It really was excellent to see RATM hit the top of the charts. If you caugth the interview on BBC radio, you would have heard the band – in the face of patronising questions about whether they hated Simon Cowell – try valiantly to hitch the event the broader political issues. Zack de La Rocha [...]
Guest post by Michael Barrett I’m sat on the 2pm train back to Wakefield after a weekend that flashed by. The carriage is empty, my MP3 player is dead, so I’m stuck thinking about the past few days and trying to shake off the vague hangover that’s rattling through my skull. Let’s begin at the [...]
Guest post by Thom Harrison ‘Suddenly I viddied what I had to do and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked cruel world. One moment of pain, perhaps, and then sleep forever and ever and ever.’ – Anthony [...]
Leonard On Tour You may know that a campaign has been gathering pace to prevent Leonard Cohen performing in Israel. Across the world there have been gatherings, petitions, facebook groups and indeed protests outside concerts calling on Leonard not to play in Israel. Initially the tone of the campaign was friendly if forthright. Activists addressed [...]
The proms don’t normally get much in the way of political coverage. In fact the last time they did was about a year and a half ago when Margaret Hodge decided to make some stupid announcement about them not being inclusive enough, so it was a real joy to have such a politically charged concert [...]
If, like me, you are a football fan then you will already be getting vague itchings of world cup fever. Yet, as things draw nearer another feeling may come over you. It will be a feeling of dread for the ridiculous spectacle with which England begins every match. At the world cup, every national anthem has the [...]
There are times I wonder why I do it. Standing for hours in the queue at a remote train station in the depths of rural Somerset hauling what feels like the unfortunate result of an unseemly encounter between Jabba the Hutt and Dibley’s eponymous vicar on my back. Waking up to the sound of thunder [...]
This week’s report on Britain’s digital future has once again raised the question of online file sharing. The carter report sets out an aim to reduce illegal file sharing by 70% over two years, yet the music industry has been fairly unanimous in its opinion that proposed measures – primarily written warnings to repeat offenders [...]
I honestly don’t care what Gordon Brown has to say about her, whether she’s a fellow Scot or not. Let’s see what someone a little more intelligent has to say on the matter (albeit 65 years prematurely): Fortune will not smile on all – Just on the one who draws the winning ticket or, rather, [...]
Stats recently published in the Telegraph show that the number of pubs in Britain has declined by more than 10 per cent in the past decade. By the end of the year, it is forecasted that there will be just 52,000 pubs in the UK compared with 61,000 a decade ago. So why should we [...]
