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Illuminating treasured cultural artefacts
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.
In this month’s essay, Stephanie Phillips reflects on the 1998 lo-fi, art pop album Julie Ruin, in which riot grrrl veteran Kathleen Hanna reaffirms her position in feminist art, while creating the building blocks for a dance punk future
In this month's essay, Skye Butchard remembers their dad's collection of cassettes on which he recorded the 1981 radio version of Tolkien's classic to reflect on memory, archiving, and how familial relationships and loss are intrinsically bound up with the culture we share.
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
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
In this month's subscriber essay, Manu Ekanayake revisits the BBC adaptation of John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to explore ideas of Englishness and patriotism corrupted by the Establishment and private school system (note – contains spoilers!)
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
In this month's Low Culture essay, Jude Rogers reflects on Penelope Farmer's novel Charlotte Sometimes, its influence on The Cure, and how it captures the fraught time between childhood and adolescence that we perhaps never leave
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
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
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 Low Culture Essay, Travis Elborough revisits No Two The Same, a documentary about London's Pimlico that reveals many of the foibles of its creator, thirsty outsider and outspoken architecture critic Ian Nairn
In this month's Low Culture essay, commissioned exclusively for tQ subscribers, Harry Sword makes the case for George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series of novels being a fine lesson in the grim reality of British history, and the literary equivalents of the music of Throbbing Gristle and Iron Maiden
In this month's Low Culture essay, Paul Burston looks back at David Bowie's appearance in BBC TV adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Baal, exploring how the German playwright was a frequent inspiration to the singer's many incarnations
In this month's Low Culture Essay, author Audrey Golden explores Factory Records film The Mad Fuckers, which could have been the UK's answer to Pretty In Pink but ended up as one of the label's great ideas that never was – though it did inadvertently give the world Madchester
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
In this month's Low Culture essay, Roy Wilkinson writes about the the sleeve for Motörhead's Bomber LP and how it became both an Airfix kit and a curious artefact that sat in the anti-militarism of his brothers' band, Sea Power
In the first of our subscriber-exclusive Low Culture essays, Adelle Stripe opens her battered copy of Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian and argues that this guide to Britain's neolithic remains has a strikingly modern relevance
The 1994 documentary Reeling With PJ Harvey is not a household name outside of fan communities but to Stephanie Phillips, the Maria Mochnacz directed film remains a fitting example of an artist’s need to curate their image
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