In the Live Forever film, Damon Albarn keeps on doing a horrid thing. He’s clutching some kind of miniature banjo and whenever the interview asks him a difficult question he looks sensitive and pained and hunches over it, picking out indifferen[…]

“Barbara Song” – Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil.
Its my friend Maria’s birthday, and I heard her sing this for the first time a few weeks ago. We were all drinking, but she wasn’t and she left before the evening ended by me[…]

Botch job — they cut out the girl MC, which means they lose the bits that make the song loveable as well as sensational (plus: a love song as well as a sensation), that duel of ‘oh well’s. Without that it’s just being hectored[…]

I spent pretty much all of yesterday reading the BBC’s Doctor Who Episode Guide. I think I’m undergoing some kind of internal audit – all the things I liked when I was a kid and brutally blue-pencilled in my worried 20s are now up f[…]

And Then They Lez Up: Cozen’s t.A.T.u. epic is up and ready on Freaky Trigger – so is Dr C’s latest instalment in the C90 Go! series. Num num num.[…]

heronbone.blogspot.com – wrote something about this which got lost in Blogger. Really good, go and read it.[…]

The Cheeky Girls – Take Your Shoes Off
Take your shoo-sies off, woo! Ah, the Cheeky Girls are back and seemingly reprogrammed. Objective: prove that the Cheeky Song was merely a statement of intent, that chart domination is inevitable. This ne[…]

Anything Goes-Cole Porter
The song is too clever by half, it moves to quickly, it has awkward rhymes, its not nearly as sophisticated as it thinks it is, but when you hear a really good reading (Ella Fitzgerald right now), you feel like wearing a bes[…]

Neumu’s saving grace Philip Sherburne weighs in on the fanatics/dilettantes debate which I seem to have inadvertently started, concluding an interesting column with a stirring rallying cry – “Here’s to outsiders getting it all[…]

Girl group records and Roy Lichtenstein pictures make a too-familiar cultural couple. The four-colour hand dabbing handkerchief to eye; the switchback between sass and heartbreak – what do they have in common, really? Sentiment, I suppose, but […]