The Only Ones – Another Girl Another Planet
Undertones – Teenage Kicks
Siouxsie and the Banshees – Hong Kong Garden
public Image – Public Image
Elvis Costello – Radio Radio
Ku Klux Klan – steel Pulse
Is This Love […]

Going the way of local cinema ads. My favourite was always (shown I think at the Oxford Odeon mid 80s):

We open on the globe as seen from space . The camera hurtles towards the globe, down through the cloud layer […]

The Birmingham perspective: we’ve had a blast all this week going to yer actual events IRL. We’ve been to the athletics (twice) – one morning and one evening session at the Stadium, hockey at UOB and badminton at […]

Roughly where the HS2 terminus will be.

I started the kindle deal threads and felt it was a lockdown thing but they are easy to do if people would appreciate it.

This site is full of people with ‘very particular sets of skills’ if by skills you mean over-detailed assessments of the worth of particular forms of cultural production. I wouldn’t worry. Next up: did those gold […]

Other tag lines excitable publicists could use….

Mucky Stuff! (Ulysses)
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll give up! (Finnegans Wake)
It’s like Benjamin Button, but in the RIGHT ORDER! (Portrait of the […]

Yes it’s only 99p, but it’s not issued by a recognised publisher of books. I’m always wary of ‘classics’ not by for example Everyman or Penguin as no-one wants to get two-thirds of the way through to discover 50 […]

Flying home from Vienna five or six years ago, they had a series of individual smoking booths like phone boxes – with glass doors so you can see exactly who cannot do without a ciggie.

Maybe only GF Newman has actually been brave enough to not succumb to the ‘bad apples, the barrel can be saved’ view of the police.

There is a critical view, that in series 1-6 it was copaganda, this is a thoughtful piece:

Certainly American cop shows over the past 2 years have had surely to reckon with this. The best argument in the article […]

One of the key sitcoms that the whole family absolutely got behind (Friday Night Dinner, Parks and Rec, Motherland), coming along when they were 14/15 which is probably the best age to watch it. Lots of love […]

A little bit like the foreign holiday is a non-negotiable for many, regardless of whether it is the most sensible use of several thousand pounds, for many spending upwards of £200 for Springsteen is not thought […]

Some of our ongoing discussion about why this might be so, so please do give me your thoughts on…

1. For the over-50s COVID is still very much a thing. My gut feeling is that 10-20% of the over-50s live music […]

Indeed so, when we book photographers it is exactly that.

Ah me and the C19 novel. Am only, after 30 years of refusal, starting to make inroads. George Eliot absolutely, need to read Middlemarch again. Wilkie Collins is fabulous entertainment. I’ve also enjoyed Jane […]

All very different in the jazz world. An event I was involved with on Saturday saw a quartet turn up as a trio, and reinvent their set accordingly. Also reminds me of anecdote when I saw Vic Godard and Subway Sect […]

Double denim buckler! Cardigan Weller! Foxton wisely lurking at the back.

I was going to disagree and say that prime proto-mullet, stripey blazer and bowling shoes Foxton was the one. Can definitely rule Buckler out.