Teenage Kicks (And Others)
– I sometimes used to worry that they’d sack him. I imagined him looking glumly through records he wouldn’t get the chance to play on the radio. It honestly never occurred to me he might die first.
–[…]

“I AM LEGION“: or Making the Contradiction the Hook
Aging leftists often wring their hands and shake their heads: “What happened to rock? In my day it was the soundtrack to the revolt against war…” And then they up and […]

Popjustice suggests multi-format bonanza as the best way to shift copies of a new Band Aid single. But with the line-up face-off currently being between ‘credible’ bands like Coldplay (i.e. music for cunts) and pop bands (i.e. music for p[…]

William Crump dines with the Iron Chef

In late 2001 I had just moved back to Mississippi after three and a half years in northern California, where I’d cultivated my gourmandism mostly on the cheap – during trips to the Bay Area, I discovered la[…]

PLUR: hidden agenda revealed
to me till now, US warblogger glenn reynolds wz merely the mind behind instapundit – a one-stop shop for tireless partisan humbug. So here he rather unexpectedly is reflecting on a. how money and politics have chan[…]

Reports on Band Aid III are neglecting to ask the one crucial question about the new record – viz. who gets to sing THAT LINE? After high-level FT editorial discussion we’re of the opinion that there is only one man with the pipes for it.[…]

…and so would you if you’d seen the midweeks. Manics at #1 again with surely their most overwrought, wafflesome, draggy song ever. I honestly thought we’d seen the last of them as a commercial force.
Luckily the despair is lifted by[…]

POP FACTOR: 762 CONTROVERSY RATING: 205
An apology: work has been very, very busy lately. Something had to give, and that something was the Square Table. Hopefully it is now, in the immortal words of Barlow,G. “back for good”.
Touch-don[…]

The aesthetics of hand-crafted CDRs — not that musicians actually sit around and carve in data on them, that would be a bit much. But increasingly my actual music purchases are steering away from ‘official’ CDs as such — perso[…]

What with Team America: World Police coming out in the US this week, much has been said about Super-Marionation of late. After the stupendous errors of the Thunderbirds film it seems that puppets may well often be the way to go in films. Which may ex[…]