RETROSPECTIVE: The Thin White Duke Does Philly Soul

| IZui0uMTe2

In 1975, David Bowie did what he did best and shocked everyone by completely changing direction. Fresh off the theatrical dystopia of Diamond Dogs, he abandoned glam rock for the smoky soul clubs of Philadelphia, emerging with Young Americans, an album that bewildered fans and critics alike. Was it cultural appropriation or genuine artistic evolution? A cynical cash-grab or a brave reinvention? Five decades on, Bowie’s “plastic soul” period remains one of his most divisive yet fascinating chapters – a skeletal ex-pat English art-rocker uniquely attempting American R&B and somehow pulling it off. Here’s why Young Americans deserves another listen, and why it matters more than you might think in the Bowie story.

So here’s the thing about Young Americans: it’s the sound of Bowie burning down everything that made him a star and dancing in the ashes. After the glam apocalypse of Diamond Dogs and all that Orwellian dystopia, he relocated to America, got absolutely obsessed with soul music, and came back with what might be the most audacious act of cultural appropriation – or appreciation, depending on your politics, in rock history.

Released in March ’75, this is Bowie’s “plastic soul” period, a term he coined himself with typical self-deprecating wit. But don’t let that fool you. There’s nothing remotely plastic about the grooves on this record. Recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia – the same room where the O’Jays and Harold Melvin cut their classics, with backing from some of the city’s finest sessionaires, this is as authentic as a skeletal English art-rock chameleon can get when he’s knee-deep in American R&B.

The title track opens proceedings like a slow-motion car crash of strings, backing vocals, and that unmistakable Bowie croon, now deeper, more soulful, dripping with a kind of desperate romanticism. “Do you remember your President Nixon?” he asks, and suddenly you’re not just listening to a pop song but witnessing Bowie’s America, all Watergate paranoia, sexual confusion, and the dying embers of the American Dream. It’s protest music for the disaffected, too fucked up to march but too aware to look away.

Then there’s “Win,” which nobody talks about enough. Luther Vandross is buried in there somewhere in the backing vocals – yes, that Luther Vandross, before anyone knew his name, and the whole thing builds like some kind of gospel testifying session that never quite commits to salvation. Bowie’s always been good at leaving you hanging, spiritually speaking.

“Fascination” came later, added for the US release, and it’s pure cocaine-and-mirrors funk, co-written with Vandross. The falsetto, the handclaps, the sheer cheek of it all – it shouldn’t work, but Bowie’s got that alchemist’s touch. He takes these American forms and filters them through his alien sensibility, and somehow it comes out sounding inevitable.

The real revelation, though, is “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Seven minutes of strung-out funk that sounds like Bowie’s finally stopped running from something or maybe just paused for breath. The bass line alone could hypnotize you, and by the time the strings come swirling in, you’re gone. It’s the sound of 4am in a city you don’t know, with people you’ll never see again, and everything feels both meaningless and utterly vital.

Of course, there’s the Beatles cover – “Across the Universe” which some people hate on principle. Fair enough. But Bowie strips away all the cosmic whimsy and turns it into something genuinely melancholic, like he’s found Lennon’s hymn to universal consciousness at the bottom of a bottle. It’s maudlin, sure, but it fits the record’s emotional landscape perfectly.

And we can’t ignore “Fame,” can we? The funk bastard child of Bowie’s collaboration with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar, recorded during these sessions. His first proper American number one, and a deliciously bitter pill about the very celebrity machine he’d been feeding for years. The irony of becoming even more famous by singing about how much fame fucks you up wasn’t lost on anyone, least of all Bowie himself.

In the Bowie canon, Young Americans is the hinge. It’s where he stops being a glam rock prophet and starts his journey toward becoming… well, everything else. Berlin, Eno, the Thin White Duke persona, all of it begins here with this sharp left turn into soul. Some fans never forgave him for it and saw it as betrayal. But that’s always been Bowie’s genius he never gives you what you expect, and just when you think you’ve got him figured out, he’s already three moves ahead.

The album’s not perfect. It’s occasionally overwrought, sometimes too slick for its own good, and there are moments where you can hear Bowie straining against the limitations of his voice in this register. But that’s part of what makes it fascinating. You’re hearing someone genuinely stretching, genuinely trying to become something they’re not, and somehow making that transformation itself into art.

Looking back, Young Americans feels like Bowie at his most vulnerable, stripped of the sci-fi armour and glitter makeup, just a deeply weird English guy trying to make sense of America, fame, and his own restless creative spirit. It’s not his best album that’s an argument for another day, but it might be his bravest and it’s undoubtedly enduring. And in an era where most rock stars were still doing the same shtick they’d been doing since 1968, that counts for something.

The plastic soul, it turns out, had more heart than most of the genuine articles.

RETROSPECTIVE: We’re Selling England By The Pound

| IZui0uMTe2

A retrospective of Genesis’ ‘Selling England By The Pound’. The band’s fifth long player from 1973 is a Progressive Rock classic that captured a changing newly decimal Britain through Mellotrons, lawnmower men and Cockney villains. Essential listening for anyone who thinks Prog Rock was all capes and codswallop. Genesis proved you could be both preposterous and profound.


