"We know we are being manipulated by a version of ourselves"

As a writer, I imagine the most rewarding thing that can happen is that your work makes such a profound connection with readers that they contact you to let you know. Which is why the (accelerating) scourge of AI scam messages targeting authors online is particularly unpleasant.

In some cases, the messages express enthusiasm and promise promotion and discussion in book groups in exchange for a fee; others purportedly come from other renowned authors, attempting to exploit any vulnerability to flattery by peers. One of the consequences, sadly, will be suspicion and cynicism, and some communication from genuine fans will inevitably be binned by accident.

What's even more grotesque, of course, is that the generative AI tools deployed for scamming purposes have been developed through digesting the writings of millions of authors who have received nothing in the way of financial compensation. That novelists are now regularly confronted with scam emails incorporating synopses of their own books brutally underlines the fact that the tools have chewed up their work and are regurgitating it for nefarious ends.

Joe Dunthorne has written about this unsettling phenomenon for the Guardian, but gone further by attempting to track down one of the scammers. The result is a disturbing insight into "scam farms", and his realisation that the person on the other end of the message is probably not a devious criminal raking in money for their own gain but "someone frightened and far from home, sitting in a sound-insulated booth with a dozen phones splayed out on their desk - while behind them their manager walks by, a taser at his hip".

Feel good hits of the 7th November

1. 'Foreign Agent' - Gnoomes

#2 in June, top spot now. Still a total earworm. Album Losey is now out, and finds Russian couple Sasha Piankov and Masha Piankova - now decamped to Slovenia without their drummer - leaning much more into the electronic side of their sound. There's even a point midway through 'Shakshuka And Pie' where they go full Daniel Avery techno.

2. 'Sunbeam' - The Last Path

Recorded by Pigs x7's Sam Grant. Enthusiastically endorsed by Richard Dawson. Mentioned in the same breath as Low, Codeine and Crazy Horse by Chris Sumlin of their new label Wrong Speed. A Geordie trio who've made the same move from restrained folk to minimalist rock as Big Brave? Do you really need any more reasons to give this and album Blunt Synopsis a go?

3. 'Highway Woman' - Squirrel Flower

All of latest album Say A Prayer To The Gods Of Getting Going - but especially this slice of folk-rock gorgeousness - makes me once again say a prayer to the gods of ensuring I happened to be walking past Green Man's Mountain Stage in the drizzle in 2019 when Squirrel Flower was opening the festival.

4. 'Glacier' - John Grant

As discussed at length on Jake Shears' Queer The Music podcast. Add Jonathan Caouette's video into the equation and you've got a phenomenally powerful song.

5. 'Ride Lonesome' - Beck

I'll admit I didn't think I needed any more Sad Folk Beck and haven't really kept in touch with him since Sea Change - but the opener and title track of his new LP is a beauty (and what follows isn't bad either).

6. 'Nice' - Kleenex

How exactly this lot escaped my attention is mystifying. Heaven-sent for anyone who loves both Wire and the Slits. Thanks to Horsegirl for the tip-off.

7. 'The Well' - Smog

Smog/Bill Callahan is one of those revered artists with such an intimidatingly large back catalogue that you don't really know where to start, so you don't. Thankfully, I was cajoled into listening to A River Ain't Too Much To Love and 'The Well' in particular has helped me to see the light. Where to go next, though?

8. 'Several Got Away' - Dinosaur Jr

Well, new Dinosaur Jr album There Near was never going to be ambient techno, was it? But it was a pleasant surprise to see the three of them goofing around rather than at each other's throats.

9. 'Placeholder' - Gilla Band

These guys and Mandy, Indiana are making some of the most exciting rock music around by refusing to play by any of the rules. Pugnello is a beast.

10. 'Ain't Nothin' To Do' - Dead Boys

No-nonsense punk thrills. Derivative, perhaps, but I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

Gripping

Serendipity, eh? Had I not been visiting the Arnolfini in Bristol to take in Polly Braden's photography exhibition Beside The Sea recently, I would have missed Jonathan Baldock's Held.

In some ways, being surrounded by Baldock's brightly coloured tapestries and sculptures was like a drug trip and reminiscent of films such as The Wicker Man and The Holy Mountain in terms of their slightly surrealist take on folklore and pagan ritual. But the artworks were neither intimidating nor sinister - on the contrary, they emphasised connection and communality. The exhibition's centrepiece was a huge fabric bear that visitors were positively encouraged to embrace, or be embraced by.

