Gary Marshall At the very beginning of the 1990s, the Happy Mondays were one of the most exciting new bands around. At a time when Indie music consisted largely of floppy fringes, effects pedals and a complete absence of charisma or tunes, the arrival of a band that understood the power of the “last gang […]
Travis : The Man Who
Gary Marshall The album cover is a photograph of Travis standing in the snow wearing big coats, reminiscent of U2, but if you’re expecting an album of breast-beating stadium rock then you’ll be surprised. Fran Healy may have announced “All I Wanna Do Is Rock” on the band’s first album but “The Man Who” is […]
Liam Howlett : The Prodigy: The Dirtchamber Sessions : Down In The Dirt
Jayne Margetts encounters The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett going solo with The Dirtchamber Sessions There is no easy way to put this, but Liam Paris Howlett is the pin-up poster boy of electronic punk. Choice doesn’t enter into the equation. The scions of street cred and music bibles Mixmag, Loaded and The Face would fight tooth […]
Laura Hird: Nail And Other Stories
Gary Marshall Rebel Inc was started in 1992 with the intention of promoting “a new wave of young urban Scottish writers who were kicking back against the literary mainstream”. Laura Hird first appeared on their “Children Of Albion Rovers” collection and Nail And Other Stories is her first short story collection for the publisher. The […]
James Adams: The Next World War
Chris Mitchell James Adams is the former defence correspondent for the Sunday Times and the author of several books about the changing role of the world’s military forces in the post-Cold War climate. The Next World War examines the impact of technology on the future of armed conflict and the decisive importance of what has […]
Margaret Wertheim: The Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace
Chris Mitchell Cyberspace is perhaps the last place you’d look for some sort of spiritual revival at the end of the twentieth century. But Margaret Wertheim believes that cyberspace is indeed a contemporary secular version of the medieval conception of Heaven – that is, a space which exists somewhere beyond or outside our everyday world. […]
Jonathan Hale: From A Great Height
Gary Marshall Access is always a problem for the would-be biographer and the phrase “unauthorised biography” is usually a sign of a cut-and-paste job written by a bored hack who has little or no affection for the band. The notoriously private Radiohead suffer more than most from this syndrome and a number of piss-poor biographies […]
Richard Beard: Damascus
Gary Marshall Do you remember the Fighting Fantasy books? Computer games for people whose parents wouldn’t buy them a computer, each page of a Fighting Fantasy book would end with a number of choices. If you wanted to attack the skeleton with a sword you would turn to page 33; if you wanted to scream […]
Jeff Buckley : Grace
Gary Marshall Grace was Jeff Buckley’s first fully-fledged album. It also turned out to be his last as, on 29th May 1997, he drank some wine, went for a swim and didn’t come back. As anyone who pored over “All Apologies” in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide will attest, whenever an artist dies young […]
Ben Elton: Blast From The Past
Gary Marshall If you’ve read any of Ben Elton’s previous books, you know more or less what to expect. A bit of unfunny comedy, cardboard characters and some lame political comment presented in fifty-foot letters of fire. Previously Elton shocked the world by suggesting that pollution was maybe not A Good Thing; this time round […]
Irvine Welsh: Filth
Gary Marshall When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked cultural event, Irvine Welsh was described as a spokesman for a generation and the most exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language and setting was something of a novelty first time round, Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits […]
Magnus Mills: The Restraint Of Beasts
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 […]
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 […]
