On TikTok, the BBC is running a livestream of a vigil in Buenos Aires; women in their mid-twenties gather with candles and side-fringes, singing One Direction ballads in heavy accents. News of Liam Payne’s sudden death aged 31 has broken …
Chappell Roan’s fame is a drag
“I feel like fame is just abusive,” Chappell Roan admits in a recent interview. “The vibe of this — stalking, talking shit online, [people who] won’t leave you alone, yelling at you in public — is the vibe of an …
Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland
If you were to judge a country by the grim piety of its journalistic depictions, you’d swear Northern Ireland were one big funeral, begetting nothing but more funerals and all of us professional keeners. It’s not that the region isn’t …
It’s Disney Girl vs Oasis Man
Finding myself at a birthday party for much younger celebrants this weekend, I felt a wraith among the living. My life’s ambition to look like Michelle Pfeiffer had finally been realised — only it was the Stardust Pfeiffer, a 5,000-year-old …
The mean girls conquering pop
Sabrina’s got that boy wrapped round her finger. Olivia knows she might sound crazy but she doesn’t care. Chappell is having a sexually explicit kinda love affair with a closeted woman. Billie is going to eat that girl for lunch, …
Mama Swifties need to grow up
It’s been a bumper week for middle-aged journalists enthusing about Taylor Swift. Broadsheet music critics attending the Edinburgh leg of her ongoing Eras tour seemed positively high on second-hand oestrogen fumes as they filed their encomiums. And there were further …
The night I conquered Berghain
There are few things in life more satisfying than hearing your own voice blasted out of a giant sound system in the bowels of a German sex club. What a glorious scene to soundtrack. People being tortured in public for …
How Parklife skewered the Nineties
If Damon Albarn was telling the truth, and Saturday’s Coachella performance was Blur’s “last gig”, it was a miserable swansong. A field of influencers (some of whom appeared to not know who Blur are) crowded into the most corporatised festival …
Why we need more Kurt Cobains
It’s been 30 years since Kurt Cobain blew his own head off with a shotgun. It’s impossible to imagine mainstream rock success in bed with that kind of despondency in this day and age. Rap might harbour that kind of …
Taylor Swift, America’s national hero
A record number of Americans are likely to watch this Sunday’s Super Bowl, probably only half of whom will be following the actual game. The other half will be scanning the luxury boxes for tantalising glimpses of Taylor Swift, the …
How Britain killed off its musical tribes
When the Teddy boys burst onto the scene at the start of the drab Fifties, they established the template for all subcultures to follow. There have always been ultra-loyal music fans of individual artists, but this was something else: a …
Searching for Shane MacGowan
Other than a dissection of abject narcissism, I’m no longer sure poetry has much to offer us. I think we’re losing our capacity to look outwards. The writing that interests me most now is about this crisis, this prolapsing of …
Shane MacGowan: Ireland’s punk poet
One Christmas on the train home to see my parents, Shane MacGowan was on the same carriage. The children in the carriage were drawn to him like he was Santa Claus, and they broke out into excited giggling every time …
Why Snoop Dogg should quit weed
Last week, the world awoke to a new status quo, a shifted paradigm, the end of an era. Where getting high was concerned, the Pope had just given up on Catholicism: Snoop Dogg had retired from the smoke. Leaderless, rudderless …
Punk’s spirit is broken
Turns out I’m still hated in Liverpool, even though I’m actually a fan of the Scouse. Wandering around Blue Dot Festival a month ago, I stopped to poach a fag off of a gaggle of Liverpudlians sat around the main …