On the one hand, Held was a fresh take on our own native folk traditions and imagery. On the other, the many depictions of flora and fauna (including the human figure or body parts) transforming into one another drew attention to interconnections in the natural world and our place within it in a way that reminded me of a couple of exhibitions of Indigenous Latin American art I've seen recently (Julia Isidrez's Mud Is Everything at Nottingham Contemporary and Gold And The Universe at the MARQ in Alicante).

And, at the risk of allowing my own current preoccupations to encourage me to read too much into things, I saw the sculptures with hands, feet, faces and tongues protruding - mischievous rather than grotesque - as a commentary on the fundamentally human aspect of the creative act, in the face of AI. The ceramics seemed to underline the fact that artists put themselves into their work, and that that work is a physical embodiment of their labours. Bypassing this process through generative AI utterly misses the point.

Weird and wonderful

The stories in Barbi Markovic's Minihorror may be as short as a single page, but many are no less unsettling than a full-length horror novel. Forget gore and grisly supernatural goings-on, the Serbian-born and Austrian-based writer suggests - real life is terrifying enough.

Buzz review here.

Songs of praise

A programme of music, film and conversation focused on DIY/punk culture, held on my doorstep? Needless to say, I absolutely loved Mark Gubb's Church of Noise, put on in mid-October as part of the broader Cardiff Music City Festival, and took the opportunity to write a Buzz piece about some of its key events: the documentary films Lo Sound Desert and In Bed With Chris Needham, a four-band hardcore bill curated by Undod Collective and headlined by Perp Walk, and a talk by Scott Satterwhite and Valerie George of the 309 Punk Project and Rockaway Park creator Mark Wilson. More in this vein next year, please!

"I try to convey the essential humanity we share as individuals"

In 1987, Margaret Thatcher famously told Woman's Own: "There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families." Francesca Odell would have disagreed, as illustrated by some of the pictures that she took during Thatcher's time in office - a selection of which are currently on display under the title Coping With And Enjoying Life at the Turner House in Penarth as part of the biennial Ffoto Cymru festival.

Most photographers begin by documenting their own immediate environment, and in Odell's case this was Sandy Lane on the Gower - an attempt to construct an alternative society in which communal bonds were prized. The photographs show free-range kids and joyous nighttime gatherings around the firepit - images that evidently still stir the glowing embers of memory for Odell's daughters Eleanor, Naomi and Lorelei, whose recollections in the captions add context and colour. The hippyish living arrangements may have been starkly at odds with the nakedly neoliberal individualism of the age, but the community's emphasis on resilience and self-reliance were not.

In 1983, Odell secured a sought-after place on the Doc Phot course in Newport - proof that personal passion for a subject was a more important entry requirement than either an impressive portfolio or technical aptitude - and subsequently benefitted from the wisdom of David Hurn, Ron McCormick, Martin Parr and more. Her contribution to the annual Newport Survey in 1985 was Keeping The Body Beautiful. This project partly offered an insight into the world of bodybuilding, and as such was a commentary on body image standards (and, arguably, on a Thatcherite pursuit of individual aspirations and self-improvement). But the more remarkable pictures take the gallery visitor inside a Turkish baths on Newport's Stow Hill, where - in comically British fashion - towel-clad women sat sweating in steam rooms sip cups of tea by way of refreshment. The atmosphere is social and convivial - an echo of the firepit gatherings of the Sandy Lane commune.

Odell's gender gave her access that would have been denied to male photographers, but she must have been acutely aware that she was trying to make her way in a man's world - not least because she was the only woman invited to contribute to Ffotogallery's Valleys Project. Her own personal circumstances - by 1982, she was divorced, with primary caregiving responsibilities taken on by her ex-husband - and an implicit desire to challenge conventional gender roles gave birth to her most affecting work. Single-Parent Dads started out close to home but branched out to explore the lives of other men.

Odell's pictures of the Buttons in Gilfach Goch and the Horley-Davies on the Gurnos Estate in Merthyr are testament to her ability to effectively become a family member rather than a detached observer or a fly on the wall. We see the four high-spirited Horley-Davies children in a bedroom, the eldest leaping off a chest of drawers onto a bed while his younger sister catches sight of her reflection in a mirror; their parents may be merely coping with life, but the kids are enjoying it. And the picture of Mark Button cradling his newborn niece, dummy in his mouth, is tender and touching - the highlight of the exhibition, in that it encapsulates Odell's faith in humanism and care, her belief in the numinous value of interpersonal connection.

