"Everything just changed"

Back in June, I concurred with Alexis Petridis' argument that we should be wary of seeing the emergence of punk as a game-changing phenomenon, even if it did have significant impacts. However, perhaps it's all a matter of perspective. For those caught up in the maelstrom - such as DB Burkeman, talking to Miss Rosen for Huck - it really was "a seismic shift".

As Burkeman reveals, he never set out to be a photographer - he loved the "image" and it just happened. That much is evident from his lax policy towards archiving: bunging rolls of undeveloped film in a drawer at the family home and forgetting about them for the best part of half a century. For someone cursed with "a notoriously bad memory" due to teenage acid abuse, the pictures that have been salvaged - now collected in a book, Crash Bang: Pictures From A Punk - are of vital personal value, as well as painting an insider's view of the scene.

Burkeman's comment that "[t]here were 100 bands in London playing every night, and you only had to pay three quid, instead of £30, to see Eddie and the Hot Rods or The Damned" made me think of fellow punk photographer Denis O'Regan, who told me a few years back how punk made music much more accessible to photographers as well as musicians. For Regan, it was a critical stepping stone on the way to a stellar career, the most recent highlight of which is Bowie: Unseen / Unheard, an immersive audio-visual documentary/exhibition making use of his extensive archive as the late icon's official photographer.

A model project

Clementine Schneidermann and Charlotte James' It's Called Ffasiwn is now into its second decade, and the fruits of the Valleys-based community photography project's first ten years are currently on display at the National Museum - presented together with oral testimony from the young participants on how the experience has been genuinely life changing.

Buzz review here.

"An act of defiance"

Byker Grove may have launched the careers of Ant & Dec, but it was at least the first kids' TV show to feature a gay kiss. Or so I thought, until I read this Guardian article - an edited excerpt from Scott Bryan's book Out Now: A Queer Journey Through Modern Television.

In it, Bryan recounts the convoluted history of Two Of Us, a drama written by Leslie Stewart that was due to be shown in schools in 1987 but ended up being shelved thanks to the poisonous anti-LGBTQ+ climate created by HIV/AIDS paranoia and Section 28. As with the controversy stirred up around Channel 4's broadcasting of Tony Harrison's poem V the same year, it just goes to show that the culture wars were being fought then as now.

Two Of Us was finally screened in 1988, but only in an edited form and at 11.30 at night. What's particularly remarkable, however, is the fact that director Roger Tonge subsequently defied the censorship, managing to get the kiss scene reinserted for both overseas sale and for a repeat daytime screening in 1990 without BBC bosses realising.

Glasgow kiss

Grant McPhee’s second volume of oral history, after 2024’s Postcards From Scotland, chronicles the emergence and development of a distinctive Scottish music scene in the 1990s, at some remove (geographically, sonically and ideologically) from Britpop and its creative sterility, vacuous jingoism and ladsladslads loutishness. Along the way, Scene Within A Scene: Scottish Independent Music 1992-2001 tells the origin stories of beloved bands such as Belle & Sebastian, as well as piquing the reader’s interest in the likes of Lung Leg, the Yummy Fur, Pink Kross and the Poison Sisters, none of whom found mass success.

The inclusion of “Scottish” in the book’s subtitle is perhaps slightly misleading; aside from short sections on outfits such as the Beta Band, Dundee’s Spare Snare and Edinburgh eccentrics The Male Nurse and Country Teasers, the focus falls predominantly on the capital’s great Central Belt rival Glasgow. And understandably so. Vic Galloway, formerly of Huckleberry/Hail Caesar! and now a BBC presenter, explains Glasgow’s gravitational pull with reference to its sizeable population, its general music culture and its independent infrastructure. However, what McPhee’s book perhaps most powerfully underlines is that this infrastructure had to be built, painstakingly, by those with both vision and determination.

Take Craig Tannock, for instance. In a city where pay-to-play policies abounded and pubs were largely only interested in covers bands, Tannock was heroic in understanding the fundamental importance of providing young musicians with access to dedicated performance spaces as well as instruments and gear. Venues need enthusiastic promoters, of course, and Tannock’s 13^th Note had Alex Kapranos and RM Hubbert, whose Kazoo Club nights dispensed with “musical gatekeeping” in favour of a principle of open-mindedness.

