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Rock

Powderfinger

Powderfinger are a rock band from Brisbane, Australia. Formed in 1989, the band has managed to keep the same line up since they hit the big time, Bernard Fanning (Vocals, guitars), Darren Middleton (guitars), Ian Haug (guitars), John Collins (Bass) and Jon Coghill (drums). Powderfinger are winners of nearly every major award in Australia – including the ARIA (Australian Record Industry Awards) for Album of the Year, Best Rock Album and Song of the Year.

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Hawkwind

Hawkwind is an English rock band and one of the earliest space rock groups. The band was formed by ex busker and blues man Dave Brock in Ladbroke Grove, England, who intended to marry simple three-chord rock with experimental electronic music. He cites his influences for the band at the time as The Moody Blues, Steve Miller Band and the krautrock scene of Kraftwerk, Neu! and particularly Can.
The band was formed in 1969 by visionary Dave Brock and although it has
been subject to numerous line-up changes it is still led by him. The early

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Juliana Hatfield

Juliana Hatfield (born July 27, 1967 in Wiscasset, Maine, United States), is an American guitarist/singer-songwriter from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock band Blake Babies. The daughter of Philip M. Hatfield (a radiologist) and The Boston Globe fashion critic Julie Hatfield, Juliana was born in Maine and grew up in the Boston suburb of Duxbury. She acquired a love of rock music during the 1970s, having been introduced by a babysitter to the music of the seminal Los Angeles punk rock band <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/X" class="bbcode_artist">X</a>, which proved a life-changing experience.

The Jezabels

The Jezabels are an indie rock band from Sydney, New South Wales that formed in 2007. They classify their music as 'intestindie' as it contains a mixture of different genres. The group's members are Hayley Mary (vocals), Samuel Lockwood (guitar), Heather Shannon (piano/keyboard) and Nik Kaloper (drums).

We are a thing that came out of a few chance meetings at Sydney University. You see, Heather and Hayley had been playing music together for a while. Inevitably came the journey south from Byron - being their place of youth - to Sydney for a foray into higher education. Nik and Sam were studying at Sydney University also. And you know, for some reason you just meet people...

We don't have a manifesto as such, but we do have definite intentions in what we do. We wish to play pop, but with a recognizable element of self-awareness. We wish to be emotional, but with a sense of certainty that our audiences won't walk away thinking that we take ourselves too seriously. What is paramount is an attempt to push this thing called the culture industry in some direction which makes it more human. (I guess this is all too ambitious but oh well... We do try)

Heather studies piano at the conservatorium and reads a bit too much Russian literature. Hayley looks toward her personal canon of pop ballads for guidance in all situations and believes we must return to the way life was prior to the poker machine epidemic. Nik is a science student who imbues his drumming with formulas and mathematical complexities. Sam is a country music-playing, Marx-spouting communist with a love of all things meaningfully subversive.

The Jezabels have released 3 EPs: Dark Storm (2010), The Man is Dead (2009) and She's So Hard (2009).

Their debut album Prisoner was released in September 2011. The Jezabels won the 2012 ARIA Award for Best Independent Release for their album, Prisoner.

Official site: http://www.thejezabels.com Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

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Matthew Barber

Matthew Barber (born January 10, 1977) is a Canadian singer-songwriter of indie pop and pop rock with folk and alternative country influences. Barber was born and grew up in Port Credit, which is part of Mississauga, Ontario, just west of Toronto, before moving to Kingston, Ontario to attend Queen's University, where he volunteered at campus radio station CFRC-FM and performed at campus pubs. After graduating from Queen's, he went to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario for his master's degree in philosophy, and here he began to take his performing more seriously.

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Oka

Electro-dance-slide_didg-slide guitar-flute-drums. I just heard these guys live at the Newtown Festival, Sydney, for the first time ever this weekend. They came down from the sunshine coast - north of Brisbane, where the tropical heat has obviously had a good influence on them. Sometimes dreamy and slow, sometimes upfront crowdpleasing pumpers - these guys rock! With four studio albums, OKA shows a wide variety in their music. Absolutely mind blowing. OKA is also a pop group from Finland.

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The Darkness

There are at least six artists with this name:
1. A popular hard rock band from the United Kingdom
2. A death metal band from Germany
3. An alternative rock band from Poland
4. A Eurodance group
5. A thrash metal band from the Czech Republic

1. The Darkness are a hard rock band which formed in Lowestoft, England in 2000. The band consists of Justin Hawkins (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Dan Hawkins (guitar, vocals), Frankie Poullain (bass) and Ed Graham (drums). According to the Nothin's Gonna Stop Us Songfacts, Ed Graham inspired the band’s name as his youthful bleak moods were known as The Darkness.

