Singer-songwriter Carlene Carter has posted a touching memoir of her mother, the country giant June Carter Cash who would have been 86 this week, at online music ‘zine Innocent Words.
Just when boys with guitars threaten to rule pop life – Damon’s all over Smash Hits, Ash are big in Big! and Liam can’t move for tabloid frenzy – an all-girl, in-your-face pop group have arrived with enough sass to burst their rockist bubble.
From Music Week, April 1996
I see that next week marks the 19th anniversary of the release of Wannabe. Coincidentally I came across this cutting while ferreting around my magazine archive: the first published interview with the Spice Girls, when they launched the promotional campaign for the single and I was a contributing editor at industry publication Music Week.
I remember quite a lot about my encounter with the five of them at Virgin Records hq in Ladbroke Grove, not least that they afforded opportunities for digs at the full-of-itself British rock cabal which had grown out of the damp squib which was Britpop.
Continue reading The Spice Girls: My part in their rise and my non-appearance in the Wannabe video
Rocking Underground is the title of Scarlett Sabet’s beautifully presented poetry collection.
Continue reading Spare and unflinching: Scarlett Sabet’s Rocking Underground
Check out, if you have the chance, Derek Boshier’s giant 2011 work Reigning Apps And Blogs in the summer show curated by Michael Craig Martin at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
Continue reading Derek Boshier’s Reigning Apps And Blogs in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
“As an artist Derek Boshier has never lost his sense of wonder at the world” – David Hockney
The publication date of Derek Boshier: Rethink/Re-entry – the monograph of the great British artist I have edited – is confirmed as October 5.
Published by Thames & Hudson with a preface by David Hockney, Rethink/Re-entry contains 300-plus illustrations, from student exercises in the mid-50s to current works including the cover, a new portrait of Hockney and chapter openers especially designed by Boshier for the project.
Tonight (June 19) witnesses a private view for the inaugural exhibition at Bohemia Club in the south coast town of St Leonard’s-on-Sea.
A few years ago I attempted a dissection of the intriguing elements of the culture-shock t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!, produced by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein for sale in Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974.
In You’re Gonna Wake Up, the declamatory tone, aggressive punctuation, satirical bite and use of basic typographical emphases such as the repeated forward slash and random capitalised text combined to detonate a densely packed cultural device.
For its 75th anniversary issue, US visual culture publication Print has selected Barney Bubbles as one of six “unsung heroes of design”.
The regions are where it’s at these days, so we are told, and naturally Barney Bubbles designs can be found in the thick of it.
This portrait of Malcolm McLaren was captured among the columns outside the entrance to London’s august British Museum by Andy Rosen in 1983.
In the photograph taken during promotion of the Duck Rock album, which was released at the start of 1983, McLaren sported a rare trenchcoat design from the Witches collection he and Vivienne Westwood debuted on the catwalk that spring.
Continue reading Malcolm McLaren in Witches trenchcoat on the steps of the British Museum 1983