Paraphrase the famous ‘I may not like what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it’ into ‘I think your sexual politics are more than a little dodgy, you look unpleasant (and decidedly unwashed), but you’re the first Irish band in history to whose music you can imagine […]
What really grabs attention in this belated companion piece to The Jam’s penultimate single The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow), is just how little they have in common. In late 1982 as The Jam’s closing chapter saw them feted as real deal pop stars for the only time, an acrid sarcastic dirge was license for […]
It’s one of those ironies, that I was given a collection of Miriam Makeba’s music just last week – that is to say, a week before the South African artist died, suffering a heart-attack after having sung at a solidarity concert for Italian author Roberto Saviano (who is living under escort, after the Neopolitan mafia […]
Forget the fashionista’s need to wear their t-shirts and proclaim themselves fans, forget that you can now buy nearly as much tat bearing the famous lightning bolt insignia as you’d find adorned with Elvis’s mug, forget all that and remember when AC/DC became as the anti-dote to rock’s ascent up its own backside. In the […]
A friend once decided on a whiskey drinking project as a new year’s resolution. She decided she would sample a different whiskey each week through the year. More a gift than a resolution for many, but for her it was an arduous task, given that she didn’t particularly like whiskey. Her thinking was far from […]
From a vast melting pot, its intensity so bewildering Fritz Lang may just be forced to gasp, a proud nightingale tired of the “Oh she’s Stevie Wonder’s lyricist isn’t she?” rhetoric rises, arms thurst wide, eyes glowing, messianic to the frickin’ hilt. This sleek slender Sappho like spectre hovers above sardine tin Northern Soul dancefloors, […]
A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work – or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of […]
How many albums have Oasis released since What’s the Story Morning Glory? The correct answer here is ‘ who cares? they’ve all been shit’. Alan McGee, founder of creation records and the man who pushed Oasis into the spotlight in the first place is convinced that their latest album is (finally) worth listening to – […]
Imagine the scene: The revolutionary court stands to order as its three women judges enter. There’s a tension in the air, the atmosphere is electric, as the accused stands in all his fuzzy-faced glory. There was a time in the mid-eighties when all you could hear on the radio had his reverbed vocals, and now […]
As I write, September 25th seems like it’s going to be a long long day. Far too much of what makes the “average” shrink tick occupies my own allotment of infinity, where laboured breathing buffs up a damp silvery fog incumbent of what should be Thursday. Not for the first time, and most certainly not for the last, […]