To conclude by quoting another politician, Jo Cox, Odell set out to show that "we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us". Coping With And Enjoying Life is a powerful affirmation of that sentiment - one that is especially urgent in the contemporary moment.

(This review was originally published in the Offline newsletter.)

Talkin' bout a meta-revolution

Sometimes, when it comes to music, I worry about having recency bias - but I still think that's preferable to falling into the same trap as so many music fans seem to do at my age: get tangled up a nostalgia loop, start buying Mojo and Record Collector and grumble incessantly about how there's no interesting music being made anymore.

For that reason, this article by The Line Of Best Fit's Joe Muggs struck a chord. In it, he takes issue with the alarmingly widespread view that there haven't been any significant musical revolutions to match punk or acid house for years, that the internet has had a flattening and homogenising effect and that culture is stagnating.

Muggs' point is that seismic changes have indeed been taking place but that critics have been unable to recognise them as such - perhaps because those changes are much broader and more nebulous than merely the emergence of a new genre: "[R]eally these revolutions are manifestations of a bigger meta-revolution, which explains why it is still hard to pin down a 'sound of now'." Or perhaps the lack of recognition is because your average white male music writer is (wilfully?) ignorant of what's happening outside his bubble.

Muggs doesn't deny that streaming has had an enormous impact, but this, he suggests, has been predominantly positive in bringing much more variety into the mainstream and creating a truly global arena. Those who were largely still marginalised and on the periphery even a decade ago - women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people - are now at the heart of everything, no longer "seen as ground-breakers or one-offs".

What's more, he claims, "artists can now not so much escape the constraints of genre but be a genre in themselves". I'm regularly struck by young acts that synthesise a breadth of genres into something novel, all because they've grown up with instant access to so much music and never felt the need to police themselves into staying in a single established genre.

Out of print

Farewell to the print edition of the British Journal Of Photography. Not that I can really mourn its demise too much, given that - for my sins - I never bought a copy, so am part of the problem. But it's a sad day when the world's longest-running photography magazine - first published in 1854 - ceases to exist.

Well, almost. It will soldier on in digital form, but I suspect Grant Scott of The United Nations Of Photography is right to be sceptical about how long this will last before the online version is also ditched.

My beloved Cookie Monster

I'll confess to having lost touch with Eels somewhat over the years, despite a potent reminder at Green Man in 2019 of their enduring quality and appeal. So it's a pleasure to report that seizing the opportunity to review new record Cookie Happened has very much put us back into contact.

Warm, witty and wise, the album cements E's status as a consummate songwriter and wordsmith. Its message - that we all have regrets and we're all "fumbling around in the dark", as 'Lost And Barking' has it, and that we should learn to be kinder to ourselves, as well as each other - is honest and consolatory.

Buzz review here.

"An unlikely but reliably invigorating guitar hero"

Reviewing Dinosaur Jr's latest album There Near recently, I noted the members' dysfunctional and fractious relationships, but suggested that they've "come to realise that they're bound by deeper ties" - a band finally "at peace with the idea that they work best together". It's a suggestion very much borne out by this fantastic Pitchfork article by Grayson Haver Currin, in which he traces the trio's history through extensive interviews with J Mascis in particular.

Along the way, Currin is repeatedly bang on the money - whether claiming that Mascis' work in Dinosaur Jr "recast[s] the exquisite ache of Neil Young at obliterative volume" or describing him as "a gentle singer who understands the frisson of an unhinged electric solo in an acoustic song" (something I can very much vouch for, having seen him on his own in Nottingham in 2002). Currin is also right to emphasise that Mascis "avoids the usual trappings of a guitar god. Onstage with Dinosaur Jr, he is largely still, save for his fingers and feet, standing like someone who hopes to be swallowed by the triple tower of Marshall stacks behind him."

Mascis has a reputation as a difficult, unwilling and recalcitrant interviewee (arguably rightly, though Mascis himself disagrees). So Currin deserves enormous credit for putting him at enough ease to willingly expose facets of his character that I never knew existed: the joker (he claims "he might have acquired tennis elbow during an alien abduction"), the social butterfly (albeit grudgingly - who complains about having to go to Kim Gordon's house for dinner?), the "enthusiastic gossip".

"The cost of doing business"?

