“build a better TARKUS 19 Feb 2011 ... and the world will beat a path to your door" — Ralph Waldo Emerson Lake and Palmer* Rare photo of official stage prop being repaired, April 1973. From ELP…
Top Ten Album Art Contains Worst Of 2009 5 Jan 2010 So the "who they" Art Vinyl people have awarded the best album cover of 2009 then. I believe a public vote may have been involved, indeed one assumes it must…
FT Advent Calendar Of Free Online Games: 4th December 4 Dec 2009 Its a Friday. So let's try something a) A bit more involving b) doesn't have a cat in it. So who is this fella? Yes its the FANCY PANTS ADVENTURES…
GEORGE MICHAEL AND QUEEN – Five Live EP 9 Mar 2012 Britain has a Pop Establishment as surely as it has a political one, and the charity tribute gig is its equivalent of a State Funeral. The line-up for the Freddie…
FIVE + QUEEN – “We Will Rock You” 9 Apr 2015 2014 saw Queen reach an unfortunate milestone - they’ve now been going for longer without Freddie Mercury than with him. It’s been an odd 23 years. John Deacon bowed out…
Lost Property Office 4: Tilda Swinton, Queen Of Atlantis 28 Mar 2012 And we are back in the Lost Property Office, this week with the fearless Kat Stevens who is the first of our guests to shun the sometimes predictable CD route…
13 Aug 2008
#428, 18th November 1978 “Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite […]
20 Feb 2007
“[John Thelwall] also had the misfortune to be a mediocre poet — a crime which, although it is committed around us every day — historians and critics cannot forgive.” —E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class* It was called The Battle of Waterloo, and it was one of the plays offered by J. K. […]
3 Sep 2007
Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]
27 Sep 2001
What is “Panic” about? Dismissed and attacked since its release as small-minded, or snobbish, or even borderline racist, The Smiths’ anti-disco broadside continues to intrigue. On this thread, The Pinefox calls it a “yoking of two ideas” – a revolutionary fantasia and an attack on dance music – and claims that it’s the second of […]
1 Jan 2002
British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972 “Sunday morning, up with the lark, I think I’ll take a walk in the park, Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …” Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972 British bubblegum pop, circa 1968-1972 – as distinct from its more worldly and sophisticated American equivalent – is a pure insight into a […]
3 Oct 2004
In search of Squirrel – Part two (warning, contains graphic images) Some of you may remember this article I wrote some time ago about my “failure” as a vegetarian and my quest for the different. Well, I’ve done it. Squirrel had become a bit of an obsession, I’d chased up all sorts of alleys (Julian […]
8 Aug 2008
#426, 23rd September 1978 On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman […]
this year sucks so bad :(