Gary Marshall As a general rule, the more hype that surrounds a book the bigger the disappointment when you finally get to read it. And The Restraint Of Beasts has certainly been hyped. Nominations for the Booker Prize notwithstanding, we have been inundated with tabloid stories of the rags-to-riches variety describing how Magnus Mills wrote […]
Ian Rankin: Dead Souls
Gary Marshall Most police thrillers conform to a strict blueprint – a misunderstood outsider who’s willing to risk his career and his life to get his man, villains who are inevitably the personification of evil and of course a bevvy of beautiful women with a truncheon fixation. Everything is presented in stark black and white […]
Will Oldham : I See A Darkness : Songs Of The Human Animal
Stephen Mitchelmore on the music of Will Oldham Who is Will Oldham? Well, maybe he’d like to know first of all. As if in search of the proper one, he’s released LPs under several different names. Made famous by the Palace name (Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, Palace Music), he then reverted to plain Will Oldham […]
Nikos Kazantzakis : The Last Temptation Of Christ : Always Thirsty
Lewis Owens on the uphill path of Nikos Kazantzakis Although many people may have heard of the novels Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which have been adapted into films, it appears that few are so familiar with the name of the author, Nikos Kazantzakis. Although a national hero in […]
Portishead : PNYC
Chris Mitchell Having nearly imploded thanks to the success of Dummy, Portishead seemed to be trying to avoid attracting any attention whatsoever to themselves, as shown by 1997’s low-key self-titled second album. But unlike the deliberate attempt at fan alienation a la Nirvana’s In Utero, Portishead’s second album went deeper and darker than Dummy, repaying […]
UNKLE: Psyence Fiction
Chris Mitchell UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction has been the UK’s most-eagerly awaited album of 1998. So eagerly awaited that virtually all of the UK music press published previews rather than reviews of the album, so keen were they to get in there and proclaim UNKLE the new saviours of British music. Which is particularly strange in […]
Stereophonics : Performance And Cocktails
Gary Marshall “WOOOOOOAAAAARGH! GNAAAAAAAH! BLEEEEEEEURGH!” If you’re one of those people who finds Kelly Jones’ “I eat gravel, me” voice about as aesthetically appealing as nails on a blackboard, you’ll loathe this album. If on the other hand you like driving like a maniac and bellowing at the top of your lungs to whatever’s on […]
Blur : 13
Gary Marshall There’s a theory that this is a terrible time for music. Everything’s been done and all that’s left for us is pale imitations of what’s gone before, an Orwellian vision of Beatles-influenced nonentities stomping on human ears for all of eternity. Blur, I think, would disagree – after all, there are very few […]
Underworld : Beaucoup Fish
Chris Mitchell Over here in the UK, few albums have been so keenly expected as the new musical opus from Underworld, the oddly named Beaucoup Fish. Most famous for their track “Born Slippy”, which was featured prominently in the film of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting a couple of years ago, Underworld nearly didn’t survive long enough […]
Luke Sutherland: Jelly Roll
Gary Marshall Irvine Welsh has a lot to answer for. In much the same way as British gangster movies made everyone associate the east end of London with long coats, guv’nors and shootahs, Scotland is now inextricably linked with drugs, swearing and psychopaths. With a glut of Trainspotting wannabes hitting the shelves over the last […]
Astro Teller: Exegesis
Chris Mitchell Exegesis is a novel written in the form of email messages between its two major protagonists, Alice Lu and EDGAR. However, Astro Teller’s debut novel is not a digital bodice-ripper, despite the jacket blurb proclaiming Exegesis to be the story of “sex, lies and cyberlove in the year 2000”. Instead, it hinges on […]
Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir
Chris Mitchell Throughout 1997, the Russian space station Mir made international headlines as it lurched from one near disaster to another. Populated by Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the two countries’ collaboration in the post-Soviet age. But even with the financing and expertise of NASA injected into the ailing Russian […]
Ulf Poschardt: DJ Culture
Chris Mitchell In the last 30 years, the role of the DJ has transformed from being a mere purveyor of pop music to being the creator of pop music. This transformation is due almost solely to the humble analogue technology of the record turntable, which still thrives in the midst of this supposedly digital decade. […]
