I’m in love with Honey Lantree, and anyone who cares about pop should love her too. Look at the cover of The Honeycombs ‘I Can’t Stop’ – she’s above the boys, looking to the left and slightly upwards, red lipstick[…]

Sleater-Kinney – One Beat
“Once. Then no more… ever. But to have been as one, through but the once, with this world, never can be undone.
“So we persevere, attempting to resolve it and contain it in our grasp, in overfilled ey[…]

Introduction
For a long time, hardcore was my secret shame, a big red H sewed to my side of anti-modernist thinking, an albatross from my misspent youth. Its strictures, its anti-pleasures, its ugliness are very far indeed from what makes up the bulk[…]

I don’t think much of the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ but there’s guilt and there’s guilt, isn’t there? There’s guilt for something you might be doing wrong – breaking some invisible law of taste, maybe […]

(That Thing I Never Wrote About X-Press 2)
In the end the main reason I quit my job is because I despise working. Despise is too flowery a word even, to be honest I’d prefer ‘hate’. I hated working in a petrol station. I hated two o[…]

Spiders: creepy, crawly little critters which seem up to no good – hanging in the corner of your room, leaving webs around just to make a mess – definitely with their own agenda. Not the most obvious creature to base a film on. Yet Hollyw[…]

A Manifesto, by Various Geezers
Geezaesthetics was coined by ILE’s Jerry The Nipper as a one-word summary of our critical stance. What did he mean? Only he knows (printing this is at least partly a nudge at him to tell us!) – we took it as an[…]

Pretty much as soon as I started Popular I decided to mark each song out of ten. I had a few reasons for this. I’d not really written reviews with marks attached before and thought it might enliven things a little. I had been reading EDGE magaz[…]

Tarkus vs The Strokes[…]

The lecture theatre is off warm, a faint scent of natural gas pitched on the air. Some students doodling matrices of multiple Xs or stickmen sex on their note pads, some scripting every single word the lecturer says. On the black board are forgotten[…]