As I ticked “listen to hip-hop/rap” on the BBC’s British Class Calculator, I assumed it would take me up a rung on the social ladder – after all, pretty much everybody in my corner of North London listens to hip-hop. My blog brother Pete wasn’t so sure, and it turns out he was right, according to the Calculator’s methodology hip-hop is an ‘emerging’ form of culture and therefore all a bit downmarket.

Which brings me to my first record: the new album from the young rapper Tyler, The Creator, Wolf. Tyler comes from the same LA hip-hop collective as Frank Ocean, except Tyler’s music is a much darker proposition than Ocean’s sun-dabbled R&B. Wolf has real bite and for the unwary, the obscenities, cartoon misogyny and homophobia can be startling.

Tyler, The Creator uses strings in his beats more than most rappers, but he didn’t make it into film composer Paul Leonard-Morgan’s Stringing us along Spotify Sunday for this blog. Paul’s excellent playlist of pop-orientated strings tracks was a real education and introduced me to the full-length version of The Temptation’s ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’; a record so funky you’d have to be dead to not tap your toes to it.

Paul’s playlist also sent me back to one of my favorite string-heavy albums, Portishead’s Roseland NYC Live, which elegantly adds the 22-piece string section of the New York Philharmonic orchestra to beloved tracks like ‘Sour Times’ and ‘Glory Box’.

The debut album from Thom Yorke’s new side project Atoms for Peace will surely feature in my top ten list for 2013. It normally takes me a few listens for this sort of dance-music record to click, but Amok is instantly accessible. The synthetic, stripped-down tones and beats immediately reminded me of Portishead’s nocturnal masterpiece Dummy, and Yorke and Beth Gibbons both share beautiful and eerie singing voices.

John Grant’s 2010 debut Queen of Denmark was an outstanding album, his sweet agave baritone bleeding out over a bed of ‘70’s soft-rock served up by his Bella Union label mates Midlake. It rightly became many peoples album of the year.

His follow-up Pale Green Ghosts jumps forward a musical decade. The red–raw lyrical intensity and delivery is still there. But, in an inspired change of direction, Grant swaps his dreamy ‘70’s sound for a more hard-edged synth-pop feel that wouldn’t be out of place in ‘80’s Sheffield. There will, of course, be intense competition from the new Daft Punk and Ghostpoet albums, but as it stands I reckon Pale Green Ghosts will be my album of 2013.

Nottingham’s young singer/songwriter Jake Bugg has been having a great time of it lately. After getting noticed at the BBC’s Introducing Stage at Glastonbury in 2011, he’s supported The Stone Roses, toured America with his hero Noel Gallagher, and found time to date Cara Delevingne. Apart from being called ‘kak’ in a Joey Barton Twitter rant, everybody seems to be a fan.

Okay, so he wears his influences on the sleeve of his hoodie Dylan: Don McLean, the Gallaghers, the Arctics and a dash of Skinner. But he wears them well. The fourteen songs on his self-titled debut are short, confident and with some cracking sing-along choruses. Bugg is rare glimmer of hope for British guitar music amid the dull Public Schoolification of the indie scene.

Finally, in the aftermath of the Leveson Inquiry I’ve been listening to Christopher Hitchens reading his memoir Hitch-22. His slightly mumbling deadpan delivery in defence of freedom of speech has helped get me battle-ready for the fight to come.

And Hitchens’ beyond-the-grave prediction of the downfall of Cardinal O’Brien…

‘I have a rule of thumb for such clerics and have never known it to fail: Set your watch and sit back, and pretty soon they will be found sprawling lustily on the floor of the men’s room.’

…had me thumping my desk in approval.

What is a classical music critic doing at The Knife? We’re not supposed to frequent the coolest gigs in town. We’re supposed to sit in the capital’s concert halls, tut-tutting if a pianist is too glitzy, shaking our heads if a new opera is too wordy. We’re certainly not meant to be bopping about in the dry ice with our chakras being blasted to bits by high-volume, sub-bass, electronic vibes.

Last week the CultureKicks team, Simon and Pete, coaxed me into joining them for an event that had been picked as The Independent’s Gig of the Week. I looked up The Knife on Youtube and liked what I heard. The music seemed rhythmically fascinating: multilayered and connected in that aural-illusion way in which every stacked-up line seems to do something different leaving you to wonder, like a child with dismantled clock, how it all fits together so well.

It is not far from some strands of contemporary classical music – a field that’s become extraordinarily varied. There are no longer ‘schools’ of composition; simply individual composers quietly influencing one another on good days or, at other times, going their own way, making their own language. The Knife—Swedish siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, their act expanded by a team of dancers—are with the latter. Their latest album is called Shaking the Habitual. And they do. They’re strange. Very strange. Downright weird. But the intricacy isn’t so far from the repetitive patterns and layered sounds of ‘post-minimalism’ and the electronic sampling effects might be familiar to a bevy of Boulez aficionadas and beyond. These worlds could be closer than you think.

I’ve never been one of those classical music people that despise pop music. I like a lot of it. I have just one problem: why does it have to be so damn loud? You only have one pair of ears, folks; they can be damaged very easily by excess decibels, and when your hearing’s gone, it’s gone. I live for music, so mostly I don’t go to gigs, and when I do, I take ear protectors.

