David Bowie, Nick Cave, Of Montreal, Scooby Doo & Wallis Bird star in Free Music Friday

Free Music Friday is currently holed up in that urban wasteland of despair, AKA post-Brexit London. The feeling of impending cultural Armageddon hasn’t stopped us putting together another damn fine (even if we do say so ourselves!) collection of downloads, streams, vids and trailers, which we’d like to dedicate to those ledges at Dundalk FC.

Iggy Pop spent two very enjoyable and moving hours paying tribute to his pal David Bowie on BBC Radio 6. Kicking off with ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ and not relenting until ‘Warszawa’ is dispatched, it’s full of warm-hearted reminiscences and fabulous yarns. In case you’re wondering, no, Iggy doesn’t have laryngitis; that’s how he always croaks!
[link]bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07llby4#play[/link]

Also magicking up online this week are these Bowie outtakes from one of the studios mentioned by Iggy in his BBC tribute, Cherokee. We’re not entirely sure of their provenance, but they make for compelling listening.

D.R Jones Cherokee from Philippe Auliac on Vimeo.

It’s turning out to be a very Bowie-esque week with strange but wonderful bedfellows Shooter Jennings and Marilyn Manson re-working ‘Cat People’ together. The animated video is giving us the creeps – but in a good way!

Free – but, as ever, you’re welcome to tip! – this week from Noise Trade are the five-track introduction to Ft. Lauderdale’s Kids who are equal parts Richard Hawley and MGMT; another sampler from Fialta, a Californian outfit who clearly worship at the altar of Brian Wilson, and an EP from Tulsa, Oklahoma’s The Bourgeois who make no apologies for their Nirvana fixation.

To the streams now and our NPR friends bring you newbies from 15-year pop sensation Haley Bonar; Of Montreal who go off on quite the flight of musical fancy - it's awesome!; the new Queen of Country Cool, Kelsey Waldon; wistful soundtrackers of summer, Blind Pilot, and Australian pop-punk slackers, Hockey Dad.

Your life simply won’t be complete until you have a banging dance remix of the Scooby Doo theme on your iTunes? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Getting his fader fingers on Scoobs, Fred, Daphne, Velma and Shaggy is heavy bass producer Figure. He’d have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky kids…

Our Limrock pals Fox Jaw are letting you bag their excellent new single, ‘Hit It Off’, for free. Lifted from their equally fine Black Light Vignette EP, it has a bit of a laidback Pearl Jam feel, which is A-OK in our book. The accompanying black & white video finds a Munster fan being pursued down a dark alley by two cross-dressing men armed with a brick and a hurley wrapped in barbwire. No, really!

Hot Press is delighted to bring you this exclusive first look at the video for ‘Everybody Is A DJ’, the first single to be taken from Hotel On Mars’ debut Don’t Feel Like Daylight album. It’s a fast and furious, tongue in cheek, retro affair featuring Dublin-based model Ruta Grigoraviciute.

Netflix have released a behind the scenes featurette for The Get Down, Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin’s keenly anticipated last days of disco/birth of hip hop drama, which premieres on August 12.

The trailer has been released for Skeleton Tree/One More Time With Feeling, the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds film, which took on a dark hue when his son, Arthur, fell to his death after taking LSD during filming. Receiving a limited theatrical release on September 8, it’s the companion piece to Cave’s Skeleton Tree album, which drops the following day.

Coming to this part of the world soon is We Are X, a film about X Japan, a glam metal outfit who are ginormodome-sized in Asia.

Brazil’s The Blog That Celebrates Itself – Melody Maker obviously exported to South America during the ‘90s – has lovingly put together a 32-track tribute album, The Cure In Other Voices. The quality control’s a bit scattershot, but it’s worth a delve.

The object of Boston prog rockers Vary Lumar’s affection is Christopher Cross whose 1979 breakthrough hit, ‘Sailing’, is taken to a whole different place.

We’re loving the new video for the Riptide Movement’s ‘Elephant In The Room’, a slick-looking affair that finds the chaps donning their finest evening attire.
It’s the first single to be lifted from their new album, Ghosts, which drops in September and could just be the record to break the Irish chart-toppers internationally.

Joe Chester has donated a track to the Nice – 14.07.16 album, which is raising funds for the victims and relatives of last month’s terror attack in the city. Currently living a short stroll away from Promenade des Anglais, Chester very powerfully spoke about that fateful night in the last issue of Hot Press.
Bag yourself a whopping 100 tracks for a minimum donation of €5.

Causing a major stir Stateside are PWR BTTM, a cheekily-named glam outfit who we’re itching to see in the flesh.

Wallis Bird whets appetites for her new Home album, with pulsating lead single ‘Change’ and its ever so arty vid.

And that is where Free Music Friday takes its leave of you for another week. Unless Brexit suddenly fast-forwards and the UK hermetically seals itself off from the rest of the world before our flight leaves on Sunday, we’ll see you back in Ireland for our next internet-raiding extravaganza. In the meantime, keep those links coming to @stuartclark66