Press Enter to Search or ESC to Close
In the evening June 9 I’ll be in Soho for a London Society event about the London life of the late cultural provocateur Malcolm McLaren. At workplace venue Fora in Broadwick Street writer Helen Barrett and I will be discussing the ways in which the man born in Stoke Newington and buried in Highgate Cemetery […]
Pete Flanagan, owner of the long-gone Zippo Records in Clapham, south London, has sent me this photograph of the shop interior. It sums up everything that was wonderful about this unique space, where Pete established a hub for like-minded souls. With staff including Edwin Pouncey (aka Savage Pencil), Pete also released otherwise hard-to-find records via […]
The Random House/Penguin takeover prompted a visit from photographer Sarah Lee to shoot my collection of Penguin books for illustrative material for The Guardian. One of her shots has already been used – a set of early 70s Raymond Chandlers with James Tormey jackets.
I’ve collected t-shirts for 30-odd years; this is one of my favourites.
My engagement with the spectacle of the Royal Wedding is taking the form of protesting at Lambeth Council’s leasing of Clapham Common to Camp Royale. British Remains, meanwhile, is publishing a design which offers a choice of expression.
Postcards are an abiding obsession, and this, just arrived from Will Birch, is a nice one to add to the collection.
Wyndham Lewis’ 1914 publication Blast 1 is the daddy of the modern aesthetic manifesto. It’s also a Modernist objet d’art. Iconoclastic and satiric, at times inchoate and irrational, Blast’s aim was to establish Vorticism‘s endorsement of the machine age and and simultaneous disavowal of the stultifying Romantic legacy of the Victorian era.
Year-ends and beginnings naturally bring a sense of loss, of time passed and experiences weighed. For me, 2010 will always mark the deaths of two individuals of personal import and also of lasting significance to our culture: Charlie Gillett and Malcolm McLaren. These apparently disparate individuals – Gillett 68 and McLaren 64 at their time […]
Alan Freeman (BBC DJ): “The popular music press always branded Henry Cow or Art Bears as ‘left wing’. “ Chris Cutler (drummer, Henry Cow/Art Bears/etc): ”Of course. Extremely. If you hate this government, and everything it stands for.” I witnessed Henry Cow live for the first time at a “free” concert held one afternoon in […]