Dressed like a Salad:Dogs in Space and the legend of The Ears.

“Mind Explodes, out come dogs, they shoot off, into space” Melbourne Australia, 1970’s. A grim, exciting time to be young, unemployed and riding the residual spray of the punk rock wave as it eventually lapped at this convict nation’s shores. The Boys Next Door, The Young Charlatans, Whirlywirld, The Primitive Calculators, Tsk-Tsk-Tsk, The Ears. Each […]

Deathrock Rattles on: Pawns/Cemetery Split Cassette

Deathrock rattles on, spooling and unspooling across circular plastic teeth. This cassette crackles with new tracks from two acts that share a thematic and aesthetic umbrella to sit perfectly perpendicular on this four track sampler. Pawns Breaking Wheel erupts first and throws commanding angular bass runs, squalling guitars and echoing baritone out of the speakers, […]

Substance – Peter Hook in Print & in Person

With so many stories under his belt he’s becoming prolific, legendary bass player and full-time Mancunian Peter Hook sets out his latest set of scribbles. Substance is Hooky’s third book, following on from ‘The Hacienda: How not to run a Nightclub’ and ‘Unknown Pleasures’, the story of Joy Division. This, the lengthiest of his […]

Darkest Dungeons & The Spectre of Lovecraft

Master of cosmic horror and open racism Howard Philips Lovecraft has had a rough trot when it comes to videogame adaptions. His vision of a dread indifferent universe seems ill at ease within the confines of the traditional videogame lexicon, but that hasn’t prevented people from trying. A dizzying array of work cribbed from his […]

Gods of Aquarius- The Strange Cosmology of Nina Hagen

Music is often described by both its practitioners and detractors as a Spiritual Pursuit. Whether lofty and ceremonial or base and profane, consciously or not it is an attempt to connect and communicate with something greater, something other, something universal. This approach and mindset varies wildly in its success when it comes to approximating the […]

Retro Justice-The Nostalgia Portal

As someone who has no real time for Videogames these days (well, outside of the Souls series) but who still clings onto an undying fondness for the carefree gaming days of youth, one of my guilty pleasures is bingeing on retro gaming related YouTube channels. The still-potent charm of pixel art and chiptune soundtracks have an […]

Set The Boy Free- Johnny Marr in pages and in person.

Johnny Marr is one of the few cats to whom the living legend mantle sits comfortably on able shoulders. A lifetime devoted to song has recently been laboured over printwise and I recently finished thumbing my way through the results: ‘Set the Boy Free’, Johnny Marr’s long awaited autobiography and handy companion piece to Morrissey’s […]

The Return of The Thunderhawk (and the perils of Kickstarter)

Kickstarter is a pretty magnificent development in creative democratisation. It both empowers creators and enables consumers to put their money where their mouth is, providing tangible support for niche projects and allowing end user feedback throughout the creative/development process. But for every Shenmue 3 there is a ‘Thor Tour 2016’. Full disclosure- I love Jon […]

Cowboys & Indians: The Dichotomy of Gothic Rock

For a genre almost universally associated with the colour black, the world of gothic rock comprises a surprising myriad of shades. Be it post-punk, trad goth, or deathrock, as the genre was birthed and evolved, splintering into innumerable shards and subsets, a panoramic view of its many strands resembles nothing so much as a tangled […]