Gigs of the Year 2012 Here are my top ten gigs of the year 2012. Live music is still one of the most mesmerising, emotional and thrilling experiences. I have danced, cried, shuffled uncomfortably on the spot, swooned at a whole...
Ok, so these probably aren’t the eighteen best tracks of 2012 but they’re the ones I’ve heard and like more than all the others I’ve heard. There are of course tracks that I haven’t heard yet and...
The Cube Microplex, Bristol, November 25th Nostalgia isn’t an easy pursuit. It requires you to remove yourself from the now, disengage from a cynical default and make emotional connections across the aeons of time. For our...
Trinity Centre, Bristol, November 28th, 2012 Watching the shaman-like figure of Warren Ellis spouting forth dream fragments in his distinctive Antipodean purr is a rare pleasure: he recollects sneaking into Chris Martin’s hotel...
There are only a few of us who have drunk through the tedium that tends to settle in around 4 am on a prolonged drinking session: the boredom that descends when every form of alcohol tastes more and more like water or poison...
There is nothing as unsexy or as repugnant as cling film. It is perverse. Unwrapping a sandwich or a piece of fruit cake from cling film is tantamount to languidly masturbating in a fountain, in a busy public park, on a...
I have coveted kitsch for as long as I can remember. The garish, the retro, the ugly, the uncanny, the misplaced; those perpetually out-of-place, unbecoming, unbelonging things that fall outside of conventional definitions of...
There’s a man with his hand thrust down the front of his jeans. He is shouting the word ‘violence’ among others whilst ferreting and thumping behind the zip of his jeans. He is not masturbating: there is nothing...
There was a time during my travels in China when I did not write. I did not put pen to paper, did not type into these smart little machines, didn’t allow dialogue to bounce around in my mind or words that connected to...
Swindon scenes There are fewer things I understand about this place. I walk around the town centre in my lunch break and watch families inhale Greggs’ pastries with all the power and swirling grace of a Dyson upright. I watch...