner The Runners. The winner will walk away with a headline slot at the extraordinarily billed Red Stripe Great Escape Festival in Brighton, playing alongside One Night Only and Jo Lean and the Jing Jang Jong, as well as appearing at this years’ highly acclaimed Blissfields Festival.

They’ll also get to play the summer highlight Lovebox Festival and best of all will have a fully functional tour bus to keep them on the road to going somewhere fast.

These four disarming bands have been selected from over 1,000 applicants who applied online for this years event, which went on to make the carefully selected 200 performing acts of the competition across 52 nights, starting way back in January 2008. The award was set up to champion real talent at its grass-roots stage and the final 200 were carefully researched by a team of Red Stripe and Barfly music-obsessed aficionados in an extensive A&R process to deliver what we hope should be an incredible night of rock ‘n’ roll.

How To Get Your Tickets:

To join us down at The Forum on Monday 12 May, you can apply for FREE tickets via Ticketmaster now. Of course it’s first come, first serve as it is with all of the free Red Stripe shows, and as always – we’ll see you down at the front.

We’d like to thank all the venues and promoters who made the Red Stripe Music Awards 2008 the unforgettable event it has been. Most of all, however, we’d like to thank all the bands that performed, and the people who showed their support at the gigs, without whom this would have been utterly meaningless. Red Stripe has been at every single one of the shows and all we can hope for is that the bands and fans had as much fun as we did.

Red Stripe Music Award Venues

The following venues have taken part in the Red Stripe Music Awards Tour 2008.