Hubbert comments: “I joke about it sometimes but it gave us all a place to go and be shit at being in a band. And the opportunity to get good at it.” Sandy Black of the Poison Sisters similarly recalls revelling in having “finally found somewhere to play that would tolerate (and actively encourage) our shenanigans”. He adds: “It really was wonderful to see these bands transforming before our very eyes and ears in such a comparatively short period of time.” For Kapranos, “[t]here’s nothing more thrilling than knowing something exciting, something with substance is happening, but you don’t know what it is yet”. The man who subsequently found fame as the face of Franz Ferdinand expresses a measure of guilt that not all alumni of the Kazoo went on to receive the wider recognition they deserved – but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that he personally did all he could to promote their cause.

One of the bands to benefit from stage time at the Kazoo was Urusei Yatsura, whose only previous performance had – according to guitarist/vocalist Graham Kemp – taken place “at a house party in a deconsecrated nunnery”. They were one of the first outfits to graduate to actually making a record (a split single with Kapranos’ the Blisters) – and then published a handy “how to” guide in the form of a comic strip in their fanzine Kitten Frenzy. Like Urusei Yatsura, the Delgados also founded a label and put out a single, but the scale of their ambition for Chemikal Underground appears to have been far greater than Urusei’s for Modern Independent. Despite being (in the words of vocalist/guitarist Emma Pollock) “so inexperienced”, they were nevertheless “very principled”, appreciating from the outset the need for both clear and consistent branding and an effective distribution deal.

As in any burgeoning scene, serendipity played a key part. The unprecedented platforming of a supposedly “unsigned” band on Top Of The Pops brought bis into the nation’s living rooms, and subsequent sales of The Secret Vampire Soundtrack EP, which was just Chemikal’s third release, raised the fledgling label’s profile as well as its bank balance. Further good fortune was to come in the form of a loan from drummer Paul Savage’s dad, which enabled them to buy their own studio, christened CHEM19. Resources were duly invested in promoting two of the finest acts ever to come out of Scotland, Mogwai and Arab Strap. Delgados bassist Stewart Henderson confesses that “Mogwai have extended levels of courtesy and patience to us as a record label that frankly we wouldn’t have been able to survive without” – though Savage diplomatically ventures that both Mogwai and Arab Strap profited from Chemikal’s propensity for “taking the eye off the financial ball”. Friendships were inevitably strained when creative decisions were restricted by budgetary constraints, and especially when both bands left for major labels – but there were no hard feelings (Arab Strap were soon welcomed back into the fold) and mutual respect endures.

Generous support for Glasgow’s scene came from further afield too: from Dutch punk band The Ex, who awakened a number of musicians to the possibilities of DIY collectivism; from record labels based outside Scotland (in particular, Slampt in Newcastle and Guided Missile in London); and from John Peel, who championed countless bands through regular radio play and session invitations.

The value of Peel’s patronage draws attention to the fact that this is a story set in a different time – a pre-digital, pre-social media age when airplay and physical distribution were critical. Henderson hints that had Chemikal launched five years later, in 2000, its existence would have been far more precarious. Meanwhile, Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch was among those who benefitted from the government’s New Deal for Musicians, which massaged the official unemployment statistics while incentivising participation both financially (housing benefit paid, an extra £10 a week on top of dole money) and through access to local studio Beatbox. But, as Lung Leg’s Annie Spandex laments, the scrapping of the scheme as well as enforced job searching, arts spaces losing funding and the introduction of university tuition fees have had a detrimental impact on people’s ability to make music.

Nevertheless, the lessons we can learn from the Scottish scene remain relevant today. McPhee concludes by insisting that the book’s message “is neither nostalgic nor cautionary. It is practical. You do not need to be chosen. Scenes still grow from contact, friction, shared spaces and stubborn belief.” Tom Worthington of Bosque Records puts it even better: “Do it yourself, with friends, and don’t wait. If there’s a door, open it. If there isn’t, put a hinge on a wall and call it a door.”

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

Keeping on keeping on

Many happy returns to the Quietus, which has turned 18. Its birthday should be celebrated not only because of the consistently stellar quality of the articles it publishes week in, week out, but also because simply continuing to survive in the current climate, at a time of dwindling ad revenue, is a hugely admirable achievement.

That much was underlined by a less welcome announcement today: the sudden closure of The Skinny. The Scottish arts and culture magazine, in existence for more than two decades, has succumbed to the dreaded combination of "funding pressures across the sector, rising costs and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis", and will I suspect be much missed north of the border.

All the more reason to be thankful that the Quietus continue to fly the flag for quality music/culture journalism, in a media landscape that looks increasingly barren and impoverished.

