This is the first is a new series of ‘What I’ve been listening to…’ columns. CultureKicks also has a ‘What I’ve been reading…’ column by Emily Rhodes, a ‘What I’ve been watching…’ column by Peter Hoskin, and a ‘What I’ve been looking at…’ one by Claudia Massie. As I ticked [...]
‘You don’t have to be a Slayer! Go and buy yourself another shirt.’ That’s what I was ordered to do by a middle-aged hippie at the gates of the End of the Road festival in Dorset a couple of years back. I was entering the site dressed in my favourite [...]
There are three notes guaranteed to shake you out of any gloom: B, C#, D. He plays them with a gentle skipping rhythm, twice up, twice down. Then the same pattern starting on D. By now smiles are breaking out, shoulders are swinging. Two more triples: F#, G#, A repeated, [...]
It was 2nd June, 2005. I was standing outside Bush Hall, a converted pool hall in west London, clutching a piece of printed paper. On it was a code to get me into to see Jason Molina, AKA Songs: Ohia, AKA Magnolia Electric Company, and I was jittery after a [...]
The tang of hairspray in the air, crushed daffodils underfoot, and the offer of a covert French kiss from a boy who looked like Ronnie Kray’s runner. It could only be a celebration of one band, or rather one man: Morrissey. So this is how it came to be that [...]
Imagine you want to tell a friend about a book – but you have first to teach them the letters of the alphabet. Imagine you’d like to describe a great painting – yet your audience shrinks back in horror if you dare to say ‘perspective’ or ‘watercolour’, let alone ‘Cubism’. [...]
I’ve only ever seen The Orb play live once, but I saw them as they were supposed to be seen: off my head on a beautiful summer’s evening in a field in the West Country As the purple sun began to set behind the NME stage at the Glastonbury Festival [...]
I doubt you’ll be surprised that I was a big fan of The Smiths. Pretty much everybody of my generation who didn’t kneel at the altar of Saint Margaret bent a knee to that other implacable Eighties northern diva, Saint Morrissey. When Johnny Marr walked out in ‘87, sick of Morrissey’s pig-headed refusal to [...]
Kraftwerk, aren’t they serious? Serious music fans listen to them on seriously expensive headphones, alone, wearing dark clothes. These fans are mostly balding men in polo-necked jumpers; the kind of men who walk around the Barbican in good strong shoes. Kraftwerk’s beats are metal on metal. Their basslines are radioactive. [...]
When did I realise that synth-pop was back? Answer: when I first watched Drive last year. It’s not that I loved the film—there was too much of Ryan Gosling staring into the middle distance, straining to be hip, for my taste—but I knew immediately that its soundtrack, oozing Eighties electro-cool, [...]