GENESIS: Selling England By The Pound (Charisma) 1973

There was something gloriously, quintessentially English about Genesis that set them apart from the prog rock pack cluttering up the album charts in 1973. Where Yes disappeared up their own cosmic backsides and ELP bludgeoned you with their virtuosity, Peter Gabriel and his merry band of public schoolboys crafted something altogether more peculiar and affecting with this, their fifth album.

Selling England By The Pound arrived at a curious juncture for the band. After the commercial disappointment of Foxtrot failing to break America (despite ‘Supper’s Ready’ being the sort of 23-minute epic that should have had the Yanks weeping into their cornflakes), Genesis regrouped and produced what many consider their defining statement. Recorded at Island Studios with John Burns and the band sharing production duties, this was a record that positively reeked of England in 1973: a country caught between nostalgia for its crumbling past and uncertainty about its increasingly tatty future.

The album opened with ‘Dancing With The Moonlit Knight’, which nicked its central melody from ‘I Know What I Like’ before that song even appeared. Gabriel’s lyrics were stuffed with references to Wimpy Bars, breakfast cereal mascots and Churchill’s England, painting a portrait of a nation flogging off its heritage for American consumer tat. “Can you tell me where my country lies?” he asked, and you suspected he already knew the answer. Tony Banks’ Mellotron swirled around like fog over the Home Counties while Steve Hackett’s guitar work was, as ever, economical but devastating.

‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’ was the obvious single, and it proved a canny choice. Built around Phil Collins’ crisp, almost funky drumming and a nursery rhyme melody, it told the story of a lawnmower man content with his lot. It was Genesis at their most accessible, which wasn’t saying much, but there was real charm in its eccentricity. The promotional film they shot, with Gabriel prancing about in a cloth cap and braces, was either brilliant or barmy. Possibly both.

But it was ‘Firth of Fifth’ that had the musos wetting themselves. Banks’ opening piano passage was genuinely beautiful, all cascading romanticism and melancholy, before the band crashed in with typical Genesis precision. Hackett’s guitar solo in the instrumental section was an absolute belter, soaring and lyrical without ever tipping into tedious showboating. If you needed to convince someone that progressive rock could be genuinely moving rather than just technically accomplished, this was the track to stick on the turntable.

‘More Fool Me’, sung by Collins, was a bit of pleasant fluff really, though his voice had a vulnerability that suited the material. ‘The Battle of Epping Forest’, however, was vintage Gabriel madness: a nine-minute saga about rival gangs of Cockney villains that name-checked half of East London and featured more characters than a Dickens novel. It was exhausting, occasionally bewildering, but never boring. The time signatures flipped about like eels while Gabriel adopted various accents and personas. You either thought it was genius or pretentious twaddle. This writer leaned towards the former.

The album closed with ‘The Cinema Show’ and ‘Aisle of Plenty’, the latter essentially a reprise that bookended the record nicely. ‘The Cinema Show’ was another lengthy piece that referenced T.S. Eliot and featured some of the most intricate playing on the record. Banks’ organ work was particularly fine, while the rhythm section of Collins and Mike Rutherford locked together with the sort of telepathy that only came from years of playing school halls and student unions together.

What was remarkable about Selling England By The Pound was how distinctly British it sounded. This wasn’t blues-rock or heavy metal or glam. It was something altogether stranger: folk melodies colliding with classical pretensions, Edwardian music hall meeting avant-garde rock, all filtered through the sensibilities of five blokes who probably read too much Tolkien at Charterhouse.

Gabriel remained one of rock’s most fascinating frontmen, a genuine oddball who could make theatrical gestures seem vital rather than risible. His lyrics here were his best yet, full of wordplay and social observation, even if they occasionally veered into sixth-form poetry territory. The rest of the band were operating at a level of musicianship that would have been intimidating if it wasn’t in service of actual songs rather than mere technical exercises.

Did this prove to be the album that broke Genesis to a wider audience? Not quite. They were far too weird, too English, too prog for that. But for those willing to enter their peculiar world, Selling England By The Pound was a rich and rewarding experience.

RETROSPECTIVE: Dire Straits’ 1980 Audiophile Delight

| IZui0uMTe2

A retrospective review of Dire Straits’ 1980 album Making Movies. Knopfler’s technical brilliance meets romantic melancholy in an era that supposedly had no use for either. In my heavily late Seventies NME hack influenced style.


DIRE STRAITS: Making Movies (Vertigo) 1980

There was something deeply suspicious about a band this technically accomplished in 1980. While half of London was still thrashing about in bin liners and safety pins, Mark Knopfler’s lot turned up with an album so pristine, 38 minutes so meticulously crafted, that you half expected to find the corners mitred.

Making Movies arrived eighteen months after their self-titled debut made them improbable millionaires in America, and it was clear they’d been spending the intervening period in expensive studios rather than the back rooms of grotty pubs. Recorded at New York’s Power Station with Jimmy Iovine producing – the man who’d just finished polishing Springsteen’s The River – this was Dire Straits going for broke, or rather, going for more money than they’d already got.

