You can’t polish a turd. Whoever said that? Were they onto something or were they just talking shit? The reality was something we knew all along: the turd was quite happy feeling shit. When you’ve been unceremoniously squeezed out of someone’s arse and suffered the ignominy of being chewed up, absorbed and subjected to the…
Category: The Modern Age
69 Love Songs: L.D Beghtol talks Magnetic Fields & Three Terrors
It’s hard to believe, but this interview is now some 25 years old. It was given by Beghtol from his office in Manhattan, and published just a month before 9/11. It was after that, that the world changed forever. For the many who have probably forgotten, Beghtol provided several of the standout ‘turns’ on The…
A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing — The Truth About The Manchester Arena Bombing
No Alarms and No Surprises. Please May 22nd 2017, 22.31 (BST) On Monday, May 22nd 2017, Salman Abedi walked into the City Room foyer at the Manchester Arena at Hunts Bank in Central Manchester and detonated an explosive suicide device. Within seconds, the innocent giddy replay of post-concert highlights as the kids typed-in messages and…
Imogen Heap Interview — God is in the details. Frou Frou album.
Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth (Frou Frou) are about to dish up a tasty nutritious blend of sultry yet spunky trip-hop in the form of the forthcoming single ‘Breathe In’ and debut album ‘Details’. Backed in the UK by LHB and Jo Wiley – this is about as ‘cred’ and as delightful as it gets…
Death of Umberto Eco: Never Leaving, Always Arriving
He provided signposts in a world of infinite junctions, a road map in a world of infinite signs. Discovering Umberto Eco at University was a bit like discovering sex. During the long bleak months of winter 1990 I’d read his novel, The Name of The Rose back to back with Travels in Hyperreality — a…
A Film about Studio Electrophonique. Ken Patten — Sheffield’s Joe Meek.
I have an entry in my ‘Dairy Diary’ for 1984: Wednesday, July 18, 1984: “Demo Day. Got up at 8.00am and had a drink, then took sarnies and guitar up to Frazer’s. We left for Sheffield about 9.00am. We got there about 9.40 and got properly started about 10.05. We did Freezeframe first, then Friction (1…
Just Like The Fambly Cat — Grandaddy
There are probably a thousand fancy guitar-shaped platitudes you could string together to form a wreath to lay at the foot of this painfully grand departure. Parting is such sweet sorrow. Sometimes you have to grow farther apart to keep growing together. Yesterday brought the beginning, tomorrow brings the end but somewhere in the middle…
Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives — The Curiously Quantum World of Hugh Everett III
‘He’s everywhere and nowhere baby. That’s where he’s at. Going down the bumpy hillside in his hippy hat. But though he’s flying around the country, his tyres are never flat.’ Or should I say, in one dimension his tyres are flat and in the other he’s not flying around at all. He’s at home in…
The Shining Ending, July 4 1921. The Shining, Isolationism and the American Dream
The ending of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has chilled and intrigued movie-goers for years. In the closing scene of the film the camera moves from Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance sitting upright, dead in the snow, to a gallery of pictures in the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel. On one of the pictures is Jack in…
The Cult of Tradition: Let’s Make The Past Great Again! ™
Before you went to the bar, Mr Farage, we were talking about why people like you and me were jumping into our little spaceships and hurtling back through time. I was talking about time just being another modern consumable and argued that providing there were enough independent time traders like your good self around, going…