I saw three films last week set in Tokyo. None of them, not even the one with the city in the title, would claim to be about Tokyo, but they ended up creating a triptych of Tokyo which, more than any individual film, reminded me of that crazy city. A[…]

Well, after a week of hard conventioneering, I’m back in the saddle to talk about ‘Drive My Car’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GHY9nLrhU
Soothing stuff and fun to play, as I remember. I bashed this one out before I left, in the […]

An occasional series where we mock the nonsense written on crisp packets.
“It takes a more adventurous homegrown spud to volunteer for our sizzling Jamaican Jerk Chicken. Some spuds simply ‘dreaded’ not being picked so they went bac[…]

When I was a kid, I used to get great School reports. High marks for attainment through the whole booklet, nice phrases. The only letdown was under physical education where I would often get an A for effort, but a 4 or 5 for attainment. When it came […]

(This is a series in which FT contributors read the ghost stories of M. R. James. Hey! It is not going as slowly as some FT series! But er yes, it has taken me quite a time to get round to this one. If you want to read it first — and do, bcz t[…]

During the 00s pop boom there was much talk of “blankness” as a vocal quality – the kind of competent, unaffected but largely inexpressive singing women like Rachel Stevens do on their records. This was making a virtue of necessity […]

Whatever I found whimsical and interesting about Wes Anderson’s early films (mainly Rushmore to be fair) had worn its welcome remarkably thin by the the time The Darjeeling Limited came around. They were always nice to look at, and the soundtra[…]

Mid-August Lunch is a perfect little film. A nice, short palate cleanser of a film about the small moments of happiness and love in the most banal of situations. Giovanni is a middle aged man still living / caring for his mother who is a stubborn bat[…]

There are still those, even in the dying days of the Noughties, who deride Rock Band and its ilk as ‘fake’. Well, here’s NES-rock group ‘I Fight Dragons’ doing their chiptune-heavy cover version of ‘And Your Bird C[…]

I’ve not been to every pub in London, but I have been to a fair few in the centre and think myself to be pretty well versed in the whereabouts of drinking venues. From refurb to closure, I keep an eye even on the holes I rarely visit. All that […]