The opening salvo, “Tunnel of Love,” sprawled across eight minutes like some Dylanesque fever dream filtered through a Tyneside accent. It was all fairgrounds and Spanish guitars, with Knopfler’s finger-picked lines circling each other like moths round a sodium lamp. The man played like he was being paid by the note, which he probably was.

“Romeo and Juliet” – which got played to death on Radio 1 – was the sort of thing that had sixth-formers scribbling lyrics in the back of their French textbooks for years. It was wretchedly romantic, all unrequited longing and cinema queues, with Knopfler doing his best to sound like he’d actually had his heart broken rather than just read about it in a Leonard Cohen novel.

But here was the rub: it worked. Despite themselves, despite the almost offensive levels of musicianship on display, despite the fact that punk never happened in their world, Dire Straits crafted something genuinely affecting. “Hand in Hand” swung like prime-era Dylan, while “Les Boys” – a tawdry tale of Parisian transvestites – had the sort of seediness that Bowie used to do before he discovered Switzerland and synthos.

The centrepiece, though, was “Skateaway,” a peculiar bit of New Wave-ish funk about a rollerskating girl cruising through urban decay. It had synthesizers, for God’s sake. Synthesizers! On a Dire Straits record! Pick Withers’ drumming was tighter than a gnat’s chuff, and the whole thing sounded like what might happen if Steely Dan decided to have a go at writing a hit single.

Mark Knopfler remained an enigma wrapped in a headband. His vocals sounded like he was perpetually on the verge of nodding off, yet there was a sly intelligence to his wordplay that elevated this above standard-issue soft rock tedium. He’d clearly listened to a lot of JJ Cale, a lot of Dylan, a lot of those American FM radio staples, and he wasn’t afraid to nick the best bits.

The production was, predictably, immaculate. Every hi-hat shimmer, every bass throb from John Illsley, every keyboard wash from Roy Bittan (on loan from the E Street Band, no less) sat exactly where it should. It was the sonic equivalent of a freshly Hoovered front room with the cushions all plumped up.

Which brought us back to that initial suspicion. In an era when the most exciting music was being made by people who could barely play their instruments, Dire Straits were almost confrontationally competent. They weren’t interested in year zero, in tearing it all down and starting again. They wanted to take you to the pictures, buy you chips on the way home, and maybe have a bit of a cuddle if you were lucky.

And you know what? Sometimes that was enough. Making Movies didn’t change your life or inspire you to form a band in your mate’s garage. But on a rainy Tuesday evening when you were skint and miserable and the world seemed determined to grind you down, it might just have made things seem temporarily bearable.

Which, in 1980, was worth something.

RETROSPECTIVE: Talking Heads – Remain In Light 1980

| IZui0uMTe2

Some records arrive like a whisper and fade, others crash in like an avalanche and leave you stumbling in their wake. Remain in Light is one of the latter, a slab of paranoia, rhythm, and obsession that still sounds as unmoored and visionary in 2025 as it did in 1980. Forty-five years on, the album hums with the intensity of four New Yorkers trying to rethink the world, their identities, and what a pop record could do. It is both human and alien, cerebral and primal, art-school gone feral. Listening now, you realise Talking Heads did not so much make an album as invent a language for disorientation.

Part One: The Sleeve

Pick up the sleeve and your first impression is confusion masquerading as design. Four faces, distorted and layered, hover in red, black, and white, a simulacrum of identity rendered through early MIT image-processing technology. The work of Tibor Kalman and M&Co, it feels both robotic and living. Your eyes register familiar features, only to be immediately unmoored. Tina Weymouth’s fascination with African masks, refracted through digital manipulation, turns the human face into a machine’s suggestion. It is uncanny, a whisper of the postmodern anxiety that would haunt the next four decades of visual culture.

Every detail matters. The typography is sharp and arresting, suggesting urgency without screaming. Fighter-bomber Avenger silhouettes and ghostly abstractions hover in the margins, hinting at violence, both literal and psychic. The design does not complement the music so much as anticipate it, a visual prelude to the interlocking chaos within. In 1980, it was a statement that identity was mutable, mediated, and constantly under negotiation. Today, that’s the norm.

Kalman’s brilliance was in making technological imperfection a part of the aesthetic. The faces are corrupted, glitched, degraded – human error filtered through a machine. This is not a record cover; it is a manifesto. By the time you slide the vinyl from its jacket, you are already prepared for disorientation. What follows is not just music, it is an ecosystem, a carefully constructed labyrinth designed to engage both body and mind.

Part Two: The Music & Legacy

Recording began at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, a sun-soaked bunker that would become a crucible for genius and frustration alike. The band was joined by Brian Eno, the unofficial fifth Head, whose influence was less about notes than architecture. He arrived with a philosophy: treat the studio as an instrument, treat chaos as composition, and do not flinch at failure. The sessions were famously intense. The band worked long, bewildering hours, layering loops, polyrhythms, and improvisations until something miraculous emerged from the mess.

