RETROMANIA

New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.

August is the deadest month.

In the comments to the previous post about Robyn Hitchcock and his epigonic attempt to perpetuate 1967...

Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it.

People are constantly asking me for my thoughts on Mark Fisher.

Listen and watch here

A flurry of recent debate on the topic of cultural stagnation versus "the future is alive and well actually!"

New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.

I have been worried that the brothers’s new effort has not received the amount of attention it deserves.

One of my favorite things I've written in the last 15 years or so, is this demolition job on what I called "recreativity" - a.k.a.

did an interview with a Swiss journo, no idea if he used the quotes... here they are (waste not want not as me old mum likes to say... another maxim of her's appears later) - Since we buy these CD boxes with all the extra tracks but rarely listen to those…

Dear Simon Reynolds, My name is ___________________ and I work with the programming team at BBC Radio 4, a nationally recognized Hot Adult Contemporary station reaching more than 1.39 million weekly listeners across the UK, with additional global reach th…

Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.

Interesting piece at Split Infinities on a band that is getting talked about at the moment but written before all the are-they-or-aren't-they buzz "Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home…

"And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion.

Reading Charlie Warzel's piece at The Atlantic about "monitoring the situation" - and specifically about a website that turns your screen into a situation room, with multiple ever-changing data feeds on the war and its economic repercussions - I thought of

Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the parish hall party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.

I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification.

Bevis Frond addresses the Anxiety of Influence in song - appropriately using the most Oedipus Complex-obsessed, Norman O.Brown-stanning man in rock, Jim Morrison, although it's a different Jim who forever shadows his (re)creative efforts.

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!

Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800 The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which a…

Someone asked me what I meant by this term….

Historians of retro concur that the first time "retro" was used in its current way was in France in the early '70s, with the phrase mode rétro - the retro style - to describe a spate of historical films about France during World War 2, which then sparked a

"It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe.

Martin Ingle oblivious to the irony of banging on about an already banged-to-bits critique "regurgitating a past that never existed" - apart from that being a contradiction in terms (if it never existed, it could never be consumed in the first place, let…

Kieran Press-Reynolds, in his Pitchfork column Rabbit Holed, interviews "Music Place, the bonkers archivist fighting against the sterility of music rec hubs today, creating a cursed but beautiful 'breadcrumb trail' across scenes and languages"

Field Music are one of those bands I don't have much of a fix on - I'd sort of mentally filed them as the kind of group Pitchfork habitually gives a good review to, alongside I dunno The Microphones / Mount Eerie (Actually looking into it they've had some…