Words Dept.: category

It’s the last day of the year, so here are my top several things of 2010. I haven’t bothered to create an artificial five or ten of everything, partly because my consumption of cultural artefacts doesn’t really merit it and partly because I like to keep it fresh and unpredictable, like a game of snooker [...]

Did Mick Hucknall actually sleep with 3,000 women in three years during the 1980s, as the Guardian claims today? Plainly the mathematics, if you care to consider them, which I don’t especially want to but sadly must, isn’t on his side since it involves somewhere close to 2.75 “insertions” per day – and Viagra wasn’t [...]

Help me. I’m worried I may be one of those “Morrissey apologists” you sometimes hear about. None of my best friends are Morrissey, yet I can’t help empathise with the erstwhile Smiths frontman. To make matters worse, I’ve got form in this area. Three years ago when, in an NME interview, Morrissey expressed some rather [...]

I’m quite impressed by the borderline heretical grumblings over at FUC51. Not because I hate the Smiths, New Order or Joy Division (they’re actually three of my favourite bands) but because I hate the idea of living and working in a supposedly creative city that’s obsessed with a musical movement that ended twenty years ago. [...]

Hello, all. You may have noticed I haven’t updated this blog for a fair while. This is thanks mainly to a combination of it being Christmas, going on holiday, and having lots of other fabulously exciting things to do. However, I became conscious that my regular reader would be missing me, so I invited, via [...]

Although I don’t generally comment on pop music and its purveyors, I couldn’t help but observe the hand-wringing over whether or not, technically speaking, the Sugababes – now that yet another member has quit – actually still “exist”. What’s apparently happened, in case you don’t read the FT, is that the three original members of [...]

I’ve got a question. How is it that people who are expressly employed to advise very senior politicians on “political” matters haven’t got the gumption to realise that by typing offensive words into an e-mail, there’s a risk that those words might be made public? Damian McBride, a “special adviser” to the Prime Minister has [...]

Just before midnight last night I was looking at the official website of Tony Hart in an attempt to find the theme tune to his 1980s kids show Hart Beat. My aim – ultimately achieved – was to stream it through the stereo in order to prove to friends what a fine piece of electro [...]

As I’ve nothing better to do and 2008 has now definitely finished, I thought I’d provide you with my list of my favourite things from the year just gone. Happy New Year, by the way. Film I thought Wall-E was surprisingly deep for a kids film and was also technically flawless. But There Will Be [...]

One of the most enlightening pieces of journalism re the Russell Brand/Jonathan Toss incident was when the BBC’s David Sillito solicited the views of people queuing to watch the filming of the Alan Titchmarsh Show and compared them with the views of people queuing to watch Never Mind the Buzzcocks. The former group (old people) [...]