Feel good hits of the 30th March

1. 'Staring At The Sun' - Straw Man Army

In among the band's intriguing selection of (predominantly) jazz and electronica for their episode of Amoeba's What's In My Bag?, Squid's Ollie Judge picked Straw Man Army's 2024 LP Earthworks, which has proven to be right up my street. Tightly coiled, politically charged (often bluntly), ambitious weirdo punk like a mash-up of Parquet Courts and No Age, and not a million miles from last year's Lifeguard record.

2. 'Play Me' - Kim Gordon

The title track of Gordon's third solo album finds her exploring hitherto uncharted territory. Who could have guessed that the Sonic Youth lynchpin would ever go on to record a horn-heavy slow jam - albeit one that skewers Spotify's ludicrous mood playlists.

3. 'Ugly Thing' - Edwin R Stevens

Even if I hadn't had a pub tip-off about A Plague Of Gimps, its release on Wrong Speed would have been recommendation enough. Looking forward to spending time in Stevens' company and hearing lines like "You made me Norman Bates' mother" when he comes to Cardiff's Paradise Garden next month.

4. 'Journey In Satchindananda' - Alice Coltrane

Listening to Work Money Death's 2001 album The Space In Which The Uncontrollable Unknown Resides, Can Be The Place From Which Creation Arises (quite the mouthful) led me to revisit Journey In Satchindananda - and very welcome it was too. Richard Russell of XL Recordings rightly refers to the LP as "a proper mind expander" in this recent Guardian article on her critical rehabilitation, compiled to coincide with White Rabbit's publication of a biography by Andy Beta, Cosmic Music.

5. 'Rip The God' - Melvins and Napalm Death

For fans of abrasive heaviosity, these two legends of the game simply teaming up for the Savage Imperial Death March tour was exciting enough - so the prospect of a collaborative record of the same name, out on 10th April, may lead to incidences of spontaneous combustion. 'Rip The God' suggests there won't be any disappointment.

6. 'Forces At Work' - The Feelies

Another What's In My Bag? tip-off, this time courtesy of Horsegirl. Not a band I can recall having heard before, but the motoric persistence of this track in particular helps to explain how Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley met at a Feelies gig.

7. 'Missed' - PJ Harvey

It's a mystery to me why Rid Of Me largely passed beneath my radar at the time of its release. Likewise why I hadn't previously noticed that the opening of 'Missed' sounds very like Slint (and not just because of Steve Albini's production).

8. 'Stimulus For Living' - Drahla

Anyone hankering for what Kim Gordon used to get up to should give Drahla a try - starting with this song (and its amusingly pretentious video).

9. 'Breaker' - Deerhunter

A classic late-period Deerhunter pop song from 2015's Fading Frontier, after the weirdness and experimentalism of its predecessor Monomania.

10. 'Processed By The Boys' - Protomartyr

The nefarious activities of ICE agents may have become major international news in the last year or so, but Protomartyr's Joe Casey was calling them out back in 2019.

Coming out of her shell

It often takes me a while to warm to a new album and stop comparing it unfavourably to what has gone before, but from first listen it was abundantly clear that Ricochet blows Snail Mail's two previous LPs out of the water. The album finds Lindsey Jordan, at the ripe old age of 26, worrying that she might be wasting her life away, but on this evidence there's no chance of that.

Buzz review here.

Dark matter

As their name would imply, The Twilight Sad have never been the cheeriest of bands, but It's The Long Goodbye is bleak even by their standards - understandably so, mind, given the tragic context of its creation. While it's not necessarily recommended for those in need of a pick-me-up, it's arguably their biggest and best record to date. The Scots' patron/champion/cheerleader Robert Smith (who contributes to three tracks) clearly knows his onions.

Buzz review here.

Black and white in black and white

Nearly a week on and I'm still smarting from the derby defeat. But at least some good came from the day, in the form of this stunning series of pictures taken by photographer Phil Kneen, a detached observer in the eye of the storm.

His images hardly depict my fellow Newcastle fans in a positive light - though at least there are none of police horses being punched...

Writing, reflecting and research rabbit holes

Having thoroughly enjoyed Keith Cameron's mighty tome 168 Songs Of Hatred And Failure: A History Of Manic Street Preachers last year (yet another fine music publication from the folks at White Rabbit), I was never going to pass up the opportunity to hear him talking about how it all came together, back in Newport where all of the interviews with Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield took place.

Buzz report on the Newport Festival of Words event here.

The last word?

The fourth volume of Alan Bennett's diaries, Enough Said, is (not unsurprisingly) a delight - full of amusing observations on life, acid commentary on politics, astute opinions on the arts, and fond reminiscences, written with characteristic warmth and wit.

"These days thoughts of death are seldom far away", he admits, and mortality does sadly cast an increasingly large shadow over the now 91 year old's life and writings. Outliving Victoria Wood by 20 years, for instance, is a matter of "apprehension not pride". But it's reassuring that he can still take pleasure in books, conversations with visitors, the stand-up of Stewart Lee, episodes of Friday Night Dinner and getting up Quentin Letts' nose.

Unlike your average diary entries, of course, these were produced in the full knowledge that they would be made public. As ever, credit to Bennett's friend Susan Powell and editor at Faber Dinah Wood for getting his scribbled scraps of paper into publishable form.

Buzz review here.

Headonistic pleasures

Like Mclusky, Bristol stoners The Heads have been away for two decades, during which time their reputation has only grown. Thankfully, new album Yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell proves that they haven't gone it straight and clean. Suffice to say that the "dove" in the title of first track 'Hits Like A Dove' probably isn't referring to a bird.

Buzz review here.

National cuisine, global influence

Ben Benton's book All You Can Eat is certainly not without its flaws and irritations, but I agree with his overall argument that "British food" is no longer monochrome, anodyne and flavourless and that the array of cuisines now available in the UK is impressive in comparison both with just a few decades ago and with what's on offer in other countries.

