"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.

When pop came out of the closet

I thoroughly enjoyed Ian Wade's book 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer, so the opportunity to hear him speaking about it was very welcome indeed. Hopefully, his chat with Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears - ranging over everything from stars' entertaining cattiness in the music press and the thrill of seeing Frankie Goes To Hollywood performing 'Relax' on TOTP, to Madonna's role as a gay ally in the midst of the AIDS crisis and how Stock, Aitken & Waterman made Hi-NRG "the Motown of the '80s" - will draw more people into picking up a copy.

The interview also introduced me to Shears' Queer The Music podcast, and I can also strongly recommend a couple of other episodes - not least because Shears is an excellent interviewer, gently coaxing rather than combative, and giving his guests space to talk without unnecessary interjection.

His conversation with John Grant revolves around Grant's song 'Glacier' from Pale Green Ghosts, prompting a fascinating discussion about sexuality, religion, pain, self-acceptance and creativity. Meanwhile, the episode with Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme is longer and more freeform, a revelatory and emotional chat between two close friends.

New angles and fresh perspectives

Today sees the return of Ffoto Cymru, Wales' biennial photography festival. Here's my preview of the month-long event, on the theme "There's More To Life", for Buzz.

Some of the details were still sketchy at the time of writing, and Richard Billingham's contribution has mutated into something different, at least.

While I can't make this evening's launch event at Ffotogallery's HQ, the opening of the Francesca Odell exhibition Coping With And Enjoying Life at Turner House in Penarth on Saturday promises to be good.

The real meal deal

While its title might suggest a celebration of that most venerable of institutions, the greasy spoon, Lewis Bassett's The Full English is substantially more sophisticated and satisfying: a brief social history of some of the cornerstones of British food culture. Given its publication by Verso, it was always likely to tickle the synapses as well as the tastebuds, and it certainly leaves the reader with plenty to chew on.

Buzz review here.

Agents of chaos

In 'The Second Coming', W B Yeats famously wrote: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." It's a line that appears to have been taken as a mission statement by his fellow Irishmen Gilla Band, if new album Pugnello is anything to go by. A ferocious, pulverising listen, the group's fourth album has rightly earned them a host of rave reviews. Here's mine, for Buzz.

It's Show time

Maybe I should bemoan "a media landscape that looks increasingly barren and impoverished" more often. No sooner have I lamented the demise of The Skinny than Drowned In Sound and Music Venue Trust have announced a new music magazine, Shownotes.

The ambitious collaborative venture is helmed by an experienced editor in Hannah Ewens and promises to feature the work of "some of the best music journalists in the world". Music Venue Trust are providing the financial backing, and as a result the focus will understandably be on grassroots venues and artists. In these difficult times, anything that draws attention to the thrills and challenges at that level is very welcome indeed.

What's more, Shownotes will be available for free. Here's hoping (assuming?) that at least one of the 500 selected host venues is in Cardiff.

Apocalypse now

It feels wrong to suggest that I enjoyed Saturday's screening of The War Game, Peter Watkins' controversial fake documentary from 1966 about the prospect of a nuclear attack, or the live soundtrack performed by Noson - but it was a memorably intense experience and genuinely up there with the very best things I've seen/heard in Chapter over the years.

Buzz review of the screening and subsequent Q&A here.

Snout better

If you'll pardon the pun, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are getting increasingly hammy in their performances, but sonically they remain as skullcrushing as ever. At Tramshed on Sunday, a set heavy (in every sense) on the material from last year's LP Death Hilarious sounded magnificent. Support for the Geordie crew came from locals Shlug (terrific) and Hang Linton (not so).

Buzz review here.

To have and to hold

I've written previously about how, when it comes to books, music and films, my love for the physical artefact endures. Some might see me as stuck in the past, clinging to soon-to-be-obsolete formats such as the CD. And yet it turns out that my kind of cultural materialism is on the rise, and that physical media are actually enjoying a revival of fortunes.

The trend is being driven by the actions of major corporations such as Sony, who are able to increase prices for accessing digital formats or even remove that access altogether as they like - even if you've already paid for it. It's just been announced that Disney+ are amending their subscription agreement to allow for ads, even for supposedly ad-free packages.

It seems that consumers are increasingly realising that both being at the whims of such corporations and the ephemerality of digital formats/streaming is a problem. This isn't so much a case of fetishising the physical object as understanding the value of conventional ownership, and knowing that having a book, a record or a film on a shelf means that you can't be deprived of it.

