This is an article by Peter Divey. I knew a little about classical music, I watched the Last Night of the Proms and had enjoyed the film Amadeus. Beethoven, Bach, some of the famous composers were sketchily familiar to me. I did not listen to classical music but neither did I listen to Radio 1. […]
This is an interview conducted in 2035 by music journalist Jason Holmes with the artist called Tone. Jason can be found at @JasonAHolmes. It’s a bright cold day in April, and the clocks are striking thirteen. “It’s good to be alive in the year of our Lord, 2035,” says TONE as he sits down outside […]
This is one of the saddest obits I’ve ever read: She was born on April 3 1932 and liked to describe herself as “the love child of itinerant communist market traders”. Her father, an atheist from the Midlands, was a member of the Marxist-sympathising Plebs League and a founder of the Communist Party of Great […]
That Soweto Kinch guy doesn’t sound like someone with a political axe to grind at all, no, not at all: Soweto’s 2010 release The New Emancipation drew its inspiration from 19th century work songs and early blues, exploring the modern resonances of the emancipation story. From debt/wage slavery, to creative oppression in the music industry […]
So this black jazz musician Soweto Kinch claimed, on last night’s ITV Peston show, that on that very day, on the very train ride he took to get to the Peston studio, a guard prevented him from going into first-class carriage, even though he had a first-class ticket, and even though there were clearly seats […]
It might seem strange to celebrate Neil Peart’s life with a video that features an animation of him, rather than the real thing, but it’s a brilliant animation that really highlights his drumming skills. (And it’s one of the classic Rush tracks. Never liked anything they did after the 80s.) Social media
Global warming hysteria allows Gary Numan to outdo them all: The decision to pour images of a desolate planet into his songs came after he heard Donald Trump refer to climate change as a hoax. Numan and his wife had moved to Los Angeles in 2012, and in California, he says, global warming “hits you […]
I finally got around to watching Bohemian Rhapsody on the weekend. It was a bit crap, but certainly not as bad as the critics said, and it was a lot of fun to watch, especially with kids. But then the views of film critics these days bear no relation to reality at all. Consider this […]
I’ve taken to carrying a box of Morrissey CDs in the back of my car. (For some reason they were going very cheap.) The reason I do this is in case I ever meet any of the old Morrissey bores from school. Back then there were pre-goth types who always dressed in black and painted […]
Yesterday I tweeted this: I said a few years ago that the left is aiming is to outlaw conservative opinion, or to practically outlaw it. At the time people thought I was exaggerating. But it seems pretty obvious now. Still think I’m exaggerating? Consider this. The left is currently agitating against their former darling Morrissey […]
A little Friday afternoon fun: The Brexit Memorial Home (with apologies to Roger Waters) Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere And build them a home, a little place of their own The Brexit Memorial Home for Incurable Remainers and Lords They can appear to themselves every day On closed circuit TV To make sure they’re […]
Seeing as United Airlines has been in the news again for its innovative canine storage solutions, I thought it was time to roll this one out again: Social media
The tweet police they live inside of my head The tweet police they come to me in my bed The tweet police they’re coming to arrest me, oh no You know that talk is cheap and those rumors ain’t nice And when I fall asleep I don’t think I’ll survive the night, the night ‘Cause […]
Grown-up kids staying still living at home, or coming back to live at home, is a big discussion point these days, such as in this article in today’s Telegraph (I can’t see the whole of it, but I don’t think I’m missing much). But I have uncovered archeological evidence that suggests that maybe it was […]
Philip Hensher in The Spectator wonders about Debussy being apparently devoid of influences: Hardly anything in Debussy’s work is obviously indebted to a predecessor. The hunt for influences on him is a favourite game of musicologists because it is so perverse; once you have mentioned Mussorgsky in the first orchestral nocturne and Wagner’s Parsifal in […]