Independent means

If you build it, they will come. Fiona Stewart may not have founded Green Man, but the festival’s managing director and owner can certainly claim to have built it into what it is today, through passion and determination – and come they do, every August, in their droves. Tickets for this year’s event sold out within two hours of going on sale in September, with thousands of hopefuls missing out. Speaking to an audience at Cardiff University recently, she suggested that the secret to Green Man’s success is simple: setting out “to create memories that will come to mind on your deathbed”. Exaggeration, you might think – but there are a few moments down the years that will live with me forever.

Stewart’s talk had been publicised with the ironic title It’s Easy to Run a Music Festival. Organising such events is a challenging business at the best of times – but the triple whammy of Brexit, COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis has made it all the more difficult. “I have lost all the money I had in the world at least three times”, Stewart admitted to the Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey in 2024. However, it turned out that the talk that she actually delivered was less an overview of the myriad logistical obstacles and risks, and more a promotional presentation/sales pitch hymning the festival’s virtues. A shame, in some ways – but nevertheless not without a number of points of interest.

Stewart began by noting that in name and concept, Green Man fits into a rich historical tradition of rural gatherings to mark the harvest season that involve eating, carousing and making merry. A rather grand way to frame beglittered punters drinking their own bodyweight in flat cider and line-dancing along to CMAT, perhaps – but in the face of the current political climate and our increasingly atomised online society, simply getting together in person to celebrate community is arguably as vital and radical as it is joyous, and festivals such as Green Man really do provide (in her words) “nutrients for the soul”.

The history lesson continued with Stewart’s observation that the Human Rights Act 1998 enshrined the right to freedom of assembly in law. The Licensing Act 2003 followed, imposing regulations on what had been a creative but chaotic sector that was rife with criminality, and resulting in a big boom in festivals: some corporate, some public funded, some community and some (like Green Man) independent.

Today, Stewart revealed, more than 150 festivals in Europe are owned and operated by just four corporations. Live Nation alone controls 65 per cent of the UK’s live music market, its fingers knuckle-deep in every conceivable related pie: venue ownership, artist management, ticketing and security companies, bar and merchandise services. Little wonder it has been the subject of anti-monopoly litigation in the US. Detailing bully-boy tactics, strategic decisions cynically designed to disrupt and private equity backing connected to ethically dubious investments, Stewart firmly cast the corporate behemoths as the supervillains of the scene.

Independent festivals, by contrast, have no obligations to maximise profits for shareholders. Neither are they hamstrung by key performance indicators and deliverables externally imposed as a condition of current and future public funding. Green Man also has no anxious sponsors to appease. All of which means that Stewart and her team have full curatorial and operational autonomy, are able to focus exclusively on keeping paying punters happy, and can (for example) stand firm in the face of political pressure and platform Kneecap.

With great power comes great responsibility, though – and Stewart spent much time outlining some of the ways in which Green Man takes that responsibility seriously. First and foremost, it boosts the Welsh economy (to the tune of £28.9 million in 2024) through employing permanent and temporary staff and engaging the services of local businesses and suppliers. Resisting the temptation to sell off pouring rights, for instance, means that the Courtyard and beer tents can champion a wealth of Welsh brewers, shifting 175,000 pints annually. The festival also offers training opportunities, including student placements.

With respect to artists, the emphasis is put on risk taking and talent development – in stark contrast to corporate festivals, which have little interest in the pipeline and whose line-ups are populated by established acts and lowest-common-denominator bookings. As someone who has had to fight her corner in what was an almost entirely male-dominated world, Stewart takes particular pride in the fact that Green Man has achieved a 50/50 gender split and been acclaimed by Cosmopolitan as “the most queer-friendly festival in the UK”.

While I would suggest that Green Man’s support for Welsh artists is perhaps overstated, that it promotes Wales on the national and international stage is nevertheless beyond dispute. Stewart professed to being somewhat bemused by politicians’ talk of leveraging “soft power”, but the festival is evidently gaining stature and clout for its ambassadorial role and brand strength.