Even those don’t save you from that sub-bass. There’s a frequency that hits you in the knees and makes your jeans ripple. There’s another that gets you in the upper chest, near the stomach, causing your supper to jump. Meanwhile, maybe because I’ve got ear protectors in, I can’t hear the words – so I take the plugs out to try the full effect and last about a minute before replacing them, having realised I still couldn’t hear the words. Everyone else must have the album because they know what the songs are called, what they’re about and so forth. And as most people are taller than I am, they can see, too. At five foot two, I glimpse billowing clouds of dry ice, a lot of coloured light, and an occasional whoosh of hand, foot or limb belonging to one of the dancers.

I’ve begun to appreciate the challenges facing classical music newbies. Where do you start? How do you fill in the blanks in your reference points? And supposing you wear the wrong thing? The Roundhouse is surely more terrifying in sartorial terms than the Royal Festival Hall: full of beehive hairdos, lace bodices, Trilbies and patent leather seven-inch heels (come to think of it, these probably help you see the stage). Will they chuck me out for wearing “sensible” shoes? One nice thing about classical concerts is that nobody gives a damn about how you look, as long as you don’t actually smell.

I’m glad I went. I’m glad I went to Camden to hear a band as weird as The Knife, and I liked the oddity, the inventiveness and the Nordic Noir-ish atmosphere of their music, though I’m not about to drop my Wagner in favour of them. Still, the wonderful thing about living in a city that heaves with different stuff is that all this is there to be sampled and each new experience feeds the next, lending a new colour to your personal canvas – and that’s why we try, and that’s how we grow. Cheers, chaps.

‘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 Slayer t-shirt—featuring a bethroned Chagall-like horned goat holding a skull in the manner of Yorick’s—when the guardian of ‘peace, love and understanding’ took issue. The woman, who was sporting dyed purple hair and flimsy angel-wings, took umbrage at the image on my chest. Later on that day she made a bee-line for me in the crowd at The Unthanks, of all things, to spit ‘oooh death metal!!!’ into my face. I deadpanned ‘thrash metal, actually’ as she stomped off, wings a-fluttering, in the direction of the portaloos.

It’s no wonder that many of the country’s metal diehards adopt a Millwall-style ‘no one likes us/we don’t care’ attitude about mainstream music. Many view heavy metal as something only worthy of derision, mockery or repugnance.

Fans of the genre also have to labour against the impression that they’re a bunch of violent troglodytes intent on chaos and carnage. A quick glance at a Cannibal Corpse album cover (never mind the tracklist) or at the wiki page of Cock and Ball Torture does little to dispel such notions. That, of course, ignores the artistic and creative intentions of the lyricists and the bands. Does anyone really think they should avoid Johnny Cash because he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Maybe metal has an image problem. There’s little spandex in my collection, but the image many have in their minds when I start droning on about drone metal is something like the image to the right.

I write this piece just as the metal world mourns the loss of Jeff Hanneman. The Slayer guitarist, who penned some of their most powerful and controversial work—including ‘Angel of Death’—died of liver failure last week. Liver failure was cited as the official cause of death but metal mythology will instead focus on the ‘necrotizing fasciitis’, a rare flesh-eating bacteria, he contracted from an untreated spider bite two years ago. The term, if not the condition, sounds almost like something Slayer would have dreamt up. Hanneman’s passing was reported far and wide—from the Wall Street Journal to Medical Daily—and may lead a few of the uninitiated to sample Slayer’s wares.

Metal is music that demands attention. Lemmy thumping his way through ‘Ace of Spades’ on my battered VHS copy of The Young Ones was ground zero for me as a child. Then I discovered the best of Black Sabbath in my local library. The cover—Bruegel’s brutal The Triumph of Death—was enough to catch the eye, but it was the opening riff of the song ‘Black Sabbath’—adapted from Holst’s The Planets—that instantly struck a dissonant chord. By the time ‘Iron Man’ was thundering away, I was a convert. It wasn’t long before names like Metallica, Slayer and Danzig were being carved onto cassette spines.

I gave up metal for a spell (at about the same time I got interested in girls), but I never really grew out of it. It was the live thrill of seeing a band that sounded like a train crash (after years on the more gentle Americana circuit) that forced the issue and a chance trip to see Danzig at the Astoria locked me back into the heavier path.

So what chemical constituents can be found in heavy metal to make it thus?

In the beginning there was the riff. The semitone, and more importantly the flattened fifth (a note pairing that was banned in religious music and used by the likes of Liszt and Wagner to create a sense of unease), are utilised to move the riff away from straight blues. This is an important distinction as it separates pure heavy metal from the ‘hard rock’ of AC/DC and Deep Purple which, for the most part, retain a blues-ier pentatonic edge.

A distortion pedal, or at least a twist on the gain knob of the amplifier, add to the power of the guitar. But that’s only part of the story. The rhythm section is what provides a great metal band with its power. A drummer capable of shifting time signatures on a sixpence while beating the living hell out of the toms, and in recent times able to control a double-kick pedal, is a must – as is a bass player thumbing notes that will make your innards rumble ominously. Black Sabbath set the gold standard here with Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, but it is in the breakneck speed of thrash metal where the low end comes into its own. Slayer’s Dave Lombardo and Tom Araya provide the meat behind the squalling riffs of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman to create a noise that sounds like the end of the world.

