This waltzing photograph of a song is hard to resist. Listening to it you’re brought in front of a scene pregnant with possibilities, and left to your own devices to make sense of it.
The setting is ‘a rooftop in Brooklyn, at one in the morning’. Everything is seen through this frame or filter. Brooklyn [...]
Slouched hidden beside a fire-exit, Antony Hegarty looked neither courageous or a star, clutching his notebook and looking nervous as he waited for his driver to arrive. This was back in 2005, backstage at a festival in Italywhere Antony and the Johnsons were due to headline that night. He averted his gaze from all passers [...]
Amongst the many half-baked explanations for Dublin band Something Happens’ inexplicable lack of global success, back in 1990, with the superb Stuck Together With God’s Glue is one that focusses entirely on lead singer Tom Dunne’s paisley shirt collection.
There may be some truth to it (take a look at the video below), but it’s an [...]
An alternative title for this triumphalist rant could be “When Critics Bite Back…”, but the dangers of sounding like a Sky One documentary cross bred with a doughnut addled Rolling Stone sub-editor are for now, enough to keep me satisfied with my primary path of destruction. Sure it’s a pre-occupation as old as Larry Gogan, [...]
When I think of John Martyn - who sadly passed away on the 29th of January - I think of friends, spread out across time and space, with whom I’ve listened to his music. It’s natural, because for decades Martyn was an artist to be discovered. He only periodically existed on radio/tv or in the [...]
Imagine yourself in the anonymous looking high-street of any home-counties English town, on a tuesday morning. As you stroll, minding your own business, a man in a bowler hat brushes accidentally into you. The likelihood - in our admittedly contrived scene - is that he’ll akwardly issue an embarassed apology, perhaps going so far as [...]
Three weeks ago I sent a pal an email. Not the kind of drunken rant fest that brings an after effect of head bowing/avoid all eye contact for at least 6 months afterwards. Conceived in an Evangelical state of purity, my friend’s cyber telegram arrived with a link to the lyrics of Idiot Wind and precise instructions [...]
There may be some artistic value hidden deep in the mix, but the prime concern with 99% of hip-hop collaborations is marketing ’synergy’. Like fancy fashion houses developing perfumes, the important thing is establishing the logo, and then attaching it to as many different markets/products as possible. Naomi Klein’s ground-breaking No Logo may have established [...]
Aynsley Dunbar could’ve been a contender. Take the two overwhelming and contradictory pieces of evidence. One, his 1967 self-composed, acrid billowing account of romantic hindsight Warning, then place it alongside the other, his poodle rock sojourn of 1987, as a rather subdued skinthumper for a Whitesnake who went for the Rock N’ Roll Gok Wan treatment [...]
It may seem like heresy (and a rip-off of a Chuck D. line), but the Clash didn’t mean shit to me when I was growing up. I was six years old in the summer of ‘77, and by the mid eighties their punk revolution had already long-been mainstreamed , commercialised (some would argue also by [...]
