La Rose Noire David Lynch is now 65. It’s amazing. Since the release of Eraserhead (once seen, never forgotten) in 1977, his career has seen so many ludicrously high peaks that is scarcely seems possible to précis them; Frank Booth dry humping Dorothy Valens to his climax, an oxygen mask […]
David Solomons
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Ellen Southern Well it’s 1969 OK, we got a war across the USA. As The Stooges were unleashing their debut album amidst the campus chaos unfolding in protest at the ever escalating Vietnam conflict, the Led Zeppelin was slipping its mooring to begin its stratospheric rise into the Rock firmament […]
Lo Alternative Frequencies Typical. A great summer album appears just after a dismal, wet August Bank Holiday weekend. Actually that’s not really fair. Whilst this year hasn’t exactly challenged 1976 for the ‘Golden Summer’ crown, nevertheless on Sunday afternoon we climbed into the car, slapped this onto the stereo and […]
Bureau B Some medical beast had revived tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to […]
Thrill Jockey Three young men sit in a small room. Around them lie discarded food cartons, an ancient black and white Telecaster, and several battered pairs of Converse All-Stars. The faces of the young men would normally be obscured by thick curtains of long hair, but on this occasion a […]
Bureau B Picture the scene: . Enormous illuminated signs flicker, punctuating the darkness, their garish primary-colour glow reflecting off the chrome and glass surfaces of the skyscrapers and the rain-drenched pavements far below. The driver glides your Spinner™ hovercar slowly and smoothly through the air as you look out at […]
Southern Lord Though the golden age of alpinism – small, rapid mountain ascents with no additional oxygen, and minimal supplies and personnel – might, technically, be taken as the decade or so between 1854 and 1865 – there is no story in its history more tragic, inspiring and gut-wrenching that […]
Meltdown Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 19 June 2011 “Please take your seats in the auditorium, as this evening’s performance is about to begin.” Sent scurrying into the Queen Elizabeth Hall by Sir Ian McKellen’s stentorian tones, we bury ourselves deep into the QEH’s welcoming black leather seats just as the […]
Klangbad In The Brain of Moebius, Moebius – his mind now encased in a hairy Frankenstein-style monster body – responded to taunts from Conrad Schnitzler, and the two Kraut Lords battled it out in a mind-bending contest which saw Moebius eventually chased out onto the mountains, plummeting over the cliffs to […]
Tin Angel “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” In the summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel, broke and depressed, inserted this insanely great Biblical quotation from Corinthians into a little number he managed to belt out in a mere 24 […]
Gnostic Dirt Even in this age of Tunng, Espers and countless assorted other groovy out-there New Folk outfits who are busy fusing ancient melodies and instrumentation with samples, beats and all the trappings of hip urban coolness as fast as their little hands can programme, for most people the word […]
Broken Horse Peaches and cream, assault and battery, Damon and Naomi…some things are just made to go together… With the unbelievable proliferation of ‘Americana’ over the past dozen or so years (just check out the bulging racks in Rough Trade), it’s hard to remember a time before such market segmentation […]
Southern Lord It’s somewhat startling to realise that more time has now elapsed since the release of Winter’s seminal doom metal masterpiece Into Darkness – twenty one years – than had passed since the release of Black Sabbath when Into Darkness first appeared. For a genre as oft derided, sneered […]
Modisti In 1961, Harold Pinter was in Paris, attending rehearsals for the French production of his play The Caretaker. Pinter’s critical reputation was starting to gain serious traction at this time, and the literary establishment were beginning to write about him as the natural successor to Samuel Beckett in the […]
Esoteric He is the God of Hellfire, and he brings you FIRE! No really, he does. Back in his 1968 prime, Arthur Brown really wasn’t fucking around. Watch the contemporary Top of the Pops footage of the finest Yorkshireman ever to leave the Dales, his flaming helmet burning like Osiris […]
Tin Angel Green and grey, the grass and the concrete, the juxtaposition between the natural world and the man-made built environment that must now co-exist with it, ideally in harmony, yet in practice all too often in conflict. Across the 11 tracks contained within, New York-based Canadian cellist Julia Kent […]
L.M. Duplication In the early 1980s, Ivo, founder of the 4AD record label (historic home of acts including The Cocteau Twins, The Birthday Party and Pixies, and current label behind Camera Obscura, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Tindersticks and Scott Walker), was given an audio cassette by razor-cheekboned Bauhaus frontman Pete […]
Sonic Youth Recordings I can still remember the electric thrill that jolted through me on first seeing the picture of Sonic Youth on the rear cover of Bad Moon Rising: clustered around that Ed Gein Halloween scarecrow, under a bruised mid-Western sky, the look of sneering distain on Thurston Moore’s […]
Drag City It’s easy to forget how dismal the nation felt when the early High Llamas albums appeared. Like an unwanted, puke-spattered drunk still hanging around at the morning-after clear-up of a party, the fag end of the (last) Tory government had clung on for years after Thatcher was driven […]
Crammed Discs To borrow the imprecation that Debbie Harry once sang so passionately in 1978, “Picture this.” However, rather than a sky full of thunder, or for that matter Debs’ telephone number (wistful sigh…), try instead . For a finishing touch, decorate the neck and body of this Heath Robinson […]