As also evidenced by the English language, we have a natural taste and aptitude for absorption. You could regard this as appropriation, a hangover from the colonial era, or you could see it more charitably (as he and I do) as proof of a receptiveness towards other cultures and a protean sense of ourselves as a nation - one that undermines the narrow-mindedly defensive and xenophobic attitude represented by Reform and their ilk.

Buzz review here.

Chippy Alley

We'd got used to a long wait for new Mclusky material - nearly 20 years, in fact - but now Andrew Falkous and co have popped, it seems they can't stop. I Sure Am Getting Sick Of This Bowling Alley - worth picking up for the title alone - is a mini-album rather than an LP, but promises that last year's The World Is Still Here And So Are We will not be the sole full-length fruits of the band's new incarnation.

Buzz review here.

Class acts

With all the gloom surrounding grassroots gig venues these days, it was heartening to read the remarkable story of Minsthorpe High School in Yorkshire, which for a halycon few years in the late 80s and early 90s hosted gigs by the likes of Therapy?, Lemonheads, The House Of Love, The Wonder Stuff and Redd Kross.

Two members of staff were the catalysts and ultimately responsible for what developed, but - as the author of the Off The Records post makes clear - the kids were closely involved in every aspect, from roadie work to security to marketing. Pupils not only had the opportunity to experience live music as audience members but also to be in the student bands that supported the touring stars.

The whole enterprise was as thoroughly DIY as you can get, and as such should be a valuable source of inspiration to anyone who needs a nudge to make good things happen.

Little wonder there are plans for a documentary, School Of Indie-Rock. This is a brilliant tale that deserves to be told much more widely.

Shutter control

I alluded to it at the time, but I found the snapshot of August Sander's monumental photographic series People Of The Twentieth Century that was exhibited at the National Museum Cardiff a few years ago quite unsettling in one particular respect. Portraits are typically intimate and personal - and yet Sander deliberately avoided identifying his subjects by name, instead classifying them by occupation or social status. In that way, they were depersonalised - designated as representatives or stereotypes rather than as fully rounded individuals.

There's no suggestion that Sander's motives were sinister, but I was reminded of his series by this Guardian article on a new exhibition in Delhi accompanying the publication of a book entitled Typecasting: Photographing The Peoples Of India 1855-1920. In it, Amrit Dhillon makes clear that the portraits of anonymous subjects made by the British were part of a larger colonial project to categorise the Indian people, "the better to understand their motivations, personality traits and customs in order to more effectively exert control".

For those of us who retain at least a modicum of faith in the power of photography as a means of bringing about positive change, as a tool for resistance and liberation, it's sobering to be confronted with an example of it being used for exactly the opposite purpose.

Play time

Three albums into a solo career that didn't begin in earnest until she was 66, alt rock icon Kim Gordon continues to astonish with a progressive vision and cutting-edge sound that is taking her ever further from her Sonic Youth roots and into productive new spaces. Play Me might just be her best effort yet.

Buzz review here.

Feel good hits of the 13th March

1. 'You Let My Tyres Down' - Tropical Fuck Storm

I'll occasionally go a few weeks without watching this KEXP performance. More fool me. It really doesn't get much better than this stupendous chaos. Just a shame there's nothing else to touch it on their three albums - but their show at the Fleece in Bristol was one of my gigs of 2024.

2. 'Facet Squared (Albini Session)' - Fugazi

Impossible to imagine this not being the opener to In On The Kill Taker? Well, the surprise release of the Albini Sessions version on Friday - where it's pushed into second place by 'Cassavetes' - suggests that Fugazi originally had other ideas, but thankfully thought better of it.

3. 'I Just Can't Get Over Losing You' - The Lemon Twigs

Pastiche it may be (60s beat morphing into 70s power pop), but this first taster from new LP Look For Your Mind! is so pitch perfect that you can't fault the brothers D'Addario for it. Eternally grateful to (of all people) Melvins for pointing me in their direction a few years back.

4. 'Ten Million Tons Of Shit' - Rainbow Grave

Did someone mention Melvins? This sludgy, nihilistic nastiness is even better live, as I discovered at Blondies Brewery in London at the tail end of last month, when a very refreshed Nic Bullen (a founder member of Napalm Death) gave us both barrels.

5. 'Mind/Body/Light/Sound' - Swans

A band I know nowhere near as well as I should. This, from 1995's The Great Annihilator (as recommended by Ghold in an article I read recently), is less intimidating than their older material but no less magnificent.

6. 'Full Time Job' - Squirrel Flower

Back to the KEXP studios. I'm not sure what it is about the place, but it always seems to bring out the absolute best in artists, and this version of 'Full Time Job' is significantly better than the one on Tomorrow's Fire.

7. 'Friends In The Bubble Bath' - Audiobooks

There can't be many odder couples in pop than David Wrench and Evangeline Ling - but it just works. This single from their 2018 debut Now (In A Minute) is a weirdo banger.

8. 'I'm Coming Home' - The Deviants

Just one of the tips I picked up from Ty Segall's episode of What's In My Bag? (along with specific Frank Zappa, Swell Maps and Bauhaus records). "Kinda like the Fugs if they were psych rock", says he. Bluesy proto-garage freakout fun, says I - and surprisingly British rather than American.

9. 'Contort Yourself' - James Chance & The Contortions

Talk about a singular vision - no one else had the idea of doing an impression of an amphetamined-up James Brown being tasered while no wave guitars and free jazz sax scrapped it out. Crazed genius.

10. 'Pay No Mind' - Weird Nightmare

'Might See You There' appeared in a recent Feel Good Hits, and Alex Edkins' side project have snuck in again. "I'm so broke I can't even pay attention" is a neat opening line.

Snaps, crackle and (Brit)pop

If you were reading an article in a copy of NME in the 1990s, there's a good chance the accompanying images were taken by staff photographer Martyn Goodacre. To mark the publication of his new book Working For The NME, the Quietus invited him to talk through a number of his photographs.

Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher feature, inevitably, but so too do Kevin Shields, George Clinton and Beth Gibbons (the latter showing off her keepie-uppie skills). The piece is most worth reading for the anecdotes about the fate of Jarvis Cocker's beloved Hillman Imp and the time the KLF were invited to go all Supermarket Sweep in HMV on Oxford Street and chose to take nothing but "blank tapes ... and some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirts"...

No fun

Like many in Wales and indeed further afield, I've found myself seduced by the effervescence and exuberance of Melin Melyn's live performances - which only makes the decision to release the dull and disappointing stop-gap album Mill On The Hill: After Dark all the more mystifying. The featured artists detract from rather than add to the original album's songs, and if the idea is to give a platform to others, then the reality does no one any favours.

Buzz review here.

Grave goods

Bands and artists inevitably hog the limelight when it comes to music coverage, but it's worth remembering they never exist in total isolation; on the contrary, they're inevitably part of a larger ecosystem that is supportive and sustaining (even if not always/necessarily optimally functional). I regularly post about gig venues and music writers/journalists, but less often about labels and record shops.

Crypt Of The Wizard - which happens to be both a label and a record shop, and now a festival - recently got its dues in the form of a Quietus article. Harry Sword spoke to co-founder and now solo proprietor Charlie Woolley about the shop's beginnings in 2015 and the changes that the business has undergone over the years.

Woolley was also granted the opportunity to recommend some of the albums he's most enjoyed releasing. Personally speaking, it was the prompt I needed to finally check out Ghold, and Bang To Rights by Heavy Sentence - in Sword's words, "worshipping at the eternal temple of Motorhead and imbued with street punk attitude alongside surprisingly deft melodic flourishes" - also struck a chord.

It's remarkable to me that Crypt Of The Wizard is "the only specialist underground metal emporium in London". If Bristol can support one - Black City Records, which I stumbled across on a recent visit - then you'd think the capital might boast a few more.

"Intimate and vivid depictions of the daily disgrace of the Jim Crow South"

I've written before about photographer Gordon Parks' celebrated series on segregation in the American South, but this Guardian article by Oliver Laughland - prompted by a new exhibition in London - was a welcome reminder to revisit those images.

In the piece, the exhibition's curator Bryan Stevenson - a Montgomery-based civil rights attorney - spells out the significance of Parks' decision to shoot in colour rather than black and white, for reasons that are very different to those behind (for example) Martin Parr's decision to make the same switch: "Most people only saw this community fighting segregation in this very two-dimensional way. And I think Parks understood that it was much more dynamic, much more artistic, much more interesting than those images could sometimes capture. The use of colour really animated the harm in ways that had been missed previously."

What also struck me was the headline quote from Parks: "The camera is my weapon of choice." As was discussed at the Eye Festival in October, the reality today is that the veracity of the photographic image is being questioned more than ever. Laughland acknowledges as much, asking Stevenson whether the camera still retains its capacity for truth-telling. Stevenson maintains that it does, despite the challenges - but AI is arguably now a more powerful weapon, especially in the hands of those who, unlike Parks, believe in inciting division rather than overcoming it.

(Incidentally, the segment about Parks getting his big break through working for the Farm Security Administration was a reminder that Linda Gordon's biography of Dorothea Lange is still sitting as yet unread on my shelves...)

Alternative rock

If Fugazi were going to spring a major surprise, it was never going to be a comeback tour. But we've got the next best thing: a Bandcamp Friday release of the "Albini Sessions" versions of the material that went on to be re-recorded for In On The Kill Taker, their finest LP.

Some of the tracks were leaked years ago and have been floating around the internet for a while, but this is a bona fide official release to benefit a cause that was very close to Albini's heart. Fugazi's Bandcamp page tells the story behind the sessions, as well as featuring a video in which Albini talks about the vital work that Letters Charity - which he founded with his wife Heather - does to combat extreme poverty. The substitution of Chicago's Sears Tower for the Washington Monument on the cover is a neat touch.

It's a strange experience listening to an album you know so intimately in a slightly different form - not least due to the alternative track sequencing. Does this suggest that Fugazi originally had a different running order in mind?

In terms of playing spot the difference, there is of course the trademark Albini drum sound, but also alternative guitar work in the heavier sections of 'Returning The Screw'. Meanwhile, '23 Beats Off' lacks the drawn-out feedback carnage that makes it my favourite song on the finished record (and that also helps to mark out In On The Kill Taker as an album on which they were moving further away from their hardcore roots and embracing experimentalism), and overall there is perhaps marginally less intensity.

On balance, then, I prefer the version that came out of the post-Electrical Audio retreat to the familiar surroundings of Inner Ear Studios. But if that didn't exist? The mind boggles at the idea that Albini told Fugazi "I think we dropped the ball" and the band agreed. It's only in close comparison that the "Albini Sessions" recordings sound in any way less than brilliant.

What perfect timing to have only just bought Joe Gross' 33 1/3 book on the album...

"It was a culture shock"

Artists and bands often like to talk about establishing a DIY culture, but rarely is it quite so evident as in the case of the Welsh reggae scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Finding themselves geographically and musically isolated from London's reggae culture, Cardiff-based musicians took to heart that old adage about being the change you want to see in the world.

Not for the first time, Daniel Dylan Wray has excavated a hidden history for the Guardian, revealing how Black artists fought against marginalisation, hostility and racism to create something they could call their own - and be proud of. Integral to the scene was the legendary Casablanca Club, as featured in an episode of ITV's Vanished Wales and the subject of a BBC Radio Wales documentary (not currently available), but sadly no longer in existence.

Wray observes that "there's an overwhelming feeling that more could be done to celebrate and preserve this vital strand of Black and Welsh culture". The National Museum Wales isn't oblivious to such histories - see for instance the recent exhibition on hip hop - but Welsh reggae definitely deserves better. The closure of the Butetown History and Arts Centre, which could have told these stories, remains an absolute travesty - a symptom of the troubling distaste for Tiger Bay's colourful, rowdy and multiracial past and preference for the Bay's bland, corporate, enshittified present.

