Kristen Sinclair

Source: spindlemagazine.com Back in 1980, a rather festive Jona Lewie sang about stopping the cavalry. Some thirty-five years later, currently unsigned London-based songstress Ella On The Run is touching on the same subject, but with a little less tinsel and injecting a lot more electrifying dance-pop panache.             Purring to life with an eerie, almost tribal intro, the Berklee College of Music graduate’s latest offering, ‘Cavalry’, marries electro-pop beats and haunting vocals with a certain edginess à la Foxes, BANKS and La Roux. With a nod to classic eighties synthpop without wallowing in its own nostalgia, Ella’s voice has all the power to carry the biggest house tracks but with a danceable, laid-back quality; what Clash Music has dubbed “attitude-laden pop against cutting edge production”. Simply brimming with massive remix potential (ahem, BBC Radio 1), the soaring, climactic chorus of ‘Cavalry’ sees Ella chant, “ Bang bang bang, do you feel the echo on the d

Issue 9 of Quarter Beat, October 2013 (Source: thecathedralquarter.com) In an area of Belfast known as the Cathedral Quarter (you should check out my coverage of its Arts Festival here ), there’s a little monthly newsletter called Quarter Beat. Leafing through some copies of the free publication I’d had slotted in my magazine rack, I came across October 2013’s print when Quarter Beat was at the ripe young age of Issue 9. The main article was written by a Cathie McKimm, entitled ‘A Tour Guide’s Perspective’ and detailing her many anecdotes about taking tourists around ‘The Big Smoke’, colloquially referring to everything as ‘wee’ (no matter what size it is) and how the Assembly Rooms, one of the oldest buildings in the city, is slowly being reclaimed by weeds. However, what had stuck in my mind from reading the piece a few years ago was McKimm’s tale about an Texan visitor commenting that ‘The Troubles’ is a “strange name for a war… it’s almost a familial term – like something you