Competition Winners: Leicester’s Best Music Reviewer

By Michelle Dhillon • 8 years ago • News

For those of you who have been waiting to find out who our competition winners for Leicester’s best music reviewer are, the results are in! And to those of you who haven’t and have randomly clicked onto this page, just go read a surprise past music review 😀

We hosted a small joint competition winners ceremony with Artbeat Festival yesterday and Fingerprints Delicafe was packed which was great to see. Next time we’ll run Rockhaq award events separately, as we didn’t expect so many proud parents to come along to the ceremony too. We will also showcase the reviews and generally make it a more suitable event for Rockhaq community members. It was great for the Rockhaq judges – especially Mark Wong and Michelle Dhillon – to meet you all though and see all shortlisted competition winners outside their usual school/college environment.

As we said yesterday, it was VERY hard for all four judges to settle on our final competition winners. The two things we unanimously agreed on were who should win first prize, and that there should be more than one ultimate winner. It was extremely hard to decide from our six shortlisted reviews as to who should ultimately win though. This is a sign of the quality and impact of each review and new community member on the Rockhaq community – and we really hope the whole event/competition has encouraged you all to come back and keep telling us what you think! We would love to hear more from each and every one of you.

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Competition winners

Drum roll, please!

First Prize: Nathan Brooks for his review of Tame Impala, Lonerism. Nathan’s review was described by all four judges as ‘the clear winner’, ‘INSANE’, ‘excellent, extensive’ and ‘astounding’. Nathan was awarded £100 along with a Rockhaq VIP bag. It was great for some of us to talk to you 🙂 Thankyou Nathan for your awesome contributions to the Rockhaq community so far, we really hope to hear more of them.

Runners Up:

First Place: Abaan Patel for his review of Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp A Butterfly. Abaan’s review was described as ‘engaging’, ‘pretty much perfect’, ‘a great lyrical exploration’ and ‘brilliantly written’. Abaan was awarded £50 along with a Rockhaq VIP bag. We were really pleased to meet him and his older bro (who may also have been converted to join the Rockhaq community). Thankyou Abaan for this insightful piece on Kendrick Lamar and we really hope to see more of your opinions and reviews on the Rockhaq community soon.

Second Place: Imran Mulla, for his review of Hamza Namira, Empty Words. Imran’s review was described as ‘awesome’, ‘diverse’, ‘well-written, concise’, ‘important’ and singled out for ‘bringing a taste of his own culture to the Rockhaq community’. Imran was awarded £50 along with a Rockhaq VIP bag. We were really pleased to meet Imran and his whole family – thanks to all of you for making it. Thankyou Imran for enlightening the Rockhaq community with your own vision and taste – we sincerely hope you return and share more of your opinions on the Rockhaq community.

Third Place: Sara Zemmouri for her review of Justin Bieber, What Do You Mean? Sara’s review was described as ‘honest’, ‘critical’, ‘confident’ and ‘showing a lot of potential’. Sara was awarded £50 along with a Rockhaq VIP bag. It was lovely to see such hard work being put into a review and from a non-native English speaker who has only been in the UK for about 5 months. Thankyou Sara for making such a commitment to writing this piece – we hope you are inspired to improve and develop your writing skills by continuing to share music reviews on the Rockhaq community.

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Honorary Mentions:

Amrita Garcha for her review of Green Day, American Idiot album. Amrita was commended by the judges for the bravery of choice in reviewing this album. We also all hold a firm place in our hearts for this album for nostalgia reasons 🙂 Sam said that Amrita is clearly a very enthusiastic and passionate writer and deserves to be commended. Amrita is also actively contributing more work to the Rockhaq community behind the scenes, and we look forward to reading her future reviews. Well done Amrita.

Jamie Brown for his opinion post on the gender bias at Glastonbury Festival. Potentially, with the subject matter, Jamie’s work could have been a final winner. Most of the judges loved this piece for it’s groundbreaking subject matter, however we felt that it could have had a bit more fire and passion as an opinion post. Sam’s opinion post on Talent Show judges is a good example to look at. This was a very strong entry though and we look forward to reading Jamie’s first music review on the Rockhaq community, which he assures us is coming very soon!

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Join the Rockhaq community to take part in community member competitions and to win Music Missions – coming soon. In the meantime, keep calm and carry on writing.