London 3-5 May 2019 Friday: Gary The May bank holiday is normally a time for the revival of pagan customs in Britain. These can be found from local village morris dancers to the crowning of the May Queen in Glastonbury. For a few days, Britain takes on the stance of people being an extra in The Wicker Man while also drowning their innards in vast quantities of booze.
Justin Farrington
152 posts
London 19 April 2019 Ten years is a long time in music. Well, I mean, it’s quite a long time in anything, really. And if you adjust for inflation, ten years in the nineteenth century is actually AGES. Especially for a punk band. So it’s quite a thing that The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing are celebrating a whole decade of their anachronistic anarchy of […]
Demiurg / London 3 March 2019 This is a story of two enigmas. One is an inscrutable totalitarian art-rock collective, and the other is the most secretive state on Earth. And this is all about what happened when the two collided to the strains of a much-loved feel-good musical with Nazis in it. Laibach have been defying musical and artistic conventions and outraging public decency for nearly forty […]
New Heavy Sounds Hey kids, let’s talk about nominative determinism! You know, that thing where someone’s name informs what they do, like having a dentist called Dr Tooth or a Tory councillor called Mr Gaping-Anus. It’s fun! Thing is, it tends to work the other way round with bands, because traditionally they actually CHOOSE their names rather than being christened at birth.
London 29 January 2019 A couple of months ago, the world lost perhaps its greatest showman, the driving force behind the creation of an entire universe: Stan Lee. Today, his creations and co-creations are everywhere — on our TV screens, at the cinema, in book stores and adorning all types of clothing, from socks to baseball caps. His influence on the world of popular culture was massive. As […]
London 1 December 2018 It’s Saturday night. It’s Oxford Street. It’s nearly Christmas. It’s fucking horrible, is what it is. And what a relief to get into The 100 Club which, while packed, is still somehow less claustrophobic than the street outside. And the reason it’s packed is because everyone’s hear to see The Heads, the elusive Bristolian psych-rock combo
Cleopatra Well deck my balls with holly and call me The Saviour, bugger me if it isn’t nearly Christmas. So get the tinsel up, dangle some dongles from a tree and slap Die Hard on the telly. Oh, and at this holiest time of year, have you considered inviting William Shatner into your heart?
Cherry Red OK. I have a shocking revelation to share with you. And there’s an easy way you can test my hypothesis. Get thee to the internet and find a recording of the Enfield Poltergeist case. In case you’re unaware, in the late 1970s, an Enfield family reported strange goings-on at their house in north London, including furniture moving, unexplained noises
London 31 October 2018 Years ago, back in the early 1990s, I had a friend (well, I say “had”– we’re still friends and he’s here tonight) with whom I shared a lot of common ground in terms of musical taste. He used to always be on at me to listen to The Church.
London 13 October 2018 Hallowe’en is just around the corner, and as the holy month of Spooptober gets underway, what better time could there be for that most festive of tipples, a Nurse With Wound / Current 93 cocktail? And that’s just what’s being served at Shepherds Bush Empire tonight, albeit with a VERY early curfew, no doubt due to that awful urban phenomenon of people moving in […]
Beggar’s Arkive It’s no exaggeration to say that the late lamented David Bowie cast an immense and glittery shadow over popular music, and it would seem the darkest part of this shadow fell on one Peter Murphy, superfan and Bauhaus lead singer. Bauhaus took the glam aesthetic of the Spiders From Mars, mixed it with the abrasiveness of punk and swapped out the science fiction for horror cinema
Ipecac Still sporting the best hair in rock, King Buzzo is back with the latest iteration of his wonderful musical monstrosity. Pinkus Abortion Technician is the kind of album title that’s designed to make you go “…wait, what?”
By Norse Music Tradition’s a funny old concept, isn’t it? For how long and how often does something have to occur before it counts as a tradition? Are some traditions more traditional than others? How does one measure something’s traditionality?
London 4-6 May 2018 Friday: Justin It’s a sunny Friday in Olde London Towne, and the weather’s predicted to be a strictly non-traditional scorcher of a May Bank Holiday weekend. What better time to punctuate outdoor drinking with a succession of slow bands in dark rooms?
Consouling Sounds OK, a brief history lesson. In the fourteenth century, a man named Tamerlane, who dreamed of restoring the glory of Genghis Khan‘s Mongol empire, laid waste to big fuck-off tracts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Calling himself “the Sword of Islam” and “the Scourge of God”, Tamerlane built towers from the skulls of his enemies.
London 23 March 2018 “Andrew O’Neill was living at my house, and he was doing a show about British industry in the nineteenth century and he said ‘why don’t we write some songs and we can do them as a support act for the show?’”
Nuclear Blast When Donald Trump was inexplicably elected to be the forty-fifth president of the United States of America, social media was abuzz with people making trite comments about “ah well, at least we’ll get some great art out of it”, as if that was really what we should be worrying about. That said, though
Leather Apron Those of you who are inclined towards the comic book medium may remember a short-lived title that ran in the very late 80s and very early 90s called Baker Street. Created by Gary Reed and Guy Davis, the story was, as you’d expect, yet another riff on Sherlock Holmes. The twist this time, though, was that punk had happened in the Victorian era. It was steampunk […]