• How Wowee Zowee by Pavement Captured the Sheer Unbridled Joy of Making Music

    April 24, 2020 - By 

    In the mid-90s, everything was about being BIG. In the US, Nirvana had proved there was an appetite for loud, scratchy punk-influenced rock music. In the UK, bands like Oasis and Blur were showing that indie was the new mainstream, conquering the singles charts, as well as the album charts. There was big money in making big music, and a canny band – if they played the game – stood every chance of making it BIG. And in the face of such opportunity, rock’s perennial slackers made their play, and began their slow slide towards smallness. For album number three,…

  • “Like a funeral.” – Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York Turns 25

    November 12, 2018 - By 

    On November 18th 1993, the three members of Nirvana sat down on the stage of the Sony Music Studios in New York, and recorded their own epitaph. Of course, they couldn’t have known that at the time, nor could the TV show producers, the gathered audience, or the guest musicians accompanying the band for this stripped back performance. But through the murky fog of hindsight, the resulting performance and live album seem infused with death, a haunted, haggard journey through one man’s misery, a journey that would end with his own death a few months later. As the world struggled…

  • Runnin’ Down A Dream: Remembering Tom Petty

    October 3, 2017 - By 

    Rock and roll is built on shifting sands. What reinvents the wheel one day, is old hat the next. One minute you’re the Great White Hope, the next you’re Yesterday’s News. And in a world of ‘nearly was’, ‘has beens’, and ‘never were’, Tom Petty was a survivor. With his wide grin, sardonic expression, and electric guitar, he rocked his way through decades worth of pretenders to the throne, seeing them all off, without even seeming to break a sweat. Cool as the proverbial cucumber, Petty didn’t exactly blaze a trail, instead preferring to stand to the side, observing with…

  • “They’re Us… That’s All” The Unlife of George A. Romero

    July 17, 2017 - By 

    In 1967, music and art threatened to take over the world. The Beatles were proclaiming that “All you need is Love”, Jefferson Airplane were chasing the white rabbit down the hole into a magical wonderland, and Pink Floyd were taking us into the outer realms on an ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. Meanwhile, up on the big screen, Warren Beattie and Faye Dunaway were smouldering as outlaw couple Bonnie and Clyde, while Dustin Hoffman pursued an unconventional love in The Graduate. It was a good time to be young, white, and American. But for all the hopefulness that emanated from pop culture, real…

  • Ain’t No Pity In The Mega-City: 40 Years of Judge Dredd

    March 6, 2017 - By 

    The war to end all wars. Senseless carnage on a scale unimagined. The East-Coast of what used to be the United States lies in ruins, occupied by foreign invaders. In the wastelands of the former Soviet Russia, a group of elite operatives infiltrate a nuclear bunker. Aiming the missiles at their enemies’ capital, a captive pleads for mercy. “Judge Dredd – don’t do it! There are half a billion people in my city – half a billion human beings! You can’t just wipe them out with the push of a button!” Dredd stares at the control panel, battered, bruised, but…

  • Copy of a Copy of a: A Strange Kind of Flattery With Lilys

    March 2, 2017 - By 

    There’s a moment on Lilys’ 1996 album Better Can’t Make Your Life Better, where you find yourself wondering “What exactly am I listening to?” It happens on the first track. For a first-time listener, it’s bewildering, a mish-mash of 60s jangle, R&B (in the old use of the term), and garage band scuzz. It sounds like the Monkees jamming with The Who on Jupiter. Which is a compliment, obviously. But if you’d been at all familiar with the Washington D.C. band, then it really was a curveball. Over the course of two well-received but obscure albums, Lilys had established themselves…

  • Starless and Bible Black: John Wetton and King Crimson

    February 1, 2017 - By 

    In 1972, King Crimson were in a bit of a mess. The band had been one of the leading lights of Britain’s art-rock scene, taking the ideas and recording approach of The Beatles to an extreme undreamed of. Their 1969 debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, rewrote the book on what rock and roll could do, but line-up changes had destabilised the band over a series of albums to such an extent where the sole remaining member was guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp, everyone else having quit in the midst of a tour, deciding they’d rather play the…

  • For The Love of Art

    December 12, 2016 - By 

    There was a time when a person could have dreams of being creative, of writing that novel, recording that album, or starring in that movie that would make everything OK. And there was a time when those dreams might actually come true. But that seems like such a long way away from the current vantage point. Liberties Press have recently come under scrutiny after several of their authors have made allegations of business irregularity. Despite books being on the shelves, several writers have spoken out about not being paid, and a new policy of charging money for manuscript submissions has…

  • The Final Cut, And The Ultimate Act of Protest

    December 1, 2016 - By 

    And now, the tide must turn. With the election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office, the cultural climate in America will inevitably change. These are uncertain times, even more so than in previous elections, as the world waits to see what President Trump will actually do. But regardless of the shape of his presidency, it’s almost certain that there will be an artistic response, capturing the fears and anger from that part of the population who no longer understand the world they’ve woken up in. The George W. Bush era was soundtracked by the pop-punk politics of Green Day…

  • Chairmen of the Bored: Nostalgia’s Tight Grip on Stranger Things

    October 18, 2016 - By 

    The opening of Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Things finds four adolescent boys gathered round a table, intently focussed on some bits of paper, and some lead figures. The boys are playing Dungeons & Dragons, the perennially popular roleplaying game which caused a moral panic in the 1980s, with concerned moral crusaders convinced that the game was a recruiting ground for Satanists and murderers. The game serves as a framing device for the whole show, with our four young heroes sent on a quest more dangerous and compelling than any dungeon adventure they might concoct in the basement. And along the…