According to my records, including this year, I’ve seen 372 live sets at Infest since 2000 (not including the two online Infests in 2020 and 2021), with 342 of those unique artists. That’s a lot to cover as a writer and regular reviewer of the festival: I’ve reviewed every in-person festival from 2005 onwards (2005-2008, […]
Twenty-five years ago this week, I began working in what became my career. At the time still recovering from a broken ankle (and I was certainly still on crutches at this point), I started what I thought was going to be a temporary role with BT Cellnet on the edge of Leeds (for those who […]
Denial can take many forms. It can be public denials, it can be denials to friends and lovers, it can be denial to yourself.
Thirty years since I started going to gigs this week, and the death of Ozzy.
It’s been a bit longer than planned since the last livestream.
The natural follow-on to last week is to look at being right, as I hurtle towards /Tuesday Ten /600.
I turned forty-six last month, so I’m likely now in the right place for a midlife crisis.
A bit later than I’d originally planned, and this was a livestream with a difference.
I can’t recall where this one first came up, but it might have been thanks to hearing a song that triggered the thought. Anyway, this week is about nothing.
Now away from the working week for a bit, it has given me time to start catching up. It is, again, Bandcamp Friday today, so along with last week’s releases, there’s an awful lot to cover today. In the meantime, here’s the usual wrap of new music and suchlike this week.
Stay-In-Fest and the Bank Holiday are already in the rearview mirror, and we’re now inching toward autumn, and the usual packed release schedule as things ramp up again. Today I bring you a fully updated events listing, a host of releases today on Bandcamp Friday, and the first of my interviews from Stay-In-Fest fully transcribed. […]
There are times when I ask questions for this long-running series that turn out, well, differently to how I might have expected, and this is one of those times.
As we continue in this strange new world, home-based entertainment is now the thing. So, I guess one of the benefits of the internet age is that we can do things online instead. This has allowed me to experiment a bit.
There was a clear pattern to pretty much all of the suggestion threads that I initiated last year. In one way or another, they mostly linked to the situation we found ourselves in: our normal way of life upended, unable to travel or socialise in the usual ways for most of the past year. That […]
As we continue in this strange new world, home-based entertainment is now the thing. So, I guess one of the benefits of the internet age is that we can do things online instead. This has allowed me to experiment a bit
This year really has felt, in some ways, like the world has run out of luck. A pandemic, a succession of hapless, right-wing Governments manipulating just about everything in their favour, and the general feeling that it is going to be a long route out of this.
Last Friday was the nineteenth anniversary of the September 11th (or 9/11) attacks, four near-simultaneous aircraft hijackings by terrorists in the US that resulted in an enormous loss of life, and has since stood as a marker of our age, and that has influenced US foreign and domestic policy ever since.
Twenty-five years ago yesterday (20-July 1995), I made it to my first proper gig. I headed over to Roundhay Park in the north-eastern edges of Leeds, along with tens of thousands of others, to the first night of the Heineken Festival that year, ostensibly to see Pop Will Eat Itself, but that evening I also […]
As a number of people in comment and meme form have joked this past week or two, this isn’t the dystopian future we were promised. But it’s the one we’ve got, and it is remarkable how certain outlooks have changed. Certain political policies that were ridiculed just three months ago have become instantly popular – […]
At the end of February (29-Feb to be exact), one of the more interesting, progressive promoters in London is marking Ten Years of Chaos at The Dome in Tufnell Park. That promoter is the collective known as Chaos Theory, who for the past ten years have been bringing London gig-goers interesting, experimental and thoughtful bills […]