The foundation was African-inspired polyrhythms, specifically the hypnotic grooves of Fela Kuti. This was not mere imitation; it was a translation of complex rhythmic systems into a New York art-rock vocabulary. Each instrument moves independently, a conversation of contradictions. Drums and percussion interlock but never collide, basslines snake around vocal hooks, and guitars oscillate between melody and texture. Adrian Belew’s guitar is both nervous and ecstatic, Jon Hassell’s trumpet drifts like a mirage, and Eno’s synthesizer textures shimmer in the spaces between. The record is dense yet breathable, controlled yet chaotic, deliberate yet accidental.

Byrne’s vocals are equally layered, a collage of obsessions and idiosyncrasies. He borrows from hip-hop cadences, ritualistic chant, and fragmented narrative, creating a delivery that is more incantation than song. The lyrics often circle existential dread with playful detachment. In “Born Under Punches”, Byrne’s voice is manic and fractured, a protagonist grappling with information overload and identity crisis. “Crosseyed and Painless” is a sermon on anxiety, paranoia, and social collapse, delivered with sharp wit and relentless rhythm.

The album’s architecture is deliberate. The first side, buoyed by kinetic energy, draws you into the labyrinth. “The Great Curve” is an ecstatic frenzy, the band locked in an ecstatic groove that simultaneously propels and destabilises. By the time “Once in a Lifetime” arrives, you are primed for reflection. The song balances existential inquiry with dance floor immediacy, Byrne pondering selfhood and entropy against a backdrop of hypnotic repetition. It is both absurd and devastatingly human.

Side two darkens the palette. “Houses in Motion” jitters with post-industrial dread, a cityscape of anxiety rendered in sound. “Seen and Not Seen” drifts toward abstraction, its protagonist dissolving into observation, a meditation on presence, absence, and perception. “Listening Wind” introduces political undercurrents, a commentary on global turbulence and American complacency filtered through dense polyrhythms and hypnotic motifs. The album closes with “The Overload”, a spectral transmission that hints at collapse and transcendence simultaneously.

The genius of Remain in Light lies in its simultaneity. It is both academic and visceral, cerebral and bodily. It occupies a transitional space where intellect and instinct cohabit uneasily but beautifully. The recording process itself becomes audible: the tape loops, studio experimentation, and improvisational layering are part of the listening experience. You hear the struggle, the trial and error, the moments of panic and revelation. This is music as architecture, as experiment, as living organism.

Culturally, the album is a negotiation of influence. The band’s engagement with African rhythms is complex, filtered through Western ears and art-school sensibility. It raises questions about appropriation, translation, and homage, but the resulting work is undeniably original. It is a fusion of ideas and sounds that challenges the listener to reconsider boundaries, genres, and expectations. The record is not just a reflection of its time, it is a critique of it, questioning identity, technology, and the very notion of pop music as a commodity.

The legacy of Remain in Light is vast. Upon release, it charted modestly, yet critics recognised its audacity. The album influenced generations of musicians, from the electronic experiments of the eighties to the worldbeat experiments of later decades. It bridged punk’s urgency with funk’s elasticity, art-school conceptualism with dancefloor immediacy. Touring the album proved difficult; the complexity and intensity of the arrangements tested the band to their limits. Yet the recordings themselves endure, a testament to ambition, collaboration, and the willingness to confront chaos head-on.

Listening today, the album resonates with a prescience that is uncanny. Byrne’s exploration of selfhood, Eno’s textural interventions, the band’s rhythmic sophistication all speak to an era increasingly dominated by technology and mediated experience. Forty-five years on, the music still feels urgent, still unsettles and energises in equal measure. It is a record that rewards repeated engagement, revealing new facets with each listen. The textures, the contradictions, the obsessive layering, all retain their power to unsettle and illuminate.

In retrospect, Remain in Light is not just an album. It is a blueprint for artistic ambition, a testament to the potential of collaboration and the thrill of experimentation. It embodies the tension between accessibility and difficulty, dance and reflection, humour and despair. Its enduring influence is evident not only in the artists who followed but in the ways it continues to challenge contemporary listeners. The record is a meditation on identity, perception, and creativity itself, an exploration that remains vital and uncontainable.

Four decades on, the album hums with life, refusing to settle into nostalgia or canonisation. It is human, machine, ritual, and meditation all at once. The visual and sonic languages it employs remain radical; the ideas embedded in its grooves still resonate. Talking Heads, at their apex, were not content with simple pop. They sought transformation, and in Remain in Light they achieved it. 

Listening now, the record still demands attention. It insists on engagement, on immersion. The faces on the sleeve, the fractured rhythms, the cascading vocals – all converge to create an experience that is simultaneously exhilarating and disorienting. It is, as ever, a record that challenges, delights, and confounds.

Remain in Light remains a masterpiece because it continues to operate on multiple planes. It is art, it is music, it is philosophy, and it is ritual. It occupies a space that few albums dare to enter, and fewer still manage to navigate successfully. Forty-five years later, it retains its power, its strangeness, and its brilliance. Talking Heads created not just an album but a living organism, one that still breathes, pulses, and disrupts.

