The Stooges – Fun House

Written  for the 2006 book 100 Albums That Changed Music, edited by Sean Egan.
THE STOOGES
FUN HOUSE
Released US August 1970 UK December 1970
US: Elektra
UK: Elektra
TRACKLISTING: Down On The Street, Loose, TV Eye, Dirt, 1970 (aka I Feel Alright), Fun House, LA Blues
PRODUCED BY: Don Galluci 
ACCORDING to Henry Rollins, it is the greatest [...]

Prog 2.0

This is a piece written for Classic Rock two years ago, a rant about the rise of the new prog scene.
It’s official: prog rules…still. Whether it’s the neo-Floydian stadium prog of Tool, the sheet-metal art of Isis or the pulverising complexity of Mastodon, we have new prog bands coming at us from [...]

Black Widow – Sabbat bloody Sabbat

This was a Vault piece from Metal Hammer about the pioneering heavy prog band Black Widow. When I was 10 I heard Come To The Sabbat on my uncle Ian’s copy of Fill Your Head With Rock and it made a huge impression upon me. It was to be about another 30 years before I [...]

The Syd Problem

This was originally published in issue one of Classic Rock presents…Prog, part of a much bigger piece on Pink Floyd generally. It reworks some material from a Vox article written in the mid 90s which I can no longer find either in the stack of mouldy mags in the box in the attic or online.
 
Dateline [...]

The Damned – Phantasmagoria

This is a review of two Damned reissues published a few months ago in Classic Rock magazine. The Damned are criminally overlooked, perhaps because a lot of people of a certain age see them as a comedy band, or they bring out the knee-jerk anti-goth prejudices of the Uncut set. My favourite Damned album is [...]

La Dusseldorf

A fine way to start today.

A cosy confab with Marilyn Manson

This originally appeared in Metal Hammer two years ago.
THE air conditioned elevator takes us up to the heart of darkness. The curtains in the tastefully anonymous room are drawn and the lights are dimmed. Manson sits curled up in a chair, sunglasses on, sipping a glass of sickly green absinthe that actually looks a lot [...]

Eastern Hero – Stephen Chow

This is a piece I wrote for DVD Review a few years ago, about Stephen Chow, who had just made Kung Fu Hustle, one of my favourite films of the past few years.
STEPHEN CHOW
UNTIL fairly recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the glory days of the Hong Kong action movie were over. The [...]

A short talk with Omar from The Mars Volta

Their new album Octahedron is imminent and it’s a fantastic piece of work. This is a transcript of an interview done a few years ago essentially for a sidebar on prog that appeared in Metal Hammer.
The Mars Volta
What is prog?
“Progressive means pushing the boundaries of music, always trying new things. I don;t [...]

Did punk really kill prog?

This is a rant published a few years ago in Classic Rock, my big idea that I continue to bang on about at length.
IN all of the interminable books, memoirs, articles and TV documentaries contemplating the meaning and legacy of punk rock, there’s one thing that they all seem to agree upon: punk rock killed [...]