It is also acknowledged as an innovator in the field, with initiatives such as the public-engagement science area Einstein’s Garden and the Settlement concept (whereby festival-goers can make a full week of it, using the site as a base camp for exploring the local area) stolen by other festivals that were themselves originally set up in Green Man’s image. Stewart did not seem bitter, though; imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all, and her festival’s overall uniqueness is not under threat.

She was, however, especially animated in talking about the work of the Green Man Trust, which has raised £2.4 million since 2014 for local good causes in such areas as the environment, education and community projects. Run-ins with NIMBYs who bemoan noise and temporary disruption but fail to appreciate the positive and wide-ranging impact of the festival and the Trust are clearly the source of some rancour.

So, what of the future? One of Stewart’s slides pointedly noted that the festival’s contribution to the Welsh economy has been projected to increase to £58.7 million by 2029 “if venue found”. She went on to stress the importance of a permanent home – if not on the current Glanusk Estate site that is currently rented each year, then somewhere else in rural Wales, where the festival’s impact can be most beneficial. Tickets may be selling out faster than ever, but expansion is not in the masterplan (whereas diversification is).

The intention is to continue fighting the good fight as one of the three largest independent festivals in the country (alongside Glastonbury and WOMAD). Stewart concluded by urging us, now armed with greater understanding of the strangulating influence of corporate festivals, to put pressure on local and central government to challenge monopolies and to vote with our feet and wallets. She also expressed a hope for greater political support for the grassroots music venues that grant early opportunities to festival stars of the future, in the form of rates relief. Amen to that – and to Green Man’s continued good health.

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

The hard sell

Why do publishers persist in not only selling hardback editions but doing so in advance of paperbacks? The answer seems obvious, even if it's not explicitly acknowledged by Larry Ryan in this opinion piece for the Guardian: they're a blatant money-spinner. If you want to read the book as soon as possible, then you have to be prepared to pay for the privilege.

I'll admit that hardbacks can be handsome, and can see that there's a certain amount of prestige associated with them if you're an author. But I'm generally in Ryan's camp. Hardbacks are not only off-puttingly expensive (perhaps counter-productively so - personally, I'd be inclined to buy many more books if the paperbacks were published simultaneously or first); they're also cumbersome to transport (and require the removal of the dust jacket to avoid damage) and take up additional room on shelves where space is already at a premium.

The model doesn't seem to serve consumers' interests, and ultimately that might spell its demise. But as long as publishers continue to feel it serves theirs in terms of profit and profile, it'll no doubt remain in place.

Opposing forces

Marc Davenant's Rebellion! begins with a well-chosen quote from Oscar Wilde: "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

The zine is, in the photographer's own words, "a celebration of protest as an essential part of our cultural identity". The images pay tribute to those willing to show the courage of their convictions - often risking ridicule, abuse and even arrest.

For Davenant, the ability to express discontent publicly by means of peaceful protest is a fundamental human right, whatever the motivating cause. The commentary accompanying the images may make his political allegiances clear, but he nevertheless presents respectful portraits of anti-vaxxers and people campaigning against asylum hotels alongside pictures of anti-racism, pro-trans, pro-Gaza and climate change protesters.

In some ways, the zine arguably demonstrates the increasingly polarised and fractious nature of modern society. Yet it's also illustrative of a right that all of those featured could agree is invaluable and inviolable - a right that is gradually and stealthily being eroded through legislation.

Documentary photography often depicts seismic social shifts and dying ways of life. Rebellion! does just this - and calls on us all to stand up for speaking out, before it's too late.

The past is always present

Chris Steele Perkins' photobook The Troubles is remarkable at least in part for its chronicling of everyday life going on amid the bloody Northern Ireland conflict.

The same goes for Paul Ferris' The Boy On The Shed - a wonderful book that is so much more than simply the memoir of a failed footballer turned physiotherapist, its opening sections a frequently poignant account of growing up with war.

And, as Derry Girls has illustrated, there is humour to be found in the country's attempts to either bury or come to terms with its recent history.

Like his hilarious memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, Seamas O'Reilly's excellent debut novel Prestige Drama dwells on similar themes, and is set in a familiar location. His Derry is a place where people speak so fast it's "like their teeth are on fire", where "the sun hangs fat in the sky, shiny white and stupid, like a photograph someone's pinned to the wall in case visitors arrive" - and where the scars of decades of violence and antagonism are rarely allowed to heal for long before someone wants to pick at them.

