20. Praga Khan – Injected With A Poison
Like ‘The Magic Friend‘ earlier on, I found this a bit too intense on the first listen – acid squelching, whooping vocals courtesy of Jade 4U, and a scary man singing about poison. And p[…]

The Children is the second British horror movie this year using the previously untapped fear potential of the under sixteens. But whilst Eden Lake put its Kate Ashfield-a-like heroine in a ripped-from-the-fever-dream-of-the-Daily-Mail battle with del[…]

A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after […]

19. Shut Up And Dance – I’m Ravin’ I’m Ravin’
How many times has a melody stalled on the tip of your tongue? Na-nur-na-nur NAH-ah NAAA. Dammit, what is it? Where on earth is that from? Na-nur-nah wee-woo-WEEEE-urr-wooo. […]

This post is simply a way of getting all my Pitchfork columns linked to in one place so I can put it on the sidebar.
Poptimist #1: Music Hall, the Beatles, the power of the crowd.
Poptimist #2: Spoilers in music, MP3 blogs, the delights of conversati[…]

When I found out my favourite theatre director in the world had written his first novel I was intrigued, but also somewhat trepidacious. Tim’s theatre writing (which I talked about a bit here) is so strongly of and about theatre itself, would […]

The story in today’s Independent on manga is pretty telling about what the author thinks of “comics for girls”. Quote: “The [typical] manga reader was a man, and he probably liked SF and he could be a student. But then they decided, let’s s[…]

Introduction
Several years ago I did a thing on Freaky Trigger called “Thousand“: this involved playing through the 1,000 MP3s I’d collected at that point – a very small number it seems now – and writing about them in re[…]

I remember the Baader-Meinhof trial. I do. I was only five but I remember it being on the ITN news (you know the one with the jaunty jingle that was on after Blue Peter gave up the ghost on the BBC). I remember it because I also remember a wet Sunday[…]

A bunch of FT writers and close associates have NEW BLOGS (or bloglike entities) which demand some of your attention: (more…)[…]