Factory records

Prolonged exposure to commercial radio might constitute extreme audio torture in my book (the gurning hosts, the jingles, the soul-destroyingly appalling music on high rotation) - but its origins are surprising and fascinating.

As Kieran Morris recounts in an article for the Guardian, it all began in 1970 with the United Biscuits Network (UBN), which took inspiration and indeed staff from Radio Caroline and other pirate radio stations of the 1960s, and was established as a means of boosting the morale and productivity of factory workers engaged in monotonous and repetitive labour.

It was also, Morris notes, "a unique opportunity for fledgling DJs": a 24-hour enterprise with top-spec kit. Many of those who cut their teeth at UBN went on to have instrumental roles in the emergence and development of commercial stations around the country.

UBN is perhaps not a cultural milestone to be celebrated, admittedly - not least because it propelled Dale Winton to national fame - but the fact that commercial radio's roots lie in a not entirely benevolent industrial strategy nevertheless makes for an interesting story.

Down in the Tube station at midnight

Mark McEvoy's pictures taken on late-night Underground journeys in the 1990s are richly evocative of time and place. Framing them in a piece for the Guardian, Luke Turner observes that McEvoy effectively documented "the last years of the fiercely tribal nature of British youth culture before it was flattened out by the internet, as streaming homogenised music tastes" - which makes them of significant historical interest despite being only 30 years old. He may not have known that seismic change was on the horizon, but he makes clear that the attempt to capture "the wide range of British culture in that space at that moment" was very deliberate. (In this respect, it's no surprise to learn that the pictures have been published as a Cafe Royal zine.)

Turner also notes that there are, of course, no smartphones on view. This is something I recently reflected on in relation to the above-ground street photography of Joan Piekny from the same era. While her concern was with how smartphones have fundamentally changed people's public behaviours, I pointed out that they've also "giv[en] anyone the means to take pictures in public without a giveaway long lens". It must have been obvious that McEvoy was wielding a camera, and so the fact that he managed to capture such candid scenes apparently without arousing the irritation or ire of visibly refreshed travellers is some feat.

Shock factor

Jeremy Beadle was known for springing surprises, but, even still, I hadn't anticipated that the jovial prankster might have been an avid collector of grisly true crime magazines.

Writer David Barnett was among those recently invited by York St John University's Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group to peruse the many magazines that Beadle had amassed by the time he died in 2008 - including an issue of True Detective that he guest edited. Barnett's report on a distinctively MR Jamesian endeavour for the Observer is here.

"This project is simply about people"

As far as I could recall, I first came across Lee Shulman as the director of I Am Martin Parr - having forgotten I'd written about the pair's collaborative exhibition at Magnum Paris Gallery three years earlier. 

That show sprang out of Shulman's main endeavour, the Anonymous Project, and in this Blind article published at the time, he talks about the joy of (re)discovering other people's Kodachrome slides - time capsules offering portraits of families and friends that are at once intimate and laden with mystery.

The shock of the newThe familiarity of the old

I'm all for discovering new artists, but it's nevertheless a comfort when bands that have been among your favourites for decades are still producing solid albums rather than fading away into mediocrity. With There Near and Soft Control, old dogs Dinosaur Jr and the Afghan Whigs could hardly be accused of trying out new tricks - but would we really want them to?

Buzz reviews here and here.

Get Therapy?

Credit to Cardiff's own Russell Todd for resisting the temptation to select nothing but Troublegum tracks for his recent Toppermost post on Therapy? I'm not sure I'd have that willpower. As it is, he limits himself to blackly comic tone-setting opener 'Knives' and single 'Trigger Inside', plus a re-recorded version of 'Die Laughing' featuring the Manics' James Dean Bradfield. (Oh to have seen Bradfield accompanying Andy Cairns on stage at the Full Moon...)

For a band with a back catalogue as extensive as Therapy?'s, narrowing it down was always going to be challenging. 'Teethgrinder' was practically a dead cert, but Babyteeth's 'Loser Cop' is an astute choice - the fact that, on a debut mini-album full of "spiky, grubby noise", it "freewheels into avant garde, Zappa-esque jazz" was indeed an early indication that Therapy? "were going to be difficult to pigeonhole". (This, I think, has also been to their detriment to an extent, in that they've never been fully embraced by the metal community, or indie types, or noise rock enthusiasts.)

