My sister died yesterday. She was 51. She was clever, loving, terrible at the trumpet, and the whole world to my brother-in-law and my little nieces. Caroline was ill for a long time. She had cancer and lived with it for seven years. In that time, she tried everything. She faced chemo, invasive surgery, laser…Continue reading Thanks, Sis
Category: Music stories
Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 6 Meeting Miki
That brings me to meeting Miki. This is the bit of this writing that I have been putting off. It’s sitting here twenty pages and nearly eighteen months into the process. Here goes. About a year before we published our book, Rob, Helen and I hosted a conference at our university campus. Titled ‘Twisting My…Continue reading Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 6 Meeting Miki
Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 5 Big Stack of Thick Books
Jesus, where do I start with Kristin Hersh? This is going to be the hardest bit of this to write. She is slippery and phantom like. She never stands still. She is ambiguous and all powerful. If someone asked me what 4AD looked like and sounded like, it would be a glance at her shadow…Continue reading Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 5 Big Stack of Thick Books
Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 4 Cool Thing in Leeds
I’ve been to three Belly gigs and they were all marvellous. The second one was 21 years after the first one. The third one was two years after that. This is the way now with bands you love. In the book that I put together with my colleagues Helen and Rob, we examined the ways…Continue reading Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 4 Cool Thing in Leeds
Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 3 Off Centre Strawberry
What is it about the start of Cannonball? How can something so quiet and unassuming make people lose it? Whether it’s a crowd of scenesters at a gig or a cabal of middle aged caners at a house party, the response is always the same. Why does Josephine Wiggs’ bass sound so good? How does…Continue reading Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 3 Off Centre Strawberry
Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 2 Venn Diagrams
Pixies (never the Pixies) are a band that I can’t seem to shake. They (along with Neil Diamond, my mum’s favourite) have been ever present in my musical life. Sometimes they dip a little off the radar but never enough so that their surfy art school anger stops beeping entirely. Lately, I’ll admit, it’s been…Continue reading Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 2 Venn Diagrams
Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 1 Plastic Bags
To misquote Wham, last Christmas I had a weird email exchange. I shouldn’t have even been checking my work email but there was a lull between my morning Toblerone and War Games starting on ITV4. More out of muscle memory than anything else, I flicked outlook open on my phone. Among a metric ton of…Continue reading Label of Love – Me and 4AD: Part 1 Plastic Bags
Vinyl Affair
Record shopping is a funny world and one that I inhabit. My life has involved a long and varied relationship with record shopping, record collecting, record boasting and lumping boxes of the fucking things from one flat or house to another. Like any long-term relationship, it’s had its ups and downs. There have been failed…Continue reading Vinyl Affair
Reading Sound and Hearing Words – some ideas and a cracking new book
If I’m completely honest and not particularly worried about my diminishing levels of credibility, I’ll admit that my first musical hero was an unusual one. I would love to say that it was Norman Blake or Kristin Hersh. If I was doing that reverse hipster thing, I might even say it was Kylie. But no,…Continue reading Reading Sound and Hearing Words – some ideas and a cracking new book
Techno, tornadoes and turntables
It seems that telling stories about raving is quite the thing at the moment. The summer saw Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place and Norman Cook’s Ibiza: The Silent Movie getting their Friday groove going on BBC4 while, in the theatre, Gary Clarke’s Wasteland has been receiving (ahem) rave reviews. All three of these examples…Continue reading Techno, tornadoes and turntables