Bags for life

If MTV Rewind got me in a nostalgic mood, then this Guardian article about vintage crisp packet designs maintained it. As an avowed crisp fanatic, I devoured Daniel Dylan Wray's piece gleefully.

Crisp Packet (not his real name, folks) started his collection with the discovery of a pickled onion Space Raiders packet - an absolute staple of mine from the school tuck shop. He's right that the original design (by Brett Ewins, the artist behind 2000AD comic strips) blows the current version away.

For his part, Wray is spot on in saying that there's "a definite air of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon cover" about the weird tangled shape on the Odduns packet - it could quite easily have sprung from the brains of Hipgnosis. It's telling that I remember the design more than the flavour (cheeseburger, apparently).

Academic Annebella Pollen, author of the foreword to Packet's book showcasing his extensive collection, points out that "[t]his is children's culture. There was a clear strategic attempt to move crisps beyond being bar snacks associated with adult men in pubs and into kids' lunch boxes." In recent years, with the drive against childhood obesity, that trend has been reversed - with the unfortunate consequence that crisp packet design has once again become dull and undistinguished.

Do the timewarp

Once upon a time, MTV was about music videos. Which is where MTV Rewind comes in - an incredible project that enables users to relive the experience of watching the channel and its offshoots back when it mattered (complete with VJs and weird idents).

There's so much to explore, and I've only dipped a toe in the water, revisiting the channel's first day. Kicking off with the Buggles' 'Video Killed The Radio Star' was certainly a power move...

Silent witness

Never judge a book by its cover - wise words, the truth of which is underscored by I Saw A Man.

At first glance, it might look like a common-or-garden airport novel, something to help pass the time while stuck in transit (especially with the addition of that yellow £4 sticker). But look more closely and you realise it would be rash to write it off so cheaply. First, Faber are not in the business of publishing trash, and second, author Owen Sheers is no commercial hack.

In fairness, the blurb is also somewhat uninspiring, promising strangers' lives becoming intertwined, "a devastating event" and "a terrible secret". The book ticks all of those boxes - but it does so in a way that will satisfy readers of a more literary bent as well as those who seeking a tense thriller. It's as if Sheers has set himself the task of working his magic within the confines of the genre, without exploding the conventions in the way that Jon McGregor does in Reservoir 13.

A large part of the beauty of I Saw A Man is that that "devastating event" is foreshadowed in the very first paragraph and yet Sheers keeps us waiting for chapter after chapter before finally revealing what happened. There's a filmic quality to the flashbacks and backstory, and a masterful management of suspense. It's an engrossing slow-burner rather than a showy firework display.

But it's equally also a very different kind of book - a meditation on mourning, on plumbing the depths of grief and finding ways to escape it (and people to help you do so). It is arguably the sensitive depiction of central character Michael Turner's gradual healing process that most obviously betrays Sheers' background as a poet.

It may not be as astounding as his debut novel, Resistance, and the denouement does turn on a rather improbable plot point, but I Saw A Man is nevertheless a significant cut above your average page-turner.

The serious business of photography

It's a running joke in our house that I'm obsessed with covering the living room walls with depressing black-and-white photo prints. (Let's just say that's an exaggeration - there's a black-and-white Robin Weaver print and a black-and-white Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen poster, admittedly, but the Peter Mitchell print is in colour, albeit very muted.)

Part of the joke is that black-and-white photography is perceived by many (both inside this house and beyond) as self-consciously "arty", presenting itself as being somehow more serious and significant than colour.

In a recent post on The United Nations Of Photography, Grant Scott explained that this is a hangover from the early days of photography, when the artform was initially regarded as merely "a mechanical recording medium". In the face of scoffs and sneers, the first photographers were desperate for their work to be taken seriously and accorded the kind of respect given to painting - and so they actively sought to establish and champion its artistic credentials.

Working in black and white was, for many decades, a matter of necessity rather than choice. As Scott observed, "[c]olour photography only became practical, cheap and widely available in the mid-1950s". At that point, the scoffs and sneers returned, but this time from old-school photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who rubbished the idea that serious work could possibly be produced in colour.

And yet the likes of Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and Martin Parr set about proving otherwise. As intimated in Lee Shulman's documentary, Parr's acceptance into Magnum - controversial though it was - was a triumph on a personal level but also signified a broader victory over artistic snobbery, in terms of preferred medium as well as subject matter.

The artistic decision over whether to choose black and white or colour is weighted with substantial cultural and historical baggage that might sway things one way or the other - but ultimately, as Scott emphasised, neither medium is inherently superior to the other.

Noise pollution

I've written critically about AI recently, but it was also with a sense of despair and futility. It feels like the horse has bolted and there's nothing much that I or anyone else can do about it.

But some opponents believe that all is not yet lost - and they include people on the inside of the industry.

The Register's Thomas Claburn has reported on an initiative called Poison Fountain, which involves deliberately feeding poisoned data to the AI crawlers/scrapers that AI models rely on, in the hope that it accelerates the bursting of the bubble.

Claburn's anonymous source said: "Poisoning attacks compromise the cognitive integrity of the model. There's no way to stop the advance of this technology, now that it is disseminated worldwide. What's left is weapons. This Poison Fountain is an example of such a weapon."

While putting up resistance may be laudable, I must admit to being wary. We're already swimming in AI slop - do we really want to pollute the waters even more? The promise of long-term gain is tempting, but might there not be significant deleterious or unforeseen consequences in the short term? It seems like a risky move, at very least.

Plus, as Claburn acknowledges, there's some evidence that AI models are already getting worse without opponents' intervention, poisoning themselves by hungrily feasting on their own shit. Maybe we should just leave them to die on their own?

In addition, it would be naive to disregard the fact that spreading disinformation to bring AI down could quite easily be twisted into doing so to deliberately mislead people for nefarious ends. I'd be concerned that the positive, ethical mission could be used by unscrupulous types as a smokescreen to justify deceiving the public for political gain.

Villa park

For the past four summers, we've lent a hand to the archaeological dig that has been uncovering evidence of Cardiff's oldest house. Trelai Park is also home to the remains of a sizeable Roman villa - but now it transpires that there's an even larger villa just waiting to be excavated down the road at Margam Park in Port Talbot.

The radar scans are stunningly clear, and, as in Trelai Park, the conditions are perfect - the fact that it's in a historic deer park means that the remains haven't been disturbed by ploughing or construction work and lie only a short distance beneath the ground surface.

Branding it potentially "Port Talbot's Pompeii" might be a little premature, but the general air of excitement is understandable. We've still not ventured over to Margam Park (also home to a number of other archaeological features), but it's definitely on our radar now.

