The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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Arsenal

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Someone said to me earlier this week that either you leave football, or football leaves you. It’s a saying I’ve heard a few times before, but this time it rang true, because football has been leaving me for some time now.

Somewhere in amongst all the nation state ownership, the crooked World Cups, the VAR and its accompanying relentless focus on refereeing decisions, the beautiful game – my abiding obsession since I was old enough to kick a ball – began a slow, inexorable drift in a direction I wasn’t really prepared to follow.

The online discourse, the pundits seeking “engagement”, the data analysis and clockwork-precision coaching. The creeping sense that individual genius and expression should be supplanted by collective cohesion, that the emotion in the stands should be kept in check until properly vetted and approved by a team of experts in a van miles away from the stadium.

My favourite sports writer, Eduardo Galeano, once memorably wrote that “the history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty”, and over the last decade I’ve felt the weight of those words. Not in the playing of the game, which remains as much a joy as ever, » Continue Reading.

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things

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It’s Friday evening, the sun is out, and there was a lovely vibe about the town as I passed through it on my way home a short while ago.

On the basis that a happy little buzz is always worth sharing, what better occasion for a short and sweet post in which I call out some of the things that have rung my personal bell this week.

1. The Nine Inch Noize album that came out last Friday. All of your favourite 90s Industrial Rock classics given a Techno facelift by Boys Noize, with added excited crowd noise. Please, please tour this material.

2. Mixtape

Coming out in a few short days on most games formats. An opportunity to roll back the years and be a teenager all over again, accompanied (it says here) by the soundtrack of a generation. Provided your generation takes in Devo, Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Joy Division, Roxy Music, Lush, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Stand up while driving! Run through picket-fenced backyards! Steal a shopping trolley! Ride a flaming stallion of delinquency! All the stuff you meant to do in your own teenage years but never got round to. I can’t wait.

Trailer in » Continue Reading.

Bingo’s Best of 2025

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As has become regrettable tradition, it’s time for me to unveil the hotly awaited list of the 20 tracks that have most profoundly rung my bell in the year just gone.

See tracks in the comments below….

On The Shortening Of Attention Sp

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I recently came across a thread on a popular website in which thousands of people debated a simple question: what are the best 5 seconds in all of recorded music,

From that debate emerged ten fairly clear winners. All of them make sense to me. All of them are in genres very well known to and by the Afterword Massive. None of them are particularly obscure. None of them were recorded later than the early 90s.

So, with all of that in mind, I ask you, the Afterword; what are the best 5 seconds in all of recorded music?

A point to anyone who can name one of the ten winning entries. Go!

D’Angelo

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Gone at 51, pancreatic cancer. One of the greatest talents of his generation.

Fuck – and I can’t stress this strongly enough – this timeline.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwynv40ly4vo

No words, just gutted. Post your favourite tracks here if you like.

What Are The Albums?

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Over the Summer I had a conversation with a couple of old friends about two urgent subjects; how we consume music, and my appalling lack of costly hobbies.

In the course of the discussion, we broadly agreed that none of us would go back from streaming to “the old ways”, and that the album is largely a dead format from here, with the caveat that there are probably 20-30 records that do demand to be listened to in their totality, rather than being strip mined into individual tracks.

On the back of the above, I’m conducting a small experiment. I’ve been gifted a tiny, incredibly basic record player, which I’ve set up in the kitchen, and I’m going to buy a limited number of albums on vinyl to play on it to see whether it actually changes the listening experience. The speakers are tiny, so this really isn’t about audio quality, it’s about vibe – does it feel any different to return home late at night and go through the abject labour of sticking on a physical album rather than just clicking two buttons and having Sonos do the rest.

The rule is that I can’t order anything online, » Continue Reading.

Diet Pepsi

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Ben Platt, Live from 2025 Las Culturistas Culture Awards. Hands down cover version of the year.

I am obsessed – obsessed – with this now.

Any other cover versions which deliver unto the original an improbable new direction?

