Yeah, ok. It’s nearly the end of 2008, so why talk about the music of 2007? Well, because we can… Hello you. To commemorate the 12ish months that was 2007, I’ve put together some of my favourite music of that year. With 16000GB capacity MP3 players these days giving the ability to have more music at fingertips than you’ll live long enough to listen to, I’m keeping it frugal by forcing myself to choose only the tastiest selection that will [...]

Why is it, after a good 50 years of ‘popular music’ and the concept of the ‘gig’, do modern bands; no matter how diverse or anti-conformist their music claims to be – STILL peddle the sad masquerade of the ‘encore’. Why do they bother? They thank the audience, they say goodnight and they walk off stage, knowing all too well that in less than 5 minutes they’ll be back on the stage doing the exact same thing. Do they really [...]

When it comes to entertainment, it was, of course, Homer Simpson who put it best when he said: “Barney’s movie had heart, but ‘Football in the Groin’ had a football in the groin”. In his own imitable, jaundiced, 4 fingered way, Homer J. summarised the way in which many of us understand comedy. Even the wittiest, most intelligent, most impeccably timed bon mot often pales in the humour stakes when compared to a man getting knocked unconscious by a pressurised [...]

A few years ago, there was a memorable advertisement for Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey; a close-up shot of a pair of earth-ridden, hard-working hands. Shrewdly, the marketing types had used this bucolic image as a representation of Jack’s rich, full, stomach-melting flavour, yet ultimately, it also encapsulated the aesthetic of those good ol’ boys of Southern USA – where men are tough, men are men, and men can be men together… To put an end to this lackadaisical deconstructionism (Take [...]

The problem with reviewing a film like Step Up is that it’s a dance film. Not a musical, a dance film, a relatively modern phenomenon in which the storyline, acting, dialogue, cinematography, mise en scène and anything else Film Studies ‘A’ Level can teach you doesn’t matter in the slightest compared to the moves being busted. If you like dancing, the movie lives or dies on the strength of the routines. And as such, I am hopelessly biased. I was [...]