More controversial still is the selection of the orchestral cover of Husker Du's 'Diane' from Infernal Love. The song's creator (and one of Cairns' heroes) Grant Hart detested what he saw as a grotesque perversion of the original, and the band now play a version that is much closer to Husker Du's - but I would agree with Todd that its shock value (musically and lyrically) endures three decades on, even if it makes most sense in the context of that baroque, overwrought LP.

Todd is also quite right to describe Therapy?'s most recent album Hard Cold Fire as having "no right to sound as good as it does" (something implicit in my own review). All of which makes me take seriously his suggestion that Crooked Timber - a record that had passed me by - is a late-career highlight worthy of investigation.

"The beating hearts of our high streets and communities"

Live music venues have (mercifully) enjoyed a reduction in business rates before, and will now do so again - along with pubs and clubs - from April next year. But independent bookshops have been excluded - something that the Booksellers Association, with the backing of a number of high-profile authors, is quite understandably petitioning the government to change, on the grounds that they too "deliver significant community benefit" and therefore "deserve targeted support".

As the Guardian's Emma Loffhagen explains, the impact of projected business rates increases are already evident in terms of bookshops tightening their belts and avoiding investment in "stock, staffing, events or their premises". Closures will almost certainly also be a consequence.

One of those firmly behind the Booksellers Association's open letter is Philip Pullman: "In the current encircling corporate darkness, independent booksellers are lighthouses. They are almost the last beacons shining to remind us about private reading, personal discovery, and the life-saving joy of encountering minds and hearts that speak to us as one person to another." This glosses over the existence of public libraries - but of course those too continue to operate in the face of significant financial constraints.

In the US, the picture appears to be surprisingly positive, with a staggering 31 per cent more stores opening in 2025 than in 2024. Here in Cardiff, too, there are positive signs. I've long bemoaned the lack of indies beyond the likes of Troutmark, which only deals in second-hand books, but it now has Love Stories opposite, specialising in romantic fiction. (Incidentally, I hope Alice Fraser had a chance to visit when she was in town last month.) What's more, on the way to Wellfield Bookshop recently, I came across a new shop on Crwys Road. If such places are to survive and indeed thrive, they need custom - but they also need the support of a sympathetic government.

"I still felt unseen and unheard and misunderstood and lonely"

You learn something new every day - and today it was that Rivers Cuomo maintains a spreadsheet called "The Encyclopedia o'Riffs" and was originally in a Yngwie Malmsteen-inspired hair metal band called Avant Garde.

I've not really bothered with Weezer for years, but as a big fan of both their first two albums and Stevie Chick's Guardian features, I read this one with interest.

Cuomo was never your average frontman: raised in a Buddhist ashram, self-confessedly nerdy, fled to Harvard at the height of the band's fame to escape the pressure. Musicians aren't immune to anxiety and self-doubt, but what's particularly interesting in this interview is the sense of responsibility that Cuomo evidently feels towards his bandmates as Weezer's chief songwriter. That their immediate and continued success is largely in his hands clearly weighs heavy on his mind. On the new album (once again self-titled), that seems to have translated into a focus on giving the fans what they want.

2026 also marks the 30th anniversary of Pinkerton. It remains a difficult album, especially after the bubblegum pop-grunge of the self-titled debut, but Chick is right to signal its redemption arc, with critics as well as fans.

Trans Europa Express, Part II

Eighteen years on from our first cross-continental Europe jaunt by train, we did it again - this time with no wedding to go to, and with a teenager in tow. The mind boggles at how we managed to coordinate it all first time around - hats off to Byway for doing a sterling job of joining all the dots on our behalf this time (and to the European rail network for being exceptionally efficient).

The highlight of the trip, perhaps inevitably, was the journey from Tirano in Italy, through St Moritz and on to Chur in Switzerland on the Bernina/Albula lines. A genuine mountain railway ascends slowly between houses into verdant valleys, before a winding vertiginous climb that remarkably brings you out on a new valley floor, hundreds of metres above sea level, still dwarfed by misted peaks. From there, you pass pools and glaciers before descending gradually. Spectacular doesn't do it justice.

In addition to its charming old town, Chur boasts a cable car - a handy means of being able to enjoy a splendid Alpine stroll at altitude and then a pint with a view without having to trek a considerable distance uphill for the pleasure.

Getting down via the longest toboggan run in Switzerland was faintly terrifying - though perhaps not quite as terrifying as the bus journey back to Chur, our driver braking sharply to sweep around hairpin bends.

