Dave Grohl’s Sound City Nostalgia
Friday, March 8th, 2013Sound City, Dave Grohl’s documentary on a Hollywood recording studio doesn’t promise much, on the surface, and yet it turns out to be a heartfelt and eloquent history of something that, with the digital revolution, we seem to have lost – sound. The film doesn’t promise much?Have I gone mad?? It’s got Dave Grohl (of [...]
J Roddy Wolston and the Business
Friday, March 8th, 2013Take doses of Jerry Lee Lewis, AC/DC, Lynnrd Skynnrd – add a couple of gramms of Paul Westberg’s crisp ear for a tune, and mix with a dancing dervish and you’ll come close to getting the good-time boogie and blues of J. Roddy Walston and the Business – officially this Monkey’s favourite new band. The [...]
Counting Crows – Underwater Sunshine (or what we did on our summer vacation)
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012Counting Crows follow up on 2008′s Saturday Nights Sunday Mornings with an album of cover versions Underwater Sunshine (or what we did on our summer vacation) from the likes of Big Star, Gram Parsons, Teenage Fanclub and Fairport Convention. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and poorly conceived covers albums (hello Sinead [...]
I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński – A review
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012In his 1921 “Manifesto on the Immediate Futurisation of Life” Bruno Jasieński called for Poland’s national poets – “the stale mummies of mickiewiczes and słowackis” – to make way from the “plazas, squares and streets” for the new: Futurists like himself. Many years later, as Soren Gauger tells us in the afterword to this excellent [...]
Sluts, Opportunists and Martin Amis – The Pregnant Widow
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012A lot of people are cynical about the sexual revolution. Most acknowledge that the new set of sex and dating rules has produced ‘confusion’. Some go so far as to label it ‘anarchy’ that will ‘destroy society’. We are told that women can have sex like men if they want to – that consenting adults [...]
Sinead O’Connor – How About I Be Me (And You Be You)
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012There’s a quote, from an article that Germaine Greer wrote back in the 70s,which springs back in to my mind continuously when listening to certain albums: “When Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho the walls came tumbling down. That’s revelation. The holy Ghost talking. So it can be done. The way to crack a mirror or shiver [...]
Hurling the little streets on the great – Gorbaciof
Saturday, February 18th, 2012While everyone’s getting caught up in the buzz about The Artist, I have a shameful confession to make: silent movies have always bored the bunions off of me – as a child I gnashed my teeth in despair when Charlie Chaplin or, god forbid, Harold Lloyd came on the television. That’s not to write off [...]
Mute Points: A Love Letter to Silent Artists
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012I remember the first time I saw Nosferatu. I was 15 and in the full throws of gothic angst – complete with importance, poetry and pianos. The dramatic German Expressionist stylings of Murnau’s Carpathian landscape, therefore, offered the ideal genre –especially when it came to an extremely teen-friendly subject…..vampires. Made in 1921 in the extremely [...]
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace – Foo Fighters
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011Sixth album from Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters
