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The Amazons Embodies The Classic Spirit Of Rock and Roll

The Amazons performing live at Omeara in London, recorded live for <em>World Cafe</em>.
James Boardman
/
Communion Presents
The Amazons performing live at Omeara in London, recorded live for World Cafe.

It's humbling, maybe a little embarrassing and definitely exciting to stand in the middle of a packed club show and be the only person who doesn't already know all the words to the songs the band is playing. Welcome to my experience seeing The Amazons at Omeara in London.

The Amazons is a four-piece rock and roll band from Reading, Berkshire with muscle, style and incredible charisma. In about five years, the members have gone from sneaking their CDs into the grocery store bags of unsuspecting customers while working their day jobs to playing massive stages like Glastonbury and headlining tours across Europe. The Amazons' latest album, Future Dust, came out in May on Fiction Records. Hear my conversation with lead singer Matt Thomson about the band's wild ride, and listen to the band's live performance in the player.

Copyright 2021 XPN. To see more, visit XPN.

Talia Schlanger hosts World Cafe, which is distributed by NPR and produced by WXPN, the public radio service of the University of Pennsylvania. She got her start in broadcasting at the CBC, Canada's national public broadcaster. She hosted CBC Radio 2 Weekend Mornings on radio and was the on-camera host for two seasons of the television series CBC Music: Backstage, as well as several prime-time music TV specials for CBC, including the Quietest Concert Ever: On Fundy's Ocean Floor. Schlanger also guest hosted various flagship shows on CBC Radio One, including As It Happens, Day 6 and Because News. Schlanger also won a Canadian Screen Award as a producer for CBC Music Presents: The Beetle Roadtrip Sessions, a cross-country rock 'n' roll road trip.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).