Live Forever
Pop music has always been an audiovisual medium, but documentary movies about pop have been rare, and successful ones rarer still. Two problems confront the film-maker wanting to do more than simply record a performance. The most interes[…]

The Ultimate Fop-Pop Explosion
When I hit the astroturf I knew it was serious. By the time I got to Battersea the next morning, my ankle resembled the Graf Zeppelin and each gear change felt like an angle grinder slicing through my leg. Only another […]

When I heard Stephen Patrick Morrissey in high school he was the boy I always wanted. Fey, elegant, prone to word play, sensitive and maybe even homosexual. His stories were autobiographical in a way that could be constructed to comfort me. I wanted[…]

101. THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – ‘My Elastic Eye’: ‘It sounds exactly like an elastic eye!’ said Fred S. I scoffed, but you know what? – it does! Though maybe more a clockwork one – but the wobbly fuzz-bass still sounds like[…]

‘Is you is or is you ain’t my baby….top of the pops top of the pops’
So sang my dearly departed Grandad within earshot on more than one occasion during my childhood. Sadly his follow-up ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ fail[…]

This article was the author’s working notes for his since published book “Adorno: A guide for the perplexed”, available from Waterstones, reputable booksellers, and Amazon

Introduction, by Alex Thomson
In many ways Adorno exemplif[…]

Interzone 2002
In 2002, nothing much happened. Again. Those fans and writers who like to plot pop history in eleven- or thirteen- or eight-year cycles were once more left looking like cultists, forever trudging up hills in search of an end of the wor[…]

“Backwoods”
I went out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread- Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’

This shouldn’t take long.
Records of the Year, that woul[…]

A List Of Forty Movies of 2002 placed in some sort of order by Pete Baran
Any year end list should come with a disclaimer, and therefore I am going to start with the most obvious disclaimer that there is. This is a top forty of the films that were r[…]

must’ve been five years old in the passenger seat, mid-dusk, on the barren highway drive to grandma’s house, the sky a navy swath, faraway lights from radio towers, signposts, airplanes, whatever, piercing through cobwebs of branches like[…]