Last night I dreamt about Mark. We were 17 years old. He showed me two Magazine albums he owned. One was Real Life, the other a compilation. In my dream I referred to Real Life as Definitive Gaze, the opening song of Real Life and still one of my favourite Magazine songs. The second album…
Give me back my man – Remembering Ricky Wilson
This piece is not about The B-52s. It’s not even about Ricky Wilson. For those who don’t know, Ricky Wilson was the original guitar player of the B-52s. He died from AIDS in 1985, at the age of 32. I love the B-52s. I always had a soft spot for them. Their ridiculous mix of…
Your Funeral My Trial
My world is ordered and structured according to (the laws of) music. I think in songs, associate on the basis of music, sometimes talk in song titles. I honestly cannot believe other human beings don’t experience life in the form of soundscapes, don’t think of a piece of music for every single situation and have…
Ever fallen in love? – In Memory of Pete Shelley
Take 1 When Pete Shelley died at the age of only 63, I realised for the first time how short and fragile life is. It was a month after the death of my father, and at the age of 50 I should of course have realised it before. Only I didn’t. Sure, I thought about…
All is quiet on New Year’s Day
All is not so quiet, it’s also not New Year’s Day anymore, Blue Monday is behind us so for many of us most new year’s resolutions are dead and buried, waiting to be resuscitated next year. Still, I have a couple of my own, not the most obvious ones I hope, but important enough to…
Lost in Music
I’m lost in music… I have so many great ideas of things to write about. In no particular order: Hüsker Dü’s drummer Grant Hart and other unsung heroes of alternative music, Terry Hall, Shane McGowan, Sinead O’Connor and other artists with uncompromising personalities and largely unseen or unaddressed histories of abuse, the great records I…
Beyond C: Terry Riley’s Alternative Timeline
I cannot imagine Terry Riley to be an aggressive man, I cannot imagine him to have strong and absolute principles of what music should be, what good music should sound like and what separates music as art from music as entertainment. I cannot imagine Terry Riley having an argument with Beyoncé after watching one of…
Dresden, 1985 (incomplete and fragmented reconstruction)
It feels like the morning after. In beautiful but pale late summer sunshine I stare at the whisky-ginger ale in front of me, freshly refilled, then at Henry on the other side of the small round aluminium table, then across the boulevard at people hurrying for lunch, or back to the office again, I don’t…
Saint George
2016, Annus Horribilis, the year that brought the first installment of Donald Trump, the year that completely upset the natural order with the death of David Bowie, later followed by Prince and Leonard Cohen, the year I would very much like to forget, or pretend never happened, contained one strange anomaly, a Christmas event I…
How I learned to stop loving Lana (not totally, but still…)
I will make a counterpoint, show what I mean in the opposite. I´m talking about experiencing Olivia Rodrigo in concert, a fast paced, happy, energetic, pleasantly nasty experience. She wrapped the audience around her finger from the first bar of the first song, combining a perfectly balanced set with crystal clear vocals and excellent audience…