The vocals and lyrics of metal are what most people associate with the genre, and the opening line of Black Sabbath again sets the tone. ‘What is this that stands before me? Figure in black which points at me,’ wails Ozzy Osbourne. Although the band were horror movie fans, not Satanists, the shock value of demonic lyrics was set in stone and has been mined by bands in the death metal, speed metal and black metal genres ever since.

However, an obsession with the devil—also a key ingredient of blues music, by the way—only tells half the story. There is a whole wing of metal lyricists, largely in the vein of Ronnie James Dio, who like nothing more than to scream about warlocks and rainbows. Motorhead sing about death (as in the brilliantly tautological ‘Killed By Death’) but often prefer to rumble about boozing and women. There are overtly political lyricists such as modern alt-metal group System of a Down, while At the Drive In pen songs about the uninvestigated murders of women by Mexican drug cartels. Tool are more likely to sing about the structure of the fibonacci code than the horns of the devil while many of the death metal merchants prefer tales of disembowelment and torture rather than anything from the books of Alastair Crowley.

I personally draw the line at ‘hair metal’ – the Guns N Roses and Mötley Crüe brigade, as I don’t think it is very heavy and it is only a very small step from Jon Bon Jovi. To me the music lacks the elements detailed above even if the tales of excess are legendary. The Eagles had a fair few hair-raising tour stories themselves and I hate the fucking Eagles, man. I’m often confused as to why a song like Paradise City, with its major chords and pop hooks, would ever be considered metal.

The other thing to remember for those who thumb their nose at metal is that it was a uniquely British phenomenon that has inspired the world. You sometimes cannot move for tributes to the influence of The Beatles on popular music but the sound born out of the industrial midlands has spoken to millions of people from the icy frontiers of Scandinavia to the sunny climes of California. Diamond Head, of Stourbridge, gave the world ‘Am I Evil?’ in 1980. It was largely ignored in Britain but became the launching pad for a generation of new bands in the US, including Metallica and Slayer, that went on to sell tens of millions of records. Iron Maiden play to hundreds of thousands of people in countries including Chile and Indonesia whenever Bruce Dickinson dons his pilot’s outfit. This was the British lion that roared.

Metal—in all its myriad forms—isn’t for everybody. Yet to ignore it is to shun a very rich vein of complex and vital music. For the most part, this is music that demands the listener’s attention and seeks to push the boundaries—whether that is the speed of the riff, the complexity of the rhythm or the darkness of the lyrics—and it will continue to flourish.

‘Bah’. If I had to condense the many varied and conflicting sentiments that appear alongside the #bbcqt hashtag into a single word, that would be it – ‘Bah’. In fact, looking at the feed at this precise moment in time*, Bah seems very much to be the order of the day as the word on the street is that David Starkey will be gracing our screens once more. Naturally, this has provoked the standard chorus from the Refusniks (‘Bah, I refuse to watch’) and Conspiracy Theorists (‘Bah. Another example of right-wing/left-wing/ BBC [delete as appropriate] bias’) but, despite their protestations, I know they’ll be watching. I know because like them and the several million viewers who tune each week, I secretly want a good Bah. True, I also like a rousing Yay from time-to-time (something that QT also provides) but ultimately, it’s the Bah I’m after and in the history of mankind, never has there been such an effective mechanism for the creation of Bahs as Question Time.

One of the more frequent Bahs levelled at QT is that it doesn’t do what it says on the tin: ‘Bah!’ goes the familiar cry ‘It’s all just hot air and bluster! No-one actually debates anything!’ And I can sympathise with that – to a point. You only have to look at the near-weekly The Economy Has Gone To The Dogs question that’s been stuck on repeat since the Credit Crunch for evidence: The Red Team will pour scorn on the Blue Team for choking the life out of the recovery, while the Blue Team will counter with something along the lines of The Mess We Inherited, while the Yellow Team fidget nervously in the De-De-Militarized Zone between the two. No resolution is ever reached, rarely is anything new bought to the table, and on waltzes this grim fandango until the country either recovers or sinks into the sea.

So it’s a legitimate Bah, then? Well, not quite. For one, it’s not QT’s fault that political discourse in this country now resembles a horrible fusion of managerialism and one-upmanship, nor is it the show’s fault that we’ve stopped having the sort of Big Ideas that actually allow for real debate. For that we only have ourselves and our votes to blame. More importantly, though, this Bah represents a fundamental misreading of Question Time as a concept: we think we’re watching the show for its stated purpose (allegedly ‘topical debate’), but that’s not what we’re really after. No, what keeps us coming back every Thursday night is the spectacle.

Take this clip from 2007 for example. Here we have the ever headmistress-y Patricia Hewitt aptly demonstrating just how much rope is needed to hang oneself. Now, I’m guessing that she wargamed this scenario prior to filming (as they all do) and concluded the only way to wriggle out of this particular sticky situation would be to bait-and-switch (‘Ministers who screw up should definitely go’/‘Screw up? What Screw up?’). Yet like all QT gambits, the viability of this tactic is entirely dependent on the confidence of delivery and on this front, she falls flat on her face. Notice that dry gulp she takes in the first few seconds of the film? That’s what keeps us watching – that moment when something primitive in our brain stem kicks in and lights up all those predatory circuits. You can see it ripple through the crowd: HUMAN WEAKNESS DETECTED; MAKE READY THE TAR AND FEATHERS.

