Tag: 90s
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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, […]
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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 […]
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Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet
Moving through crowded Edinburgh with a friend, we talked as fast as we walked, trying to make it to Patisserie Valerie for dinner. I hadn’t seen Roy in a while and we were discussing our favourite things which were writing, music, and Doctor Who. At some point, we got our subjects tangled up. “Matthew Sweet’s […]
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The Blair Witch Project ruined my childhood
We were all far less sophisticated back in the nineties, which made manipulation far easier, yet it was a different kind of coercive dishonesty to the sort peddled on Facebook via shared posts, the sort taken for actual news. People are differently stupid now. These days, we know when something is being marketed at us […]
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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 […]
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Aurora Gory Alice by Letters To Cleo
Letters To Cleo are brilliant and this is my favourite album they did. Let’s take a quick look at how I found them – and how long I had to pause the tape to see their name in the credits!
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Return to Horror High
The school I spent nearly six years of my life has changed beyond recognition, but I’ve changed too. For years I wrote books for young adults, but somehow against the odds successfully switched the writing adult fiction. But while I wrote books for teenagers, I found myself touring, hitching my way around schools across Scotland. […]
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Social Dancing by Bis
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 […]
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College rock: a confession
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. […]
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I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan – an examination
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 […]
Kirkland Ciccone 