For those willing to engage fully, it remains an astonishing journey, a record that refuses to be tamed, a testament to what happens when intelligence, curiosity, and obsession collide. Remain in Light is not simply listened to. It is experienced, interrogated, and felt. It is, in every sense, timeless.

RETROSPECTIVE: Northern Souls. The Smiths 1984 Debut Album

| IZui0uMTe2

Forged in a Stretford attic, dismissed by its own singer and dogged by controversy, The Smiths’ debut still changed British music forever. Forty years on, its northern jangle, bitter poetry and doomed legacy sound sharper than ever.

The Smiths Debut Album 1984


The Smiths – The Smiths (Rough Trade, 1984):

Cast your mind back to February 1984 and the brittle landscape of British pop. The charts are drenched in synthesisers and covered with eyeliner, samples and sequencers are elbowing guitars into the wings. Then, out of the drizzle, four skinny lads of Irish descent from Manchester lurch onto the scene; one clutching gladioli, another his Rickenbacker like a bayonet. They call themselves The Smiths, the most ordinary name imaginable. In that choice alone lies the revolution.

The partnership had begun two years earlier with Johnny Marr knocking on Steven Patrick Morrissey’s door in Stretford a moment Morrissey would later recount in Autobiography with cinematic precision: the “handsome stranger in drainpipe jeans” standing on the doorstep, “smiling with the certainty of someone who knew what was next.” In Marr, he found his melodic twin; in Morrissey, Marr found someone who could give his guitar lines a wounded voice.

They began in Marr’s attic, crafting early songs like “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “Suffer Little Children.” Morrissey later wrote of those first sessions as “a new pulse in the dull heart of the city,” though he would remain forever unsatisfied with how their debut finally sounded.

The road to that debut LP was fraught. Morrissey recalled how Rough Trade, “a label without the cash or the courage to lead,” seemed both ally and obstacle. The Troy Tate produced sessions at Elephant Studios collapsed under the heat, guitars going out of tune, tempers fraying. John Porter re-recorded the lot. Morrissey, ever the perfectionist, declared the results “not good enough,” but at a cost of £6,000 Rough Trade said it would have to do.

So The Smiths* emerged: flawed, magnificent, defiantly northern.

It opens with “Reel Around the Fountain” a slow, aching waltz of shame and seduction. Marr’s guitar drips like rain from the rooftops, Rourke’s bass curls around it, and Morrissey sighs, “It’s time the tale were told…” From the first line, it’s less an album and more a confession.

Then comes “You’ve Got Everything Now”, sharp and bitter, a howl from the uninvited. “Miserable Lie” follows, schizophrenic and breathless – part lullaby, part nervous breakdown. And then “Pretty Girls Make Graves”, all glittering guitars and doomed romance, Morrissey cutting through the post-punk fog with a sneer and a sigh.

Side two delivers the anthems that defined the band. “Still Ill”, with its tremulous jangle and weary poetry, reads like Morrissey’s entire philosophy in three minutes “Does the body rule the mind or the mind rule the body? I dunno…” Then “Hand in Glove”, the debut single that started it all, a clattering burst of urgency with the immortal claim that “the sun shines out of our behinds.” It was ludicrous, brazen, brilliant – the ultimate outsider song.

“What Difference Does It Make?” gave them their first true hit, a bruised pop song with its teeth showing, while “I Don’t Owe You Anything” slows the pulse, Paul Carrack’s organ sighing under Morrissey’s rejected torch-song croon. And closing the record, the infamous “Suffer Little Children” the Moors murders rendered as gothic lullaby. Morrissey later wrote that he “could not sing it without shivering,” but Ann West, mother of victim Lesley Ann Downey, came to see it for what it was: sorrow, not exploitation.

The album hit number two, a trend that would follow them around – blocked from the top spot by Simple Minds’ attempt at stadium rock ‘Sparkle In The Rain’. The reviews were split. NME’s Don Watson sniffed at the “lacklustre sound,” calling it “a death of the punk ideal.” Others called it genius. Critic Dave DiMartino said he hadn’t “been as fascinated by an album in years.” Morrissey, impervious as ever, proclaimed it “a signpost in the history of popular music.”

He wasn’t wrong.

In Autobiography, Morrissey remembers the aftermath with mingled pride and exasperation – a record born “out of nothing but belief” yet betrayed by “the poverty of studio time.” That tension is what keeps The Smiths alive. The imperfections are its pulse.

By 1987 the band had imploded, Marr walking away, Morrissey wallowing in resentment. The nineties brought lawsuits and character assassinations that were hard to shrug off. Mike Joyce suing for unpaid royalties and winning, the courtroom exchange finishing off whatever friendship remained. Marr and Morrissey never reconciled, and when Andy Rourke died in 2023 after a long illness, the final curtain fell. The reunion everyone wanted, the one they both secretly feared was gone forever. A relief no doubt.

So this debut remains a flawed masterpiece built on attic dreams, frustration and northern defiance. From “Reel Around the Fountain” to “Suffer Little Children”, from “Still Ill” to “Hand in Glove”, it a rain-streaked declaration that ordinary lives could sound extraordinary.

