"Wire contributor, semi-mythical pop svengali, erstwhile thespian, sampler troubadour and untidy kitchen user" - Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy
"Your songs are pretty little paths - take us somewhere nice." - Elodie Amandine Roy, Applejack Zine
The eerie, unsettling potential of the harmonica had, by 1978, already been well established. It’s slurred wail and reedy chords, its uncanny sound – so close in many respects to the human…
At the turn of 1930s, two of German expressionist cinema’s leading lights left the dark shadows of the catacombs and the back alleys in search of other worlds. Both Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau had…
In my brief absence from the blogosphere, I seem to have missed the boat somewhat on Inception and meanwhile Mark K-Punk has gone and made almost exactly the point I wanted to make…
I have lost count of the number of reviews that have spoken of the new Pipettes album in terms along the lines of, “they have moved away from the individual sixties garage aesthetic of…
In the first days of 2008, after three years of fairly relentless touring, The Pipettes found ourselves back in London. Three key members had decided to leave the band in order to pursue…
There’s an interesting feature in the latest issue of The Journalist, in-house organ of the NUJ, about the decline in fortunes of newspaper and magazine horoscope columnists. In 1988,…
Went the Day Well, Cavalcanti’s first proper feature for Ealing Studios in 1942, is like an episode of Dad’s Army directed by Michael Haneke. Scenes of brutal horror erupting…
Amidst all the brouhaha in recent months over Roger Ebert’s denunciation of the possibility of video games being considered as art forms, few seem to have asked why the eminent…
For over a century, the question of tomorrow has largely been a question of evolution. Under the influence more, perhaps, of Herbert Spencer than Charles Darwin, the future path of the…
“It’s the year 2010 and you wake to a familiar tune playing softly. It gets you out of bed and makes you feel good. As you walk into the bathroom, your Personal Media Minder activates the…
As the Vorspiel draws to a close, the curtain rises on a vast pale room. Stage left stands a vastly proportioned door which will make dwarves of the protagonists (and giants…
“It was amazing. I closed my eyes and I could imagine myself in a hotel room in East Berlin in 1986. Really, it was like listening to the hotel band playing disco tunes in communist Germany…
There are a number of found objects featured significantly in HTV’s (1977) series, Children of the Stones: the engraved stone found by the poacher, Dai (“It’s mine! I found…
I shall be taking part in this event at the end of August at the Tom Thumb Theatre, at Dreamland, Margate. Yes, the same Dreamland rhapsodised in Lindsay Anderson’s short film, O…