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Spotlighting the impact of cultural landmarks
In 1995, Polly Harvey reinvented herself as a pink catsuit-wearing vamp peddling an album of stormy gothic American blues. But was it really such a surprise? Ben Hewitt argues the transformation only put up in lights what Harvey had already shown: she was an actor as much as a singer
Yes they probably invented folk rock but also, on their landmark third album, Fairport Convention, presented a view of England that has now been lost... one of violent division along lines of class and gender but one that was also positive and questing, says Michael Hann
Rather than simply play acoustic versions of their hits, Nirvana treated MTV’s Unplugged show as an opportunity to turn their own music on its head, to connect it to American roots and European glam. 25 years on, the resulting album, MTV Unplugged In New York, stands as their finest work, says David Bennun
Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s final album together is a collection of songs “about going out” with a troubled mind at their core. When he recovered from a traumatising illness, Michael White fell hard for its blend of beats and brooding
The legacy of Michael Jackson looked to be assured when he died a decade ago, but further shocking allegations have left him in danger of being “cancelled”. Can all the King of Pop’s horses and all the King’s men put MJ back together again? And, asks Jeremy Allen, to what extent is his legacy worth saving anyway?
Revisiting the work of the American futurist and self-described agnostic mystic, Robert Anton Wilson, forty years since the publication of his Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, Sean Kitching finds the author’s questing vision more vital and necessary today than it has ever been
Michael Hann talks to Joe Elliott of Def Leppard, Cronos of Venom, Biff Byford of Saxon and more about the grassroots movement termed the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal which revitalised the genre and laid the foundations for extreme metal as we know it today
Sean Kitching talks to Olivia Tremor Control co-founder, Will Cullen Hart, about re-injecting the psychedelic into 60s psych pop and the less immediately apparent influences that inspired The Olivia Tremor Control’s 1999 magnum opus, Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One