Born in drizzle and doubt, it still shines like broken glass under the streetlights of Manchester.

RETROSPECTIVE: The Thin White Duke’s Disappearing Act

| IZui0uMTe2

Bowie’s Low nearly half a century on.


In the pantheon of rock’s great reinventions, few albums have aged as gracefully, or as mysteriously as David Bowie’s Low. Released in January 1977 to widespread bewilderment and commercial indifference, this curious hybrid of fractured pop songs and ambient soundscapes now appears, from our 2025 vantage point, to be one of the most prophetic statements in popular music’s history.

The conventional narrative surrounding ‘Low’ has always centred on geography and biography: Bowie fleeing Los Angeles and its pharmaceutical temptations for the disciplined clarity of divided Berlin, collaborating with the electronic music pioneer Brian Eno to create something entirely new. Yet recent archival research has complicated this neat story considerably. Much of the album’s foundational work actually took place at the Château d’Hérouville studios in France, months before Bowie’s Berlin sojourn began in earnest. The geographical mythology, it transpires, was partly retrospective construction, though no less meaningful for that.

What emerges most clearly, nearly half a century on, is how ‘Low’ functions as both ending and beginning. It represents the final flowering of the rhythmic obsessions that had driven Bowie through his American soul period, yet subjects those same impulses to a process of systematic deconstruction that would influence popular music for decades to come. The rhythm section of Dennis Davis and George Murray, veterans of ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Station to Station’, found themselves playing against type – their customary precision dissolved into something more impressionistic, more concerned with atmosphere than with groove.

The Brian Eno collaboration proved transformative in ways that have become clearer with time. Eno’s methodology, the famous “Oblique Strategies” cards, his insistence on removing conventional guitar solos, his suggestion that Carlos Alomar play rhythm parts without chord progressions, represented a systematic assault on rock orthodoxy. The results were songs that barely qualified as songs at all: “Breaking Glass” distils two minutes of nervous energy into treated percussion and fractured vocals, whilst “What in the World” transforms romantic yearning into something that might have been transmitted from outer space.

The album’s bipartite structure – seven relatively orthodox pop songs followed by four extended instrumental pieces – baffled RCA’s marketing department and contributed to its commercial failure in America. From today’s perspective, however, this division appears remarkably prescient. The instrumental suite that occupies ‘Low’ s second side anticipates much of what we now recognise as ambient music, electronic composition, and even certain aspects of contemporary hip-hop production. These are not songs to be sung along with but environments to be inhabited.

Recent scholarship has illuminated the extent to which these instrumentals drew from Bowie’s direct observation of Berlin’s divided landscape. “Warszawa”, despite its Polish title, was inspired by a fragment of Eastern European folk music encountered during train travel, yet the wordless vocal improvisations that crown the piece were shaped by Bowie’s response to the city’s displaced populations. The recent revelation that much of the composition employed a Chamberlin keyboard loaded with authentic folk samples adds another layer to its haunting effectiveness.

“Art Decade”, the album’s most austere moment, benefits enormously from contextualisation within Berlin’s cultural and physical landscape. The title references both artistic periods and the literal decay Bowie witnessed in the city’s bombed-out quarters. The track’s processed saxophone, actually Bowie himself, electronically treated beyond recognition – creates a soundtrack for urban desolation that prefigures everything from post-punk’s architectural obsessions to contemporary electronic music’s fascination with industrial decay.

Perhaps most remarkably, ‘Low’ anticipated many of the anxieties that characterise our current cultural moment. The paranoia that suffuses tracks such as “Always Crashing in the Same Car” was attributed at the time to pharmaceutical excess, yet it reads today as remarkably prescient about our surveillance-saturated digital existence. The isolation and disconnection that runs through the album’s emotional landscape prefigures our contemporary struggles with technology-mediated relationships and algorithmic social control.

The album’s commercial disappointment, number three in Britain, invisible in America – now appears less like failure than validation. Records of this ambition and difficulty are not intended for mass consumption; they are designed to influence everything that follows. And the influence has been extraordinary: the template ‘Low’ established can be traced through post-punk, new wave, ambient house, and contemporary art-pop. Its innovations have become so thoroughly absorbed into popular music’s vocabulary that they no longer sound revolutionary – the ultimate mark of success.

What continues to astonish is how genuinely futuristic much of Low remains. The drum sound that producer Tony Visconti achieved by positioning microphones in a stairwell – compressed, gated, artificially enhanced – established the template for 1980s pop production. Yet it originated here, in service of compositions that had no commercial ambitions whatsoever. Similarly, the harmonic treatments applied to Bowie’s vocals created textures that sound alien even today.

Recent discoveries in the Bowie estate’s archives have only confirmed ‘Low’s status as a masterpiece of studio technique. Alternate mixes recently made available reveal the extraordinary care that went into every sonic decision. The stripped-back version of “Sound and Vision” demonstrates how much archaeological work underpinned the finished product – every element feels essential, irreducible, the result of countless hours of experimentation distilled into perfect miniatures.