"Everything just changed"

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

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

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

A model project

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

Buzz review here.

"An act of defiance"

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

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

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

Glasgow kiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping on keeping on

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

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

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

Factory records

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

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

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

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

Down in the Tube station at midnight

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

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

Shock factor

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

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

"This project is simply about people"

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

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

The shock of the newThe familiarity of the old

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

Buzz reviews here and here.

Get Therapy?

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

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

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

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

"The beating hearts of our high streets and communities"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trans Europa Express, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporal punishment

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

Buzz review here.

Resurrection men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

Public disconnect

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

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

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

Triumph and failure

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

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

Unfinished symphonies

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

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

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

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

Tribute acts

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

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

Empty promises

There's something strange and unsettling about empty shopping centres and big-box retail units, and about the general air of vacancy (cultural, architectural, spiritual) of these bleak, identikit nowheresvilles they create. By contrast, in Up All Night, Imogen Willetts sees such spaces more positively, as a blank canvas and an exciting opportunity, endorsing their colonisation for cultural purposes.

In this fascinating piece for the Oakland Review Of Books that touches on the literal and metaphorical toxicity of Silicon Valley and AI, Colin Dickey suggests that they can be both, arguing that with Us and Backrooms the strip malls of the Bay Area have become "the preeminent setting for underground labyrinth horror".

Creative licence

Ghanaian film posters - painted by artists who hadn't seen the films, and designed to attract audiences who hadn't yet seen them either - have become the stuff of legend. But I hadn't realised that they were still being made today - albeit to order, for the benefit of collectors.

Not for nothing is the process called "imaginative painting". The artists conjure up things that simply don't appear in the films. "There is a kind of sensationalism to it", says academic Joseph Oduro-Frimpong - and the typically garish, bloody, exaggerated (often comically) imagery certainly suggests as much.

"This delirium of noise"

Popular wisdom has it that the gig that lit UK punk's blue touchpaper was the Sex Pistols' show at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976. Not so, according to Simon Price. In a splendid long read for the Quietus, he's made a convincing case for the Ramones' first trip across the pond (and indeed first shows outside the US) exactly a month later as being more energising and inspirational.

The oddball leather-jacketed products of an ailing, near-bankrupt New York initially played at the Roundhouse - sandwiched between the Stranglers and headliners the Flaming Groovies - and then at Dingwalls the following night. Price hails the band's flying visit as "the glue that bound the various factions of the British punk scene together while providing a blueprint of how an assault on the British cultural mainstream was now entirely possible".

As David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnell muse in This Is Spinal Tap, "[i]t's such a fine line between stupid and clever" - and the Ramones were the band to prove it. Price is right that they boiled down rock 'n' roll to its "base elements", a cartoonish blitz. Their genius was to "take the classic three-minute pop song, trim off the excess bullshit, speed it up, and you've got a TWO-minute pop song". The Ramones' most obvious and principal impact on those who witnessed them on those two nights in Camden was to put a rocket up everyone's arses and get them playing faster.

However, as Price acknowledges, that 1976 visit was actually "a hugely important cultural exchange" in that it also proved to be of benefit to a rabble who were used to modest CBGB crowds: "The Ramones gave London a kickstart. And London gave the Ramones a career, enabling them to leave their mark as one of the most influential bands of all time."

"I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!"

Late last year came the unexpected and extremely exciting news that punk veterans and long-term pals Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye had teamed up to record new music together. I haven't seen or heard anything more on that front - but at least one of their other joint projects is about to bear fruit.

The pair, whose impressionable teenage minds were blown by attending a Cramps gig together in 1979, are now part of the team breathing life back into the psychobilly legends' label Vengeance Records and setting up Cramps, Inc to look after their business interests. First up will be the release of lost 1977 album Gravest Gravy, produced by Alex Chilton, with at least nine reissues to follow.

Full credit to Rollins and MacKaye for working for free - though that shouldn't come as a surprise. What better way to pay tribute to your heroes than to make sure more people are able to enjoy their genius?

The roads less travelled

As someone who enjoyed pottering around Pontypridd in the company of Daryl Leeworthy and felt an irrepressible urge to go to Middlesbrough for a parmo thanks to Ben Benton, I was always likely to take pleasure in Chris Moss' book Where Tourists Seldom Tread. And so it proved.

