MORCHEEBA – “The Great London Traffic Warden Massacre”: The parking shop at Wandsworth Town Hall is a mass of low expectations thoroughly met – laminate zone maps on formica tables, chewed pencils on raffia strings, customers […]

FT Top 100 Films
49: CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON
Martin Skidmore says:
I love this film. It’s full of great moments and scenes, beautifully shot, mostly flawlessly acted, with glorious cinematography. I love the scene with the petite girl (Zh[…]

Tube Trouble
It’s curious the way people react when the underground has problems. Last night flash floods created mayhem and several stations closed. Bank station was also closed but this was due to ‘a fire’. These things amuse me. […]

No.1
The Grove Tavern, Walthamstow
I like the Grove for three reasons: 1) It has proper locals, 2) Sunday night is ‘song night’ and 3) I used to live opposite.
The Grove is a small square boozer on the corner of a late Victorian terrace. […]

“You will worship dEUS”
Although I’m not the die-hard dEUS fans I used to be, I still keep track of all things gODly. So, after his film and his collaboration with CJ Bolland, Tom Barman has decided to produce a new dEUS single,&#82[…]

This album grabbed me from the beginning: I have an article in progress on soul music in which I refer to “the peerlessly composed intro to Al Green’s ‘Love And Happiness’”, and that intro is sampled for the first track.
It&#8[…]

No way to run a comic: Al told me about this site at the weekend, it may have been linked here before but I don’t remember it. It’s an exhaustive (35 long pages) examination of the Spider-Man “Clone Saga” – the storyline[…]

Caribbean cover versions with the wrong words
Among the many pleasures in reggae cover versions is that they don’t take a great deal of trouble to get the lyrics correct. This was spurred by listening to yet another Trojan Box Set, this the Reg[…]

As mentioned almost a year ago, probably my favourite artist is Ed Ruscha. But, until last weeked, I had never seen any in the flesh. I had survived pretty much on They Called Her Styrene by Phaidon and a few web covers. One of the appeals to me of t[…]

VANISHING LONDON…
1: Mole Jazz
(Part one in an occasional series, done partially under protest because one of the best things in London is the constant renewal – good and bad.)
Mole Jazz used to be right at teh bottom of the Gray’s […]