Buzz review here.

Community service?

Are streaming services "minutes away from being obsolete"? When someone as close to the heart of the music industry as Jimmy Iovine says so, then it's worth taking notice. Joel Gouveia was initially taken aback by the claim, but on reflection argues that Iovine has a point.

In a piece for The Artist Economy, Gouveia underlines that the current system is precarious and doesn't work for anyone within the industry: not the record labels, who have lost control of the means of distribution and consumption to the tech companies; not the streaming services themselves, for which margins are squeezed and turning a significant profit is tricky if not impossible; and certainly not the vast majority of artists, who are compensated with pennies (if at all) while the model funnels the big bucks to the top-streamed megastars.

This much isn't in dispute - but if Spotify et al were to fold, what is the solution/exit strategy? Gouveia argues that "the answer is direct ownership", and claims that "[w]e are witnessing the death of the 'Mass Audience' and the birth of the 'Micro-Community'."

That we are on the cusp of - or indeed already experiencing - something of a shift/sea change does, I think, ring true. More and more artists are withdrawing from streaming services, operating via Bandcamp and their own websites, focusing on hard-copy merch and seeking to cultivate community. This resistance to the system is piecemeal rather than coordinated, though, and it raises other issues.

For starters, a DIY approach is feasible for fledgling artists, but the micro-community can't be too micro if self-sustainability is the target. Bands like Los Campesinos! are showing that mid-tier acts can create their own little world, but they would be the first to admit that they've only been able to do so having already built up a fanbase - and that it doesn't really support them financially.

Cultivating close connections and rapport can best be achieved through personal, face-to-face contact at gigs, which are also a prime opportunity for selling merch. But the cost of touring has risen significantly in recent years to the point of being practically uneconomical for many. As Los Campesinos!' Gareth David has explained, even sold-out gigs can be lossmakers.

For major acts, meanwhile, such personal contact is impossible. They are then reliant on social media to create community (or the illusion of it) - opening themselves up to its toxic and corrosive side-effects. Plus they still need some means of mass distribution. Gouveia might be right in pointing out a general trend towards micro-communities, but there will always be artists (and industry types) who have grander ambitions.

I'd suggest that Gouveia also fails to acknowledge quite how significant streaming and social media are. Once upon a time, industry decisions were made based on record sales and chart positions; now, streaming figures are the key metric, as Oasis manager Marcus Russell noted in a talk last year, and social media stature/online brand is almost as important. That goes not only for record labels and management companies but also for festival organisers, as Green Man's Fiona Stewart admitted this week. Abandon mainstream streaming services and social media and you're making yourself much less widely visible.

Curiously, the one group to which Gouveia's article gives little consideration is consumers. Streaming's persistence relies on the fact that we've got accustomed to being able to listen to anything wherever and whenever we want, and paying peanuts for the privilege. A significant hike in the cost of monthly streaming subscriptions would not be unreasonable; indeed, it would be totally justifiable if it meant that artists were properly and equitably compensated and the money didn't just go to making the platforms themselves profitable.

The problem, though, is hinted at in Gouveia's point about all of the streaming services being much of a muchness. In that context, no platform will want to be the first mover on price increases for fear of instantly haemorrhaging subscribers to rival services. Without coordinated action by the platforms or external intervention from governments or regulators, that leaves us at something of an impasse.

In the meantime, then, even as increasing numbers of artists make a deliberate decision to opt out, the broken system seems set to limp on.

"A locus of art and energy"

Ask someone to name a venue/club that was at the epicentre of New York's exciting punk and no wave scene of the late 1970s, and chances are CBGB will come to mind first. The infamously grotty dive on Bowery is perennially celebrated, with good reason - most recently with the release of a new 101-track box set (and this Guardian article by Garth Cartwright).

In the words of the venue's photographic chronicler Gary Green, "New York was gritty, dirty and poor in those days. And CBGB reflected that." This characterisation of the city very much echoes the portraits painted in the books written by regular patrons and performers Thurston Moore and Lenny Kaye.

