Music and Writing: interesting roundtable from 2003 where Mark Sinker sets a bunch of questions that assorted ILXish and other thinkers try and answer. I think he sent me the questions too, I know I didn’t answer them. Well worth a look.[…]

Some of you may remember my Top 100 singles of the 90s, which I ran on this site six years ago. They have been off the site for a long time now, because they’re not hugely representative of my tastes now. Occasionally I wonder what I should do […]

Tim Finney, from an ILM thread about reggaeton.
I often think about a post Josh Kortbein wrote on his blog about how he couldn’t remember the moment when he got used to house beat, but somehow it had quietly gone from seeming oppressive, rhythm[…]

Kim Wilde – “Cambodia”
Mark S says:
Writing a chart-song with this title in 1981 – Year Zero was 1978, as punky types (=me) liked boringly to remind everyone – sets some kind of dunderhead record, you’d think, for […]

Pandas: The Great Leap Forward, a documentary my wife taped off Sky Travel, is chock full of marvellous giant panda footage from a big Chinese nature sanctuary. The programme is Chinese-made, or so we guessed from the footage recorded in the 1980s an[…]

Public Enemy – “Fight The Power”
Steve M says:
Clearly I picked this because I was worried there wouldn’t be enough rockist rap in the list. I still think this is their best and most succinct single, although I know the genera[…]

What kind of sucker would buy Kronenbourg Premier Cru? What kind of idiot would be taken in by its frosted blue bottle? What kind of snob would fall for the pretension that “Kronie” has a ‘Premier Cru’ anyway? What kind of buf[…]

Mysterious goat defies so-called gender. Note the forthright advice from a vet.[…]

The JAMMS – It’s Grim Up North (Part 1)
N. says
This record is ten minutes long (exactly). On it, Bill Drummond reads out the names of (approximately) 70 towns in Northern England over a beserk techno backing, containing bursts of train s[…]

This month, Blog 7 is the BLOG OF THE STRANGE. We will present the Top 23 Strange Phenomena (to be decided on Friday), discourse upon HAUNTED PUBS and relate the myriad of ODD THINGS which have happened to us, or to people we know. Also Pete will mak[…]