Articles

Sacred words, profane music? The Free Monks as a musical phenomenon

The Free Monks (Eleftheroi) are a Greek rock band of black-robed Orthodox monks who, through their music and other activities, have attempted to interact with Greek young people and to break away from the mould of Orthodox clergy as stiff and distant.

Europe's musical ambassadors	Billy Connolly, John McCusker and Friends
In May 1997, I was the editor of the now-defunct music monthly Select, a magazine that will forever be associated with the music known as Britpop. more	Who's Billy Connolly? It depends on who you ask. Most kids know him as Uncle Montague in the Lemony Snicker movie. more
Brass in pocket	Rock's Quarrel with Tradition
Juan de Marcos Gonzalez has the confident demeanour of a highly successful man. more	Scene: A music classroom at a junior high school. The beginning band class has just ended and the students are putting away their curricular materials--instruments and beginning band method books. more

NEWS

Uptown boys

New York's failure to produce a band of any real significance during the 1990s is one of that decade's musical anomalies.

Rock and read

There is no business like show business, as writers prove each time they stand in public and read extracts from their books.

Queer as folk

There are some films that divide the world into the righteous and--if you will--the wrongteous.

Been and gone

After seeing Martin Scorsese's grand seven-film series The Blues, you feel as if you've attended a symposium on an all but vanished music.

What Blur did next

What happened to Cool Britannia? Britpop[TM], which was the start of it all, was a reaction to the Americanisation of British culture.