CBGB wasn't the only punk mecca in town, however. Moore's very first gig in New York was, at his friend Harold's insistence, actually at Max's Kansas City, where Suicide and the Cramps blew the two teenagers' minds.

Unlike CBGB, Max's had significant stature before the punk era properly kicked off, with Andy Warhol declaring it "the exact spot where pop art and pop life came together", the Stooges regular visitors and the Velvet Underground enjoying a two-month residency. But it really came into its own in the late 1970s, branded "a social hub of the subterranean universe" by Kaye's bandmate Patti Smith.

Prompted by the publication of a memoir by booker Peter Crowley, Daniel Dylan Wray has traced the curiously named venue's rise and fall. It may have been marginally classier than CBGB, but it too offered a vital space for experimentation and innovation to fledgling acts. Together, they helped to forge (in Crowley's words) "the cultural future of America".

Meanwhile, elsewhere in New York, another club was busy writing its way into music history. Punk had a largely antagonistic relationship to disco, but both flourished at roughly the same time and place - and Studio 54 was disco's equivalent to CBGB and Max's, albeit a whole lot more salubrious and glam. Photographer Tod Papageorge was on hand between 1978 and 1980 to capture its decadence and dazzle.

While Lenny Kaye's Lightning Striking explores "ten transformative moments in rock and roll" from around the US and indeed further afield, Jesse Rifkin focuses solely on New York-based scenes for his book This Must Be The Place: Music, Community And Vanished Spaces In New York City. This Quietus article and the playlist he put together is testament to the city's musical vibrancy, drawing attention to some of the lesser lights who "never quite got their due".

Rifkin's take-home message is unequivocal: "One of the most important things we can do to allow for future Death By Audios - or CBGBs, or Mudd Clubs, or Sidewalk Cafes - is to put as much energy into nursing current scenes as we do celebrating past ones." Amen to that.

Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in Spacemen 3

If you're going to be transparent about your influences, then you can't go far wrong with the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and Suicide. Little wonder that I loved Spacemen 3 from the moment I first heard them. That said, it occurred to me that I didn't know all of their records equally well - which is where this Quietus piece by Danny Passarella, which "distils Spacemen 3's sprawling catalogue into ten entry points", came in, singling out highlights and offering useful pointers.

Passarella devotes particular attention to the practically posthumous LP Recurring, identifying 'Hypnotized' as "a clear signpost of the direction Jason [Pierce] would take with Spiritualized". I would argue that that direction was already clear from 'Lord Can You Hear Me?' on 1989's Playing With Fire. (It was a revelation to me to discover, separately, that the track was covered in typically sublime fashion by Low for a 1998 tribute album also featuring Mogwai, Arab Strap and Bardo Pond.)

Passarella's more on the money about 'Big City', which sounds like "a psychedelic rock band playing acid house" and hints at where they might have gone had they been able to hold it together for another album or two.

The list also features 'Losing Touch With My Mind' (from the brilliantly titled Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To), giving me an excuse to share a link to the muscular version that the Icarus Line recorded as an early B-side, which devolves into what seems like the very literal sound of confusion.

Beauty and the beast within

Bullying, bloodlust, brutality inflicted on the weak and the marginalised, toxic masculinity, the corrupting influence of power, civilisational collapse: it's not really a mystery what drew Adolescence writer Jack Thorne to work on a TV adaptation of Lord Of The Flies. William Golding's remarkable debut novel may have been published in 1954, but it has much to say about the times in which we currently live.

Thorne's script was inevitably excellent, straying fruitfully from the source material in offering glimpses of backstories for the central protagonists, making them more complex. But in many ways the BBC series was the vision of director Marc Munden. He was responsible for ensuring that the cinematography had a hallucinogenic and slightly surreal quality (partly a happy accident, he's admitted), and for rendering the frenzied violence so viscerally (aided by a soundtrack composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer that regularly ratcheted up the tension).