Wray's article is also evidence that his forthcoming book about Sheffield's music scene(s), Groovy, Laidback and Nasty, will be well worth a read.

Fine art dining

My natural inclination is to give chain restaurants a wide berth, and my first and (to date) only Nando's - in Newport in September - proved to be not cheeky but profoundly dispiriting. I left with the sense that they cared little about anything, including customer satisfaction and any semblance of culinary quality.

So it was surprising to come across this story about the company's generous patronage of the visual arts in its native South Africa. Rather than covering restaurant walls with bland identikit images the world over, Nando's seems to take a much more curatorial approach, forging close working relationships with artists and purchasing unique artworks for display.

The artists quoted in the Guardian article are uniformly positive about the company's policy, citing the creative freedom and opportunity to work full time that the support grants them, as well as the chance to exhibit in a less stuffy and elitist space than a conventional gallery.

Some companies would no doubt adopt such a policy just to be able to loudly blow their own trumpet (hello Brewdog!), but it seems as though journalist Rachel Savage had to do a bit of digging to research the piece - so credit to Nando's for quietly backing the arts. If only they took the same level of interest in the dining experience...

Feel good hits of the 3rd March

1. 'Sicko!' - Mandy, Indiana feat. billy woods

Both song and video deliver sensory overload. There's a lot to get your head round, and it's not one to tackle if you've got a hangover, but URGH crackles with energy, invention and bile. 

2. 'Mata Zyklek - Angine de Poitrine

It seems as though one day Angine de Poitrine were on no one's radar, and the next everyone was raving about them. The reason? Footage of them performing for KEXP going viral. Musos may marvel at the microtonal guitar and looping, but I'm just in love with the audiovisual combo. The Quebecois duo have announced three UK dates, including one as close as Bristol, but they all sold out almost immediately.

3. 'JCMF' - Alan Sparhawk

A real highlight of Sparhawk's solo set, bristling with righteous anger and visions of vengeance, now recorded and released. A sign of what might be to come next, perhaps? (He's also put out the poignant 'No More Darkness', which closed last year's Green Man set.)

4. 'Better Than Good' - The Bug Club

More love for KEXP, this time for inviting Newport's finest The Bug Club to burn through a blistering studio set back in October 2024, introducing them to the wider world. 'Better Than Good' is perhaps the pick of the bunch, but you should really just watch the whole lot. Looking forward to forthcoming album Every Single Muscle - 'Watching The Omnibus' suggests it might veer closer to On The Intricate Inner Workings Of The System than last year's Very Human Features.

5. 'July' - Kowloon Walled City

No idea how I've only just come across this, given the combination of band and cover, and the fact it was released in 2012, but this is a fine Low cover. I should really go and see them in Bristol, shouldn't I? (The flipside - a 50-ton cover of Soundgarden's '4th Of July' by Thou - is also worth a listen.)

6. 'Evie' - Holy Fuck

There really aren't many things better than Holy Fuck's rhythm section in groovy lockstep. They've been away for too long, but 'Evie' (and 'Elevate') bode well for Event Beat, out later this month.

7. 'Let's Just Get Married' - Aimee Fatale

Sweet, soft-focus, stylised 60s pop with echoes of Dusty Springfield, Shangri-Las, Isobel Campbell, Lana Del Rey, Howling Bells, Raveonettes, Cat's Eyes - all the good stuff, basically.

8. 'Vox Tuned D.E.D.' - Liars

A splendid warped thumper from 2014's Mess. I've never been fully on board with Liars, but this album - recommended by JR Moores - has done the trick.

9. 'Guitar Trio' - Rhys Chatham

Reading appreciations/obituaries of Eliane Radigue induced me to get Harry Sword's marvellous tome Monolithic Undertow off the shelf, and I wound up poring over the passages about Rhys Chatham. I don't think I'd ever played 'Guitar Trio' in full before. The schoolboy concentration and delight on Thurston Moore's face is priceless.

10. 'The House Always Wins' - Matador

I don't listen to metal much in the house, but Elder's Innate Passage is an album I've found myself going back to repeatedly over the last few years. This, from a Brighton-based trio, is very much in the same vein: heavy, melodic, moderately proggy. Thanks to Echoes And Dust for the introduction.

The stranglers

If you want an insight into the trials and tribulations of being a mid-tier band in the current musical climate, Gareth David of Los Campesinos! is your man.

Last March, he wrote a blog post about how LC! played a first gig in Ireland in years, selling out a fairly sizeable venue, and yet still end up making a loss. The breakdown of earnings and costs was illuminating.

Now, granted the platform of a piece for the Observer, he's explained how streaming services such as Spotify are strangling the life out of music. Through failing to fairly compensate artists, they're contributing to the maintenance and indeed expansion of an "insipid monoculture" in which only those with money can easily prosper, with the shockwaves "felt through the whole music ecosystem, from the closure of grassroots venues, nightclubs and record shops, to the wilting of the music press".

The situation may be bleak, but David concludes by offering some positivity. Streaming isn't about to disappear overnight (and he doesn't deny its appeal), but buying music and merch direct from artists and going to gigs can help to make a difference.

David's candour on financial issues is refreshing - and he's evidently on a mission to convince others to follow suit: "I would love to see transparency from my fellow musicians about their income and the workings of the industry, to raise awareness among fans and to forge solidarity with their peers. A united front and a sharing of knowledge will be the first step in remodelling a broken music industry to favour those who give it value - rather than those who extract value from it."

Rotten

As opening lines go, "We got a McDonald's the night my mam got lung cancer" hits hard. But Richard Milward's debut novel Apples doesn't really follow up on that initial promise.

For a start, the plot is slight - centred on a gang of teenage girls led by Eve, and a loner lad called Adam - and seems to rather fizzle out. It's less of a story, and more of an evocation of a time and place - that time and place being the north east of England in the late 90s/early 00s.