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under: An essay on the 10th anniverary of his death
Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death ‘Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact occur.’ (Borges) Like Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, the novelist, playwright and poet, died young. At this end of the century, 58 is young. […]
Spiritualized : Live At The Royal Albert Hall
Chris Mitchell When bands release double live albums, it’s usually a cause for consternation rather than celebration. Notorious for being very much less than the sum of their parts, live albums tend to be the last refuge for heavy metal bands who ran out of ideas long ago and want to milk every last cent […]
Julian Dibbell: My Tiny Life
Chris Mitchell With the popularity of the World Wide Web these days, it’s easy to forget that the Internet has other tricks up its telephone wires. MUDs (Multi User Dimension) and MOOs (Multi user dimension, Object Orientated) are burgeoning virtual reality communities tucked away in the backwaters of cyberspace. My Tiny Life is Village Voice […]
Julian Dibbell: My Tiny Life
Chris Mitchell With the popularity of the World Wide Web these days, it’s easy to forget that the Internet has other tricks up its telephone wires. MUDs (Multi User Dimension) and MOOs (Multi user dimension, Object Orientated) are burgeoning virtual reality communities tucked away in the backwaters of cyberspace. My Tiny Life is Village Voice […]
Irvine Welsh : You’ll Have Had Your Hole : You’ll Have Had Your Theatre
Dr Willy Maley applauds the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s stage play You’ll Have Had Your Hole Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind of people who attended football matches at his plays. Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with […]
Douglas Coupland : Polaroids From The Dead : Ueber Furcht bis hin zu Ewigkeit
Chris Mitchell mailte Douglas Coupland und sprach mit ihm ueber Ruhm, die Zukunft und die Probleme mit amerikanischer Schokolade. German translation by Boris Haenssler You can read the English version of this interview by clicking here. Douglas Coupland ist kein durchschnittlicher Romanautor. Seit der Veroeffentlichung von Generation X im Jahre 1991 wurde er dank seiner […]
Iain Banks: A Song Of Stone
David B. Livingstone Anybody would be forgiven a measure of confusion upon entry into one of Iain Banks’ many fictional worlds. From the moldering attic at the epicenter of The Wasp Factory to the immense, hallucinatory title structure of The Bridge, Banks has always delighted in plunging his readers into strange, painstakingly described settings and […]
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Gary Marshall Starting with a 1951 baseball game and ending with the Internet, “Underworld” is not a book for the faint-hearted. Elegiac in tone and described variously as DeLillo’s Magnum Opus and his attempt to write the Great American Novel, the book weighs in at a hefty 827 pages and zips back and forwards in […]
P.J. O’Rourke: Eat The Rich
Gary Marshall P.J. O’Rourke has never been afraid to tackle big subjects. Previous books have attempted to explain the entire US Government, refute the arguments of the environmental lobby, and describe the bits of the Gulf War that CNN wouldn’t broadcast. With his latest book, “Eat The Rich”, PJ sets his sights on possibly the […]
Richard Powers: Gain
David B. Livingstone Nobody talks much about the quest for “great American novel” anymore; the phrase, once a sneering European attempt at an oxymoron, was long ago answered by Faulkner, Hemingway, and Miller. To the surprise of some, even America – first, the motley amalgam of immigrant trappers and farmers; later, the citadel of capitalism […]
Linton Kwesi Johnson : Dread Beat An’ Blood : Inglan Is A Bitch
Nancy Rawlinson finds legendary dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnston has not mellowed with age Twenty years ago, a landmark album was released in the UK. Dread Beat An’ Blood was Linton Kwesi Johnson’s debut recording, the first time his political poetry had been accompanied by the powerful beats of reggae. This new form of music, […]
Douglas Coupland: Lara’s Book Lara Croft And The Tomb Raider Phenomenon
Chris Mitchell Well, it had to happen. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb Raider videogames, gets the coffee table treatment in her own glossy picture book. In an attempt to give this tome some literary gravitas, “Generation X” author Douglas Coupland has been drafted in to provides thoughts about the Lara phenomenon and a story […]
