The World of Pop According to Smash Hits
Top Trumps – you remember, those stato-geek touchstones of the eighties playground – has produced a Smash Hits! deck, and, as always, its the killer cards and dismal failures at the top and tail of[…]

Context is all, part 547653 — so over the weekend I reviewed the new Staubgold compilation Tempo Technik Teamwork and Pig Destroyer’s new album Terrifyer for the AMG, and my further thoughts on them both will run there in a couple of week[…]

Anti-Beatles Prejudice
It can be hard to disentangle judgement and prejudice at times (actually it’s always impossible, but you can do a fairly decent job most of the time). I occasionally wonder whether my dislike for and low opinion of the Be[…]

The first of my generation has made it. While shopping with my mum today in Tesco, we/she bought Gwyneth Herbert‘s album. Gwyneth was in the year above me at uni. In fact, the first thing I ever ‘reviewed’ was a gig of hers. She was[…]

Some Thoughts on Britney and Paris as Socio-Cultural Bellwethers.
Two unrelated points that I think mean something but am unsure exactly what.
1) I have heard in the last 3 days, Britney Spears single Toxic three times, once at a strip club and twice[…]

I’ll be the first person to say that the world was not clamouring for Terminator 3. My reason oddly appears to be different to most, since I always thought that Terminator 2: Judgement Day was a bit – well – shit. Superfluous to the streaml[…]

Toe curling moments in political television (apologies for inaccurate transcription from memory but this is broadly correct):
Question Time, BBC1, 7 October 2004. Dimbleby declares that only 60 seconds remain of the programme. Nation thanks its lucky[…]

A List Of Films from 2003
How to write about what I thought were the best forty films of last year. No, scratch that, why am I writing about the forty best films of last year? The simplest answer of course would be that I did it last year and am a co[…]

Graffiti Criticism: it’s pretty common to see scrawls on Tube posters – someone putting “SLAPER” on an advert for Christina, a casual “Bollox” appended to a Dido picture, the face of Robbie Williams acquiring two b[…]

I thought I’d break the NYLPM mould a bit and talk about some records I’m enjoying. First up is the non-religious half of this new R Kelly album, Happy People. Some critics have suggested that this record is just a CD’s worth of &#8[…]