The Thing about working nights is deciding which music to play, its all about keeping awake and keeping your customers interested…Some people do this by trying to play into their desire for cock rock and chart country. I do so by shocking them […]

“Where’s the oldest pub in London?”
A text message from a friend. The query sounds simple enough but the truth is anything but clear unless the pedant’s answer, “London” is enough for you.
Google the phrase and the[…]

Woks. Are they still a big thing? (They are large physically. I still think the basis of the no washing up rule comes from the fact they are too big to fit in basins.) I wondered briefly yesterday since I spent a considerable amount of time seasoning[…]

Nice to see our legislators getting their teeth into something juicy for a change. As is the way with this kind of news, it at first seems remarkably trivial. And yet, one thinks, what is more important to a nations sense of identity that everything[…]

Matt Ingram is dead right about those nasty Putumayo covers – Isabel actually owns Gypsy Caravan and the sleeve has always been a bit distressing. In other ways the label is a bit more innovative – their ‘Playground’ series of[…]

Flaming hell Michael Ignatieff, in an interview in the FT a few weekends ago, made some interesting, informed comments about the Iraq situation and the future of the UN. On the strength of this, I picked up a copy of his new novel, Charlie Johnson […]

British post-apocalypse television courtesy of Graham Nelson. Having blogged about Survivors I was looking for stuff on The Changes and pondering something about this genre of telly, when I came across this section of Graham’s largely-neglected[…]

Driving in Unfamiliar London Considered as a Chart-Topping Computer Game: I haven’t done it in an age, I realised, but the housewarming (excellent party for a nice flat: thanks for inviting me guys!!) was far far across town (in the wild south,[…]

Introduction
Welcome to the Ninth Freaky Trigger pop music Focus Group.
What’s all this then? We took twenty recent hit singles (released between July and September in the UK) and got a focus group to rate them each out of ten and comment on th[…]

What is it with teen comedies employing early nineties British indie as their main themes. The American Pie movies have Laid by James as their main theme; supposedly for the rude line ‘She only comes when she’s on top‘. And now Camp[…]