How about this doozy from 2009 where Eric Pickles performs a wonderful slow-motion belly flop? Again, watch closely and you can actually hear the collective penny drop: ‘Is he describing a job? Oh my god, he’s describing a job!’. Pulses quicken and nostrils flare while Caroline Lucas purrs with delight in the background. This isn’t looking good Eric, but there’s no turning back now. You’re in it up to your eyes and no amount of digging is going to stop the rising tide. He doubles down on his position but it’s too late. Pitchforks are being brandished, flaming torches appear and mob justice dispensed. Once again, topical debate has turned into something much more interesting – a more contemporary Lord of the Flies where the Pig just happened to be the then Conservative Party Chairman.

This is the stuff that hops us up – that unmistakable whiff of fear and panic that set our frontal lobes all a-jangle – and it’s no secret how it’s achieved. Simply take three members of the political establishment and place them in an environment where they have absolutely no control. Sure, they’ll probably have a rough idea of what’ll come up and will have prepared extensively, but at the end of the day they’re out on their own. No Spads to use as human shields, no retakes to Ctrl-Z errors away, or spin doctors to hide behind. Nope, it’s just them, two mortal enemies, a pair of civilian talking heads and a braying rabble. It’s so simple yet it rarely fails to gee up that animal instinct that hides within us all. That’s the hook.

And hooked we are. Just look at what QT does to Twitter every Thursday: it’s like a football match where the opposing teams number in the tens of thousands, everyone has their own ball and the goal posts are wherever the hell you want them to be. Question Time has spawned a devoted hardcore that you simply don’t get with other shows of its ilk. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall the One Show inspiring the likes of the wantonly goofy @markinreading or the sublimely realised @dimblebot, nor do you see people gathering in pubs to party and watch Newsnight as the #BBCQT Watchalong crowd do every month.

So, Bah indeed. We may moan and wail, gnash our teeth and threaten to never watch the show again, but we will. We will because deep down, in places that we don’t talk about at parties we want QT for the Bah. We need QT for the Bah.

Jack Hurley runs the blog Questionable Time. Follow him on Twitter here.

* CultureKicks disclaimer: erm, this piece was written last week.

‘Breaking America.’ You hear that phrase a lot in the entertainment world of the UK and Europe. It’s something that’s coveted, often attempted, but rarely achieved. Sure, Kate Winslet’s done it. So have Gordon Ramsey, Ewan MacGregor, Julian Fellowes, Ridley Scott, The Beatles and Adele, to name just some. But it’s becoming harder these days to find a formula that works in the US.

When I became a literary manager I spent a lot of time in the UK, representing a British director who was shooting a film in London. I got to know the UK film world and found I had an affinity for British and European talent above that I have for Americans. I got the humor, the intelligence and, of course, there was a niche.  I became known as a young manager who specialised in bringing primarily British performers, writers and directors to the US to see what they could do.

It’s not big news that the US is obsessed with the Brits. Maybe it’s the accent, but film and television execs are into bringing new voices to America and they love the idea that perhaps they found a rose from across the pond.

One director I represented was Saul Metzstein, a protégé of Danny Boyle’s from Glasgow.  He won a few Scottish Baftas for a film called Late Night Shopping (2001) and it was clear he had a voice that could translate to America. This, of course, is key. Some people aren’t interested in commercialising or Americanising their work. That’s completely fine – but unless those people are doing a period drama à la Merchant and Ivory, they’re better off staying in the UK and finding success there.

Saul did a film I set up for him that starred some Brits and some Americans, then he went back to the UK and directed some television before doing second unit work on Dredd (2012) and now on The Three Musketeers. He has one foot in both worlds, and it will pay off for him whichever way he chooses to take it. Stay in the UK and make small movies and direct a lot of high profile television, or continue to direct second unit until a US studio sees that he can blow stuff up really well and gives him a movie to direct himself. He’s in a great position but what it’s taken is talent, time and, for Saul, an ability to adapt, bend and compromise.

Of course, some UK filmmakers don’t want to leave their exalted positions in their home country. Shane Meadows is a great example of this. He’s successful in the UK and has little to no desire to do anything US-related. His work is also so bound up with the UK that it might be difficult to break in, no matter how talented he is.

Writers are a different proposition from filmmakers. I always have at least two or three British writers on my roster, but it’s very hard to find ones whose writing can adapt seamlessly to the US.  It has to be so easily malleable to American storytelling that there is no question where the writer comes from. British writers must adapt to the proper language and formatting for screenwriting and, unless they are making a film in the UK to sell to the US (like Guy Ritchie in his early days), they must make a universal story or one whose actors have visibility in the US.

Sometimes what it takes from a performer or personality is simply a desire to leave their homeland and try their hand under the lights of Hollywood.  One example of this is handsome television chef Stuart O’Keeffe, raised in a small town in Ireland, who came to LA and is now making his way up the ladder as a television chef. He has a skill, he is camera handsome and he met an agent while waiting tables in Los Angeles.

Often it requires that kind of luck to make it happen, but you must have the skill, a special something, whether it be a talent for writing or filmmaking, or a way around the kitchen and a pretty face. Look at that list of names at the top of this post again. Not just anyone can make it in America.