This article by Wired's Adam Morgan about the increasing covert use of AI within book publishers is a grim read - not least because it chimes with what I've heard anecdotally about another publisher, suggesting that this is very much an industry-wide trend.

Staff there are being strongly encouraged to integrate AI use into every aspect of their roles, yet given no guidance how to do this ethically and efficiently, and no indication as to the overall purpose. Morgan observes: "Most of the industry professionals I spoke with just want publishers to provide clear AI usage guidelines and disclosures, at the very least, to mitigate the current chaos." This is vital so that staff know where they stand, but also so that publishers who cancel author contracts and printing due to unacknowledged generative AI use can't be accused of flagrant hypocrisy.

Two points are particularly worth drawing out of Morgan's article.

First, it's important that blame for this trend should be apportioned correctly; it's unfair to cast aspersions about employees' ethics when they're backed into a corner by their employers and circumstances, left with little choice if they want to keep their jobs. As one member of staff puts it: "It's skeleton crews everywhere you look. Large teams have been reduced to just five or six people, give or take, and we're doing double or triple the number of books. No wonder people are taking shortcuts. I don't judge them for that. I judge the company for shoving the shortcuts down our throats and saying 'Do this or we fall behind'."

Second, and relatedly, industry expert Dan Sinykin points out: "The C-suites at Big Five publishing companies have more in common with the C-suites at other major American companies than they do with the editors and publicists and translators who work for them. They're always looking for ways to maximize profit, and right now they're trying to see what they can get away with before there's a revolt." In other words, it's money men who are pulling the strings and calling the shots, not people with a genuine passion for books. As such, it's hardly surprising (albeit nevertheless enormously dispiriting) that short-term profits are being prioritised ahead of everything and everyone else: authors, readers, staff, propriety, the industry's future.

"A violent, raging, uncompromising din"

Two recent books, Imogen Willetts' Up All Night and Grant McPhee's Scene Within A Scene, served as a reminder that bands and musical/artistic scenes are always a product of their circumstances and environment. Rarely can that have been more evident than with Einsturzende Neubauten.

Debut album Kollaps has just turned 45, and in a Quietus piece originally published to mark the record's 40th birthday, Jeremy Allen explored the context of its creation. Like New York in the latter half of the 1970s, West Berlin in the early 1980s "provided a perfect storm for creativity". Not only did Blixa Bargeld and accomplices make music in the city's ruins, benefitting from the availability of cheap/free space (warehouses, squats, squares) in which to live, practise and perform; they actually made music out of the city's ruins, scavenging for scrap that could be repurposed as rudimentary instruments.

When it comes to the brunch

Pori opening around a year ago may have slipped under my radar, but I've now called in three times in quick succession. Service was a letdown on the last visit, but didn't detract from the fact that they serve one of the best brunches in the city.

Buzz review here.

"It's about reaching the edges"

Over the decades, British documentary photographers have often taken us to the coast, capturing the interplay of sand, sea and sky and celebrating beaches as a place of leisure and relaxation, but also chronicling the sad decline of the traditional seaside holiday resort. Most often, the perspective is that of a visitor - but what of those who actually grow up and live there all year round?

Polly Braden's exhibition Beside The Sea, recently on display at Bristol's Arnolfini, set out to take a different approach. Coming out of her work for the Guardian's Against The Tide project, it featured portraits of an array of young people in some of the UK's most maligned coastal towns. Rather than merely taking their pictures, however, she also took their personal stories.

The exhibition certainly didn't shy away from outlining the severity of the myriad problems facing such towns. Some of these are not unique - a lack of employment and education opportunities, a dearth of community spaces, swingeing cuts to funding for youth services - but they're compounded by additional challenges, such as seasonality. The impact is most starkly evident in the so-called "mental health gap": I was staggered to read that "young people living in England's most deprived coastal areas are three times more likely to be living with an undiagnosed mental health condition than their peers inland".

The picture seems bleak. Yet Braden was aware of the dangers of confirmation bias - of looking for, finding and dwelling on the negatives. As she told the Guardian's Donna Ferguson, she didn't want to simply "tell a miserable story of deprivation" and by extension write off those who live there - quite the contrary. "I'm interested in unheard, overlooked or stereotyped stories. In this series I wanted to challenge the idea that young people are lazy and disengaged and instead show their creativity, resilience and care of their community."

Sure enough, what shone through the gloom was Braden's participants' positivity: their spirited rejection of jaundiced views, their sense of pride in and connection to places and communities so often talked down, the value they recognised in having spaces to develop and express their creativity or simply to hang out.

