I Know It’s Over is The Queen Is Dead’s first pause for breath. As usual, Morrissey’s mordant wit is mistaken, historically, for unmitigated misery. “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.” What an opening line! Remember all those classic blues and folk songs that billow forth from the point of view of…
Cheap Channel 4 Television lifestyle shows espouse the benefits of leaving the stinky city, with its failing schools and stabby schoolchildren, and moving to the countryside, a bucolic idyll where everyone is happy and you can catch and eat your own hedgehogs. And I love the countryside. Two or three weekends a year I still…
Howe Gelb, leader of the Tucson, Arizona group Giant Sand, started mixing country music, then still unacceptable in polite society, with punk, jazz, and noise thirty years ago. Today, Howe tours the world without troubling the charts, and is feted by collaborators and fans from PJ Harvey to the Spanish flamenco musicians with whom he…
Next time you read a thoughtful article in a broadsheet newspaper about how ‘graphic novels’ are now serious literature, take a look at the American comic books of the fifties and sixties and remind yourself how far we, as a civilization, have come. Pitiful four-colour daubs picture infantile, underwear clad simpletons, barely capable of reasoned…
For decades, stand-up comedians entered the palace of entertainment by the tradesmen’s entrance. Now the red carpet is rolled out, do we have any idea what to do next? And where did this change in our status begin? In 1993, after David Baddiel and Rob Newman became the fist comics to play Wembley, Janet Street…