I once had a conversation with a rock fan about favourite guitarists: I mentioned Steve Cropper, of Booker T & the MGs, who also produced and co-wrote many of the great Stax recordings, such as Otis Redding’s. This guy hadn’t heard o[…]

Emotion vs Technique in Soul Music and its Criticism
Does soul music have soul, and does it matter?
Hear or read most people praising soul music, and they’ll be hyping certain qualities, while some others won’t get a mention. ‘Soul&[…]

Auguste Bartholdi
What’s the biggest gap between the fame of a sculpture and the obscurity of its creator? I can’t think that anything beats this man’s most famed work: the Statue of Liberty. (He created the original, and Gustave Ei[…]

The Last Dance by Ed McBain
This may be as inconsequential 87th Precinct novel as I’ve ever read, and I’ve read nearly all of them. Nothing changes for any of the regulars, no character development that amounts to anything, a very dull my[…]

No, I didn’t mean to type Klimt…
Who was the first abstract painter in the western tradition? Some people will argue for Mondrian or Malevich or Kupka, but most people give the title to Kandinsky, who reached this milestone with a composi[…]

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
This must be the most obscure highly canonical novel. Or maybe just the most obscure such that I knew about – at least, since that poll of living Nobel laureates voting for the greatest books ever, which m[…]

Rock, Paper, Scissors
There’s a great article on this game (which had its world championships recently) here, explaining how it isn’t as artificial a situation as you might think – it describes a set of dice where over a number of &[…]

I did a ‘pick of the Trojan box sets’ over at ILM, which went down pretty well, then someone on I Love Comics asked for a similar view on the Marvel Comics Essential volumes (5-600 pages of vintage comics in B&W on cheap paper for ab[…]

More John Peel
I think it was 1975 when I started listening to Peel. I’ve been on and off ever since, sometimes hardly missing a show for months on end, sometimes going equally long without hearing one. Even when I wasn’t listening, it me[…]

I have 34 of these box sets now, so I thought I’d offer some guidance to anyone thinking they look tempting (especially at the £7 prices on offer at HMV and Fopp, for instance) but unsure where to dip their toe in. Pretty much all of the […]