A year ago, almost to the day, I got an email out of the blue from Lucy Shortis, who runs the office of my favourite artist, Tom Phillips. She said some nice things about a very old blog post of mine, and asked if I would consider writing a “short biography of Tom” for a […]
Cultural Calendar
Review of Barb Jungr: Walking in the Sun
Back in November — it may have even been October — a CD arrived in the post, addressed to me at DJ Alchemi Ltd. It was the new Barb Jungr album, Walking in the Sun. Now Lucy and I both count ourselves as Barb fans, so this was an unexpected pleasure. But it was also […]
Quantity not quality: a year’s worth of CDs and where they came from
Photo copyright and cc-licensedby Enrico Fuente. I don’t make a big deal about New Year’s Resolutions, at least not in public. But I do aim to buy progressively fewer CDs each year. Five years ago, in 02001 and 02002, my ‘habit’ almost got out of hand: I was buying over 150 CDs a year. That’s […]
Steven Johnson and Brian Eno at the ICA
Yesterday evening the ICA put on an event that was part book launch for Steven Johnson’s new book, The Ghost Map (subtitle: A Street, an Epidemic and the Two Men Who Battled to Save Victorian London — these long ‘pitch’ subtitles are getting out of hand), and part first UK event for the Long Now […]
Review of Mark Abis: Changing Inside
Several months ago, on the back of my review of Joe Boyd’s book, I was contacted by singer-songwriter Mark Abis, of whom (Mark explained) Boyd had said, “[He] got my attention. His melodies are original, his voice warm and distinctive, a real musical sensibility is obvious, with literate lyrics to boot. My vote for one […]
Neil Young: Living With War
[Click the image to hear Neil Young’s new album in full.] Even if I didn’t like all the results when Neil Young first donned a vocoder and got a synthesiser in 01982, when he put out a rockabilly album months later, followed by a country album, and so on, I liked the fact that he […]
Review of White Bicycles by Joe Boyd
In the April issue of Prospect, Philip Oltermann observes a trend he calls the network biography, focusing more on artists’ social networking to gain influence, and less on individual talent and its fruits. Along with this, “anecdotes have become more than mere padding”, he claims, and have moved to centre stage in biographical accounts. Joe […]
Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates
The title of this article is one of film-maker Werner Herzog’s quotes. He rails against the “worn out” images that are served up by TV, and his advice to budding film-makers is, “You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school,” and “Work as a taxi […]
6 down, 994 to go
Here are a couple of pictures taken this afternoon at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse. It was six years ago today that Jem Finer’s Longplayer composition started playing continuously, and it’s planned to keep playing until 31 December 02999, when it will start to repeat from the beginning. I wrote more about Longplayer after my […]
Great gigs in London for a tenner or less
This is normally a quiet time of year for gigs in London (as for on-topic blog posts) but one of the highlights of the first week in January is the Winter Sprinter series of gigs organised by Track and Field at the Water Rats Theatre (which claims to be the venue of Bob Dylan’s first […]