Artists illuminate their non-musical passions
People say doomscrolling is tearing apart the social fabric – and they're probably right – but, says Kevin Lee Kharas of Real Lies, it's a problem he's learning to like. Here, he tells us what it's taught him about life and people
A decade ago CdY couldn't understand why people compared her music to that made by a man in his seventies, but after listening to the work of Scott Walker she found much she approved of, including scatological humour. Main portrait by Dana Trippe, all other pictures by Haley Fohr
Meemo Comma, aka Lara Rix-Martin, speaks to Jennifer Lucy Allan about how the Strugatsky brothers' 1971 Soviet sci-fi Roadside Picnic formed the source material of her new album Decimation Of I, and the lessons she's learned from wider Russian science fiction
To see himself through lockdown, James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers has been compiling tailor-made crossword puzzles for his family and friends. He tells Patrick Clarke about the therapeutic effects and extreme cultural wormholes they can inspire. Plus, solve an exclusive '80s indie crossword compiled by JDB himself!
When once he would cane it like there was no tomorrow, Jason Williamson now prefers to bake banana bread in the kitchen and lift weights in his garden. Here, the Sleaford Mods man runs JR Moores through the kind of baking advice you don't get from Mary Berry
Andrew Mueller is a travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist, pundit and author. He has also been a rock critic for donkey's and has been in a country rock band The Blazing Zoo for nigh on a decade. We asked him if the former had given him any insights into the latter...
In the second of our series of Factory Floor features, drummer Gabe Gurnsey tells us about the pleasures, pongs and musical potential of his English bulldog, Vince. Photos by Anna Stroe, classic album covers feat. Vince by Gurnsey
In Cabaret Voltaire, Chris Watson used tape loops and field recordings as a pioneer of industrial music. Now, he is a sound recordist for BBC nature programmes who also works on installations, films and his own albums. He speaks to Luke Turner about trying to capture the sound of the world in a very noisy modern age
Mary Epworth's Twitter profile is three words long. It reads 'I like hares'. Here, the singer-songwriter and self-confessed "wildlife-obsessive" talks to John Freeman about the "otherworldly, but hugely misunderstood" mammal.
Steve Ignorant now lives in North Norfolk and volunteers as a crew member on the independent Sea Palling lifeboat. Here, he tells Luke Turner about his work on the choppy grey waters. Photo thanks to Damon Allen Davison
In the wake of Nightingales' new record The Awful Truth, the band's leader Robert Lloyd takes John Quin for a freewheeling ride through 13 significant tracks, from a boyhood love of Lulu and Lou Reed to later encounters with Faust and Freakwater
In this month's Low Culture subscriber essay, Ophira Gottlieb looks at the 2002 documentary collaboration between poet Simon Armitage and the inmates of Feltham Young Offenders Institution, arguing it was a notable addition to the ancient canon of prison literature
In this month's essay, Jim Gibson unpicks the cultural myths of the idyllic British countryside as he reflects on Duane Hopkins' 2008 film Better Things in the context of his own life in a rural working class community
We love it when our subscribers send in suggestions of things for us to talk about – but do we love what they’re suggesting? Is Eurythmics’ soundtrack to the 1984 film 1984 doubleplusgood or does it send John Doran into his own personal Room 101? Find out here.
In this month's subscriber essay, novelist Richard Milward travels back 55 years to the cobblestone-strewn streets of Paris, the release of France Gall's album 1968, and discovers how a time of political upheaval had a profound impact on the happy-go-lucky genre of yé-yé
Each year, Eamonn Forde would make a Christmas pilgrimage to "London's greatest tourist attraction", the statue to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed at Harrods. In this month's Low Culture Essay, he mourns its loss, and reflects on the nature of its art
As festival season approaches, writer, memoirist and founder of the Class Festival of literature Natasha Carthew looks back to the 1980s and reflects on the influence of the anarchic Elephant Fayre on her life and work. Images courtesy of Port Eliot / Michael Barrett
Troubled by facts that felt like fiction, Anna Doble feared Patrick Keiller's 1994 film might all be an in-joke. But, as she writes in this month's Low Culture Essay, it created a magic-real place that she would later explore through song.
Ray Aggs speaks to Zara Hedderman about the music created during their Samarbeta residency earlier this year, exploring their relationship with folk music as a person of colour, and released exclusively to tQ subscribers today. Plus, exclusive footage documenting its process, courtesy of Low Four