Archives – 2021  

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The FT Annual Between New Year And Christmas Pub Crawl – the Oxford Circus Wobbly Staircase
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POSTPONED UNTIL THE 19th FEBRUARY.
All details below correct for the new date
After a year off for some reason or other (the online pub crawl was lovely but not this), here is  the 22st Annual Between Christmas and New Year Pub Crawl (ABCANYPC).
And[…]

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Omargeddon #27: Birth of a Ghost
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On 5 May 2017, I took another step into my fifth decade. The celebrations began with a massive brunch, the centrepiece of which was a ridiculous freakshake, because 2017. Then I met some of my chums in the pub and then had another restaurant meal for[…]

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Omargeddon #24-26: Omar Rodríguez-López Group (live albums)
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During the acute phase of the pandemic last year, I noticed quite a few demo albums were dropping into my Spotify feed. As much as I enjoy partaking in a kind of VH1 Behind the Music-style history lesson, I’m sure it was a direct result of musician[…]

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Omargeddon #23: The Apocalypse Inside of an Orange
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I’ve been especially drawn to instrumentals of late; I’m certain that this is because I haven’t worked in an open-plan office for well over a year and can easily listen to music uninterrupted for nearly the whole of my working day. Lyrics mean […]

The World Cup Of Four Letter Words*
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*Four Letter Word Song Titles, that is.
As you all know I spend a lot of my pop time these days running elaborate Twitter tournaments.  These have a lot of matches and it can be tricky keeping track of what’s going on, so this is an experiment[…]

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Omargeddon #22: Gorilla Preacher Cartel
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Omar Rodríguez-López song and album titles are some of the very best in existence, and it really doesn’t get much better than Gorilla Preacher Cartel. According to an early release schedule*, this was revised from the originally proposed Scrapyar[…]

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Omargeddon #20 / #21: ¿Sólo Extraño? / Nom de Guerre Cabal
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Since the beginning of his solo career, song reworkings and rearrangements have appeared frequently across Omar Rodríguez-López’s oeuvre. Samples and sequences recur on most of his electronic music, and many of the spacey instrumentals that featu[…]

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Omargeddon #19: Blind Worms, Pious Swine
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Lately, the weather has been seesawing wildly through various meteorological events over the course of any given day, as is oft springtime’s wont. These icy, azure early mornings remind me of the Blind Worms, Pious Swine cover. Of course, the buds […]

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Omargeddon #18: Un Corazón de Nadie
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To suggest that delivering three albums over a twelve-month period indicates a slow year would normally be ridiculous, but for Omar Rodríguez-López fans, 2012 probably felt a bit like an old-timey cowboy actor (i.e. Slim Pickens). To give this a b[…]

Latest comments on FT

  1. Tom, I loved loved loved these polls and participated obsessively, until one day (it was March 2023) I just stopped…

  2. I feel sad that I couldn't persistently engage in every poll as much as I'd have liked - and not…

  3. Thanks for doing the polls, Tom, and for writing this lovely, considered, reflective piece. It’s given me closure on my…

  4. Lovely. I drifted away 18 months or so ago (I liked being all in on it and life stuff just…