Almost the first issue of the NME I bought had a Stuart Maconie album review in it which ended something like this: “There are only two possible marks for this record. One is zero and the other is (10)“, and I think that cheap move was th[…]

Hook Road Car Park, Epsom – 24th October 1999
The cars drag themselves through the 7am rain like a parade of slugs, into the multi-storey. It’s cold, everybody’s wearing cheap waterproofs or knackered jumpers, most people have an ex[…]

Why? The Beta Band is the most troublesome record of 1999 – its makers disown it, its few disciples adore it, a whole lot of people hate it, and a whole lot more like me just don’t know what to make of it, but keep playing it anyway. Whil[…]

8 October 1999, London
No pop in this record collection: 1977 is billed as a trip through 22 years of “music and anarchy”, part club, part gig, part showcase for organisers Satellite Records. Sounds like a good night out – sounds li[…]

Position Normal – Stop Your Nonsense 
Pay attention: you should buy this record.
It’s best to get the message up front, right, because the click-happy, frames’n’flash graphics-or-bust internet audience is now thoroughly post-[…]

The Human League – Reproduction and Travelogue
One thing we know about men who go into space: they come back changed. Quatermass’ astronauts return carrying a cold-war plague; Philip K Dick’s Palmer Eldritch comes back a hallucinopa[…]

Are You Scared To Get Angsty?
You don’t decide to listen to this kind of music: it chooses you. Indie kids are born not made, see, and one day at the crossroads, after the seventeenth pointless, exhausting infatuation, after the twenty-fifth re[…]

“Where’s Your Child” is a 12″ record by Chicago House act Bam Bam, long out of print but available on compilations occasionally, including one called Acid Flashback, where I heard it. It’s a clammy, tauntingly hostile da[…]

Ingratitude: a key critical quality I’d not much previously thought about, until I got the new CD by Toronto’s Pope Factory through the post. Standing dressing-gowned and bleary-eyed in the hallway of my parents’ house, slimly omino[…]

England under the knife: the second great British pop album of 1999 is a sick and bruised twin of the first. XTC’s Apple Venus painted England as a rustic, mystic utopia, where lives find rest and satisfaction in changeless countryside ritual. […]