Salad for Men
Home yesterday evening, bored of reading about subterranean London excursions and playing Snake 2, I decided to have some supper. It was hot and sticky despite soft rain finally clearing the atmosphere, and lukewarm food like Italian-s[…]

“Mac Nerdery etc” at daringfireball.net
John Gruber – my sort of nerd. Some substantial essays often extolling more sober lines of thought as an antidote to popular badly-thought-through-isms. A prime example being the recent &#8220[…]

Distilled from several years of pop experience, here from the WORST to the BEST are ways to approach a cover version.
The Acoustic Guitar: i.e. “Any good song will sound great on an acoustic guitar”, runs the prized nugget of MOJO wisdom […]

The Silence of Flooded Houses
I discovered this little introduction to a book of Beatles lyrics, by Richard Brautigan.[…]

Against The Corporate We
My mouth tells me that Innocent Smoothies are very nice. My brain suggests they are a great deal better for me than that next can of coke. So why am I so suspicious of them? This provides a clue:
“We promise a lot of th[…]

Sexy History
I’m reading Rubicon by Tom Holland, a pacy account of the corruption and collapse of the Roman republic in the first century BC. It’s a period I’m interested in because my own Roman studies started with Augustus, with t[…]

Practical Criticism
I wonder sometimes if music criticism shouldn’t be more practical. I suppose I’m thinking of the music criticism you pay for in magazines. The ‘music press’, with a handful of sterling exceptions (you know […]

Misery, complaints, self-pity, injustice — the utter joy of Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Exotic Video Show, just rereleased for the first time on DVD, lies in its naivete. Which is a trite thing to say on the one hand and something perfectly apt […]