In search of Squirrel – Part two

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 […]

Download This! 2002

1 Jan 2003 101. THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – ‘My Elastic Eye’: ‘It sounds exactly like an elastic eye!’ said Fred S. I scoffed, but you know what? – it does! Though maybe more a clockwork one – but the wobbly fuzz-bass still sounds like it’s looking, even probing the track for something. Every music-box noise here is luxurious […]

Resisting Entropy – Mars Planets and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Food Science Day 2007 Experiment #1)

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 […]

The Strange Death of the UK Charts

22 Jan 2009 This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present. The final drop-off is for 2009, where there’ve only been 3 new entries so far, so the […]

your own private quatre bras

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. […]

THE BEATLES – “Eleanor Rigby”/”Yellow Submarine”

30 Dec 2005 #222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]

SAINT ETIENNE – “Popular”

21 May 2012 #1976, 21st May 2012 Huge weepy thanks to Bob, Pete and Sarah for immortalising us in song. And thanks to commenters past and present for making it worth immortalising. 10

ARE YOU LOCAL?

13 Feb 2000 England is DIFFERENT (or SPECIAL if you want to be polite) to everywhere else for many reasons, but one is because our music “industry” (it’s not an industry – making baked beans is an industry, and nobody does THAT in their spare time, writes fanzines about it or has them poured over themselves at weddings. […]