And Julie Was Her Name – Listening To Old Music
Whenever you choose to fix it, the birth of Rock is a barrier, like a wall built in time. We on the other side look back to the times before and can’t touch them somehow, can’t imagine tho[…]

The Clientele – Suburban Light
My favourite record of 2000 sounds like it fell through a hole in 1968, and waits in the here and now shyly and patiently, hoping people will notice it. Actually it crackles with a sensibility from still further b[…]

Radiohead – Kid A 
I’ve enjoyed Kid A most when the office is empty and it’s just me and the striplights and the screen, too late in the evening. At quiet times like those I’ve been only too happy to indulge it – in fact I’ve found i[…]

“Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” Good question. I’ve asked it myself for years; John Cusack phrases it neatly in the first minute of High Fidelity. But then he […]

American Psycho seems to be a film about pop music, among other things. Its anti-hero, Patrick Bateman, is a handsome and successful man desperate to retain his standing among other men, often a sliver more successful or handsome than he. To manage t[…]

IHM LYRIC WATCH 2
“I put MCs on the ceiling like Michelangelo did the Sixteenth Chapel” – Jeru The Damaja, “Black Cowboys”
What about the other fifteen chapels, eh Jeru? Not to mention that, well, there aren’t any […]

1.
Belle And Sebastian are great: Belle And Sebastian are dreadful. After a couple of months spent waking up to the first, it’s dispiriting to be reminded that the second still holds. I spent three years disliking Belle And Sebastian after hear[…]

The Pokemon Phenomenon 
This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasm[…]

Piano Magic – Artists’ Rifles
Piano Magic perversely insist on releasing their records as Summer approaches: last year’s masterpiece of filigree loneliness, Low Birth Weight, came out at the height of that boisterous season, and it […]

I was probably one of the last kids to grow up with parents who reckoned, unequivocally, that pop music was trash. Being liberal types they never stopped me listening to it, but there was a clear and unbreakable aesthetic line between pop music and &[…]