Life Style

Beat the clock: quintessential punk mavericks get their documentary due

It seems like yesterday--and yet a million light-years ago. The Eighties, the decade that gave birth to and then sanctified the phenomenon of "indie rock," was also, not so coincidentally.

Don't look back in anger	But is it garbage?
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	We reap what we sow, and if we're filling our kids' heads with this garbage ... what comes out is what you put in. more
Branson's best season	X-Ecutioners' Day - hip-hop DJ band
UNLESS YOU'VE BEEN TO Branson, you've probably never heard of Shoji Tabuchi, a master fiddler from Japan who sports spangly jackets and a n]op of black hair. more	Three years after the X-ecutioners started bumping cuts for Built From Scratch (Relativity, 2002), the album is seeing the light of day. 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.