Apples was written in Milward's early 20s and heavily inspired by the lightbulb moment of reading Irvine Welsh - and it shows. There's a breathless relish in the descriptions of unsavoury individuals and situations, seedy goings-on, self-destructive behaviour and sexual violence.

Milward's characters are self-centred and sex obsessed, unsure of themselves but often masking it with bravado, on a permanent mission to stave off smalltown boredom by getting fucked in one way or another. With little prospect of a positive future, they give it no thought, preferring to live very much for the present.

There are a handful of shocking incidents along the way that caught me off-guard, but in truth I think what most discomforted me about reading Apples is the way that it tore down and trashed cherished rose-tinted memories of my own teenage years, a few miles up the road in Northumberland in the early 90s.

Milward conjures up precisely the sort of rowdy and chaotic house parties I used go to - from describing buckets of "tac" in the garden and puking up homemade cocktails everywhere, to namechecking the notorious brand of white cider that was my particular poison. But, to use a spectacularly confused metaphor, he casts it all in a darker light - less hedonism, and more nihilism - and, if I'm honest, the flashes of casual racism and misogyny also ring true.

I'm not normally squeamish about this kind of thing in fiction, but this felt very close to the bone. The raw realism is what gives the novel its punch and, ultimately, is its strongest asset - but it's also precisely what made the book a painful read, personally speaking.

Seaside postcards from the past

What better time to pay a long overdue first visit to the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol than for an exhibition celebrating the late photographer's breakthrough series The Last Resort, 40 years after it first made an impact? The opportunity to see those images in the flesh, in the place that Parr himself set up to champion documentary photography of all shades, was too good to miss. 

The exhibition opening was initially conceived as a two-hour event on Friday evening - but such was the enthusiasm and interest that the MPF turned it into a two-day affair, including guided tours and talks.

When I was there, on Saturday morning, MPF's Louis Little and Isaac Blease gave a practically full house an overview of the project's origins, defining characteristics, impact and afterlife, drawing attention to particular images on the gallery walls and offering interesting background information even for those of us who know the series well.

Little and Blease explained that Parr and his wife Susie moved to Merseyside from Ireland in 1982, and Parr began photographing New Brighton, a faded seaside resort, the following year. The approach and subject matter were inspired by the work of Tony Ray-Jones and particularly his book The English Seen, focusing on the nation at leisure, as well as the lurid picture postcards of John Hinde.

Parr's seismic shift from black and white to colour was prompted by the political climate of the time and a desire for his work to make a greater impact; with that shift, Little and Blease suggested, Parr went from celebrating culture to critiquing it. New Brighton was symbolic of the formerly grand seaside towns slowly dying due to political and economic neglect, changing leisure pursuits and the growing accessibility of foreign holidays.

Three observations about the images themselves were particularly illuminating.

First, Blease pointed out that Parr and his wife were at that time contemplating starting a family, which perhaps explains why so much attention is devoted to parent and child relationships and interactions - from toddlers on fairground rides to the baby swigging from a can of Coke.

Second, Little explained that the image that has become known as the Ice Cream Girl - in which an apparently overworked and disgruntled young employee stares straight down Parr's lens with a fierce defiance - was the result of a process called "going fishing", whereby Parr would identify a promising location and then play the waiting game. His contact sheets show that he often took several shots in the same spot, hoping that one might capture something special - no doubt a potentially expensive approach in the pre-digital era.

Third, in talking through Parr's choice of equipment, Little discussed saturation and the use of flash, which - in the picture of the children's beauty pageant at the lido - creates a slightly surreal effect. Looking more closely at that image, I was struck by the one girl who is deliberately touching her hair and preening for the judges. The way that she's knowingly playing at being an adult reminded me of the work of Clementine Schneidermann; little wonder Schneidermann's pictures have been exhibited at the MPF.

Parr's fondness for retaining records and ephemera proved enormously helpful when the exhibition was being prepared. The invitation to the original 1985 show at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool is on display in one of the vitrines, promising a Punch & Judy show and a specially commissioned stick of rock, and encouraging invitees to dress in beachwear or scuba gear. (Parr himself played along, pictured at the event in shorts, Hawaiian shirt and enormous sombrero.)

What I hadn't realised was that that initial exhibition was actually a joint show with another photographer, Tom Wood, though Parr went solo when the work was put on display at the Serpentine Gallery in London the following year. Blease touched briefly on the controversy it caused there, despite only being in situ for a week - a case of middle-class critics accusing Parr of patronising poverty tourism, taking offence on behalf of working-class Merseysiders who had seen the images and regarded them simply as depictions of reality.

Blease noted that this sensitivity arose in part because of growing concerns in the 1980s with the personal and political positionality of photographers, in terms of race and gender as well as class. Parr was himself rather uncomfortable with his role as a predatory figure taking pictures of people unaware, and indeed seems to have acknowledged this in the image of the adult beauty pageant contestants with a headless photographer in the foreground.

The catalogue/book produced to coincide with the exhibition contains a selection of images plus essays by Blease and the designer of the original book Peter Brawne, contact sheets and an afterword by Susie Parr, in which she reveals that Parr loved New Brighton so much that he asked for his ashes to be scattered there. He would have been pleased with the book and exhibition - a fitting testament to the project that really made his name.

Strange tunes for strange times

Very few bands would be more suited to a place on the roster of a record label called Weird World than Hen Ogledd. New album Discombobulated makes little sense on paper, and arguably not much more to the ears, but it's a fascinating, inventive album - eccentric without being self-consciously quirky, and notably fuelled by more anger than previous releases.

Buzz review here.

Reading festival

This Guardian list of the "best songs inspired by literature" may have been prompted by the new film adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but the Kate Bush classic doesn't actually feature in the rankings. Instead, Alexis Petridis pointedly picks Bush's 'The Sensual World', her reimagining of Molly Bloom's monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses. Justifiable choice or deliberate ragebait? Let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

Some of the literary inspirations I knew (J G Ballard on The Normal's 'Warm Leatherette', Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch's Venus In Furs on the Velvet Underground track of the same name), but others I didn't. Particularly enlightening was the selection of Nirvana's 'Scentless Apprentice', for which Kurt Cobain drew on Patrick Suskind's Perfume - a stomach-churner of a novel that I read a couple of years back and that helps to make more sense of a song I love.