It's staggering to me that people can be so uninterested in exploring their own country, and Moss is a kindred spirit, on a mission to make the case for veering off the beaten track in search of unexpected delights.

Buzz review here.

Romance and Roombas

It had been far too long since I'd seen stand-up of any kind, let alone gone along to a Go Faster Stripe recording - so, to make up for lost time, on Sunday I went to two. Alice Fraser was up first, with A Passion For Passion, and then it was ... Alice Fraser again, with Oh Man!. It's impressive enough to hold one one-hour show in your head, but two? Fair play.

Buzz review here.

The King is dead

Despite the recent revelation that Kevin Keegan had Stage 4 cancer, the news of his death at the age of 75 has still come as a devastating hammer blow.

Keegan had a radically transformative impact on Newcastle not once but twice, first on the pitch and then on the sidelines. Both times, his arrival not only arrested decline but reoriented the club in the right direction.

I'm too young to have seen him play (except for during John Anderson's testimonial, when he turned out in green, opposing those in black and white), but tales of his tenacity, work rate and goalscoring prowess were familiar. When he returned as a manager, the impact was almost immediate, and for the next five years we played with an unparalleled verve, dynamism, relentlessness and positivity. Not for nowt was the "Entertainers" tag earned; watching us was rarely less than thrilling.

Keegan's ethos was simply that matches are won by outscoring the opposition, and we accumulated the firepower to blow pretty much anyone away. In those terms, defence was unimportant. (Darren Peacock once pleaded for a defensive training session, which was duly delivered and then never repeated.) It was, quite simply, a glorious time to be a fan - even if ultimately we won nothing more than a lot of games and the hearts of neutrals.

Stories abound of Keegan's rapport with players, and of his decency, honesty and humility as a man as well as a much-decorated player and a manager. But perhaps what made him most special was his passion, charisma and ability to instil belief in both the team and the fans, galvanising the club and the city.

It remains the source of much sadness that Keegan's brief third spell panned out so badly, with Mike Ashley appearing to quell fan unrest by appointing our former double saviour only to be seemingly intent on undermining and humiliating him at every turn. That Keegan won the subsequent court case comes as scant consolation - but, while his relationship with our oafish owner at the time soon broke down, his relationship with the club or its supporters never soured.

Being a fan can be a blessing; it can also be a curse. For the fact that I've been an avid follower for 34 years, through thick and (more often) thin, the blame can be placed firmly at Keegan's door. Thank you for everything, King Kev.

Community spirit

If Ken Loach read Underdogs, he might be seriously tempted to come out of retirement to make one more film. The novel's Northern setting and themes of post-industrial hardship, working-class community and identity would be enough to make his eyes light up.

The book is, in the words of its author Louise Powell, about the "lost world" of "flapping" - unlicensed greyhound racing. Her objective, she told the BBC's Evie Lake, was "to reconstruct that world, not just how it looked" - an objective she has certainly achieved.

Buzz review here.

Success stories

The world of contemporary publishing can seem a depressing place, where publishers slavishly chase trends and churn out lowest-common-denominator slop. The aversion to risk taking is frustrating - though for small presses, which are often seen as nimble and adaptable but which live from hand to mouth, the temptation to play it safe is perhaps more understandable. All of which makes the rise of And Other Stories worth noting.

As co-founder Stefan Tobler explained in Ellen Peirson-Hagger's Observer profile, the Sheffield-based imprint has been able to be bold because it receives annual public funding from the Arts Council. Some (such as Green Man's Fiona Stewart) would question whether the press can legitimately claim to be "independent" - but it seems clear that the money has been liberating as well as "stabilising", and put to good use. Even if, as Tobler points out, "[t]he bulk of money is sales", simply having a guaranteed financial platform to build on is enormously helpful.

The result is that And Other Stories has been able to pursue its mission of publishing innovative contemporary writing, often in translation, and seeking to give readers what they need rather than what they want - or at least what mainstream publishers think they want. According to co-founder Tara Tobler, "[y]ou can do all these extraordinary things without having to cater to market assumptions about how much a reader is or isn't willing to work, because those assumptions are all just about privilege and the assumption that the English market is used to having everything handed to it".

Sales, awards and growth all suggest that And Other Stories is on the right lines. The press is vital proof that arts funding can genuinely pay off - and a valuable success story to cling on to amid challenges that seem to emerge or grow every day.