To achieve this required serious commitment on Braden's part: "The last thing I wanted to do was go to Blackpool, take a couple of photographs, leave and never go back again. That way everyone would feel dissatisfied and used." Consequently, Beside The Sea was fundamentally collaborative rather than exploitative, providing a visibility beyond the images. As such, it was a model example of a rich, long-term socially engaged project.

What's more, a companion exhibition upstairs granted some of the participants - a number of budding photographers from Weston-super-Mare - the opportunity to share their own work. I particularly enjoyed Siobhan Evans' Messages series, featuring scraps of text spotted in the urban environment, which made you feel as though you were trying to decipher some fiendishly complex code. Equally impressive were Braden Evans' images of wildflowers cracking concrete. Combining both resilience and beauty, widely perceived as weeds yet thriving in a hostile environment - the symbolism was obvious, but no less powerful for it.

Golden wonder

When a recipe begins with the instruction to melt some butter in a pan, you can pretty much guarantee you're onto a winner. Like bacon or chorizo, it makes pretty much everything better.

Butter may have gone out of fashion in the 1980s and 1990s - certainly, I grew up with lurid yellow and unmitigatedly awful margarine, and butter was seen as decadent as well as unhealthy - but I swear by the stuff now. As, it seems, do many others - if this Guardian article by Morwenna Ferrier is anything to go by.

While I wouldn't dare to claim to be some kind of connoisseur - we generally get supermarket own brand, and unsalted because it's more versatile - visiting one of the specialist butter shops in Paris featured in the article is now on my wishlist.

That said, two stunning examples can be found close to home. The Marmite butter at Heaneys has (quite rightly) become the stuff of local legend, while a morcilla-laced variant was a highlight of a meal at Asador 44 last month. Their beauty is that, unlike a spread that sits atop bread, they melt through the warm toasted sourdough, infusing and enriching it with flavour. I can't recommend either highly enough.

The black stuff

If a photography exhibition opens with a quartet of images by Lee Miller, Robert Frank, Bill Brandt and Don McCullin, the odds are that it's going to be worth a visit - and sure enough Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography And The Gothic justified the journey over to Bristol from Cardiff. The theme may be loose, but any attempt by the Martin Parr Foundation to make good use of their archive and show off their collection should be applauded.

The exhibition is divided into four sections, with the abovementioned four images all featuring in the first and most visually impressive, "The Castle". An Englishman's home is his castle, or so the saying goes, and Miller's picture of the devastation wrought on London houses by a German bomb during the Blitz illustrates that even castles aren't impregnable - the wrecked piano in the foreground underlying the war's considerable impact on culture.

For the most part, however, this section depicts self-inflicted wounds: the damaging effects of heavy industry on both places and people. The rapacious, exploitative attitude to land and resources is starkly illustrated by McCullin, who captured a woman pushing a gleaming new pram through a bleak post-industrial hellscape in County Durham, while images from Janine Wiedel's Vulcans Forge take us inside the one of the dark Satanic mills (a steelworks in Stoke) so effectively you can practically feel the grime and intense blasting heat. Graham Smith's "Thirty Eight Bastard Years on the Furnace Front" shows a worker hunched over in the mess room of a Middlesbrough ironworks, a broken man. Humans are just another expendable resource, chewed up and ground down.

Not that home offers much more comfort. The second section, "Domestic Bliss", is ironically titled, but less coherent and therefore less effective than the first. It would, I think, have benefitted from one of Tish Murtha's Byker photos, or an example of Nick Hedges' work on substandard housing, or maybe even one of Parr's own nauseatingly lurid food portraits. That said, Parr is at least represented by an image from 1988's The Cost Of Living depicting a Tory fundraising bash - a cucumber-sandwiches-and-Pimms-style genteel garden party held to boost the coffers of a political party that was actively seeking to widen the wealth gap and introduced Section 28 that very year.

This hint of what horrors might lurk beneath a ostensibly respectable exterior helps to cast a pair of pictures by John Myers in a different, more troubling light. On the surface, they are simply of a row of garages and a double bed - but you find yourself searching for deeper meaning, for something hidden, and uneasily speculating about what may have happened in those lock-ups or between those sheets.

