25 June 2011

Richard Ashcroft to perform at TaKLIBERTY Festival in New Jersey


It has a cumbersome name, but the lineup is pretty slick. NYC radio station Rock 101.9 RXP's TaKLIBERTY (pronounced "take liberty") festival will bring Coldplay, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Richard Ashcroft, the Kooks, and other contemporary rock bands to the PNC Bank Arts Festival in Holmdel, New Jersey on September 18. There will be music on two stages, and the radio station promises that there will be more big names announced in coming weeks.

So far, TaKLIBERTY has a distinctly Glastonbury-like feel to it. Most of the bands committed to playing the festival are from the British Isles. Coldplay, the most popular of the TaKLIBERTY bands, will arrive in advance of its as-yet-unnamed fifth album; "Every Teardrop a Waterfall," the lead single, is currently climbing the American charts.

Richard Ashcroft was the frontman of The Verve, a Northern English group whose "Bittersweet Symphony" was an enormous, if mostly unacknowledged, influence on Coldplay's cinematic sound. The Kooks, a Brighton-born pop-rock band with catchy songs, have never had a big stateside hit, but they've reached the U.K. Top 20 five times. Graffiti6 is a London singing duo; Two Door Cinema Club is a talented electropop combo from Northern Ireland. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the one American act on the bill so far, plays music heavily informed by the New Music Express' much-venerated C86 compilation.