Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*.

(Click on it if you want it a bit clearer).
The red bars are the percentage of femal[…]

My head that is. Ichi, the recent Japanese samurai bit of fluff is a puzzling piece. Not to be confused with the brutal, mental but considerably better Ichi The Killer by Takeshi Miike, Ichi is a gender swap run around at Zatoichi (also recently made[…]

Saint-Marcellin
Cheese stats: A soft raw-milk cow’s cheese from Lyon, France
Bought from: Une Normande à Londres
This is a small round cheese, packed in its own little clay dish, pale and creamy with a white bloom on the outside. Breaking into[…]

And so its BRITAIN’S GRAND CANYON WATCH, with a new contender throwing his deep and awesome hat into the ring. Because London already has a Grand Canyone of course, which I always assumed would double nicely as BRITAIN’S GRAND CANYON. But[…]

Frustrating thinkpiece by Ann Powers on Lady Gaga and an apparent turn to theatricality in pop. Frustrating because what I want it to do is zero in a bit more on what Gaga’s “persona” that “never breaks” is and instead i[…]

Future history as outlined by Google.

WORLD WAR III: Has its own Wikipedia page which is inconclusive as to whether this has already happened.
WORLD WAR IV: The “Long Struggle Against Islamofascism”. We’re apparently in this one. T[…]

The music video for Sons Of Maxwell’s “United Breaks Guitars” has racked up almost 3.5 million hits in just over two weeks. You can’t buy the MP3 anywhere and it’s by a band you’ve almost certainly never heard of: […]

We are not usually in the business of baiting the Daily Mail, but clearly everyone who works there are on holiday and someone has turned on the Daily Mail story generator today. For as Starry of this parish just tweeted, this item about Christopher H[…]

It might have been the death of Steven Wells, or the closure of VIBE, or just people having a tired old moan, but there’s been a lot of mulling over the state of music writing this last couple of weeks. It seemed to me that one obvious thing to[…]

Recession chic in W10.