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, holding on the A, before three minims—G#, C#, B—herald a familiar thud-thud of the bass and we’re off.

‘Where it began?’ [strum-strumma-strumma, thud-thud] ‘I can’t begin to knowin’’ [thud-thud] ‘but then I know it’s growin’ strong…’

If there is a better crowd-pleaser than ‘Sweet Caroline’, I am yet to hear it. Good times never feel so good as when Neil Diamond’s signature tune is being played, all the more so when it is the Jewish Elvis himself holding the guitar.

He may be a Brooklyn boy but Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ has long been adopted by baseball fans in Boston, who sing it during the eighth inning, whether they are winning or losing. So it was appropriate—and much appreciated by the Fenway Park faithful—that Diamond himself should serenade the Red Sox supporters last week at the first home match since the explosions at the Boston marathon.

It is a song full of optimism and fighting pain with hope. ‘And when I hurt, hurtin’ runs off my shoulders. How can I hurt when holding you?’ No wonder the song has sold heavily since Diamond sang it at the ball game. He has said that he will donate all the recent proceeds to the victims of the bombings.

Recorded 44 years ago at a time of upheaval in his life, with the end of his first marriage and a severance from his first record label, it was ‘Sweet Caroline’ that turned Diamond from Tin Pan Alley singer-songwriter to global superstar. The single went platinum and heralded a string of top-ten hits—‘Holly Holy’, ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’, ‘I Am … I Said’, and ‘Song Sung Blue’—culminating in the hugely successful album Hot August Night, the record that ignited my love for Diamond’s sentimental rock-pop crooning when I heard it playing on my aunt’s turntable.

Some may feel a little uncomfortable in these Operation Yewtree days to know that Diamond was inspired to write his greatest hit after seeing a photograph of the 11-year-old Caroline Kennedy riding her pony—‘Hands, touchin’ hands, reachin’ out, touchin’ me, touchin’ you’—but I am happy to believe that he was just touched emotionally by the innocence and sadness behind the young girl, who had lost her father and uncle. So many of Diamond’s greatest songs are founded on heartache, right from ‘Solitary Man’, his first hit in 1966, an upbeat rejection of rejection.

It was the pain of an adolescent baseball fan that turned Diamond to music in the first place. He had been ten when the Brooklyn Dodgers threw away a huge lead in the 1951 regular season, finally losing a play-off for the National League pennant to a three-run homer in the ninth inning for the New York Giants. They reached the World Series in the next two years but lost each time to the New York Yankees, the intra-city rivalry only making it worse for the young Dodgers fan. When they finally won the 1955 World Series, Diamond recalled screaming out of the window until his lungs gave out.

And yet two years later they were gone from New York, chasing the money offered for a relocation to California, a journey that Diamond would himself make a year before recording ‘Sweet Caroline’. ‘They left me. They abandoned me,’ he recalled years later. ‘I went into a real funk.’ To cheer him up, his parents bought him some guitar lessons – and so a sequin-shirted giant of sentimentalism was born.

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 ticketing snafu had complicated entry. After three years of waiting to see the man with the eerie and powerful voice behind ‘Ring the Bell’ and ‘Riding With the Ghost’, I was getting frantic I would miss out.

In the queue beside me were a handful of eager-looking people. These faces, none more so than a John Lennon (circa Two Virgins) lookalike, would become familiar to me over the coming years as my wife and I chased Molina around various London venues and festivals in Somerset and Dorset. The Magnolia Electric community was small, but it was loyal.

The Farewell Transmission message last month, delivered by Twitter, that Jason Molina had gone at the tender age of 39 triggered the usual cavalcade of retweets, laments and circular blogs saying the same thing. Molina was by no means a big name and only a trace of his work drifted in and out of the mainstream music press. His passing registered barely a flicker outside a few short online obituaries. The circumstances of his death should themselves be cause for contemplation. ‘Alcohol-related organ failure’ at 39 is alarming in itself, but the fact his parents had to take to the internet for funds— Molina had no medical insurance—in 2011 is not the usual departure lounge preparation for a rock star, even a minor one.

To borrow one of his phrases, I was paralysed by the emptiness of it, when I heard the news. My mind cast back to Bush Hall, when I’d seen the tiny man with the mono-brow and the huge voice in full force for the first time. I could almost feel the 200 or so heads that I’d seen around the short-lived Molina circuit falling in unison. I don’t usually get maudlin when people I don’t know personally (outside a few terse greetings over a pool table in Butlins in Minehead) pass away. But this one almost felt personal. The early days of my now-married life were peppered with regular Magnolia shows, and there was the torrid time—detailed below—when I first discovered Jason Molina too.

It was not a shock, however. A solo gig at the Luminaire a few years back suggested that not all was well, as his quiet stage persona turned obliquely aggressive. And the steady stream of records all but dried-up, just as his music started to blossom into something that threatened to break out after 15 years of prolific work with his penultimate release Josephine.

Molina never burst onto the scene. His early Songs: Ohia records, sparse in production with songs often played on a tenor guitar, showed signs of genuine talent. He was generally lumped into the same basket as Palace Music/Bonnie Prince Billy and often dismissed as a poor cousin. However, he developed beyond those scratchy beginnings in interesting but unpredictable ways. One album, Axxess & Ace, featured songs with hooks you could hang a winter coat on, only to be followed by an album, Protection Spells, that was so intimate in style that it was almost like sitting at the end of his bed.

