;or; Confessions Of A Gabber Fan
Or maybe it should be called “Why I Like Kid 606” because Vinyl Communications, as a music-releasing entity, is a bit hard to encapsulate in a relatively short article. With releases as disparate as Lockwe[…]

Low’s Christmas tree is a simple one, with eight plain wooden baubles. The band write four tracks themselves, offer interpretations of two carols and crooners’ favourite “Blue Christmas”, and nobody’s bothered to take credit for “Taking D[…]

I’m in a central London cinema watching Fight Club: on the screen, Brad Pitt has forced a Korean shopkeeper to kneel in a puddle and is holding a gun to the man’s head. Pitt tells the man he is going to die, then asks him what he most wan[…]

Revelations, even small ones, hit you unexpectedly. Mine comes about halfway through ‘Spooked’, the third track on Layo & Bushwacka’s Low Life, when, having explored some rather tasty crunchy electronic sounds, punishing bass a[…]

A triple album box set, three hours long, containing 69 songs, covering almost as many genres – well, it has to be crap, hasn’t it? Surely it must betray signs of Prince-like lack of quality control? Amazingly, it doesn’t. The Magnetic […]

Writing about “So Hard”, I suggested that the story of the Pet Shop Boys in the 90s has been one of decline management, which is of course a terribly English story, much more so than the stories of wealth and despair they used to tell. Th[…]

Death In Vegas – The Contino Sessions
It begins with a tremulously strummed guitar. It ends with a supercharged riff. There are many guitars throughout the songs in between: echoing, shimmering, feedback guitar; gently twanging feelgood guitar;[…]

Music Of The Millennium, Channel 4, 13th November 1999
Bob Geldof was unhappy. So was Courtney Pine, so was Miranda Sawyer. Courtney, plumply likeable in a snug hat, looked politely bemused. Miranda looked annoyed and uneasy, but Bob’s face was[…]

What Becomes of The Broken Hearted?
Glamour is a pop critic’s fatal weakness. A bit of spangle and the dreariest band gets to count the raves on a hundred adoring hands, even if their records are then roundly ignored. Of course there’s no[…]

The E Brothers Guide To Jukebox Etiquette 
As Dr Johnson once put it :”When a man is tired of jukeboxes, he is tired of Life by Simply Red”. Or was that Don Johnson? Whichever, his sage words merely underscore the quite tectonic importance of th[…]