A Noble pursuit

It's very rare that the same story dominates the front pages of every single newspaper - and even rarer that they all carry the exact same illustrative image.

Phil Noble's photo of a shellshocked Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, caught like a rabbit in the proverbial headlights as he was escorted to a Norfolk police station following his arrest, has been splashed everywhere - and has inevitably proven grist for the meme mill.

In a post for his site The United Nations Of Photography, Grant Scott has given the background to the picture, noting that it's a prime example of "luck, tenacity and an awareness of the moment" being more important than technical skill or composition.

On the strength of his comments at last year's Eye Festival in Aberystwyth, in which he talked about perseverance and serendipity, Joel Goodman is one photographer who would be inclined to agree.

Heavy toll

Admittedly, it's somewhat unfair to continually gauge a band's latest release against their finest achievement, especially when that achievement was an incredible debut that seemed to come out of nowhere. Howling Bells' comeback effort Strange Life contains a number of strong songs, with appeal for fans of Mazzy Star and Angel Olsen's indie rock dabblings - but its flaws mean that it won't change the narrative that they peaked early.

Buzz review here.

Abandon all hope

I've never really been able to understand the impulse to remake films, and in the case of Threads it seems even more incomprehensible. Mick Jackson and Barry Hines' 1984 original is, after all, perfection in all its harrowing bleakness - yet there are those who clearly feel it could be done better.

On the one hand, if anyone was going to do it justice, it would be Warp Films - partly because of their track record (not least Adolescence), and partly because of their location in Sheffield, the city in which Threads is set.

On the other, however, Jackson is absolutely right to be concerned by Warp's Emily Feller claiming that the remake will highlight "how resilience and connection can offer hope even in the most challenging of times". As he told Empire, suitably bluntly, "hope is not part of nuclear war". The overall message of Threads is resoundingly clear and should stay that way, however horrifically grim it might seem.

Small wonders

The 33 1/3 back catalogue is an extraordinary treasure trove: pocket-sized books dedicated to single albums, written by knowledgeable fans at liberty to take a variety of approaches but all offering insight and passion on their chosen subject. And yet (to my shame) I've only read one book in the whole series: Leah Kardos' relatively recently published book on Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love.

With so much to enjoy, I'm eager to tuck in. But, as with (say) the albums of The Fall, the sheer number is daunting, and it's hard to know exactly where to start. Which is where Top10Nathan's selection of six of the best comes in very handy.

The two picks that appeal to me the most are Kid A by Marvin Lin, lauded as "a genuinely fresh and entertaining read on one of the most enthralling left turns in music history", and Spiderland by Scott Tennent, because it's an album that is widely (and indeed increasingly) celebrated yet still shrouded in mystery.

However, top of my to-read list is Joe Gross' book on Fugazi's In On The Kill Taker, which - prompted by Top10Nathan's post - is finally winging its way to me now.

The unlikely language of love

Gary Barlow once sang of using "a million love songs" as a means of communicating his romantic feelings. I wonder whether he tried 'Stabbed In The Face' by Wolf Eyes?

Not the first track that springs to mind, admittedly, but, as he explains in this Guardian article, it helped to cement John Doran's nascent relationship with his partner Maria: "[I]ts howling feedback and tinnitus machine noise sounded like a celebratory, ecstatic, love-filled symphony. People might think we're being juvenile by saying 'Stabbed In The Face' is our song, but it is the soundtrack of an incredibly joyous, optimistic time."

Among the other contributors to the article, Doran's fellow Quietus co-founder Luke Turner writes about Einsturzende Neubauten and Tim Jonze recalls the role of Public Image Ltd's 'This Is Not A Love Song' (ironically) in bringing him and his partner together.

I have a similar story: the proper post-midnight first dance at our wedding was to Eels' 'It's A Motherfucker' - a song we both love and fell in love over, even though it's about the death of E's mother.

"The most depressing experience I've ever had in the cinema"

Mark Kermode was hardly likely to give Melania a rave review, but his utter evisceration of the entire hubristic shitshow is an absolute treat.

It's "a bribe" by Amazon.

It's "a heist movie" showing a crime family breaking into the White House and trashing democracy.

It's "a piece of handsomely mounted cryptofascist propaganda".

And - perhaps most memorably of all - it's like "a documentary in which Eva Braun feels sad about war while Hitler invades Poland".

All of this delivered in bewilderment and anger by a man in a Gang Of Four T-shirt. Bravo.

Club classics

My first encounter with The Bug Club came in July 2022, at a hometown (or thereabouts) show as they were gearing up to release debut album Green Dream In F#. Three and a half years later, in a venue across the street and in the company of The Family Battenberg, there was little or no trace of that album's material in the set, which just goes to show the lightning pace at which the band have been working. One thing has stayed the same, though: a Bug Club show is a pure joyride. Buzz review here.

Hats off to those behind the Outline initiative, which certainly seems to be fulfilling its remit of catalysing energy and enthusiasm around Newport's music scene.

"I think I've been overcelebrated"

Self-flagellation is nothing new for Don McCullin - but in a recent interview with the Observer's Andrew Anthony, conducted to coincide with the opening of a new exhibition, he was particularly scathing.

Like Martin Parr, he noted that he has "a wonderful life" - and yet "I feel uncomfortable because I don't think I deserve this much". The extent of his moral torment, as a renowned documentarian of conflict, was clear: "You don't have the right to steal other people's images, more so when they're suffering and dying. I've committed some very unpleasant deeds. I'm like a moving train that's carrying a sackload of shit."