Clean break

Dry Cleaning's new LP Secret Love isn't the first album to be oversold/missold by its press release, and it won't be the last, but this is a particularly spectacular example: "Here, the south London four-piece take their place in rock's avant garde, catalysing the Reaganite paranoia of early 80s US punk and hardcore with the dry strut of Keith Richards, stoner rock, dystopian degradation, playful no wave and pastoral fingerpicking, while Florence's delivery, meticulously calibrated to her bandmates' soundscapes, asserts her in a lineage of spoken-word artists stretching from Laurie Anderson to Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins."

Needless to say, my interest was well and truly piqued - though dampened by a degree of scepticism, given a pronounced antipathy to their two previous efforts. And sure enough, the reality doesn't come close to living up to that promise - if that promise was even possible at all ("playful no wave", anyone?).

And yet I find Secret Love less irritating than either New Long Leg or Stumpwork. Maybe, with time (and a more consistent fourth record), I might finally come around - even if only grudgingly.

Buzz review here.

Divide and rule

It might appear perverse to have chosen the present moment to willingly read a book about the antics of venal, unscrupulous, manipulative, self-serving, power-crazed bullies. And yet I'm glad to have finally got around to reading What A Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe's scathing satirical takedown of the Thatcher era.

The novel centres on the cousins of the Winshaw dynasty: Dorothy (a formidable farmer and, I would venture, precursor to Chicken Run's Mrs Tweedy), Thomas (a single-minded merchant banker), Henry (a slippery politician), Mark (a callous arms dealer), Roddy (a devious sex-pest art dealer) and Hilary (an outspoken tabloid columnist who has opinions for money). 

Collectively, the cousins enjoy class privilege and nepotistic advantage, but they aren't the dimwitted bounders, cads and rotters of a Wodehouse novel; on the contrary, they're utter shits - conniving, corrupt and cynical through and through. Mortimer Winshaw, Roddy and Hilary's father, goes so far as to brand them "the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of back-stabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth".

Through the narrator figure of Michael Owen, engaged by the cousins' eccentric aunt Tabitha to write the family biography, we are shown how they're able to bend reality to their will, conspiring with each other to further feather their nests.

Owen is in many ways a pitiable, tragic figure - a reclusive author suffering from writer's block who finds himself increasingly drawn into the Winshaws' world, initially through Tabitha's commission and then through grim fascination and more - and you can sense Coe's genuine fury at the carve-ups, cover-ups and collusions of the 1980s bubbling just beneath the surface, particularly with regard to the mismanagement and underfunding of the NHS.

But, this being a satire, it isn't bleak. Coe evidently relishes the opportunity to create caricatures (the cousins, primarily, but also private detective and cottaging enthusiast Findlay Onyx), takes delight in inventing titles put out by vanity publisher Peacock Press (see in particular The A-Z Of Plinths by the Reverend J. W. Pottage) and transforms the final section of the book into a gloriously hammy Midsomer Murders-style whodunnit.

In some ways, from the vantage point of 2026, What A Carve Up!'s chronicling of nefarious activities seems almost quaint, a reminder of a time before the internet and social media in particular upped the ante. And yet it's a prescient book too, foreseeing (in the figure of Hilary) how public opinion can be swayed and harnessed and how rage can be manufactured through the media, and (in the figure of Mark) how weapons can be flogged with government approval but without a shred of conscience or concern as to the consequences.

There's an element of score settling and wish fulfillment in What A Carve Up! - Coe taking revenge by imagining the cousins' comeuppance. Sadly, though, there's little sign of their real-life 2026 counterparts meeting a similarly satisfying fate.

Sidelined

Reluctant though I am to start the year on a negative note, the fact that Side's gallery is definitely no more demands acknowledgement.

The Newcastle gallery shut its doors in April 2023 owing to substantial funding cuts, but there was some optimism that the closure might only be temporary (including on this very site), given the groundswell of public support that the news generated. That support and enthusiasm has sadly not been enough, with a permanent exhibition space deemed "no longer financially viable in the current funding climate", and the gallery has been converted into "a Pilates and wellness studio".

That Side's work will continue through digital exhibitions and collaborations with other organisations and institutions comes as some consolation - the archive is too valuable to be lost or forgotten - but the loss of a physical home is nevertheless a heavy blow.

Over the festive period, I took the opportunity to immerse myself in some of the weightier photobooks on my shelves, including the wonderful Chris Killip retrospective. Killip died in 2020; as one of Side's founders and its first director, he would no doubt have been particularly dismayed by the gallery's demise. It should make us treasure - and, more to the point, actively support - the likes of Ffotogallery, the Photographers Gallery and the Martin Parr Foundation all the more.

Back to the Dark Ages

Our techbro overlords would have us believe that we're on the cusp - or even in the midst of - a golden age, a new Enlightenment, an exponential expansion of knowledge and capacity. But Joseph de Weck, in this Guardian article, argues the exact opposite: that AI is taking us back to the Dark Ages.

The MIT study cited might be flawed, and the findings overstated/misrepresented, but evidence that AI is inducing laziness and a dereliction of responsibility for independent/critical thinking and decision making seems overwhelming and incontrovertible. On a daily basis, people are surrendering to and putting absolute faith in systems that come with disclaimers that they may deliver "inaccurate or incorrect information" - and frequently do.

This is of course not the only reason to be intensely wary of or outright opposed to AI - see also its cannibalisation of artistic endeavours and devaluation of the creative process, and the enormity of its impact on the environment. But the production of a more supine, manipulable population is a huge concern, especially politically.

This is not to criticise individuals. The temptation to take short-cuts and avoid hard, time-consuming graft or extensive reflection is understandable and - let's face it - probably human instinct. What de Weck's article doesn't really emphasise - and should - is that this is a structural problem: of governance, of opacity, of corporate and political influence.

We need to focus on one key question: whose interests does AI ultimately serve? The answer is: not mine, and not yours either, but those of an elite minority intent on enriching themselves at our expense.

"You're stealing other people's emotional tragedies"

Reacting to the news of Martin Parr's death, Don McCullin, while expressing his admiration, noted: "Our work was in total contrast - it didn't gel together. We were chalk and cheese."

That was very much underlined by two recent Guardian articles. One - on Wendy Jones' biography of sorts of Parr - quoted Parr as saying "I've had a wonderful life with photography". By contrast, the other - in which McCullin talks about some of his greatest pictures - was headlined with the quote: "It's been a cesspit, really, my life."