My entry into his world began in the hills on the outskirts of Melbourne when an old friend handed me a Coopers Red and put on an album called Didn’t It Rain. I was back in my hometown after a mate had unexpectedly passed away, and the gothic harmonies of Molina and Jim & Jennie (from the Pinetops) hit me like a train. The eerie, repetitive couplets musing on death and depression bore a hole straight into my emotional core. Serendipity came into play the next day when I found the same album, produced by the venerable Steve Albini, on sale for next to nothing in a stack of CDs in a hippie clothing shop.

That voice describing the ‘big city moon between the railway towers and the big diesel rigs’ has followed me ever since; from the peaks of the Andes to the mountain tunnels of the Faroe Islands to the silence of Antarctica.

His 2003 effort Magnolia & Electric Company was a revelation in a different way. A full band exploded into life and transformed Molina’s songs into something more muscular; powerful in a different way. It should have been a breakthrough and, true enough, William Schaff’s bird skull artwork does peer out of a few record collections I’ve perused. Yet it proved a case of Almost Was Good Enough in retrospect as the following records failed to match its majesty. Fading Trails in 2006 and Josephine in 2009 were great records as the Magnolia Electric band grew in stature. But not in profile or sales. Those same few faces still graced the Molina circuit.

I’ve listened to every Molina album and EP I own—including the heartbreakingly austere Autumn Bird Songs that snuck out invisibly last year—since the news broke. That’s 20 discs and a box set and a lot of sorrow. His vulnerable voice now courses like a ghost from my speakers and headphones. Didn’t It Rain sounds like an epitaph now. ‘When I die put my bones in an empty street to remind me of how it used to be, don’t write my name on a stone bring a Coleman lantern and a radio Cleveland game and two fishing poles and watch with me from the shore,’ he once commanded. I’m now riding with his ghost.

His music can be streamed via this web site.

There is an artist in Edinburgh who produces the most agonisingly precise images I can think of. Her name is Emily Hogarth and she makes her work by creating stencil-like images from paper. The slicing of the paper is at its most impressive when she renders lettering, as in the looping cursive script that spells out the lines from Rabbie Burns poems on show in her current exhibition at the Watermill in Aberfeldy.

I spent a bit of time looking at these images last weekend. I hadn’t read the exhibition notes first, so had some issues trying to work out what was going on with these strange, lace-like images, floating in their frames. It’s hard to believe that anyone could have the patience to do this with a scalpel. What if you slice off the final letter by mistake? That’s what I mean by agonising; I don’t have the nerve for this kind of thing. It made me anxious just looking at them.

Hogarth also makes screenprints from the papercut images. These are very easy to look at; solid, shadow-free copies of their paper parents. The design element actually comes over stronger in these versions and in their richly patterned complexity they reminded me of work by the great children’s illustrator Pat Hutchins.

I found some more tasty prints at the Temple Gallery, on the other side of the main square from the Watermill, where print-maker Ryan Hannigan has his studio. The gallery, in fact, is the studio and it is dominated by some great inky beasts of printing presses. These iron giants are beautiful things to look at in themselves, but I like what comes out of them too. When I visited, Ryan was making some stylish posters involving letterpress and printing directly off a vinyl record. Letterpress features large in his work.

Music is a thing here, too. When he’s not printing (or painting or making hand-printed linings for a range of reworked vintage coats and bags), Ryan is the lead singer in a band, and a proper one too. Star Wheel Press (named after one of the printing presses in the gallery) are hot stuff in Scotland right now, a cult, drawly Americana outfit who supported Midlake in Edinburgh a couple of weeks back. Their albums arrive with a handsome hand-printed cover too, of course.

I went to Edinburgh recently and met Richard Demarco at Summerhall. Demarco, for those who don’t know, is a little colossus of the arts who throughout his career has been responsible for bringing a quite remarkable amount to the Scottish cultural scene, particularly in visual art and theatre. We talked about his vast archive, part of which is housed at Summerhall, and looked at a fraction of it. I enjoyed rummaging through a pile of prints of Demarco’s own drawings, mostly cityscapes defined by clear, graphic line and an understated palette.

Jospeh Beuys, with whom Demarco had a long and productive artistic relationship, features prominently in the archive material on display at Summerhall. I talked a bit about the paintings I am doing at the moment which include animals, live dogs and dead road-kill in particular, and I was urged to look at Beuys’ animal drawings. People tend to think of Beuys chiefly in terms of his work as a proto-conceptualist artist but he was a refined draughtsman too. His animal drawings are delightful, fluid creations, capturing creatures through minimal line or flat, monotone wash.

In looking for further inspiration for my animal studies, I have also been taking in some of Lucian Freud’s work. His whippets, contrasting their sinuous, brindled frames with fleshy human forms, are probably the best known, though he also did some cracking horses. Throughout his career he did quite a few dead animals too – monkeys, birds, bats. On the rare occasions I feel I’m getting somewhere with my corpses I just need study the gnarly dead birds Freud did in the mid-Forties, and those creepy monkey drawings, so very dead, to bring me crashing back down.