As such, they lead neatly into "Double Take", the most unsettling of the four sections. We're immediately confronted with Gilles Peress' gruesome photo of a Bloody Sunday victim, reminiscent of Letizia Battaglia's work in Sicily. The Troubles feature heavily - whether through Akihiko Okamura bringing his outsider's perspective to bear on a blaze in Derry or through Donovan Wylie's portraits of cells in the notorious Maze prison, where only the curtains change from room to room, conveying the rigid dehumanising impersonality of the carceral system.

The mood lightens somewhat for the final section, "Night Creatures", featuring John Bulmer's images of students (presumably) scaling college buildings from 1958's The Night Climbers Of Cambridge and Derek Ridgers' portraits of punters from the short-lived but hugely influential early 1980s Soho goth club the Batcave. The outfits are outlandish, the make-up is extravagant and the backcombed barnets are impossible - and as a bonus there's a book to buy that serves as a suitable souvenir of the show.

A connection is made

The problem with being vehemently anti-Britpop is having to pretend that any albums from that time and place that you do like aren't actually Britpop at all. Elastica's self-titled debut is a case in point - a sharp, savvy album that, whether I like it or not, was tarred with the Britpop brush.

Reviewing the reissue for the Quietus, Claire Biddles perhaps drifts into the realm of hyperbole in describing the record as "untouchable louche perfection", but I agree that it "exudes a sleazy smokers' area glamour: fags and keys on a night out, sitting on pavements in your glad rags, waking up with a hangover and a drawn-on tattoo". It was certainly pleasingly at odds with the cheap jingoism and boorish masculine attitude that came to define the period.

Perhaps its greatest strength, though, was as a gateway drug to even stronger stuff. The fact that 'Connection' stole directly from Wire's 'Three Girl Rhumba' was upheld in court, but did the job of introducing the pioneering punks to a new generation. And it's hard to listen to Kleenex/LiLiPUT (as I have been recently, repeatedly) and not see Elastica as a helpful neon-lit signpost.

Look: North

As previously noted on here, Chris Killip may not have been a native North-Easterner, but it's evident he took the region to his heart - both in terms of his role in establishing Side Gallery and the amount of work he produced in the area.

So it's fitting that, in direct collaboration with both the late photographer's son and the Chris Killip Trust, Mark Holborn has pulled together Chris Killip: North for Thames & Hudson, a handsome collection of images ranging across several projects - many of which are previously unpublished.

Buzz review here.

"I wanted to be the Devil"

Extreme metal pioneer, sometime fitness instructor, keen twitcher, Kate Bush fan: Cronos was clearly quite a character. See this Classic Rock interview from earlier this year - his last - and this 2020 chat about his formative years and the early days of Venom with John Doran of the Quietus.

Venom emerged in Newcastle in the late 1970s with a ferocious sound that drew in Black Sabbath and Motorhead and took them to darker places. They were a product of a time and place, but they also in turn shaped the fact that the city became a hub - perhaps THE hub - for NWOBHM in the 1980s.

Cronos' death has inevitably prompted a number of obituaries, but it also led Pete Gofton of fellow North Eastern outfits Kenickie and Frankie & The Heartstrings to share a link to Metal City on social media in tribute. The film - a daft post-Spinal Tap documentary pulled together by label Neat Records and featuring Warfare, Saracen and Avenger alongside Cronos' crew - is an absolute hoot. Hammy acting, scorned women smashing up guitars, bands lost in transit/Transit, exploding drumkits, songs called 'Metal Anarchy', Cronos arriving at a country house hotel on horseback and wearing a cape before signing in in blood: it's got it all.

"It felt like home"

This Paste article by Niko Stratis, prompted by Nevermind's 35th birthday last month, is an eloquent, deeply personal piece that underlines how music can resonate with the soul in a manner that's hard to articulate. There was something in the songs, Kurt Cobain's lyrics, "the way depression leaked through the cracks of him", that spoke to Stratis at a fundamental and intimate level.

But, crucially, she's not one of those fans who jealously and fiercely guards artists and albums as their own. On the contrary, she describes Nevermind as "a record that belongs to each new listener in a different and perfect way": "That the words that once told of grief and sinful things have become something new for kids as they grow old is a blessing Kurt Cobain never got to see."

I've often wondered what Kurt would make of seeing kids in factory-faded smiley face T-shirts, were he still alive today. I used to think he'd be appalled, but no longer - he might be astonished, yes, but surely it would be a wonderful thing to know your music continues to connect with generation after generation.

Needless to say, Stratis' acclaimed book The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman is on my reading list.