England is DIFFERENT (or SPECIAL if you want to be polite) to everywhere else for many reasons, but one is because our music “industry” (it’s not an industry – making baked beans is an industry, and nobody does THAT in their s[…]

For a while – maybe even a week – after New Year’s, I could still glance at the top of newspapers and feel a quiet, thrilling jolt at the date. Of course I hadn’t thought anything would change when the year did, but even so there was briefly […]

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[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
You can tell when you’re in the Midlands because there’s metal on all the taxi radios. There are parts of the country where the 90s didn’t happen, they just passed in a slow iron-grey dra[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Kids, I swear, it was a grass-roots musical revolution out there! While the NME nobs sipped Chardonnay in their Wapping skyscrapers and cossetted their chinless audience with flaccid guitar nostalgia, the […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s 
The sharp London boy dialogue which bookends Weekender‘s 12 minutes sounds like Billy Liar or some other bolshy, aspirational 60s youth fable. It’s that link as much as the length which tips […]

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. […]

This is a selection of the Funny Folk cartoons which ran on Freaky Trigger during 1999. Script and Art by Al Ewing except * where Script is by Al and Tom Ewing.
“Choke – it’s predicted DOOM – for ME!”
“I’ll &[…]

If he had been born in any pop era, Brian Wilson would’ve flourished at least to some degree with those mad skills of his. He wrote and co-wrote cunning songs about surfing, hotrods and teenage autonomy without any firsthand experience; doubtle[…]

A coin in a jukebox, a basement that smells of piss and rust, full of vinyl at ten pence a time, a tape in a cheap cardboard sleeve, bought in a train station, a green courier bag holed where the corners of 12″s poked through, a radio aerial, q[…]