After building a home studio the SMD musician and Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode producer James Ford picked up no less than 18 instruments – and a microphone – in order to make his beguiling debut LP. Words by Jeremy Allen. All portraits by Pip Bourdillon
Simian Mobile Disco's second live album offers an oblique answer to a series of questions about live dance music. Chad Parkhill presses the duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw about their motives in releasing this document of their show
As she prepares to release her new EP with Simian Mobile Disco, Luke Turner sits down with Beth Ditto and finds that, a million record sales down the line from that song, Gossip's singer is still an unreformed Arkansas punk. Just with a better mattress
In this month's Low Culture essay, Jennifer Lucy Allan rewatches the infamous rave episode of 90s TV detective drama Inspector Morse, and discovers that while he might have preferred lunchtime ale to nocturnal pingers, the Oxford detective knew all about a comedown
Low Culture is a new series where tQ writers use lockdown time to pull some of their favourite music, films, games and books off the shelves in order to tackle an idea that's been bugging them for a long time. In the first instalment John Doran argues that the Velvet Underground only really hit their true peak after they lost Nico, Warhol and Cale
Recently discovered free jazz gems from Los Angeles and Berlin, orchestral free jazz spiked by West African grooves, folk-jazz tracing the history of indigenous North American Wabanaki people, and dynamic dice-and-splice free jazz assemblages from LA are featured in Peter Margasak’s latest round up of jazz and improvised music.
Half a century after the release of one of the all-time great live albums, John Doran argues that the Velvet Underground only really hit their true peak after they lost Nico, Warhol and Cale. This feature was first published on 2 April 2020