McCullin is the very definition of the tortured artist - a photographer who has spent decades documenting the horrific violence that people inflict on each other, and who feels guilty and uncomfortable at having made a career out of it. When interviewer Emine Saner suggests that there is value in bearing witness, McCullin demurs, citing Ukraine and Gaza: "I feel as if I've been riding on other people's pain over the last 60 years, and their pain hasn't helped prevent this kind of tragedy. We've learned nothing."

Support act

Encouraging news from London, where the O2 Arena has committed to providing funding to the Music Venue Trust to support their work with grassroots venues. It's not the MVT's proposed £1 ticket levy, but it's not to be sniffed at: an initial "six-figure" donation, plus additional funds each time a new headliner performs there.

The O2 isn't the first arena to strike a deal in support of the MVT, though. As I reported for Buzz early last year, Swansea Arena led the way, by both signing up to the ticket levy and raising money for the MVT's Pipeline Investment Fund. At the time, MVT CEO Mark Davyd said: "We hope their example will inspire many more." Might that hope be bearing fruit?

Currying favour

Some of the restaurants I've enthused about for Buzz don't really need the additional promotion, either because they're not short of rave reviews or because they now have the considerable kudos of having a Michelin star to their name. Which is why I was so keen to sing the praises of Vijay Yadav Kitchen - easily overlooked but certainly not easily forgotten if you've given it a try (or three, in my case). The value for money ratio is exceptional.

Buzz review here.

"Ordinary extraordinariness"

Towards the end of Lee Shulman's documentary I Am Martin Parr (highly recommended and available on iPlayer, folks!), Grayson Perry claims - with ample justification - that Parr achieved what is effectively the holy grail for photographers: making a way of seeing.

Perry is among those to pay warm tribute in this Guardian article, reprising his argument from the film that the colour work for which Parr became famous flew in the face of the "performative seriousness" of so much documentary photography. Don McCullin - while himself an old-school advocate of bleak black-and-white reportage - acknowledges Parr's keen eye and sense of humour.

According to Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad of Photo London, Parr's core belief was "in the importance of looking closely at the world around us" - and what he saw, the Tate's Maria Balshaw notes, was "the changing spectacle of UK life in all its ordinary extraordinariness". Parr himself, meanwhile, was the personification of extraordinary ordinariness - a photographer who, in the words of his biographer-of-sorts Wendy Jones, seemed to be "anonymous and invisible". The key to seeing, perhaps, is being unseen yourself.

For fellow photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, however, "[t]he key to Martin's success was that he never lost that sense of wonder. In my experience the hardest thing with photography is holding on to the curiosity and naivety you had when you first fell in love with it." Hawkesworth credits Parr with inspiring him to find his own personal visual style. His anecdotes substantiate Benson and Farshad's claim that Parr's "unwavering support for emerging artists helped new voices to flourish".

In a separate tribute written for the Observer, Sean O'Hagan comments: "It strikes me now that he is one of those rare characters who will be acutely missed because he is irreplaceable." That may be true in many ways, but, as Benson and Farshad point out (and as I noted at the end of my review of the documentary), Parr will live on not only through his impressive body of work but also through the Martin Parr Foundation, which has "created a vital home for British and Irish photography, ensuring that future generations will have access to an extraordinary archive and a beacon for the study of visual culture".

Winter (ear)warmer

Having contrived to be otherwise engaged for every single one of Vogon Laundromat's first-Saturday-of-the-month noise/metal/punk nights held in Newport in the spring, I was determined to make it along to the December edition. And a real treat it proved, for the cost of less than a pint. Buzz report here.

Part of the draw, admittedly, was paying a first visit to the Cab. A rough and ready space with a solid sound system, rudimentary cash-only can bar, random pole in front of the stage and heavily stickered toilet, it was everything I'd hoped for, and perfect for this kind of line-up.

For the second time in less than a week, I found myself pining for the Moon, and lamenting the fact that there doesn't seem to be anywhere quite like this left in Cardiff. But as photographer Keith rightly pointed out to me, perhaps it's for the best for the health of the South Wales music scene that Newport has something that Cardiff doesn't.

Anger (mis)management

The Oxford University Press' choice for word of the year so often speaks volumes about contemporary culture, and this year's, "rage bait", is no different. Media platforms and individual content creators seek to draw consumers in for financial gain, and provoking anger has become seen as an easy way to do so.

It's rare these days that I go on social media and don't see at least one thing that instantly boils my blood. Of course, rather than getting sucked in and wasting energy on indignant sharing and commenting, the sensible option is to refuse to be manipulated and simply block and/or switch off. Easier said than done sometimes, though.

The American ruse?

Fresh from accusing Pavement of straying into sell-out territory by releasing another greatest hits compilation, I now find myself pointing the finger at those behind MC50 for seeking to exploit fans' loyalty with the 10 More album. In hindsight, though, maybe I should just lighten up; after all, this collection of live recordings does sound great, and ultimately it's up to fans whether they want to take the bait and part with their money.

Cacophony and catharsis

It's become something of a happy tradition to see Gnod once every four years - though ideally it would be much more frequently than that. In Clwb on Wednesday, they were as magnificently and mesmerically noisy as ever (and had excellent support from Joao Pais Filipe and The Death Of Money), but the evening was somewhat bittersweet in that it brought to mind my two previous encounters, in 2017 and 2021, which both took place in the now shuttered Moon. That place was made for nights like these.

Buzz report here.

Flying start

For a debut, Invada's Game is remarkably accomplished. Part survival story, part psychological thriller, part folk horror, part cultural commentary, part druggy farce, the film betrays neither the inexperience of its creators nor the small scale of its budget.

Watching it at Chapter on Friday and then hearing producer Geoff Barrow, lead actor Marc Bessant and principal writer Rob Williams talk about the processes, creative decisions and challenges was a real treat.

Buzz report here.

Beach boys

As with the recent Pavement soundtrack album, it's hard to assess Animal Collective's sonic companion-piece to Sam Fleischner's documentary film Jetty outside the context of the film - but, if it's being released as a standalone record, then needs must. Expect ambient weirdness rather than wonky pop thrills.

Buzz review here.

Look north

After a good run - The Offing, The Perfect Golden Circle, Cuddy, Rare Singles - Jesus Christ Kinski is the first Benjamin Myers novel in a few years that I haven't had the opportunity to enthuse about for Buzz. Centred around irascible German actor Klaus Kinski's infamous 1971 one-man show playing Jesus, the book is very different to anything he's written before - but then that's his modus operandi, and the reviews suggest it's another winner.

