In the comments to the previous post about Robyn Hitchcock and his epigonic attempt to perpetuate 1967 ... Phil Knight mentioned that there was quite a bit of it - back-to-psychedelia (specifically English psychedelia) in the early-mid Eighties.... Television Personalities ... The Cleaners from Venus , The Monochrome Set... Quite a bit of it - indeed there was, indeed there was. Focused on the UK…
Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active - reckoned Robyn…
People are constantly asking me for my thoughts on Mark Fisher. Only a slight exaggeration. It actually got a little wearisome and I had to start saying no. But then I seemed to get a second wind. Or maybe I just found it easier to comply than to write the note explaining why I couldn't. Here's some thoughts requested recently by a European journalist - I have no idea if she used them. Waste not…
A flurry of recent debate on the topic of cultural stagnation versus "the future is alive and well actually!" Here's an interesting article by Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor from a few weeks ago It starts with a electronic dance festival experience that feels blocked and static: But by some deadening alchemy, the sets smushed into a homogenous paste, largely indistinguishable in tempo and…
I have been worried that the brothers’s new effort has not received the amount of attention it deserves. So to boost its profile a bit, here is a little something I prepared earlier (actually for their label, local indie imprint Warp Records). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ We live in an age of over-exposure. Too many artists actively strip away their mystique, promoting a public persona first and the music a…
One of my favorite things I've written in the last 15 years or so, is this demolition job on what I called "recreativity" - a.k.a. "everything is a remix", a.k.a. "copying is cool", a.k.a. "there's no such thing as originality" So it was funny to see this well-worn mission statement recycled in Whatever You Think Think the Opposite , a sort of motivational book of aphorisms + illustrations (an…
did an interview with a Swiss journo, no idea if he used the quotes... here they are (waste not want not as me old mum likes to say... another maxim of her's appears later) - Since we buy these CD boxes with all the extra tracks but rarely listen to those because there was a reason at the time to not publish them my question is: Do you see the power of the fetish at work here? I don't know if it's…
Dear Simon Reynolds, My name is ___________________ and I work with the programming team at BBC Radio 4, a nationally recognized Hot Adult Contemporary station reaching more than 1.39 million weekly listeners across the UK, with additional global reach through online streaming. We recently came across your book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, and were immediately drawn to its…
Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately. The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April - resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before. What did the poet say? The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil Dancersend was incandescent last…