A major problem, as he sees it (and as he told the Guardian's Emine Saner in December), relates to the impact of his work - or lack of it: "It's worthless to me because it hasn't changed a thing." Anthony gently demurs, noting that "[c]onflict prevention seems an impossibly high bar by which to judge photography or any other journalistic or artistic form". In any case, there is surely some value in simply bearing witness to atrocity - a point on which Joel Goodman, Jenny Matthews and Philip Hatcher-Moore agreed at last year's Eye Festival. Few have done so as powerfully and consistently as McCullin.

Dead good

I've often wondered (though not so much as to actually stop and count) the body count on Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads. So I'm grateful for Dele Fadele for doing the maths: 75 people, apparently, plus one dog.

Fadele's article - written for the Quietus in 2016 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the album's release and now republished for the thirtieth - draws parallels between the record and gangsta rap, noting that ultimately both have their roots in the darkest ghetto blues. However, he makes a point of noting the starkly different reception afforded to Murder Ballads and your average gangsta rap album.

Murder Ballads is certainly not for the faint hearted. I may have been wooed by the improbable duet with Kylie Minogue, 'Where The Wild Roses Grow' (incidentally, not a song I ever expected to hear sung at a local karaoke night - credit to former Buzz editor Fedor and his partner Isa for taking it on), but ultimately that too involves Kylie's character meeting a grisly end. 'Stagger Lee' and 'O'Malley's Bar' are in particular a lot to take, as violent linguistically and musically as the bloody tales they tell.

Feel good hits of the 5th February

Right, after several years on hiatus, it's about time this regular feature was resurrected - not least because it's a helpful way for me to keep a record of what I've been listening to...

1. 'Blood Moon' - Haress

The portentous first track from last year's superb album Skylarks, which, while broadly in a folk lexicon, draws in some fascinating influences from further afield (Slint, desert blues), and which took its inspiration from Benjamin Myers' novel The Gallows Pole (and Shane Meadows' TV adaptation). Gutted to have missed their matinee show at the Cab in Newport on Sunday. 

2. 'Who Do You Love' - Our Girl

Stand-out song from the trio's second LP The Good Kind. It kicks up a notch very nicely just after two minutes and then slips into blissful Deerhunter territory 40 seconds later. As one of the YouTube commenters suggests, it "could've easily been four minutes longer". 

3. 'Bend Down And Kiss The Ground' - Bloody Head

A second song from this FGH batch to have been released on Wrong Speed, after Haress' 'Blood Moon'. This is the title track of the Nottingham bruisers' follow-up to the superb Perpetual Eden. You know exactly what's coming from the off, but it's no less impactful when it finally arrives.

4. 'In The Same Room' - Julia Holter

A timely recent reminder that, while my inclination is always to reach for Have You In My Wilderness, she did put out the odd pop-adjacent song earlier in her career (in this case, on Ektasis).

5. 'Respect' - Aretha Franklin

As is the way with these things, the Guardian's recent list of the 30 best live albums stoked plenty of disagreement (the lack of space for Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York and MC5's Kick Out The Jams particularly irked me) - but it did at least turn me on to Aretha Franklin's astonishing Live At Fillmore West, from which this is taken.

6. 'Dead End' - Snail Mail

Having been seriously underwhelmed by Valentine (title track aside), I'm hoping that this - unapologetically uncomplicated indie rock, with just the right amount of slacker and saccharine - signifies that forthcoming album Ricochet will be a return to the form of Lindsey Jordan's debut Lush.

7. 'Long Live Love' - Sugar

It's fair to say that while decades may have passed, Bob Mould, David Barbe and Malcolm Travis haven't forgotten how to sound like Sugar. 'Long Live Love' follows 'House Of Dead Memories', released in October, and both have been received like the prime Copper Blue tracks they're not. Damn the fact that I can't make either the London or Bristol legs of their May tour.

8. 'Might See You There' - Weird Nightmare

Short and sweet, 'Might See You There' is pitch-perfect chunky power pop (think Ex Hex and Cheap Trick) from Alex Edkins of on-indefinite-hiatus Canadians Metz. There were signs on last LP Up On Gravity Hill that the noise-rockers did in fact have a melodic bone in their body, so this easy-on-the-ears bop doesn't come as a total surprise.

9. 'Cloud Core' - Lightning Bolt

I'm still not sure that listening to Lightning Bolt in the comfort of your own home, rather than in a dank basement or a Butlins venue, is a wise move. This is a taster from their forthcoming split LP with OOIOO, The Horizontal Spirals/The Horizontal Viral, which is out on Thrill Jockey in late April.

10. 'Square One' - Tinned Meats

I'll be honest: I don't really have a clue what the hell's going on here (an increasingly common scenario, to be truthful). But the bass and drums in the verses are great.

Living the high life

Faced with the threat of eviction from our homes, most of us would put up a fight - but not many would decide to stage a remarkable rooftop protest. But then Rick Canty was clearly made of tougher stuff.

Isaac Atkin-Mayne's short Rick On The Roof tells the extraordinary tale of how Canty spent three years living in a tent on top of the house he had been turfed out of, becoming a local legend in his home town of Barry. As the film underlines, what started out as one man's personal crusade gradually became a cause celebre, with the community rallying around in support.

Ultimately, though, it's a sad story, with the protest coming to a painful end and memories of that community spirit now fading in a town harmed - like so many others - by austerity politics.

Credit to Short Of The Week for platforming the film. The website looks like a treasure trove ripe for exploration.

(They're not your) steppin' stone

It being Independent Venue Week, the Quietus drew renewed attention to this 2024 piece by the site's co-founder Luke Turner, which takes issue with perhaps the most popular argument in favour of supporting such venues: that they're a starting point or staging post on the journey upwards to bigger and better things.

Turner is careful to preface his comments by expressing his admiration for the Music Venue Trust and recognising that the #ItStartedHere campaign is "well-intentioned", without explicitly acknowledging why this argument is seen as one worth pushing.

Put simply, it's a powerful way of getting people to give a shit. Who among us can honestly say they're able to resist an "I saw X in a tiny venue with about 30 others" brag?