Naturally, Freud’s drawing is impeccable but his ability to get across the ‘deadness’ is also remarkable. This is important, obviously, when drawing a dead animal but harder than you might think. As well as rigidity, the corpse acquires a certain heft that is lacking in life; Freud knew this. His animals are certainly dead, and not sleeping like the whippets.

Art on TV can be problematic (think of Noel Fielding worshipping Damien Hirst or that Leonardo travesty with Fiona Bruce) but Andrew Graham Dixon’s High Art of the Low Countries is a triumph. He is a fine presenter who lets the art take precedence while telling you things you might not already know, and that is all we need. The art here is spectacular and offers a wonderful, richly illustrated reminder of the exceptional talents of the Low Country artists. I can’t help thinking that Van Eyck, such a cinematic painter, might have been made for TV like this.

If you sit in the window of the Caffe Nero on Cranbourn Street, near Leicester Square Tube station, and look across the heads of the passing tourists, you will see rising out of the ox-blood tiles above the Wok to Walk Chinese takeaway opposite a relief carving of a set of stumps, two cricket bats, a ball and the words ‘J Wisden & Compy’.

This is holy ground. The Wok to Walk is to cricket what the Cavern Club must be to pop music, only with a side order of prawn crackers. The Victorian ‘compy’ that once sold sports goods from a shop on that site has long gone, but John Wisden’s cricketers’ almanack, founded in 1864, remains, notching up 150 editions at the crease this month.

The first Wisden almanack, a facsimile of which comes with this year’s edition, was a slim beast, just 112 pages to this year’s 1,584, and so lacking in beef that it had to be padded out with such things as the results of the university Boat Races, the lengths of Britain’s canals, the dates of battles in the Wars of the Roses and the rules of quoits.

It was essentially Schott’s miscellany with an extra dose of cricket, among which was Julius Caesar’s century for England against Kent (no, not him, but a Surrey batsman of the same name who also venit, vidit and vicit), and the first in what became a series on ‘extraordinary matches’, in which the Royal Surrey Militia XI were dismissed by Shillinglee without scoring a single run.

Other such matches later recorded in Wisden include Left-handers v Right-handers, Greenwich Pensioners with One Arm v Greenwich Pensioners with One Leg, or Smokers v Non-Smokers (the smokers ran out of puff), while my favourite was the match in 1873 between Married Butchers of Burnley and Single Butchers of Burnley (the married men
won). Who could have imagined that a town with a population at the time of only 40,000 needed so many butchers?

Eccentricity was a big part of cricket in those days, when teams bore names like the Knickerbockers, Incogniti and I Zingari (Italian for The Gypsies). In 1850, young Julius had got together 11 of his relatives for a match, apparently just so they could call themselves by the Suetonian name of The Twelve Caesars. This sense of fun has endured.

Wisden has a reputation, of course, for accuracy and authority, but it is the quirks that have always attracted me most. The first task on getting each new season’s chunky yellow brick is to find the ‘index of unusual occurrences’, where this year we learn of the best man who skipped the wedding in order to make his career-best score, the Spain batsman who hit two international Twenty20 centuries in the same day, against Finland and Estonia, and the match in which the first ball of an over cost 18 runs (thanks to two no-balls and three boundaries).

The ability to smile at life has always been a part of Wisden’s—and cricket’s—charm. The 1919 edition, when Lord knows there were reasons enough not to smile as the toll of cricketers who had died in conflict neared 2,000, relates that cricket had become so popular in Tonga that it had to be banned on six days of the week or no work would ever get done.

I also love the unintentionally funny, but quite macabre, wording of a story in 1935 about Maurice Nichol, a batsman who was ‘found dead in his bed’ before Worcestershire’s match against Essex. Wisden relates that it was ‘a sad event that marred the enjoyment of the match but did not prevent Worcestershire gaining a first-innings lead’.

Dip into a Wisden at random and you will always find something you did not know. In fact, I discovered this at 2am yesterday morning after getting home from the Wisden dinner, when I opened the almanack to read the piece I had written and discovered a second piece that I had filed last summer and completely forgotten about.

The first Wisden I bought was in 1996, which covered the thrilling drawn series between England and West Indies the previous summer, but it was the small quirky stories pointed out the index of unusual occurrences that attracted me more.

Why else would I turn to the reports of state matches in South Africa unless prompted by the index heading ‘calamari stopped play’? (The ball, hit for six, had landed in a frying pan and play had to stop for ten minutes before it had cooled down enough for the umpires to remove the grease.)

‘Outfielders forced to stand in sea’ was another story I had to read, this time about club cricket in Fiji, while ‘Batsman hits same spectator twice’ led me to a report from Hove where a poor woman from Bristol suffered at the hands of Gloucestershire’s Andrew Symonds: ‘Having been struck in the face by a four, she returned from treatment only to be hit on the leg by a six.’

Then there was ‘Mass stopped play’ (when the sounds of Holy Communion at St Cuthbert’s in Lytham were mysteriously relayed over the public address system at the nearby cricket ground) or the intriguing ‘Baffling bowling analysis’, which led me to a match in which, with Lancashire needing only six to win, Peter Bowler, a Somerset batsman (of course), was asked to finish it quickly, which he did with one ball, a no-ball struck for four, giving him the seemingly impossible figures of nought for six off 0.0 overs.