Appearing as a guest on Jen Bowden's Northern Voices podcast recently, Myers talked about Jesus Christ Kinski and some of its predecessors, as well as discussing diversity and tokenism in the publishing industry and having not a chip but perhaps a crisp on his shoulder as a proudly northern writer in a world that still revolves around London and the south east.

The conversation left me all the more convinced that I really must seek out his early novel Pig Iron. It was also good to learn that the big-screen adaptation of The Offing will be filming next year, with conversations about a similar treatment for The Perfect Golden Circle in process and a new novel and novella set for publication in 2027.

"It gave me the platform to grow"

Amid the relentless torrent of shit, a rare good news story: that of striker Richard Kone's remarkable route to becoming a Championship footballer with QPR and an Ivory Coast international potentially destined for next year's World Cup.

What particularly caught my eye was that Kone's journey began with the 2019 Homeless World Cup here in Cardiff, where he represented his country as a teenager. As I reported for Buzz, it was a brilliant event - though one that owed its existence to Michael Sheen's financial backing, with funding having fallen through at the eleventh hour.

Kone claims that the experience was "life changing". I can only hope that Sheen has seen Kone's story and takes pride in the impact that his generosity and general enthusiasm has had.

"A cleansing force"

I wasn't really that bothered about missing out on seeing My Bloody Valentine on the current tour - until I read Daniel Dylan Wray's report from Manchester, that is.

It's a wonderful review, cogently making the case that subjection to noisy music may potentially be a profoundly cathartic experience: "There is a remarkable feeling of clarity and serenity that hits when this music lands at full force - a potent and uplifting feeling of peace and harmony can be triggered when you submit yourself to this onslaught and become sucked up in it."

Wray also makes mention of the fact that MBV paid tribute to Mani, who was for a short time a bandmate of Kevin Shields in Primal Scream: "Those who saw Primal Scream live during their XTRMNTR era, in which Mani was on bass and Shields was on guitar, speak about it with a giddy reverence of a band operating at the full throttle peak." I'm no PS fan generally, but you can count me in that number.

Wray's debut book Groovy, Laidback And Nasty - a history/profile of the music scene of his native Sheffield - is due to be published by White Rabbit in May next year, and, as a fan of pretty much everything he seems to do for the Guardian and the Quietus, I'm eager to get my mitts on a copy.

Some Psychocandy talking

It was a curious coincidence that no sooner had I got my head out of Paul Morley's latest book on David Bowie than Ned Raggett was opening his Quietus piece marking the 40th anniversary of Psychocandy with Bowie's dismissal of his fellow Velvet Underground fans as "awful" and "so sophomoric". He wasn't wrong about many things, but it's fair to say Bowie was well wide of the mark when it came to The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Raggett situates the band behind this now-legendary debut in the lineage of artists who have instinctively understood that the combination of "hooks and noise" simply works. The Jesus & Mary Chain would dial back the obliterating feedback on later releases, but even at this early stage, Raggett notes, "they pretty clearly loved the sweet stuff and not just the sour, the winsome and beautiful, not just the Jesus fuck of it all". The clues are all there in the album title.

Raggett also acknowledges that, simple though the lyrics often are, they are often perfect - especially right at the start of lead single 'Never Understand': "The sun comes up, another day begins / And I don't even worry about the state I'm in."

Stormy night

GWENIFER RAYMOND / SAM GRASSIE, 19TH NOVEMBER 2025, CARDIFF PARADISE GARDEN

It comes as no surprise whatsoever to learn that Sam Grassie was a Bert Jansch Foundation Young Artist between 2020 and 2022. No doubt the late fingerstyle legend would have been flattered to hear his influence coming through loud and clear in a guitarist of the new folk generation. Glaswegian Grassie produces fingerpaintings of what feel like pastoral scenes shadowed with darkness; as such, he's a perfect support act for the evening's headliner.

No stranger to Wales, he performed in Green Man's Walled Garden last year, and is no less engaging in this rather smaller but equally horticulturally themed space. "I have a back-up set for when people are talking", he admits with a laugh - but the audience's respectful silence (well earned) ensures he never needs to fall back on it tonight.

If we're going to laud overseas visitors like Marissa Nadler for their entrancing takes on traditional American music, then it's only right that we should be equally fulsome in our praise of the incredible talent doing likewise on our own doorstep. Gwenifer Raymond may have decamped to Brighton, but she's clearly enjoying being back on home turf, delighted to have been able to nip to her mum's for cake between soundcheck and showtime.

Hers is mountain music, transposed from Appalachia to the Garth. Armed only with an acoustic guitar, she is a summoner of storms, a lightning rod, an orchestrator of elemental forces. That she achieves this without the aid of technotrickery, merely through skill, is astonishing. She was once quoted as saying of certain old bluesman "I loved how they could make the guitar sound as if there was more than one playing"; at times tonight, it sounds as though there might be three or four, duelling with each other in different time signatures.

Raymond's distrust of her own singing voice and consequent preference for instrumentals has had the bonus of giving her greater creative licence. The heroes of her youth, Nirvana, became so jaded with the verse-chorus-verse structure that they wrote a song about it; in refusing to be bound by it herself, she is free to be more inventive, explorative and adventurous.

This gig may be to promote new album Last Night I Saw The Dog Star Bark, but the show is stolen by the incredible 'Hell For Certain' from 2020's Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain. Its intensity and aggression betray her background in grunge and punk; not only is a hard rain gonna fall, but on occasion it genuinely pelts it down.

I'll be honest: the first glimpse I get of Raymond is at the merch stand afterwards. The combination of low/no stage, seated performer and cordon of lanky guitar nerds is not conducive to clear sight lines, even for a six-footer. But no matter: rather like being blindfolded, it feels as though your sense of hearing is quickened, and without the distraction of the visual those of us towards the back are able to focus purely on these expressive stories told without words, savouring an intimate audience with a virtuoso.

(An edited version of this review appeared on the Buzz website.)

Touts out

It's not often that the shower of shite currently calling themselves the Labour Party gets something right, but the decision to ban all reselling of event tickets for anything over face value should be welcomed - even if it has been a mystifyingly/frustratingly long time in coming.

The likes of Radiohead, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and The Cure were among the musicians and bands to put pressure on the party to keep their election pledge to tackle the problem of touting.

Prior to the announcement, Stubhub and Viagogo were predictably bleating about the supposedly damaging effects of a ban, such as fans being induced to resort to unregulated sites - as though a nominally regulated racket was somehow much preferable. What a tragedy that their business model has now been trashed - and that the business regulator is scrutinising their operations.