They are widely regarded as a glam rock band, but the members disputed this and saw themselves as a classic hard-rock band. Their highly retro style of music was influenced by rock bands like Queen, AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Aerosmith, Sparks, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, T. Rex, Def Leppard, Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy. They are best known for the soaring falsetto of their lead singer Justin Hawkins, whose departure in 2006 resulted in the dissolution of the band. In 2011, the band announced their return, with a third album, "Hot Cakes," to be released on Wind-up Records.

Dan had initially seen his brother's potential of being a frontman after Justin did an impressive recreation of Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' at a New Year's Eve party in 1999, thrown by Justin and Dan's aunt in her pub The Swan at Gillingham just over the River Waveney in Norfolk, despite the fact that Justin was only miming to the original song. Playing at first only in pubs and bars, their pyrotechnic guitar solos and over the top performances soon brought them to public knowledge.

Achieving major success in the UK in 2003, The Darkness received considerable radio airplay of their singles, including I Believe in a Thing Called Love and the Christmas hit Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End). Their debut album, Permission to Land, reached number one in the UK charts and went on to sell one and a half million copies in the UK alone. The success of this album led to heavy touring for the band, which included headlining the Carling Festivals in 2004. The band won three Brit Awards in the same year, including Best Group, Best Rock Group and Best Album. They also won two Kerrang! awards for Best Live Act and Best British Band.

By late 2004 the band's huge success had led to a public backlash, and people claiming that the band were more a joke than a 'real' band became more common. The band responded to this criticism by touring the UK's top arenas on the "Winter-National Tour" tour with the Irish group Ash supporting them. One part of the show included Justin climbing upon a life-sized white tiger during "Love on the Rocks with No Ice" and being elevated around the audience whilst still playing guitar. The majority of the shows on the tour sold out.

On May 23, 2005 original bass player Frankie Poullain left the band during the recording of their second album, apparently due to "musical differences" with Justin Hawkins. Frankie has disputed this version of events, claiming he was "frozen out" and forced to leave the band by Justin and his longterm girlfriend (and the band's manager) Sue Whitehouse. On June 13 2005, The Darkness announced that Richie Edwards, formerly Dan's guitar technician, had replaced Frankie as bass player.

One Way Ticket, the first single from their second album, was released on 14 November 2005, debuting and peaking at number 8 on the UK Singles chart. The Darkness followed this with their second album One Way Ticket to Hell...And Back on November 28, 2005 to mixed reviews despite it having been produced by the well known Roy Thomas Baker whom has worked with bands such as Queen. Although it has been made platinum its sales do not come close to their debut's five-times-platinum rating and its chart peak at number eleven is a weak showing compared to Permission To Land's number one. The second single release from this album was Is It Just Me?, released on 20th February 2006 and charted at number eight. Soon afterwards Justin announced while performing live that the third single to be released from the album would be Girlfriend; and gained a mixed response. Released on 22nd May 2006, it charted at a disappointing number thirty-nine.

After having disappeared for quite some time the band announced that singer Justin Hawkins had left the band on 11th October 2006, after a battle against drugs.

On December 24, 2006, it was reported by Yahoo! News that bass player Richie Edwards would become the group's new frontman, with Toby MacFarlaine to join The Darkness and take over on bass. In blog entries on MySpace, Richie Edwards, Dan Hawkins and Ed Graham said that they had started recording a new album with Toby McFarlaine, and that they had formed a new band together.

On March 2, 2007, The Darkness' official website was changed, showing a photograph of the new, and as yet unnamed band. Links to the members individual Myspace pages were included, confirming the line-up of Richie Edwards, Dan Hawkins, Toby MacFarlaine and Ed Graham. Richie later added a message to the site, categorically confirming that the band would not continue under the name "The Darkness", saying "we are literally days away from announcing our new name".

It was announced on August 25, 2007 that the band had finished recording an album but no release dates or names, of either the band or album, had been decided. Record label and support has yet to be decided.

On November 9, 2007, it was announced on The University of East Anglia's student union website that the new band would be called Stone Gods. This name was confirmed on the official website on November 21, 2007. The line-up has been confirmed as Dan Hawkins (lead guitar), Toby MacFarlaine (bass), Ed Graham (drums) and Richie Edwards (vocals/guitar).

In March 2011, The Darkness announced on their newly updated website that they would be reforming the original line-up to play the Download Festival in Donington, Derbyshire. Songfacts reports that Nothin's Gonna Stop Us, the first new material from the band since they reconvened, was made available several months later as a free download from The Darkness’s official website.

The Darkness will be releasing "Hotcakes," their first album since reuniting, in 2012 on Wind-up Records. This album includes the singles "Every Inch of You" and Everybody Have a Good Time." Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

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