Of the cities we visited, the last - Strasbourg - took the prize for the most beautiful, its old town encircled by water. Its cathedral, too, was stunning, especially when illuminated by the special night-time display.

As church interiors go, though, it was slightly disappointing. Salzburg arguably had the most impressive array of churches overall.

However, Munich boasted both the freaky jeweled skeleton of Saint Munditia, allegedly dating back to the fourth century, at Alter Peter and the extraordinary Asamkirche, which looks like the ideal setting for a black mass.

Zurich's churches, meanwhile, were dour and uninteresting - blame the Reformation. It was at least possible to have a drink at the actual Cabaret Voltaire (though beware the almost impenetrably dense guide given to you if you venture into the museum, and the fact that you'll have 'Nag Nag Nag' playing in your head for the rest of the day).

Zurich also presented the opportunity to take a dip in the lake - which Stanley did, twice, despite not having any swimming trunks. Cooling off in Lake Como the next day, on our brief stopover in Lecco, was even more picturesque.

A diet that consisted almost entirely of bread, meat, breaded meat and cheese meant that the main souvenir we brought back to the UK was probably gout.

So, what did we learn? You can buy Bayern Munich-branded lederhosen, beer should be sold in two-pint glasses more widely, Swiss trains cater for camp bears and the young Mozart was able to pop downstairs for a Pot Noodle, a can of Monster and a scratchcard.

Corporal punishment

Karishma Jobanputra's The Body Of The Thing is remarkably assured for a debut collection of short stories. Each tale explores a different facet of female experience, cumulatively forming a portrait of the negotiations, tribulations, anxieties and complexities of modern womanhood. It's also further proof of publisher And Other Stories' eye for talent.

Buzz review here.

Resurrection men

HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES / THE DAMNED, 14TH AUGUST 2026, CARDIFF CASTLE

Yet another hot, sunny evening at the Castle in this eternal summer, and Julie Andrews is sweetly announcing that the hills are alive with the sound of music. "Turn that shit off!" bellows Captain Sensible in his red-and-white-banded Monster Raving Loony Party shirt. The Damned still know how to make an entrance, half a century after forming.

In truth, the hills of South Wales are currently alive with the sound of crackling flames. The military have been called in to assist the emergency services, concertgoers' phones have pinged with the government warning of the severe wildfire risk and there's a distinctly smoky whiff in the air. And yet here's dapper Dave Vanian - part undertaker, part Prohibition-era pimp - taking delight in singing the chorus of 'Ignite': "I'm gonna set the world alight."

But then The Damned have never played by the rules, not even those of Punk Rock Club. Enlisting a member of punk's sworn enemies Pink Floyd, Nick Mason, to produce their second album Music For Pleasure was a provocative move and an excommunicable offence, as was their subsequent drift into psychedelia and goth rock, and the 1986 take on 'Eloise'.

Barry Ryan's crooner classic isn't the only cover to get an airing tonight; freakbeat gem 'Making Time' by The Creation features on new album Not Like Everybody Else, along with nine other tracks that inspired the band's late guitarist Brian James to first pick up an instrument. The record saw original drummer Rat Scabies return to the fold, and tonight underlines that there's life in the old dogs yet.

It's a shame they couldn't have been accommodated on the same  bill as first-wave punk contemporaries The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers and The Undertones here a fortnight ago. But that seems immaterial when you're witnessing them blast through 'Neat Neat Neat', 'New Rose' and 'Smash It Up' back to back like the last 50 years never happened.

And so - after 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' and an intro video that makes me want to cringe myself inside out - to Hollywood Vampires. This collective - I hesitate to call them a "supergroup", for reasons that will become apparent - could be written off as a Johnny Depp vanity project, following in the footsteps of Keanu Reeves and Steven Seagal, though Depp has at least had the good grace to surround himself with high-profile musicians who cast him in shadow.

While the actor has become permanently trapped in the character of Jack Sparrow, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry appears to be wearing all of the rich stuff looted from another fictional pirate, The Goonies' One-Eyed Willy. Goth ringmaster Alice Cooper, meanwhile, is a baroque panda with a deeply disconcerting trouser bulge. The quartet, rounded out by guitarist Tommy Hendrikson, are like a hard rock Mount Rushmore: craggy, weathered and extremely big-headed.

