dmerryweather has written the following articles:
If the story of Factory Records was a film, you wouldn’t believe it.
When I heard that the story of Factory Records was going to be made into a film, I didn’t believe it.
‘24 Hour Party People’ claims to tell the story of Factory Records ‘76 - ‘92. Don’t believe it.
Britain‘s best director, Mi»
Why Damon? Apart from the money, why have you made the soundtrack to the latest Hugh Grant Brit-Com?
Four years ago you were making scratchy indie songs. Since then, although you weren't dressed for success, success came a-knocking anyway. Hit album, couple of minor hit singles (one with a video showing Joan Coll»
Night time in the city. The streets are crawling with people looking for a good time, looking to escape their lives. People just like you.
Down the steps and through the door, you push past the freaks and wind your way into the club. The walls black and sweaty, the low ceiling bristling with flashing, bright disco»
More incomprehensible mayhem as our ‘hero’ - the taciturn, unsmiling, shades sporting, kung-fu half-vampire, Blade (Wesley Snipes) - returns to kick more ass and shoot guns.
Good. But this time he teams up with the bad guys (who call themselves The Bloodpack, cos they too are vampires, see?) in order to de»
After about half an hour into the film, two girls a few rows in front of me walked out. Then again, some bloke behind me sat guffawing all the way through. F’sho’, ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ is one of those ‘You’ll either love it or hate it’ deals.
Me? I thought it was alright.
Wes Anderson caught »
“I hear a new world
calling me
So strange and so real
haunting me“
Rod Freeman & The Blue Men ~ ‘I Hear a New World’ 1960.
Beep-beep bweeep tshck-tshck-tshck-tshck dum-TEESH!
Hear that? That’s the sound of the future. Or, to be more precise, electronica, and ‘Electronic 01‘»
Marilyn Manson always worked best as an agent-provocateur to the more uptight members of AmeriKKKas religious right. For some reason his really rather silly Oogie-Boogie, Halowe’en drag act annoyed them, so for that reason alone it was worth him sticking around.
For the rest of us, however, who are u»
Don’t know if you saw that film that was on the other weekend, The Bridges of Madison County, in which a decidedly middle-aged Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep were attempting to get it on in much the same way that two ancient, wizened tortoises would: very, very slowly. I didn’t see all of it myself, but it was some Su»
Lambchop, Nashville's acclaimed 'country-soul' 14 piece, return with a new album, the follow up to 2000’s hugely successful Nixon, and a full UK tour.
Entitled 'Is A Woman', the new album, which the band's label, City Slang, say "mines rich seams »
Curiouser and curiouser...
Back we go. Sailing, drifting back, across some uncharted, wine-dark sea, back towards a land of mystery and imagination. Absent from all atlases, it exists only in dreams and on ancient maps where cartographers have scratched ‘Here Monsters Be’.
With the wind fluttering the »
Here’s a funny thing.
‘I’m Coming Home‘ is an album of bare-bones Appalachian folk by Thomas Hanson. It is an album so ripe with the muddy texture of the old western frontier that just listening to it, you can just picture him, alone by a campfire in the hilly forests of the North Eastern US. Pluckin»
Where did [/do] you sit in class?
I always made sure I sat by the window. There, in many a longuer, I would stare fixedly out the grimy glass, over the rows of rooftops, past the motorway, to the distant hills. Where concrete and grey finally gave way to a murmur of green. In the classroom the teachers info»
In Review: One Day on Radio 1. part three [of three] - Evening. It is Tuesday, 19th November 2001. My day of masochism is entering it’s final run. It’s in the evening that Radio 1 finally shrugs the weight of the playlist that dictates the make-up of the station’s daytime musical output. But just how radic»
One day on Radio 1 part two [of three] - Afternoon. Just over seven hours in, my journey through the strange world of 'wunnerful' Radio 1 (FM!) continues... and continues... (pray for me) Mark Radcliffe ~ 1.00pm - 3.00pm 1.00: The opening music strikes up before Kylie’s v»
One Day On Radio 1 - part one [of three]: Morning.
Stupid idea, I know, but the plan is to listen to - to subject myself to - a ‘whole’ day listening to Radio 1 and reviewing the stations output for one day (Tuesday 19th November 2001).