The yin and yang of Pavement

When Nigel Godrich was working on what turned out to be Pavement's final studio album, he claimed he wanted to create something that would "reach people who were turned off by the beautiful sloppiness of other Pavement records". It was a curious ambition for a self-declared fan of the band to want to airbrush out precisely what made them so distinctive, and the resulting record, Terror Twilight, is much maligned. It's like Malkmus and crew have been tamed, scrubbed up and squeezed into a suit and tie that's a couple of sizes too small, shod in brogues that pinch at the toes and heel, and sent off to pitch themselves to a board of executives.

I got the same feeling listening to Hecklers Choice, their new best of compilation - which, though featuring only two tracks from Terror Twilight, is uncharacteristically lean, clean-cut and business-like in its selection.

By contrast, the soundtrack to Alex Ross Perry's film Pavements, released on the same day, is much less all killer, no filler - and much of the filler in this instance is largely incomprehensible if you haven't seen the film.

Buzz reviews of both albums here.

It's fair to say that any disappointment with either/both has been offset by the fact that they've sent me back to the albums. For years, I've been happily declaring Brighten The Corners my favourite, but it's been Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain that's been on particularly high rotation of late.

Starman

I'll be honest: Paul Morley's style in Far Above The World: The Time And Space Of David Bowie has rendered the prospect of reading the copy of his doorstop book about Tony Wilson currently sitting on my shelves less appealing. But, in fairness, if any musician deserves to be written about in this way - exaggeratedly, often breathlessly - then it's Bowie, defined by his creative restlessness, his otherworldliness, his manic energy, his determination to avoid sterility and stay ahead of the curve.

Buzz review here.

"Everything was in flux"

Reviewing Tortoise's new album Touch for Buzz recently and reading Louis Pattison's Guardian feature on the band reminded me of Pattison's article "The Untold History Of UK Post-Rock", written last year for Bandcamp.

In it, he traces the term "post-rock" back to a Wire piece by Simon Reynolds from 1994. Reynolds was celebrating the nascent genre's sense of creative freedom and experimentation, in much the same way as he did with regard to the immediate post-punk period in Rip It Up And Start Again.

Pattison argues that by the late 90s, there was a glut of UK bands building on the pioneering work of Bark Psychosis, Slint and Tortoise: "[T]he beauty of this era was there was no consensus about what that 'post' in 'post-rock' meant. Everything was in flux, and exactly how the music of tomorrow would sound was up for grabs." I might add that the disparate nature of 

Fridge's Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers make a great point about Radiohead's role in "[taking] the ideas of post-rock and transplant[ing] them into a mainstream context". OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac may not be revolutionary records, but they exposed mainstream listeners sucked in by 'Creep' and The Bends to much more complex music that strayed from a strict rock template.

Mogwai were my primary gateway drug, though, with the Glaswegians coming to form a quarter of what I'd identify as post-rock's equivalent of thrash metal's Big Four: Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Ros. I loved them all, and still do, but there's no doubt that their emergence more narrowly codified what the term meant. As Pattison observes, "the sound seemed to harden into formula, coming to mean a largely instrumental music focused around a particular dynamic: play quiet, then loud, then quiet again. Post-rock as a genre would persist, but some of its initial freedom had been lost."

The purpose of his article is not to lament this loss, but to flag up some overlooked gems from "five particularly fertile years between 1996 and 2001". I'm familiar with Billy Mahonie and to a lesser extent Hood, Fridge and Aereogramme, but really should know Pram, Seefeel and Rothko better, and Philosopher's Stone, Eardrum and Fonn are all new names to check out. The late 90s is often seen as a rather dismal period for music, but Pattison proves that (as ever) plenty of interesting activity was going on beneath the surface.

Black magic woman

Ever since my first live encounter with Marissa Nadler, at Godspeed You! Black Emperor's ATP in 2010, I've been desperate to see her again. Mercifully, the opportunity finally presented itself in the form of a Cardiff date on the short UK leg of her current European tour in support of new LP New Radiations. Needless to say, she - in tandem with partner-in-crime Milky Burgess - did not disappoint.

Buzz review here.

Eye witness report

For someone turned off by tech talk and largely uninterested in the finer points of photographic technique, last month's Eye Festival in Aberystwyth made for a richly stimulating weekend. It was a pleasure to listen to a clutch of star photographers - Philip Hatcher-Moore, Denise Maxwell, Simon Norfolk, Harry Borden, Joel Goodman, Daniel Meadows, Eileen Perrier and Jenny Matthews - speak about their work and professional philosophy/practice, raising significant talking points on everything from ethics, respect and archiving to the scourge of generative AI along the way.

Buzz long-read report here.

Everything falls apart

If you only read one thing about Husker Du, make it the chapter from Michael Azerrad's superlative Our Band Could Be Your Life. But if you read two, or need a more condensed history/primer, then Stevie Chick's recent piece for the Quietus is highly recommended.

Chick invites Bob Mould - fresh from speaking about the reformed Sugar - to take a wander even further down memory lane, recalling the band's beginnings in the basement of a St Paul record store, their decision to escape the creative dead end of hardcore punk ("constricting and dogmatic") by bringing in melody, underground success and band breakdown, and patching things up with Grant Hart shortly before his death.

Greg Norton also contributes his reflections, including on his post-Du career in the catering industry: "I discovered that mental health and addiction are as bad in restaurants as in the music business."

Scrap the cap

Terri White's mini-documentary on child poverty for the Guardian is alarming and eye-opening, not least because of the staggering, shameful statistics that it spells out: 37 per cent of children in Greater Manchester live in poverty, and 75 per cent of kids living in poverty nationally are in working households.

Drawing on her own personal experience, White speaks to an assortment of people, including mums and staff at charities, in a film that underlines the devastating impact of the two-child benefit cap in particular.

The cap is a policy that was introduced by the Tories but that Labour seem reluctant to scrap; indeed, six MPs were suspended for calling for exactly that last summer. In White's film, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, brands the cap "abhorrent", and to his credit he's since backed that up by putting pressure on Keir Starmer to ditch it, as a measure that has "no moral basis".

As White emphasises, child poverty is both preventable and a political choice. The prospect of pleas to remove the cap being heeded seems unlikely, though, given the current state of the party under Starmer's leadership - and I'd strongly advise that you avoid looking at the YouTube comments section if you don't want to despair at the views of your fellow citizens.

Tangible benefits

Ever since being baffled by a library copy of TNT in my youth, I've never fully grasped what Tortoise are all about. Long-awaited new album Touch hasn't totally won me over, but they do come across as more approachable and less intimidating. Buzz review here.

