My own tale of Notting Hill hipness beyond description — by chance, back in 2000 I was invited to attend the opening night of Alan McGee’s club he started a few months after Creation pissed away the last bits of champagne. What was it ca[…]

Notting Hell
This weekend is the Notting Hill Carnival. Luckily I’m going to Scotland and will be shielded from dancing policemen, incessant steel drumming and ear-killing whistles. Warm cans of Red Stripe are available at inflated prices from […]

Cut your fringe!
You can amuse yourselves here with 1-star reviews of the worst of the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s possible some of these comments are funnier than the shows themselves. Of course, the secret to the Fringe is that everything is blood[…]

Marvellous article from G. Strachan in the Guardian, about the dread spectre of ‘player unrest’, about which we hear a great deal these days.
Gordon, typically forthright, says it doesn’t exist, that it’s made up by malign sh[…]

Law of Averages
Reviewing new album Showtime in the Guardian today, Dorian Lynskey comments that ‘ Too often [Dizzee Rascal] dwells on internecine squabbles of which the average listener knows, and cares, little’. Which raises some fascin[…]

FT Top 100 Films
39: THE BREAKFAST CLUB
HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!
The thing about The Breakfast Club is that it’s the only one of the bratpack movies that’s really about school. In (most of) the others, school is there (apart from the couple t[…]

Minor Public Service Announcement
Freaky Trigger favourites Big & Rich’s Horse Of A Different Color album gets its official UK release on the 6th of September.[…]

U-S-uh, how does it go again?
Watching the highlights of the Olympics women’s football final this evening (a fitting end to the great Mia Hamm’s career) it struck me that one of the reasons a lot of people find the US’ sporting succ[…]

Hi, this is my first post here, so here’s a bit about me … I’m Barry Bruner, and if I can tear myself away from watching the Olympics and go back to writing my thesis then I will be Dr. Barry Bruner someday. I’m nearing the en[…]

A challenge for the research-oriented — this question came up elsewhere but as an answer couldn’t be found, I bring it to you: is there a service or webpage or the like which lets you know what albums are in print? Something like the Al[…]