So, from the time I wake up to when I - mercifully - fall asleep »
So. You’re in some late-night drinking dive. A smoky Jazz bar, a run-down cocktail bar, something like that. Anyway, it’s late... no, no - it’s early, it’s really early. And so far the night has dragged on like your life has dragged on: uneventful, disappointing and is apparently drawing to a drunken end.»
AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!
Sorry. Shit! Sorry.
Start again.
I don’t know if it’s just me but there seems to be something in the air at the moment, a tiring, oppressive gloom. Of course, it could be just the low light of encroaching winter that exhausts the spirit, the darkening skies, the gre»
Anyone for Riot Grrl disco?
‘Feminist Sweepstakes‘, the follow up to Le Tigre‘s eponymous debut from last year, takes the scrawly DIY punk of the 90’s ’Totally Girl Powered’ movement and dresses it up in spangly fairly lights and glitter.
Described on the record as “some kinda underground el»
If you thought ‘We Love Life‘ was going to be 'Pulp's ‘return’ to the wacky, radio-friendly BritPop-era Pulp, then you’re fresh outta luck I’m afraid.
‘We Love Life‘ is, if anything, a continuation of what came before, namely the angry swirl of dark hues that was ‘This Is Hardcore<»
“Blind as the Fate decrees
I will go on
Teaching myself to be
The Young Untold“
~ ‘Searching For Mr Right‘
Side One: the record starts.
A jittery drum pattern, a minimalist guitar. Echoey and distant the sound builds, now added by a dark-soul Joy Division bass and fi»
“You think I’m licked, don’t you? You all think I’m licked... well, I’M NOT LICKED!” ~ James Stewart in ‘Mr Smith Goes To Washington’ “.I still have much to offer“ ~ Martin Rossiter ‘Is It Over?‘ Gene may have been fighting fit and able at one point, but they took one hellllll»
This much we know:
The advent of the success of The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays in the early 90s led to a decade where ‘Indie’ would no longer exclusively refer to small, relatively unknown ‘underground’ bands, cult bands. Indie came to incorporate a wider and more commercial range of music. It»
aka ‘Heato’, aka Paul Heaton, aka best white soul voice in Britain, aka one of the country’s greatest wordsmiths... What’s happened to The Great British Songwriter by the way? It’s one of the things the Brit music scene excelled in at one point. All those quintessentially British singer/songwriters, sharp »
Curtains closed against the sun, patchouli incense burning the day away. A broken red rose, a helicopter explodes in slow-mo on a TV screen. Blood drips onto black velvet...
Where Echoes End then - they take this shit seriously. Frowning against the Australian sun they assemble intricate, dark, brooding and»
It is the future. David (Haley Joel Osment) is a Mecha, a state-of-the-art android child bought by the father of a similar aged real boy who is in a cryogenically maintained coma and terminally ill.
Initially the boy’s mother rejects David until she discover»
For Aussie director Baz Luhurmann it seems that too much is never enough. Moulin Rouge is the third of his ’Red Curtain’ trilogy of films which began with ’Strictly Ballroom’ and continued with ’Romeo + Juliet’. The three movies, each becoming more colourful, dazzling and audacious th»
Nina Persson: the girl at the other side of a crowded room who grabs my attention with Siren-like irresistibility yet who remains completely oblivious to my existence, which only goes to make her all the more alluring.
So I stand there and hope - at least - that her sphinx-like level gaze will turn my way. But no.»
R&B singer and actress Aaliyah died when a small plane that was to carry her and eight others back to the United States crashed after takeoff in the Bahamas, authorities said. Eight were killed in Saturday's crash, and one critically injured man was flown to Florida for treatment. "We find it deva»
Bjork’s retreat from the media front line is hardly surprising really, considering the amount of patronising and lazy racism she’s had to endure. Like the way Chris Evans and others would talk to her like she’s six years old or something, and all those comments from the music press calling her a pixie and elfin »
Though from Detroit, The White Stripes fit neatly into the New New Yorker scenester scene. Y’know, all those poor little rich boys, The Strokes, A.R.E Weapons, Moldy Peaches and so on, slumming it in their ‘poor person’ chic, belting out 70s garage pop and getting the NY fashionista magazine»