With the record's release date nearing, the Guardian's Louis Pattison spoke to the band about their early days (once again underlining the inestimable value of cheap rent and the availability of large inner-city spaces for the creation of art), as well as hometown friends (Steve Albini) and British admirers (Squid, Geordie Greep). What comes across particularly is their melange of wildly divergent musical influences - rock, jazz, dancehall, dub, classical - and consequent openness to stylistic experimentation.

On a related note, the Guardian should be commended for their apparent crusade to raise the profile of mid-90s post-rock. The 30th anniversary reissue of Handwriting seems to have been all the excuse they needed to publish a profile of Rachel's, whose music - like that of Tortoise - bridged the gulf between the mainstream and the classical/avant garde.

Making images to make amends

I think it was through Offline that I first learned of the work of Mohamed Hassan, so it was fitting to hear the Egyptian-born photographer talking about his first book Our Hidden Room with Offline editor Brian Carroll. Their conversation took place as part of Saturday's photobook fair at Ffotogallery in Cardiff, though - given that Carroll was the book's designer - the pair have been in dialogue with each other for much longer.

Behind Our Hidden Room stands a tragic tale: Hassan's photographer father, traumatised by his spell in the army, took his own life and, in her furious grief, Hassan's mother burnt his entire archive (prints, negatives and all) and forbade her son from indulging his interest in the art form. When she passed away, he was free from the dutiful obligation to pursue an unwanted career in engineering and came to Wales to study photography.

Our Hidden Room, Hassan explained, is many ways a tribute - an attempt to commemorate his father's passion and to compensate for the destruction of a lifetime's work. As such, it incorporates pictures from family photo albums as well as Hassan's own images taken on return visits to Egypt.

But its creation also turned out to be something of a therapeutic process for Hassan himself, who has suffered with depression too and who admitted that photography has brought about a positive change in him; sharing the fruits of the project has been an unburdening, making him more open in talking about his personal difficulties. Given that (as Carroll suggests) Our Hidden Room is as much about Hassan as it is about his father, and that he now calls Pembrokeshire home, its inclusion of pictures taken in Wales as well as Egypt makes sense.

Our Hidden Room is a reminder that painful memories and intensely personal experiences can be productively channelled into art in a way that can not only help to (re)connect the artist to their subject but also resonate with others.

Beyond the book, the conversation also underlined the power of the picture politically as well as personally. Hassan noted that merely taking photos in cities like Cairo and Alexandria is automatically viewed with suspicion by the authorities and can result in arrest and imprisonment. Even in an age of digital manipulation and AI-generated images, it seems, the camera's capacity to capture what is actually going on persists.

Not waving but drowning

Listening to Just Mustard's We Were Just Here is like staring at the ripples on the surface of a murky pond, and then finding yourself repeatedly dunked into the chilly depths. With the caveat that I have a nagging feeling I may have underestimated the band's third LP, here's my (necessarily kneejerk) review for Buzz.

A window on the world

The National Museum of Wales' current exhibition Picture Post: A Twentieth Century Icon pays rightful tribute to a titan of a publication - a news magazine that broke new ground, publishing the work of a number of celebrated photographers and inspiring many more.

Buzz review here.

"That dream has been destroyed"

Not a day goes by without new reminders of the damage that the internet generally but social media in particular have done (and continue to do) to our political landscape. Dangerous echo chambers, amplified misinformation/disinformation, catalysed hate, compromised democracy, intensified culture wars...

Yet it's worth noting, occasionally, that the internet is still seen very differently elsewhere in the world. For Afghani women and girls, for instance, it has been a source of vital connections and a means of personal emancipation through education - a chastening reminder of a positive, revolutionary potential that we in the West have almost completely lost. But as the BBC's Mahfouz Zubaide recently reported, this "last hope" has now been extinguished by the Taliban, and the picture seems bleaker in Afghanistan too.

Home comforts

If you come at the kings, you best not miss. Despite having the gall to take on formidable local adversaries in Tommy Heaney and Tom Waters, Hiraeth head chefs Andy Ashton and Lewis Dwyer hit the target with their £70-a-head taster menu.

Buzz review here.

Island records

It makes a change for a musician to be giving tours rather than going on them - but it's become a way of life for Idlewild's Roddy Woomble. The long-time Iona resident spoke to the Quietus' Stevie Chick about how he's taken to showing visitors around the island during his downtime from band duties.

Those duties have ratcheted up again recently with the release of a tenth album, this one self-titled. It's curious to think that a band as ragged and chaotic as they once were have lasted so long (with the odd hiatus along the way).

Woomble claimed that "the new record's very much what Idlewild fans have probably wanted for quite a while, referencing ourselves a wee bit: 100 Broken Windows and The Remote Part." While it's a solid enough album, that rather oversells it - it's more like a middle-aged man's idea of what those records are like than a realistic representation. As Oliver Moore-Howells put it in a lukewarm review for Buzz, they're neither idle nor wild these days.

That many fans pine for the 100 Broken Windows/The Remote Part era is entirely understandable - it's when Idlewild were at their most fascinating. They may not quite have ever struck the improbable balance between Black Flag and REM that Woomble had envisaged when they set out, but Hope Is Important and even the Captain EP had given more than a few snatches of a melodicism erupting through, and the fact that production duties on 100 Broken Windows were shared by Shellac's Bob Weston and Manics polisher Dave Eringa speaks volumes about where they were at.

That Black Flag/REM hybrid is mentioned in Steve Miller's Toppermost article on the band - as ever, a concise and helpful primer for anyone not already in the know. Miller rightly notes that with The Remote Part, "as the sharp edges were further smoothed, it's arguable that the band was at risk of losing some of its identity", and alludes to "a push and pull between a band that was trying to reach across the Atlantic, and one that wanted to remember its roots".

That tension was a source of creative energy but also of unbearable internal friction and strain. The Remote Part was the tipping point; something had to give. Once bassist Bob Fairfoull left under a cloud in 2002, having lost the civil war for Idlewild's future, and Woomble promised "As of next year we're going to be a different band really", what had made them so engaging was sadly lost. They've carried on, making a series of sedate, reflective records that have their own merits, but I for one miss the days when tunefulness was forced to fight its corner.

Sweet treat

"I want to see if people are still interested." So said Bob Mould to Rolling Stone's David Browne in announcing that Sugar are back with a new song and a selection of live dates. I think "interested" may be an understatement...

For many of those who were too young for Mould's previous three-piece, Husker Du, but were energised by Nirvana (myself included), Sugar's beefy power-pop was a revelation. 1992's Copper Blue was one of a handful of albums for which I owe a debt of gratitude to the local librarian who stocked the CD shelves - a tour de force that still sounds better every time I put it on.