As the behind-the-scenes documentary made clear, the circumstances of filming were far from straightforward. For starters, Munden was directing child actors, most of whom were inexperienced and all of whom were subject to restrictions on how many hours a day they could work, and yet he managed to elicit uniformly superb performances. He also had to contend with all of the challenges that the series' stunning location in Malaysia threw at the crew - particularly torrential rain (at one point, an assistant was shown trying to rescue his soggy but vitally important notebook with a hairdryer).

Ultimately, Thorne and Munden's adaptation was a tour de force, powerfully underlining the fragility of civilised society and the fact that the potential for savagery lurks within us all.

Feel good hits of the 23rd April

1. 'Hot Head' - Orcutt Shelley Miller Yow

Take one avant-rock power trio composed of three outstanding musicians and throw professional nutjob David Yow into the mix on an incendiary cover of a Captain Beefheart track, and the effect is like a grenade going off in a cement mixer. We may have been deprived of Yow's presence at Strange Brew last night, but the band - kicking off the Bristol New Music festival in style - were a glorious embodiment of both symbiosis and chaos.

2. 'The Bunker' - Edwin R Stevens

Just your average nearly-nine-minute-long folk song whose prettiness is undercut with lyrics about oral sex, Germans spreading autism and post-apocalyptic suicide fantasies. As I said after seeing him at Paradise Garden a couple of weeks ago, the guy's a one-off.

3. 'Time Will Be The Only Saviour' - Bill Ryder-Jones

I've come to the realisation that Bill Ryder-Jones' trash talk about Yawn - as well as the quality of follow-up Iechyd Da - had jaundiced my view of the earlier album. The solo performance of this track at St John the Evangelist last month was sublime.

4. 'Light On Our Feet' - Snail Mail

The high point of Lindsey Jordan's splendid third LP Ricochet is - appropriately enough - light on its feet, and is the most obvious marker of a blossoming confidence in her songwriting.

5. 'Heresy' - Nine Inch Noize

The first I heard of this project - a collaboration between Trent Reznor and Alexander Ridha aka Boys Noize - was when the footage from Coachella started doing the rounds. This version of the Downward Spiral classic is an absolute stunner.

6. 'Silver Machine' - Hawkwind

Speaking of heresy, is it verboten to suggest that this is the best thing Lemmy ever did? I'll stick my neck out...

7. 'Dying For You' - Charli XCX

As anticipated, nothing else on Charli XCX's soundtrack to Wuthering Heights quite matches up to opener 'House', her astonishing collaboration with John Cale, but it's a very solid record capable of standing on its own, and one that signifies an expansion of her sonic palette to encompass industrial and goth. Plus 'Dying For You' had me humming the verse to 'Video Killed The Radio Star'.

8. 'Attempt At A Crash Landing - Theme' - The Twilight Sad

All-guns-blazing stand-out from latest album It's The Long Goodbye, which - owing to circumstances - is a particularly bleak record even by the Scots' own standards.

9. 'Dayvan Cowboy' - Boards Of Canada

Confession time: Boards Of Canada's surprise return has me less animated that most musos simply because to date they've somehow largely passed under my radar (a handful of listens to Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi aside). But encountering this track, from 2005's The Campfire Headphase, has really piqued my interest in them and just-announced comeback LP Inferno. Here's Andy Price writing for Music Radar on how the track took shape.

10. 'Forever' - TTSSFU

A song about always that sounds like Alvvays. Sweet and simple, and a highlight of her recent Clwb gig.

"The expectation of presence"

One of the takeaways from Oasis manager Marcus Russell's guest lecture at Cardiff University last year was the band's loathing of social media duties. These days, however, whether you're a fledgling act desperately trying to get noticed or an established artist needing to stay visible, self-promotion and short-form video content is considered practically essential.

In an article for the Guardian, Daniel Dylan Wray spoke on the subject with a number of different people, including musicians Charlie Wayne of Black Country, New Road and Benefits' Kingsley Hall, as well as author Benjamin Myers and comedian Stewart Lee. The consensus was that social media is a necessary evil - one that keeps you in the public eye but also saps energy and distracts from the creative endeavours you're setting out to promote. Hall made his views very clear: "[N]one of us really want to do it. It's a horrible conundrum. This grinding, relentless popularity contest. Seeing creative people chasing the algorithm, craving to go viral, and completely forgetting their purpose: it's tiresome."

