Whenever our old friend Nicholas Currie wants to tell us how, you know, *radical* and *sexual* and *dangerous* his music is compared to all those *repressed* and *parochial* Brit-rockers (hmmm … Fran Healy hollering his way through “Turn&[…]

Having “the rock” is often assumed to be a singularly male obsession. We chicks have got more important things to worry about that strapping on a set of leather strides, damaging our sleek body curves with ungainly guitar straps and stand[…]

cf. Stereolab thirty years ago.[…]

cf. Stereolab with a Brummie accent.[…]

ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba b[…]

How Special were The Specials? Undoubtedly some of them along the line went to a special school, if you get my drift. Certainly the dramatic decline of Terry Hall’s career suggests that education was not what he was all about.
Ah but take us ba[…]

I have a love-hate relationship with drugs in music. I – of course – am a clean living girl and would never take the things myself. Unless they were sleeping pills to avoid listening to the Velvet Underground. (I am not saying I would nee[…]

A difficult one this, as a member of another rock band writes asking me to criticise a group I have never actually heard. Where is the sense of musicianly community, I ask you? I write back, pointing out that my ears have remained happily unsullied b[…]

If Semisonic were indeed semi-sonic, that would mean that they would be barely audible, and that could only be an improvement. Semisonic, in their skittish reconstructed way released a song called “Secret Smile” which was all about a woma[…]

Of all the foul inventions – a poll which forces me to choose between two behemoths of mediocrity like The Stereophonics and Travis, the least defensible acts doing the rounds in Britain. A poll which saw the swift exit of REM and the even swif[…]