I've seen Mould perform Husker Du songs with No Age at ATP (and been slightly grumpy about it), and even witnessed him play 'Hoover Dam' and 'If I Can't Change Your Mind' at a sweltering Globe, when his solo tour brought him to Cardiff three summers ago. But a full Sugar set is a tantalising prospect. Fingers crossed, then, for more dates beyond the two already announced for London.

And what of the new track, 'House Of Dead Memories'? It certainly has the familiar fire in its belly. The fury and focus of much of Mould's last two albums, Blue Hearts and Here We Go Crazy, must have helped to pave the way for Sugar's resurrection - he's now clearly back in the right headspace to team up with David Barbe and Malcolm Travis. Here's hoping for a full album.

(Self-)endangered species

I'll admit to being a little unsettled by the new Antlers album Blight. Partly this is because its gloomy reflections on environmental apocalypse are discomfortingly bleak - though, it should be pointed out, not without good reason, in light of claims that the planet has reached its first climate tipping point. But partly it's because the "fuck around, find out" narrative and especially the implication that human extinction might be a good thing is not a million miles away from the arguments typically used by ecofascists.

However, maybe this is reading too much into things. Let's give Peter Silberman the benefit of the doubt. The record is a heartfelt personal response to an unfolding disaster - one that we absolutely should be confronted with and acknowledge, albeit belatedly (arguably too late), rather than one that we should be able to continue to conveniently ignore.

In many ways, encountering Blight was like bumping into an old flame, its understated beauty and power helping to rekindle a love that, since 2011's Burst Apart, had gone cold.

Buzz review here.

Haunting melodies

2025 saw the sad death of genius songwriter (not a phrase I use lightly) Brian Wilson. It's also seen the return of the Besnard Lakes, a band very much after his own heart: masters of intricate composition, conjurors of studio magic, purveyors of blissful harmonies, creators of a self-contained world all of their own that you can live inside for days or weeks.

The Besnard Lakes Are The Ghost Nation doesn't mark a radical departure from what has gone before, but it does offer a new set of songs to swoon over.

Buzz review here.

No Lovin' lost

I like to imagine JR Moores as a savage beast caged in the corner of the Quietus offices, pacing back and forth hungrily until another unsuspecting gazelle is sent his way to be torn limb from limb. Inviting him to get his teeth stuck into Richard Ashcroft's new album Lovin' You was always going to yield spectacularly bloody results, maintaining a consistently high score on the snort-laugh-ometer.

Ashcroft is without doubt one of this island's most chronically delusional artists. He's sorely mistaken in believing that his shit not only doesn't stink but merits being repeatedly inflicted on a wider audience. He remains convinced that he's a rebel - and indeed he is, a rebel against all semblance of quality or creativity.

All of which makes him an entirely deserving victim of Moores' withering wit. A choice example: "One of the higher brow comparisons suggests that the object of his wooing has 'da Vinci eyes'. On hearing this ode she might prefer the ears of Van Gogh."

Since reading Moores' demolition job, I've had the extreme misfortune of hearing the album's lead single 'Lover', and can only say that Ashcroft has got off lightly.

And all of this is not even to mention the album cover, which (as someone pointed out on Bluesky) makes it look as though the beachgoers would rather commit mass suicide by walking to a chilly death in the sea than spend another minute in the company of Ashcroft and his acoustic guitar. And, frankly, who can blame them?

"This kind of cross between a northern, working-class Divine and Margarita Pracatan"

Have you heard the one about the Orthodox Jewish housewife who lived a double life entertaining punters with her racy and uproarious hi-NRG routines in Manchester's gay clubs in the 1980s? I certainly hadn't, until Alexis Petridis told Avril A's remarkable story in the Guardian earlier this week.

You've got to love a good old-fashioned British eccentric with a devil-may-care attitude and a healthy disregard for personal dignity.

Bombtracks

It's a shame that Upchuck's latest album I'm Nice Now - their first for Domino - doesn't really do them justice. But that's more a reflection on their explosive live performances - lightning like that is notoriously hard to bottle.

Buzz review here.

The "unhurried pursuit of the sonic sublime"

Happy thirtieth birthday to Sonic Youth's magnificent Washing Machine. To mark the occasion for the Quietus, Stevie Chick has written one of the very best music articles I've read in ages.

As for so many, grunge was my gateway drug, and Dirty was my first exposure to Sonic Youth's noisy delirium. But when I first saw them live, at Reading 1996, the set was predominantly composed of songs from the previous year's LP, a magnum opus to match the much-celebrated Daydream Nation (and blessed with considerably better recording quality). My tiny teenage brain was instantly and forever fried.

Chick does everything right in terms of setting the scene for the album's creation: grunge gone overground, Kurt Cobain dead, a grieving and disillusioned band seeking to retreat from/find a dignified and creative way out of the new corporate rock reality. Similarly, he crafts a credible narrative: Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star was a first abortive attempt to break out (it remains, for me, a scratchy and patchy affair), but they changed tack for Washing Machine, made good their escape and never looked back.

As all the best album appraisals should do, it's given me a newfound appreciation of tracks that I'd previously regarded as relatively inconsequential ('Unwind', in this case). It also offers valuable insights - such as into how their tour with Neil Young turned out to be mutually beneficial, and how the album's signature sound (trebly and free) was shaped by Kim Gordon's decision to largely lay down her bass in favour of a guitar. (As it turns out, I had already read about this, in Goodbye 20th Century, where David Browne argues that Gordon's collaboration with Julie Cafritz in Free Kitten was the catalyst.) 

Where Chick's article is truly exceptional is in his descriptions of the record's two longest and most spectacular songs. Here he is on the glorious moment when the title track resolves itself into a groove: "Then the third and final section, where the guitars cease to operate within a realm charted by notes but rather dealing more in pure texture. From halfway through the song, Moore (in the right channel) switches from mutant-blues vamping, to booming raga tones, before being engulfed in distortion. As Gordon strums the rhythm and guitarist Lee Ronaldo ekes out shrieks of feedback, Moore's fuzz-toned and wah-tethered guitar opens wider and wider. It's a truly psychedelic moment, one that reminds me of an old friend's description of being stoned as being like a bubble rising up through your body and popping inside your head. Moore's screeching buzz ascends in frequency, before unhurriedly dipping again, the four musicians backing down from this moment of furious intensity to another musical conversation it feels like we're eavesdropping."