‘Low’ endures because it solved a problem most popular artists never recognise: how to maintain visibility whilst achieving genuine artistic invisibility. Bowie created his most personal statement by becoming deliberately less human. The electronic processing, the ambient diversions, the systematic removal of conventional rock signifiers – these represent methods of artistic evacuation, ways of escaping the personality cult that threatened to consume him.

From our current perspective, with knowledge of everything that followed – the completion of the Berlin trilogy, the commercial rehabilitation, the decades of recycling past innovations – ‘Low’ appears as Bowie’s most courageous artistic statement. It represents the sound of a major popular artist refusing the safety of established success, choosing instead to venture into genuinely uncharted musical territory.

The album concludes with “Subterraneans”, originally conceived as music for The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the piece provides an apt metaphor for the entire enterprise. It is the sound of something recognisably human being processed through alien technology, emerging transformed but not destroyed. Nearly fifty years after its creation, this remains the most accurate description of what ‘Low’ achieved – and why it continues to matter.

RETROSPECTIVE: Sex Pistols’ Punk Detonation

| IZui0uMTe2

Nearly fifty years after its release, the Sex Pistols’ incendiary debut remains punk’s perfect storm, a molotov cocktail of working-class rage, musical brilliance, and media manipulation that changed British culture forever….


The album that didn’t just break rules – it obliterated the rulebook

Never Mind the Bollocks didn’t just land in 1977, it crashed through the plate-glass window of British society and sprayed the drawing room with cultural shrapnel. Nearly fifty years on, it still snarls like a kicked dog. In a landscape now wallpapered with playlist-core, TikTok hooks and sanitised rebellion-by-subscription, Bollocks feels like a holy relic from a time when music had the power to make the establishment sweat.

The Pistols weren’t a band in the traditional sense. They were a detonation. The result of a chemical reaction in the King’s Road boutique Sex, where Malcolm McLaren, part art school agitator, part snake-oil messiah set out to manufacture a British answer to the Ramones. What he ended up with was something far more combustible: four working-class lads with nothing to lose, contempt for the sacred, and just enough talent to weaponise it.

It was John Lydon, not McLaren, who gave the Pistols their real teeth. That infamous audition, Lydon miming Alice Cooper in a torn “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt wasn’t an audition at all. It was a warning. And from the moment he snarled into a mic, Rotten was born. Not a singer in the usual sense, but a frontman who could turn a howl into a manifesto. His was a voice shaped by failed systems and boarded-up futures. You believed him not because he told the truth, but because he believed his own bile. And in a cultural moment drowning in fakes, that was radical.

His lyrics didn’t sermonise like The Clash or cartoon like the Ramones—they targeted. They named names. “The fascist regime.” “The tourists.” “The Queen.” This wasn’t abstract anger. This was brutalist literary wit, honed on council estates and spat back at a country that had turned its back on him.

Behind Rotten, the band were better than they ever get credit for. Steve Jones’ guitar work was pure sledgehammer pinched from Ronnie Wood’s toolkit and stripped of all bluesy indulgence. Paul Cook held it all together with dead-eyed discipline. And then there was Glen Matlock, the band’s melodic spine, the one who actually wrote songs. Before McLaren booted him out for liking the Beatles (the horror) in fairness his mum and dad weren’t too keen on his band membership either – Matlock laid the foundation for nearly every track that matters. Sid might’ve looked the part, but Glen sounded it.

And that brings us to Sid Vicious: the icon who couldn’t play. The most famous non-musician in music history. He brought nothing to the table musically, less than nothing, in fact but gave the tabloids something they couldn’t resist: a photogenic train wreck in safety pins and blood. He turned the band from agitators into tabloid currency, and McLaren milked every drop of it. Sid was myth in motion. His tragic end, overdosing after allegedly stabbing Nancy Spungen, would become punk’s dark parable. The image devoured the music.

But Never Mind the Bollocks is no chaotic mess. It’s a tight, brutal record, shaped by Chris Thomas, a producer fresh from Floyd’s palaces of sound, now neck-deep in spit and swearing. It shouldn’t have worked. But it did. It worked because the songs were solid, the delivery vicious, and the band at least for one special moment, utterly focused.

“Anarchy in the UK” starts with a leer and explodes into a full-throttle riot. “Pretty Vacant” is practically power pop under the sneer. And “Bodies”? Still disturbing, still necessary a razor blade of a song about abortion, trauma, and madness that no one today would dare touch.

And then there’s Art School McLaren’s marketing sorcery. Every cancelled gig, every court case, every playground rumour was stoked by him. The infamous Bill Grundy interview, the Jubilee boat stunt, contracts signed outside Buckingham Palace it was all punk as performance art. The Pistols were slashed, banned, burned, boycotted. Which, of course, meant they sold more records than God.

