News and Proclamations

All different, sometimes challenging listens, but all eminently worth it

It hurts my Mancunian soul to write these words but it's the label Factory should have been.

My contribution to this destructive endeavour is to list some of the best sacrilegious, blasphemous or just plain unholy lyrics that have littered the annals of popular music.

Our technical wizard and all round good guy, Mac, is going to jump off a tower in the name of charity.

Elsewhere in the aforementioned press release it states that ‘Sometimes all you want to do is fuck’. Well sometimes (like when reading such self-aggrandising bull-shit whilst listening to self-vandalising crapulence) all I want to do is yell ‘fuck off’.

Here are some pictures taken on the opening of the Can's Inner Space studio exhibition at the RocknPop Museum in Gronau, (just over the Dutch border from Enschede). The installation runs until March 2008. A visit is highly recommended. 

Mr Dawson, our Chief Reviewer, brings you a round up of what has been playing on his gramophone this past month. Hopefully you will gain as much pleasure from listening to these LPs as he did!

The visual evidence of a hare-brained scheme...

I have been reading the Julian Cope biography ‘Head On' recently and there is a bit in the book where he says ‘He hates music that is made to impress people' I've never heard any of his records but I couldn't agree more.

I have dreadful visions of four hard-edged garage pop bands giving it some and more to a couple of sexagenarians.

When Johnny Borrell sings “There's nothing on the radio that means that much to me” he's only got himself to blame.

Hullo all!

Hullo chaps!

I read every now and again how so many teenagers are keeping blogs. Now, there is nothing unusual about keeping a record of one's thoughts and feelings – I believe they used to be called diaries.

Hullo there!

Hello good people!

With specific reference to guitar-based music, the whole scene is getting like the bloody Antiques Roadshow. No wonder old bands are re-forming. They can cash in on a lucrative live scene. And no wonder that, alongside these genuine, fine and trusty old antiques, a new set of reproductions are being wheeled out to satisfy the market. That's why the Bunnymen supported Coldplay not that long ago.

How you all doing?

What a month...