And then there's the extraordinary album closer, 'The Diamond Sea', which (slightly unusually for Sonic Youth) veers off into the leftfield not once but twice. After a brief reprise of verse and chorus, it ventures even further out than before in what Chick refers to as "a series of shifting, abstract passages of feedback, amplifier abuse and pedal fuckery that is beautiful, that is charged with emotion, that feels like spiritual free jazz. It feels like all the emotion, this uncontained loss and grief and anger and sadness, pouring out, so pure and untrammelled it won't obey song-form. To some it will prove unlistenable; to others, myself included, it feels impossibly moving." I can attest to that, even when you're hearing it while sat hungover in a Pizza Hut at Butlins. (Whoever put together that ATP playlist deserves a medal.)

The sub-five-minute edited version on the 'Little Trouble Girl' single is a mere curio - something to listen to once and then file away. No, only the full 20-minute original can really satisfy. Members of Mogwai would certainly agree; in Electric Wizards, JR Moores writes about how they would religiously listen to it backwards as well as forwards.

If I'd been writing a piece like this on Washing Machine, I would probably have tried to find a bit more space for 'Little Trouble Girl', arguably the biggest outlier in the entire Sonic Youth canon. Likewise, 'Skip Tracer', one of my favourite Lee songs, would merit a mention - not least because its spoken-word lyrics give the lie to any insinuation that they were humourless and self-important: "The guitar guy played real good feedback, and super-sounding riffs / With his mild-mannered look on, yeah he was truly hip / The girl started out in red patent leather / Very 'I'm in a band', with kneepads."

I also take slight issue with the suggestion that Washing Machine "map[ped] out the new territory they'd explore during the rest of their career". Certainly, having been at a crossroads, they opted to "continue on this charmed, fearless path, laudably unconcerned by the material world they'd flirted with and then rejected, occasionally frustrating listeners but, more often, indulging us in the magic they could wreak whenever they truly let loose". But they only followed that path so far; after the acutely avant garde abstraction of 2000's New York Ghosts & Flowers, they actually started cycling back towards the centre, and by the time they got to Rather Ripped in 2006, they were back to bottling the lightning in pop-length songs. Swansong The Eternal is a fantastic album, at least in part because it echoes the early 90s records.

Chick does however have more of a point if you factor in Thurston Moore's post-Sonic Youth solo career. After the cathartic blast of the Chelsea Light Moving record and (to a lesser extent) The Best Day, 2017's Rock 'N' Roll Consciousness and 2020's By The Fire both have a free, languid, explorative style familiar from Washing Machine.

Enough nitpicking. Chick's piece does an astonishing job of capturing what it's like to listen to these songs and have your mind blown all over again.

Central reservation

It's only been a month since I wrote about Nick Cave's increasingly troubling politics, but the fact that he's doubled down in a post on The Red Hand Files, and the manner in which he's done so, are nevertheless deeply depressing and deserving of comment.

Responding to a fan's message, he declared himself to be "neither on the left nor on the right" and claimed to be "finding both sides indefensible and unrecognisable". On the surface of it, this is the inverse of "There are good people on both sides", but it amounts to the same thing.

I understand his point about nuance and complexities often being lost in our increasingly polarised political landscape, and agree that sometimes people should simply acknowledge their ignorance on a topic and keep quiet.

But there are some issues for which staying silent is not an option - like a genocide that is taking place before our eyes, for instance. You don't have to understand all of the geopolitical history to know that what is happening in Gaza is profoundly wrong and should be condemned unreservedly. Cave, however, airily rejects "moral certainty" together with "herd mentality and dogma".

Particularly offensive is his comment "I am disturbed on a fundamental level by the self-serving, toddler politics of some of my counterparts" - another dismissive swipe at those in the BDS movement (Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Thurston Moore et al), and others. He added: "I believe we have an obligation to assist those who are genuinely marginalised, oppressed or sorrowful in a way that is helpful and constructive and not to exploit their suffering for our own professional advancement or personal survival."

This cynicism about other artists' motives leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Do Kneecap owe their significant public profile to their very vocal support for Palestine? In part, yes. But it takes far more courage to do what they have done and speak out at every opportunity, in the face of the repressive force of the state, than to sit on the fence sneering at a supposedly fashionable cause.

Suffering for his art

Many photographers make it their mission to document "things that will soon be gone forever", but few go to lengths quite so extreme as Ragnar Axelsson. In an article for The Photographic Index, a new site founded with an objective "to explore photography as a cultural force", former LIFE editor-in-chief Bill Shapiro spoke to the Icelander about his extraordinary practice.

A passion that began (as it has for many) with the likes of Eugene Smith, Ernst Haas and Henri Cartier-Bresson became an obsession, and for the last 40 years Axelsson has been taking pictures in the Arctic, battling against elemental forces, isolation and extreme cold. At one point, he reveals, he came very close to losing a thumb to frostbite.

Axelsson is fond of photographing those who live and work in these inhospitable conditions, but also concerned to capture the impacts of global warming on this most sensitive of environments. The Arctic is, he claims, "incredibly beautiful" - something that his arresting black-and-white images underline - but that beauty is increasingly under threat.

Dividing lines

The death of poet and playwright Tony Harrison has served as a reminder that culture wars are nothing new. This BBC article by Neil Armstrong from earlier this year tells the story of how Harrison's long-form poem V went from relative obscurity upon publication in 1985 to national notoriety when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987, its creator cast as the bete noire of right-wing politicians and newspapers.

The extraordinary poem - available to read in full on the site of the London Review Of Books, which first published it - left an indelible mark on me when I first encountered it. Prompted by the desecration of graves in the cemetery where Harrison's parents were buried, V is a mirror up to the realities of Thatcher's Britain in the mid-1980s. As fellow Yorkshire poet Blake Morrison put it in his introduction to the poem in the Independent, "it describes unflinchingly what is meant by a divided society, because it takes the abstractions we have learned to live with - unemployment, racial tension, inequality, deprivation - and gives them a kind of physical existence on the page".

Typically, then, Tory politicians and press (and Mary Whitehouse too, of course) frothed and fulminated against its "bad language" - both an attempt to whip up a moral panic and a cynical distraction technique to deflect attention away from what Harrison was actually trying to say. There was also an evident disgust at Harrison's perceived (ab)use of the poetic form - and indeed the deliberate echoes of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard - to make his point; this was supposedly the sacred transformed into the profane. Yet, as underlined by the supplementary evidence reproduced in the second Bloodaxe edition, V struck a chord at least as widely as it struck a nerve.

Not only did the episode expose a whole swathe of reactionary philistines, it also underlined that poetry was not dusty and moribund; on the contrary, it could still be a living, breathing artform with the capacity to genuinely connect with people on an emotional and intellectual level and to offer insightful commentary on contemporary society. Not bad, as legacies go.