Silent Words Speak Loudest

Back in June, I concurred with Alexis Petridis' argument that we should be wary of seeing the emergence of punk as a game-changing pheno...

Clementine Schneidermann and Charlotte James' It's Called Ffasiwn is now into its second decade, and the fruits of the Valleys-base...

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 ...

Grant McPhee’s second volume of oral history, after 2024’s Postcards From Scotland , chronicles the emergence and development of a distincti...

Many happy returns to the Quietus , which has turned 18. Its birthday should be celebrated not only because of the consistently stellar qual...

Prolonged exposure to commercial radio might constitute extreme audio torture in my book (the gurning hosts, the jingles, the soul-destroyin...

Mark McEvoy's pictures taken on late-night Underground journeys in the 1990s are richly evocative of time and place. Framing them in a p...

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

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 ...

I'm all for discovering new artists, but it's nevertheless a comfort when bands that have been among your favourites for decades are...

Credit to Cardiff's own Russell Todd for resisting the temptation to select nothing but Troublegum tracks for his recent Toppermost post...

Live music venues have (mercifully) enjoyed a reduction in business rates before , and will now do so again - along with pubs and clubs - fr...

You learn something new every day - and today it was that Rivers Cuomo maintains a spreadsheet called " The Encyclopedia o'Riffs ...

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 ...

Karishma Jobanputra's The Body Of The Thing  is remarkably assured for a debut collection of short stories. Each tale explores a differe...

HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES / THE DAMNED, 14TH AUGUST 2026, CARDIFF CASTLE Yet another hot, sunny evening at the Castle in this eternal summer, and J...

In this Huck article on her street photography in London in the 1990s (now published as a Cafe Royal zine ), Joan Piekny makes an interesti...

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

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...

When it comes to musicians and fans, the former are (inevitably) more often in the spotlight, literally and metaphorically, than the latter....

There's something strange and unsettling about empty shopping centres and big-box retail units, and about the general air of vacancy (cu...

Ghanaian film posters - painted by artists who hadn't seen the films, and designed to attract audiences who hadn't yet seen them eit...

Popular wisdom has it that the gig that lit UK punk's blue touchpaper was the Sex Pistols' show at Manchester's Lesser Free Trad...

Late last year came the unexpected and extremely exciting news that punk veterans and long-term pals Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye had teame...

As someone who enjoyed pottering around Pontypridd in the company of Daryl Leeworthy  and felt an irrepressible urge to go to Middlesbrough ...

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...

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 h...

If Ken Loach read Underdogs , he might be seriously tempted to come out of retirement to make one more film. The novel's Northern settin...

The world of contemporary publishing can seem a depressing place, where publishers slavishly chase trends and churn out lowest-common-denomi...

It's somewhat mystifying and disappointing that Bluecoat have allowed Tish Murtha's Youth Unemployment to remain out of print - but...

It goes without saying (or certainly should) that 'Ghost Town' is fantastic, one of the finest singles ever to top the UK charts. Bu...

Perhaps it's just me, but the cover of Jon Pountney's Valleys instantly calls to mind the " sunlit uplands " that we were ...

Stevie Chick's  Quietus piece on Cat Power's 2006 album The Greatest  is first and foremost a, well, great appraisal of a truly ...

Molly Tie’s Rebel Grrrls has three principal merits. First, it focuses not only on women but more narrowly on female fans, to explore “ wha...

Talking about the fantastic pictures he took in Vancouver over the course of a decade, between 1972 and 1982, Greg Girard described the peri...

" I even introduced America to the roundabout " is the sort of bold claim you might expect would secure someone a guest appearance...

To mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the Guardian have come up with something rather better than the Yank equ...

1. 'Little Green Apples' - Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell A sensational duet, as recommended by a friend after I'd watched TH...

Travelling to Newport didn't seem like the most sensible thing to be doing on the hottest day of the year - but I'm so glad I did. T...