Category: Music
-
Strange Little Girls by Tori Amos
The long-standing tradition of artists reinterpreting the work of fellow artists is often regarded as a stop-gap until the next album of originals is released. Obviously the cover album is meant to be a bonus, something for fans to enjoy, yet never to be taken into serious consideration. A cover album serves two functions. It […]
-
My Brother the Cow by Mudhoney
Mudhoney are not Nirvana. They’re the grunge band who helped originate a musical shift, but they’re not Nirvana. Sometimes, when you read about Mudhoney in a music magazine, or an blog like this one, you can’t get too far without a Nirvana comparison. You may as well be reading about Nirvana, because they’re always there, […]
-
Flaunt It by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
If Tony James didn’t invent Sigue Sigue Sputnik, no-one else would. They were an odd proposition, even in the ultra glammy ‘80s. A fusion of disparate influences, Sigue Sigue Sputnik existed in a universe where future music was driven by pulsing beats, Japan was the coolest country in the world, and sex happened using a […]
-
Celebrity Skin by Hole
This album is indestructible. It wouldn’t be allowed to fail even though everyone and their cat had already written off Courtney Love as a hasbeen widow who had her finest work subcreated by Kurt Cobain. You can’t imagine how much Courtney was disdained in the years before Celebrity Skin was released. The letters page of […]
-
The Dreaming by Kate Bush
Madness as music is The Dreaming by Kate Bush. Later, she’d talk about the record in terms of the audience reaction, telling an interviewer that people regarded it as her ‘she’s gone mad’ album. Kate Bush is everything to so many people, but all we really know of her, the actual artist, is the stories […]
-
G.F.S.U. by Lolita Storm
I found Red Hot Riding Hood sitting on the New Releases shelf at HMV in Glesga, waiting for me because no one else knew it was there. listed influences on MySpace sold them immediately. Betty Boo. Girls Aloud. Suicide. Shampoo. Even Sigue Sigue Sputnik, for God sake. What? I thought. How can a band this […]
-
The Brenda Walsh Hatefest ’93
Television is the great pacifier, a true switch on/switch off experience. But what if there’s a character in your favourite fictional escape you absolutely cannot stand? These days, whole communities have sprung up online, massive groups dedicated to the phenomenon of ‘hate-watching’. The internet has allowed us to connect over our shared hatred of fictional […]
-
Wogan, 1985. The Grace Jones Moment.
One image has stuck to my brain from childhood, one of many, but this one stayed a little stronger and lasted a little longer. For years I remembered a figure wrapped in bandages in front of a microphone. The lights moved, the music started, and they – whoever they were – slowly began to unpeel […]
-
Cut by The Slits
Everything I learned about London came from an album called Cut by a band named The Slits. I bought it at Avalanche Records in Glesga, while at college, one eye on my work, the other on a city that always pulled at me. London needs no explanation. For me, London birthed punk. The real punk. […]
-
Garbage by Garbage
Nineteen Ninety-Six was a year where I was slowly starting to form myself through music and art. Before that, music was something I listened to for enjoyment, something in the charts I bought because it was popular and catchy. The bands I’d inherited from my dad (The Smiths, The Cure, The Slits, Siouxsie And The […]
Kirkland Ciccone 