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Spotlighting the impact of cultural landmarks
Wayne Gooderham explores the influence of Hubert Selby Jr's transgressive masterpiece on popular music; and on the gender sensibilities of The Smiths, Van Morrison and The Velvet Underground in particular. CW: Some may find the language quoted in this article that describes LGBTQI people & sex workers outmoded or offensive
Forty-five years after it was first released, Joseph Burnett returns to Young's fifth solo record, an album that marked an angered transition from Harvest, bolstered by some of his bleakest and greatest moments. This feature was first published on 9 August 2014
The diaristic title of the Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Brian Eno and Nico's live record demands it be put into some kind of historical context. Michael Bellis looks at a highly unusual album released in a time of great cultural and social change
The Rotherham-based musician and artist looks back 40 years and considers the noise of industry, the noise of industrial action, the noise of excessive police violence and electronic music as political resistance. Digital and 35mm photographs of the site of the former Orgreave Coking Works taken by Max Roberts. In memory of drummer and producer Keith LeBlanc
It’s four decades since Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released their debut album From Her To Eternity, a record that found Cave attempting a new musical and lyrical language that could free him from his past and help him create – and curate – his future, says Wesley Doyle
With its roots in both the avant garde and novelty music, cut & paste came of age in 1987 with the likes of Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, Coldcut, Steinski, Bomb The Bass and M/A/R/R/S. Angus Batey traces the history of this magpie movement
Joni Mitchell's sixth album was a change of gear, coming deep from within the ME decade, its romantic entanglements dissolving to reveal a deeper search within but far from being solipsistic Mitchell’s rumination strikes a universal chord, says Matthew Lindsay
On its 40th anniversary, Eden Tizard explores The Fall’s Perverted By Language, an album where Mark E. Smith turns his focus to the suburbs and its inhabitants. A key record in The Fall saga, featuring a group at a crossroads, on the hunt for a new mode of attack
Forty years ago this week Marc Almond released the album that almost finished his career. Derided at the time as an overblown, self-obsessed indulgence, Torment and Toreros is now considered a flawed masterpiece in the lineage of Lou Reed’s Berlin, Big Star’s Third, and Nick Cave’s Your Funeral…My Trial. Here the people who made the record tell its story in their own words.
You can call it post hardcore if you like or you can refer to it as an essential corner stone of first wave emo; Noel Gardner just wants to celebrate an essential underground album seeing the light of day for the first time in a quarter of a century
Recently there has been much ado about Dark Side Of The Moon, but significantly less fuss made about The Final Cut. David Bennun examines how we got from one to the other in a single decade and how the current split at the heard of Pink Floyd represents the divide between crank leftism and centrist Dadism