Britpop fascinated me while I lived through it, because I never quite belonged to it, yet somehow it filled the charts and radio playlists with guitar bands. Even as a teenager, I felt something about Britpop was a little too masculine, overly laddish, which wasn't me at all. The entire scene, I'd later discover, was… Continue reading The It Girl by Sleeper
Ze Records was one of the hippest labels of the time. This was their attempt at a Christmas album. It's...something.
Kim Gordon is an idol of mine. Read on to find out why.
I saw Patrick Wolf very early on in his career at the original Stereo while he was touring Lycanthropy. The gig wasn't very well attended, which made sense because Patrick was most definitely a cult artist at that point, beloved by critics and photographed for all the coolest magazines, who presented him as the coolest… Continue reading Lycanthropy by Patrick Wolf
From as long as I can remember, my nightmare always starts and ends the same way every single time. I'm in a large bed that's improbably being propelled down a busy road full of cars in a city that vaguely seems like it might be somewhere in America, but only a version I've seen on… Continue reading The joyful noise of The Monkees
Independent music and ideology go hand in hand, the clue being in the word independent. But independence isn't necessarily the label bands sign to, but their mindset, how they present their work. What makes one band stand out from another? The Fall never had that problem. In whatever incarnation they arrived, it was always fully-formed,… Continue reading I Am Kurious Oranj by The Fall
Trends change, fashions leap around, forever leaving millions of reviewers and bloggers to catch them. Sometimes, however, it isn't up to us to catch these trends, but to catch up with them. In the case of Bis, a band whose magpie musical styles made them impossible to categorise outside of 'pop' (a whole universe in… Continue reading Social Dancing by Bis
Really, I should have been in a college rock band. The problem was that I came from the wrong country, turned teen in the wrong decade, and my college was a stout tower block rather than a bustling campus with a radio station where all the best songs could be found left of the dial.… Continue reading College rock: a confession
SPOILERS AHEAD! Lois Duncan was a household name if your house was home to kids with library memberships in the 70s and 80s. Her books for young people were Young Adult before the genre became mainstreamed. Looked down on, these books were known back then as Juvenile Fiction. Not that Lois Duncan ever wrote fiction… Continue reading I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan – an examination
This was a high school album on CD that I desperately wanted to own before the credits of the film started to roll. When it comes to music in movies, especially those aimed at young people, no-one did it better than John Hughes. A tastemaker, he wrote characters in his movies that listened to the… Continue reading Scream (Music From The Dimension Motion Picture)
Kirkland Ciccone 
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