Thumbs

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Finally got round to seeing Lucy Dacus play live this evening, with the eldest of the Little progeny in tow.

The show was very good, and Night Shift did not disappoint, but I was completely blown away by the performance of Thumbs, a song I’ve heard many times before but which seemed to gain extra dimensions when sung live. Such a simple thing, so beautifully written, so spare in its arrangement. Single spotlight, the whole room holding its breath.

“You two are connected by a pure coincidence Bound to him by blood, but baby it’s all relative”.

One of the more powerful live performances I’ve seen in a while, and quite unexpected. A true four minute novella, and a ripple right across the audience.

Has anyone else found a song transformed by hearing it live?

Bingo Little’s 100 Favourite Songs Of All Time

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As promised/threatened at the tail end of last year, I have decided to follow in the footsteps of the estimable Kid Dynamite by cataloguing my 100 favourite songs of all time (and also by pilfering wholesale his format). I figure if I start now and get a couple done each week then we should hopefully be through it all by 2025, leaving me with a lasting record of all my nonsense, and anyone else who manages to follow along with a plethora of unanswerable questions and varying degrees of musical PTSD.

As a chronic maker of lists, this top 100 has sat on my phone for a while now, but I thought it might be interesting to lay it all out with some thoughts on each tune and maybe a little bit of accompanying autobiog as to why and when each of these 100 love affairs began. I’m afraid I’m not going to follow Kid’s very sensible approach of one pick per artist, but otherwise the – ahem – song remains the same.

If nothing else, it will provide the authorities with valuable psychological profiling material when my many crimes eventually and inevitably come to light. And if further enticement » Continue Reading.

Bingo Little’s Best Of 2023

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Here we all are again at the awards show at the end of the universe. A peek into the other side of the Afterword, away from all the banjos and beards and whatnot, to a land populated by an insufferable Gen Xer with an inelegant Peter Pan complex and a deeply unfashionable belief that music not only did not reach its zenith in the 70s but has in fact only continued to improve with the passage of time.

If you’d each like to look under your seat, you’ll find a crate of rotten produce to reflect your indignation and a vuvuzela to help drown out the atrocious racket with will shortly emanate from this thread. Those among your number less temperamentally inclined to what we all know lies ahead are advised to seek the nearest exit post haste. Those made of sturdier stuff are advised to buckle up, pour yourself a stiff one and dive on in.

2023 was a year of highs and lows. Lots of parties, lots of laughs, some fabulous days out in fabulous company, but also having to watch friends and family go through tough times, and trying to find the best way to support » Continue Reading.

Fred Again. Again.

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Around a year ago I wrote this rather over-excited blog post, percolating in characteristically uninhibited and exuberant fashion on a moving experience I had with music at the Coachella festival.

Music Makes Life Worth Living

Long story short: I went to Coachella, saw Fred Again and found myself brought, quite without warning, to tears by a potent combination of the joy of being out of lockdown, a large, happy crowd, Fred’s rather gorgeous mental-health-positive House music and (let’s face it) what was probably a little bit of sunstroke. But it was also bittersweet – there was some sadness in there wrought of the two years we’d all just been through, the toll it had taken on a number of people I care about, and – frankly – the shit scariness of those early Covid days.

It was a show that proved to be something of a watershed moment, both for Fred and myself. In the case of the former, it established him as something of a coming force in » Continue Reading.

Bingo Little’s Best of 2022

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It’s the time of the season when I like to sit down, make a big list of all the year’s best tunes, and then write some stuff about them. And then mercilessly foist it all on you.

2022 was, for me at least, an especially good year for music. I mean, obviously I say that every year because I’m an incurable exuberant, but this year in particular really was very good indeed. As in, it was actually a bit painful getting this down to 20 songs, and a busy December has meant I’ve had to do it in more of a hurry than I’d have liked.

I’ll post the longlist in the comments, in case anyone is interested, but this is where I ended up landing. 20 songs that lifted my heart, nodded my head and put a spring in my step across the year. Hopefully one or two of them may do likewise for at least someone else on here. And if they can’t do that, they can at least confirm a few suspicions as to the ongoing death of music.