The premise is that Hollywood Vampires are paying their respects to legends and personal heroes of rock. The reality is barely any better than you'd encounter at the Globe any night of the week, albeit with overinflated production values. We're treated to (ironically bloodless) covers of The Who, The Doors and Jeff Beck - the setlist reading like the tracklisting of one of those compilation albums put out to coincide with Father's Day that would subsequently get stuck in the family car's CD player and have to be forcibly removed at the garage for the sake of everyone's sanity.

Perry proclaims his enthusiasm for punk with all the conviction of a man signing his own death warrant, but I'd gladly sign mine if it meant not having to hear their version of David Bowie's '"Heroes"'. Remarkably, another Depp-fronted cover - a heinous Hammer-horror-meets-Marilyn-Manson rendition of The Velvet Underground's 'Venus In Furs' that will haunt me for all the wrong reasons - is even worse. At this point, calling them a tribute act feels absurdly generous; they're not so much honouring the dead as pissing on their graves, and hammering a stake through rock's barely beating heart in the process.

And yet.

When, at the end of the main set, they return to more familiar territory - the glorious stomp of AC/DC's 'Highway To Hell', Perry chopping out the riff to 'Walk This Way', Cooper declaring "School's out for the summer!" - a most unsettling thing occurs: a gormless grin gradually spreads across my face. This, finally, is fun of the biggest and dumbest kind, and my genetic hardwiring means that its lobotomising effect is (unfortunately) irresistible.

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

Public disconnect

In this Huck article on her street photography in London in the 1990s (now published as a Cafe Royal zine), Joan Piekny makes an interesting observation: "Back in the '90s, the vibe was different. People would hang around on the streets, taking a break from work to smoke a cigarette, people watch, and sometimes strike up conversations. There was eye contact, communication, and people were more approachable. In the earlier era the only distraction was people lost in their own thoughts, and that could create a beautiful mood to photograph."

It's an intriguing point: has the advent of the smartphone, which monopolises people's attention even when they're out and about in public and on the move, made it more challenging for street photographers to find engaging subjects, and for them to then engage with those subjects? Piekny implies that it has.

Of course, smartphones have also impacted street photography in a more obvious way: by giving anyone the means to take pictures in public without a giveaway long lens. While this might seem democratising and may have facilitated more candid images, it has also reinvigorated decades-old debates around legality, ethics and consent.

Triumph and failure

It's often overlooked, but sport is as much about losing as it is about winning - and the former can arguably generate even more dramatic images.

This Guardian gallery bears out the truth of Greg Whitmore's assertion that Chris Smith "wanted to portray the moments when dreams are broken as well as when they are realised". The late photographer's most powerful pictures are of sporting superstars - Muhammad Ali, Barry McGuigan and Seve Ballesteros - suffering crises of confidence, captured intimately at the moment that circumstances are forcing them to face up to their own fallibility.

Unfinished symphonies

It's one thing to openly release different versions of the same song or album; it's quite another to deceive fans into thinking they're buying the finished product when in fact it's still a work in progress. The Guardian's Adam Benzine has shone light on "the year's worst pop trend" - one of which Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, Raye and more are all guilty: "fans paying the highest price to pre-order what is ostensibly the most desirable, collectible or elaborate edition of an album are instead receiving incomplete or unpolished versions of the music".

The justification given, inevitably, is that vinyl pressing involves such long lead times that albums are being submitted half-baked, with further tweaks and indeed substantial alterations being made during the production process, meaning that the versions available for streaming end up being significantly different.

That's no excuse, of course - those lead times should simply be factored in. It's unethical to expect fans to shell out for LPs in advance in full knowledge that you'll continue to tinker away on the album while their copies are being pressed.

But the pop industry has never cared much for ethics, and Raye's suggestion that the substandard vinyl version could become a collectible is telling: a new means of exploiting fans can - and no doubt will - be marketed as benefitting them.

Tribute acts

When it comes to musicians and fans, the former are (inevitably) more often in the spotlight, literally and metaphorically, than the latter. And yet fandom - its forms, its eccentricities, its excesses - can be fascinating, and books such as Molly Tie's Rebel Grrrls productively shift the focus from those on stage to those in the audience.

The Holy Pop! exhibition currently on display at Somerset House follows in this trend, featuring fans' homemade shrines to dead pop stars. The Quietus' Jak Hutchcraft spoke to its curator Tory Turk about collections, collective memory and hero worship, and over the course of their conversation came to the realisation that "this exhibition is in fact a shrine itself. It's a temple dedicated to the undying power of pop music, the stories and storytellers that guide us through life, and the connection so many of us feel to the art and the artists we love."