What was the worst you were hurt? And was it as bad as this?
A simple piano figure echoes through the emptiest room in creation, its notes caked with dust and maybe regret, repeating until it stops being any kind of melody and becomes the sad up and […]

IT’S GOOD TO TALK
What is The Matrix? Mostly, an advert. The vehicle of communication, transport and ultimate liberation in this modern-and-knows-it film isn’t the dowdy, sinister computer but the telephone, specifically the Nokia mobile […]

The Chemical Brothers – Surrender
There’s very little that’s tougher to write about than enjoyable music. Should you blunder across a record that harrows your soul or corrodes your skull or scrapes your brainstem with iron claws, we[…]

This is a selection of the Funny Folk cartoons which ran on Freaky Trigger during 1999. Script and Art by Al Ewing except * where Script is by Al and Tom Ewing.
“Choke – it’s predicted DOOM – for ME!”
“I’ll &[…]

HEY BROTHER, POUR THE WINE
I wanted to write something about crooning and the figure of the crooner, the great crooners being the true dinosaurs of the rock era: old, cold-blooded, and powerful. Through one lens, the songs sung by Dino or Frankie or […]

Part of the attraction of Smile to the journalistic and maybe the ‘alternative’ mind is its encapsulation of writerly failure – the deadlines that quietly slip away, the fragmented masterpieces kept in shoeboxes, the way some people can liv[…]

A coin in a jukebox, a basement that smells of piss and rust, full of vinyl at ten pence a time, a tape in a cheap cardboard sleeve, bought in a train station, a green courier bag holed where the corners of 12″s poked through, a radio aerial, q[…]

What was that phrase? Grace under pressure? No pressure here any more, twenty years into the game and playing in front of an audience that’s more like a congregation, but Robert Forster and Grant McLennan are still gracious enough and more so. […]

The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use,[…]

The shutdown of the Chain Reaction label leaves its various artists to fend for themselves, without the cover of CR’s austere aesthetic: skeletonised house, ultra-repetetive processed dub, and of course the literal cover of those lovely but irr[…]