Perhaps more significantly, it's a means of encouraging the moneybags echelon of the music industry to put its hands in its pockets - whether out of shame or (more likely) out of self-interest. Without the grassroots venues of today, the story goes, there would be no stadium-filling superstars of tomorrow. That this strategy seems to be working means it's not to be easily dismissed.

And yet in his article Turner makes three very valid counterpoints.

First, the pipeline narrative is too simplistic. The conveyor belt that supposedly starts with small venues is broken, its functioning warped and compromised by a whole host of factors including privilege, algorithms (streaming and social media) and economics. When even long-established mid-sized bands with sizeable and devoted followings are unable to make touring economically viable, the idea that simply "putting in the hours at the coalface will eventually lead to fame and fortune" seems increasingly naive.

Second, what about artists who are uninterested in climbing the greasy pole? Those who - to use Turner's own metaphor - see grassroots venues not as "mere rungs on a ladder" but as home? They shouldn't be sneered at for modest ambition and being satisfied at a certain level, or for refusing to play the game or to define "success" purely in terms of "ticket sales and streaming numbers". Turner puts it plainly: "To focus on music venues as steps to be conquered on the way to a typical career is everything that is wrong with the commodification of art, especially in a time when that route is a slippery illusion."

Which brings him to his third point. In asserting the importance of grassroots venues within the wider ecosystem, the pipeline argument paradoxically devalues them. Rather than prizing such venues only as breeding grounds for arena headliners, we should be celebrating them for their own sake, on their own terms - as "vital, beloved rooms where those onstage create an energy that, even if it's only witnessed by ten, twenty people, lets us touch the electricity of music, and find a little joy". Very little compares to the thrill of live music, and the magic is all the more intense and wonderful when you're up close and personal.

Crisis point

Contemporary events, I accept, are such that none of us really need any more reason to be depressed - and yet George Monbiot's commentary on the new report Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse And National Security: A National Security Assessment deserves amplification.

The picture it paints is stark: in a nutshell, ecosystem collapse is already happening, and it constitutes an enormous threat to national and global geopolitical stability. That the report has been compiled not by leftie environmentalists but hard-nosed security types underlines just how serious its diagnosis and prognosis of our current predicament is, and how urgently drastic action is required.

For Monbiot, the report largely confirms much of what he and many others have been saying for years. But he's also scathing of Labour for both delaying and redacting it, and (it seems) deliberately making it hard to access - most probably because it puts their policy failings under the spotlight. It's nothing new to bemoan the sheer uselessness of Starmer's government, but it is in this area that their deficiencies may prove to be the most costly.

What's the point?

Many an artist has struggled with the question of how to make art in the midst of atrocity - but at the present moment, with atrocity seemingly ubiquitous, that dilemma appears particularly acute.

In an article for the Quietus, Drew Daniel (Matmos/The Soft Pink Truth) has offered his personal thoughts on an old chestnut. As might be expected of a musician who's an English professor by day, it's articulate and reflective, quoting Adorno as well as Swans.

Daniel confronts the question head on: "[W]hat can one person who likes to make records possibly think they can accomplish in the face of an ongoing slide into state murder and authoritarian politics?" Or, put even more bluntly, "why bother making art at all?"

Daniels' response is honest and realistic; rather than suggesting naively and hubristically that he and other artists can somehow make a significant difference in the wider world, he acknowledges the ultimate futility of art in such horrific circumstances. Instead, he focuses on its impact on a micro level, internally and interpersonally. In exploring the unfamiliar territory of "chamber and orchestral arrangements", he has "sought in music something that feels 'other', some kind of temporary escape hatch from the present lifeworld" - and has found "beauty".

Art is more than just a coping mechanism, though. "At its best", Daniels concludes, "art reminds us of the possibility of freedom in this world, and the reality of our connection to each other as the basis and grounding condition of that freedom's expression". To that, I'd add that the creating art is an inherently positive act - an act of generosity that by its very nature stands in opposition to the violence, meanness of spirit and grotesque philistinism of contemporary politics.

Shared perspective

It's little wonder that filmmaker Joel Coen struck up "an immediate rapport" with photographer Lee Friedlander. After all, as the Guardian's Sean O'Hagan comments, "the everyday landscapes in which the Coen brothers set films such as Fargo, The Big Lebowski or Barton Fink are not that far removed from the American terrain that Friedlander has made his own over six decades" - so much so that many of the latter's pictures could quite easily pass for stills from as-yet unreleased Coen brothers' flicks.

Friedlander's gallerist Jeffrey Fraenkel (the matchmaker) has observed that "[a]nyone who's seen Joel's movies knows he has a special eye for images" - and the recurrent collaborations with celebrated cinematographer Roger Deakins (himself a former photographer) just go to prove it. The visual feel and language of Coen brothers films is arguably what makes them most distinctive, and Joel has understandably identified Friedlander as a kindred spirit, someone who sees the world in much the same way - all of which made him the perfect curator of Friedlander's work for an exhibition and book.

"Excitement and joy and good energy"

Thurston Moore is no stranger to evangelising about artists and genres, and sharing his recommendations. Who else would compile and publish a list of his "350 best records of 2025"?

In a new book Now Jazz Now - co-authored with long-time associate Byron Coley, a writer and label owner, and Mats Gustafsson, a saxophonist, and published by his own Ecstatic Peace imprint - Moore enthuses about free jazz, which he discovered through Coley in the late 1980s and early 1990s, soon becoming an avid fan and collector.

By way of a taster, the Quietus invited him to pick ten "entry points" into a form of music that (rightly or wrongly) has a reputation for being fiendishly difficult to get a handle on.

I'll be honest - it mainly makes my head spin/ache, but I did particularly dip into the recommended Peter Brotzmann record, Machine Gun, as one that the Quietus' Stewart Smith suggests stands most chance of finding favour with fans of punk, metal and noise, and I can see his point. Maybe, with time, disorientation and bewilderment might be replaced by love...

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.