I could go on, but if you love eccentricities (even if you have only a passing interest in cricket) perhaps you should go and find your own joys. All human life, its frustrations and foibles, is there and you have 150 editions through which to flick.

Wisden sometimes misses the most unusual stories, though. My favourite instance of cricket trumping journalism came when Leslie Hylton, a West Indies fast bowler, died in 1955. His Wisden obituary spoke of his achievements in the 1934-35 rubber against R. E. S. Wyatt’s XI and his tour of England in 1939, but somehow forgot to mention the perhaps more interesting fact that he had been hanged for the murder of his wife. He had claimed self-defence until the prosecution proved that he had shot her seven times and thus would have needed to reload. Maybe it was felt disrespectful to bring it up?

Patrick Kidd is a writer for The Times. His book The Best of Enemies, written with Peter McGuinness, looks at the rivalry between England and Australia, with particular reference to cricket.

Rules are there to be broken, as the saying goes. Break them I did when I went to Spain for a few days without a book written by a Spaniard or set in Spain.

Choosing a book to match the destination is my one holiday reading rule, which has led to several wonderful experiences, such as reading Sunset Song in Scotland and Midnight’s Children in India.

Not this time, as I churlishly threw caution to the wind and packed Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake, West with the Night by Beryl Markham and The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal – novels set in Sark, Kenya and Austria, respectively. Perhaps every now and then a rule needs to be broken in order to remind oneself why it was there in the first place. The holiday, though heavenly, was lacking a certain book-shaped something and next time I go to Spain I will for sure bring a Spanish treat, most likely a beloved volume of Laurie Lee. At least the threads of travel and adventure that run through these three books felt apt.

I whizzed through Mr Pye in just a morning, thoroughly enjoying this peculiar, eccentric fable about a rotund little man who goes off to Sark on an evangelical mission. Yes, it really is as bonkers as it sounds, with the added treat of Mervyn Peake’s delightful illustrations, and a couple of wonderfully improbable twists. Incidentally, I heard that the whimsically named novel The Guernsey Literary Potato and Peel Pie Society has inspired several Americans to go on holiday to Guernsey. Might I suggest they read Mr Pye too, as not only is it much better, but it would inspire a little literary trip over to neighbouring Sark too.

From Sark to British East Africa, the world of Beryl Markham evoked in her memoir West with the Night. She was by turn a racehorse trainer, freelance pilot and then elephant hunter – all pretty macho occupations, and yet she manages to write about them in with surprisingly lyrical, feminine prose. My favourite quotation from this endlessly quotable-from book is probably:

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know – that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

Yes Beryl!

The Exiles Return was written by Edmund de Waal’s grandmother, who must have been every bit as brave as Beryl Markham. We all read about her life in The Hare with Amber Eyes and now Persephone Books have published, very beautifully, one of her novels. It is a thought-provoking meditation on exile and a chilling portrait of Vienna after the Second World War, suffused with the feeling of a terrible past swept under the carpet and tripping people up. (You can read my review of it for The Spectator here.)

Another brave lady in this month’s reading was Rosamund Stacey, the unlikely heroine of Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone. Rosamund is a dowdy young academic, whose act of heroism is having a baby in spite of being single. This was in the sixties, when she had a ‘U’ for unmarried on the end of her hospital bed. When the baby gets ill and Rosamund is told she can’t see her for two weeks, this quiet, timid academic lets forth probably the best scream in literature. The Millstone is a feminist book, and also a funny one; moments of horror like the scream are contrasted with light touches like bumping into an awful sister-in-law buying pheasants in Selfridges.

I loved The Real Mrs Miniver, Ysenda Maxtone Grahame’s sparkling biography of her grandmother, Jan Struther. It was fascinating to learn about the life of a woman who grew famous from everyone thinking she was like her fictional invention – prim, happily married ‘Mrs Miniver’ – when in fact she was anything but. What makes it such a special book is the eye for detail shared by grandmother and granddaughter, which, when Jan Struther’s life takes a turn for the worse, makes it terribly moving.

I felt surprisingly untouched by Franny and Zoey, two novellas by J.D. Sallinger published together in a book which has been languishing on my shelf since I was a teenager and was briefly obsessed with his collection of short stories, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor. Franny and Zoey concerns the family of Seymour Glass, who features so unforgettably in ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, one of those short stories. Yet I felt mildly irritated by these novellas, a bit bored by Franny’s obsession with the mysterious spiritual book at their heart. There was, however, a brilliant shaving scene, when Zoey gets thoroughly annoyed with his mother. I wonder if anyone has written something about shaving in American literature, as it crops up again and again, like in Death of a Salesman, when Linda notices the whole house smells of shaving cream after Biff and Happy go through that particularly masculine ritual.

Rituals abound in the children’s books that I’ve been re-reading in ‘The Dark is Rising’ series by Susan Cooper. I loved both Greenwitch and The Grey King – three and four in the quintet – and now feel that funny push-pull of longing to read the final instalment, dampened by not wanting the series to end. One thing I’ve particularly loved about these books is the way they’re set in different parts of Britain and engage so imaginatively with local folklore. When and why did I read them? Perhaps I should end with the shameful admission that one of my favourite things to do on a night in is to read a children’s book, cover-to-cover, in the bath.

Emily Rhodes blogs at EmilyBooks. Follow her on Twitter here.