Psychiatry and Songs

In 1993, I gave Last Splash by The Breeders 12/12, a Hot Press double six, as indicated in the final para of this brief review. The powers that be in HP were like: nope—this is a kid. (I was.) But they didn’t remove the line saying why I couldn’t deduct any points (“this record was […]

In late 1994, I was asked to review Second Coming by The Stone Roses. That felt like a moment of arrival in Hot Press at the end of my second year. This was BIG. Bill Graham had reviewed the first. I made sure I didn’t read any other reviews, though after I submitted my encomium […]

Badly Drawn Boy: “One Plus One Is One” (XL). WITH HIS faux-bumbling nom de plume and head-scratching demeanour, not to mention the welded-on woolly hat, Damon Gough has perfected the act of the accidental auteur, stumbling haplessly into the spotlight. But you don’t win the Mercury Prize (The Hour Of Bewilderbeast) or soundtrack multiplex movies […]

Nothing to say here. Just that this was a fantastic record and unexpectedly so. In 1994, I’d been in San Francisco making a pilgrimage to AMC sites and ignoring RHP sites like Grace Cathedral Park. Didn’t care, but this record nearly ten years later tranformed my relationship with Kozelek. Seventeen years ago, my wife’s near-twin […]

Just wanted to post this alongside the accompanying live review. Fabulous album all these years later. Lead Us Not Into Temptation, David Byrne’s soundtrack to Young Adam, was sublime, one of the best records of last year. Take a recent immersion in film scores and a well-known wildly wandering muse, and it’s no surprise that […]

This is a short review of a David Byrne show in the Olympia that I went to with my wife and we both really loved. Grown Backwards is the only solo album of his I have spent proper time with. That formal excellence aversion I mention below: I think that never went away. Right now, […]

Just a couple of things about this piece. It was titled Swede Dreams in HP, and still is on the HP site, because when I interviewed Stephen Malkmus his impending debut solo album was going to be called Swedish Reggae. So I, or someone, popped that headline onto the piece. By the time the piece […]

One evening in February 1994, I sat on the floor of the hall of my family home, shushing my parents and brothers while I awaited a call from Kristin Hersh in Chicago. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I was new to interviewing. I was nearly a year in Hot Press by then but […]

The Holy Bible is the sacred text of the Manic Street Preachers. I have hardly ever listened to it all the way through. Not too thrilled with this: people really love it. It was just a little too pain-filled, even for me, and at the time I was pretty much proud of how much pain […]