1. Free – Bakar

A mid-year discovery that proved an ideal soundtrack to virtually every situation and » Continue Reading.

Newness Here’s The Anthem

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Nearing, as we are, the end of the calendar year, thoughts begin to turn to the traditional “Best of…” Spotify playlist.

Normally, this is a fairly simple process: I keep a running list of good things I hear during the year, I scan through the “best of” playlists on a few websites in early December to ensure there’s nothing too excellent that I missed, and – sure enough – 20 tracks magically present themselves as the period’s finest.

2022, however, is proving something of an exception. Put simply: my longlist is too long, and I am already struggling to reduce it to the requisite 20 without landing firmly in “kill your darlings” territory (and I rather like my darlings). Plus! There’s still about a month to go.

Obviously, this is good news: lots of exciting new music, which is what we like (right?). But it’s also an awful lot of pressure – as seasoned blog observers will no doubt be aware, my end of year playlist is such a feature of the holiday season that many have come to rely on it in order to maintain the fragile balance of their emotional inner lives. Heavy hangs the head that picks » Continue Reading.

They Say These Are The Golden Years

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Last week I had the good fortune of attending the final night of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour, at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith. I know there are a few fellow fans on here, so I thought it would be worth a quick write up.

Obviously, Sour was one of the better albums of 2021. 11 tracks and a little under 35 minutes of the precocious Rodrigo tearing her ex boyfriend a new one over a series of pop punk and piano-lead indie tracks, with a sprinkling of songwriting genius and a touching refusal to accept when it was time to stop kicking because the corpse was long since cold. An absolute torrent of rage and accusation, all delivered with a smile. God only knows what it must feel like to be the person who inspired it.

So – first up, the audience. 90%+ female, absolutely crackling with expectation and bedecked with merch way before the show even began. I’ve said before on these pages that, for all the lengthy, obsessive “pieces” and poring over rock minutiae we see on the Afterword, probably no cohort actually “feels” music like teenage girls. This event rather confirmed that notion; they were, quite simply, » Continue Reading.

Meet Me In The Bathroom

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While on holiday last week I finally picked up and read Elizabeth Goodman’s excellent “Meet Me In The Bathroom”. It’s an account of New York music in the early 2000s, documented in that peculiar format of quotes from individuals arrayed in narrative succession, once so beloved of Q magazine. As such, it’s super easy reading and warmly redolent of the heyday of UK music magazinery.

The book focuses mainly on four acts – The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem and Interpol. That said, it also focuses on a number of others who were either fellow travellers, inspirations or successors; the likes of Jonathan Fire*Eater, The White Stripes, The Rapture, Fischerspooner, TV On The Radio, The Hives, Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, Kings of Leon, etc.

It’s a highly enjoyable read, particularly for anyone who was young enough to be excited by at least some of these bands, or certainly anyone who is willing and able to recognise the particular greatness of The Strokes.

The turn of the millennium was obviously a time of great change for the music industry, which makes it fertile ground for a book of this type. It’s interesting to read about the flowering of » Continue Reading.

Music Makes Life Worth Living

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Music makes life worth living. Music is worth living for.

– Andrew WK

So, I had this amazing experience and I need to write about it somewhere, so I’m going to write about it here.

Basically, I went to the Coachella Festival and, in the middle of a weekend of some quite brilliant music, saw one of the best, or at least most affecting, live performances I can ever recall.

Those who pay close attention to matters Bingo Little may already be aware that I am quite keen on an English DJ and Brian Eno protege named Fred Again. He made a couple of great albums during the pandemic and has been playing shows to rave reviews. Plus, he’s already released Lights Out this year, which is wonderful. Advanced word had him as the do not miss act of the entire festival, so I made it my business to be at the Mojave stage early, and down the front.

Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who got the memo, as the crowd stretched right out of the tent and demonstrated a restless energy that unmistakably suggested the expectation of an imminent good time. My assumption was that the show would » Continue Reading.