For someone like Lee, who has so far managed to steer clear of social media but now seems resigned to biting the bullet, the challenge is particularly pronounced. Social media participation would problematise the distinction he's carefully cultivated between himself and his distinct onstage persona - but without it, he fears "gradually watching audiences ebb away".

It's possible to exist outside the system, so to speak, but very hard to build or maintain any sort of substantial fanbase. Even those who have refused to play the game, such as BC,NR, acknowledge that the landscape has shifted significantly over recent years. Wayne admitted: "[S]ince we formed in 2018, there is 100% more pressure to do it. The real change is the expectation of presence. That because you have the option of engaging your audience constantly, you should." The grim reality is that - as Lee implies - if you don't, you're likely to get left behind or forgotten, however brilliant your work is.

This is just another facet of the changing relationship between fans and artists. Last year, I noted that toxic fandom is being encouraged by musicians' social media use, and that this use is largely being driven by an industry that thrives on greed. The implication is that artists are effectively hostages, being exploited within the system just as much as their fans.

The start of a new demer-era?

Jane's Addiction, Jesus Lizard, and now Sugar: incredible, enormously influential US alt-rock bands reforming and then choosing to tour the UK during the May half-term, which we always have earmarked for family holiday. It's starting to feel like a conspiracy.

In the circumstances, then, it probably wasn't the best idea to read Stevie Chick's excellent Guardian feature on Sugar, for which he interviewed the band's three reunited amigos: Bob Mould, Malcolm Travis and David Barbe. But if you're lucky enough to have a ticket for one of the shows, then it'll certainly whet your appetite - and for anyone who doesn't know them already, it's a neat introduction.

Since getting back together, Sugar have put out two new songs, both of which are on a par with anything they released pre-split: 'House Of Dead Memories' and 'Long Live Love'. But there's been no talk of a full album, and in conversation with Chick, Mould refused to confirm either way, perhaps understandably preferring to live in the present: "This time, I'm just trying to enjoy it all, in a way I wasn't able to the first time around."

So are these live dates just a temporary return, or might it be the start of a whole new phase in the band's history? Here's hoping for the latter, and that it turns out more Dinosaur Jr than Jane's Addiction - and that I actually get to see them.

Deep dive

What lies beneath? Inspired by Robert Macfarlane's book, Robert Petit's artfully filmed documentary Underland is an engrossing and illuminating subterranean voyage of discovery.

Buzz review here.

Clash of the titans

Let's face it: metal uberlords Melvins and Napalm Death teaming up to write and record a collaborative album was never likely to be a disappointment, was it? Savage Imperial Death March indeed.

Buzz review here.

Beat poet

The term "singer-songwriter" conjures up a few images in my head (mostly negative), but none of them correspond to Edwin R Stevens. Saturday's performance at Paradise Garden, mostly of material from his new album A Plague Of Gimps, underlined that the North Walian inhabits a weird, grimy world all of his own - albeit one in which there is always laughter in the dark.

Buzz review here.

Magic realist, real magic

I'll admit I was predisposed to look favourably on David Keenan's latest novel, Boyhood, from the moment I saw the cover image, taken by Douglas Corrance - one of the very best photographs in his book Glasgow 1970s-1980s.

Little wonder Corrance's pictures caught Keenan's eye, depicting Glasgow as they do as a city that might be rough around the edges but is also full of "colour and character". His first two novels This Is Memorial Device and For The Good Times, he told the London Magazine's Robert Greer, are "places where reality itself feels as though it might be up for grabs". That much is also true of Boyhood's Glasgow - and its various other locations (including Paris and Mexico).

Reviewing the book for Buzz was a challenging if not impossible task: how to encapsulate its kaleidoscopic contents neatly in a couple of hundred words? In an interview with the Spinoff's Claire Mabey, Keenan argued that "prophetic books are books literally spoken out of the air", and it does feel with the fluid rush and gallop of Boyhood's prose that he's an amanuensis, frantically transcribing words and phrases dictated to him from the ether.

