Oxford-educated, Gales listed author.
Since I am off to Canada quite soon, I have decided to do a post about the country’s most prominent patriot, the legendary Don Cherry. For anyone who doesn’t know, hockey is a Canadian obsession. By coaching the NHL’s Boston Continue Reading …
Tonight Manchester is staging a live tribute to Chris Sievey, the recently deceased creator of one of the city’s most-loved comedy characters, Frank Sidebottom. Sievey made his career by donning a papier machee head that made him look like a Continue Reading …
Image: bigjom / FreeDigitalPhotos.net James Dean, Jackson Pollock and Princess Diana died in them. Jim Morrison was supposedly traumatized by watching one. JG Ballard thought they were sexy. What am I writing about? Car Crashes. I can remember some years Continue Reading …
Yesterday I had fun talking to Matt Grimes, a music industry lecturer at Birmingham City University who is starting a PhD on canonization and fans’ memories of Crass. Matt is writing up a blog post about our day of discussion. Continue Reading …
Tonight I got round to watching two biopics of 1960s icons, BBC4’s Lennon Naked and the new Doors feature documentary When You’re Strange. What unites these films is their father and son rejection narrative. In Lennon Naked, Christopher Eccleston does Continue Reading …
I was recently asked to review Jews, Race and Popular Music by Jon Stratton for the journal Popular Music. The book is an interesting case-by-case study of the Jewish input into musical performance, from torch singing to Amy Winehouse. Stratton Continue Reading …
I must be getting slow – I just spotted that Madison, Wisconsin recently had a conference in honour of the work of John Fiske featuring keynotes by Fiske and Henry Jenkins. As I’m sure you know, with their emphasis on Continue Reading …
‘Popular Music Fandom: A One Day Symposium’ took place last Friday and was a great success. Speakers from as far a field as Brazil arrived at the Binks Building and Matt Hills gave a really interesting and dynamic keynote speech Continue Reading …