The reading experience reminded me of advice dispensed by a gorge-walking instructor a few years ago: take a leap of faith and surrender to the powerful and urgent force of the elements, allowing yourself to be swept along by the current. If you do, it's an exhilarating joyride.

Joining the dots

Rarely can a band's profile have risen so rapidly as Angine De Poitrine's. The fact that that rise is entirely attributable to a single source - their KEXP performance - is equally remarkable. This is very much a case of DO believe the hype. New album Vol. II is inventive and imaginative in every way except its title.

Buzz review here.

Reel cool time

Ah, mixtapes: the lost art of carefully curating a sequence of songs, whether to introduce the recipient to new musical delights, to show off your own impeccable tastes or as a nerdy, clumsily cliched and wildly optimistic seduction technique (or all three simultaneously).

Me? Guilty as charged. I cringe myself inside out at some of the things to which I subjected girlfriends prospective or actual.

This article finds Guardian readers paying touching tribute to the humble homemade compilation as a wooing device, a symbol of sibling affection, a cornerstone of musical education or - in the case of Sofia Ilyas, raised in an oppressively religious household - "a quiet act of rebellion".

Arts funding

Such is the lot of contemporary artists that many (most?) are forced into making their living by other means. However, while the scale of the phenomenon might be unprecedented, the phenomenon itself is nothing new. Impecunious musicians, filmmakers, painters and poets without family or friends in high places have long had to earn an honest crust - or a not-so-honest crust, in the case of Jean Genet and Jean-Luc Godard, both of whom resorted to stealing and reselling books.

Their illegal entrepreneurialism is covered in this Guardian article by Mason Currey, author of the book Making Art And Making A Living. Thanks to his piece I learned that John Cage became a mushroom expert and subsequently won the equivalent of £70,000 answering funghi-related questions on an Italian gameshow.

Presumably Currey's book - unlike his article - makes mention of Cage's fellow composer Philip Glass, who was at various times a plumber and a cabbie. He also had a removals business whose name - Chelsea Light Moving - was subsequently borrowed by Thurston Moore for his immediately post-Sonic Youth project.

Teen scenes

As a huge fan of what both British Culture Archive and Craig Atkinson's Cafe Royal Books do, I was delighted to learn of the existence of the Museum of Youth Culture, and the fact that it'll be opening its doors in Camden (probably its natural habitat) next month.

The museum has similarly sprung out of a sizeable photography collection - one amassed by Jon Swinstead, founder of the magazine Sleazenation, in his garden shed - and this gallery gives a flavour or what will be on display. It will be more than merely an exhibition of images, though.

Reporting on the opening, the Guardian's Lanre Bakare presents a very interesting hypothesis: that "subcultures are on the wane when compared to the myriad tribes that emerged in the 1970s and 80s". Swinstead and his colleagues are reluctant to agree - but I would venture that distinct tribes are indeed much less visible or rigidly defined now, with the internet arguably breaking down tribalist attitudes in the realm of music and culture even though it is having the opposite effect politically. The implication (which Bakare doesn't spell out) is that the Museum of Youth Culture may soon seem somewhat quaint, a monument to a time when tribal identity and allegiance mattered.

"An act of resistance"

Branded a leftist "troublemaker" and subject to the unwelcome attentions of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, photographer Lisette Model could have been forgiven for avoiding controversy and lying low. And in some respects it seems she did - amassing an enormous number of pictures of key players in jazz's golden era, themselves under suspicion by McCarthy and his cronies, but keeping quiet about it.

Thankfully, the photos - of everyone from Billie Holiday to Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie - were discovered and have now been published in a book. Miss Rosen has told the story for Huck.

Hole lotta love

The reputation of Tasmin Stephens aka TTSSFU has been snowballing for a while, and last Thursday's gig at Clwb, with support from fellow North Westerners Wyatt, showed why. Long may she and her co-conspirators continue to have fun performing their spiky grunge-pop.

Buzz review here.

Songs and praise

It's no slight on the calibre of the company that Bill Ryder-Jones keeps, but the opportunity to see him perform solo in a church barely five minutes from my front door was not one to be missed. Bringing to a close his tour with Clementine March, the adopted Welshman was on sparkling form.

Buzz review here.

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.