But you can’t sustain that level of heat. The 1978 U.S. tour, an mis-booked shambles by design saw Sid out of his mind, the band disintegrating, and Rotten fed up with being a performing monkey for the media circus. At Winterland in San Francisco, he looked out at the crowd and delivered the perfect punk epitaph: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

That line still echoes because it summed it all up; the manipulation, the disillusionment, the raw, ugly brilliance of it all. The Pistols didn’t burn out so much as combust in real time. And what followed, Sid’s death, McLaren’s myth-making, Lydon’s post-punk messiah rebirth in Public Image Ltd wasn’t an epilogue but a necessary failing forward.

Lydon, to his credit, didn’t retreat into parody. PiL pushed boundaries most punk bands wouldn’t touch; dub, experimentalism, post-punk minimalism. It didn’t make headlines, but it made art. Meanwhile, the world turned the Pistols into a brand. Punk became a T-shirt slogan, rebellion a marketing brief. Rotten became John Lydon again, appearing on butter ads and talk shows, but Bollocks remained.

And that’s the point. You can license the image, sell the nostalgia, but you can’t fake what this album captured. Never Mind the Bollocks is a time capsule filled with rage, wit, and electricity. It’s the sound of a band and a country on the brink. Could something like this happen today? Not a chance. The algorithms wouldn’t allow it. The PR team would step in. The snarl would be filtered and auto-tuned.

But that’s why this record matters more than ever. It reminds us that music can scare people. That songs can shake the foundations of the establishment. That sometimes, four angry kids with guitars can tell the world exactly where to stick it and be heard.

Never Mind the Bollocks isn’t just a punk album. It’s a battering ram through the front door of British culture. Nearly fifty years on, drop the needle and hear it again: that beautiful unrepeatable roar of latent energy stored in the opening chords of Holidays In The Sun.

COMMENTARY: The Conscience Of Generations

| IZui0uMTe2

From the trenches of Spain to TikTok activism: How each generation finds its own way to fight injustice. I take a look at what defines moral courage across nearly a century of activism.

The photographs are fading now, fresh faces, serious beneath berets, holding rifles they barely knew how to use – ‘but if they could shoot rabbits they could shoot fascists’. They were clerks and miners, teachers and labourers, probably born around the time of World War One and united by nothing more than a conviction that fascism had to be stopped. In the winter of 1936, they kissed their wives and girlfriends goodbye at Victoria Station and caught the boat train to Paris, then walked across the Pyrenees to join a war that wasn’t theirs.

Ninety years later, their grandchildren are hunched over smartphones and laptops, typing furiously. Organising boycotts of Israeli goods, coordinating with activists in Manchester and Glasgow through encrypted messaging apps. Their enemy is different, their methods transformed, but the impulse, that peculiar British inability to mind one’s own business when faced with injustice, remains precisely the same.

This is the paradox of moral courage: it appears constant across generations, yet manifests in forms so different that each age struggles to recognise virtue in its predecessors or descendants. The young man boarding the train to Spain in 1937 and the student sharing TikTok videos about Gaza today are separated by everything except the essential thing: the refusal to be a bystander.

The Weight of History

The Spain volunteers were products of their time in ways they barely understood. They had grown up on tales of The Great War, that ghastly demonstration of what happened when good men did nothing whilst imperialism organised itself a war machine prepared to send tens of thousands to their deaths for twenty yards of Flanders. The unemployment queues of the twenties and thirties had given them first-hand experience of how political decisions destroyed ordinary lives. When Hitler began his march across Europe, they possessed a clarity of vision that seems almost enviable today.

It was a simple decision, Fascism was visibly, unmistakably evil. The choice was binary: fight or surrender civilisation itself.

Their media diet reinforced this clarity. The Left Book Club, founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936, distributed serious political analysis to tens of thousands of subscribers. These weren’t soundbites or slogans, but hefty volumes that provided comprehensive frameworks for understanding the world. Members read Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” and Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China” with the same intensity that previous generations had reserved for scripture.

The Communist Party of Great Britain, despite its relatively small membership, provided intellectual structure for much of the anti-fascist movement. Party members attended evening classes in Marxist theory, studied the writings of Lenin and Stalin, and engaged in lengthy debates about the contradictions and solutions dialectical materialism. It was serious, systematic, and utterly certain of its moral foundation.

This certainty came at a cost. The volunteers who returned from Spain, barely half of those who went, found themselves isolated in a society that preferred to forget their sacrifice. The government had banned participation; employers dismissed them as troublemakers; families often disowned them. They had acted on their convictions and paid the price.

The Television Generation

By the 1960s, everything had changed. Television brought warfare into British sitting rooms with an immediacy that print could never achieve. The Vietnam War, though fought 8,000 miles away, became as real as the evening news. Young people watched napalm falling on villages and made their moral calculations accordingly.

But television also fragmented attention. The Spain volunteers had spent years preparing for their moment of choice, reading widely and thinking deeply. The sixties activist might encounter a crisis on Tuesday evening news and be marching against it by Saturday afternoon. The intensity was different, more diffuse but potentially more democratic.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstrated this new model perfectly. Founded in 1958, it brought together people across traditional political divides, vicars and communists, housewives and students, united by a single issue rather than a comprehensive ideology. The annual march from Aldershot to London became a ritual of moral witness, drawing tens of thousands who might never have joined a political party.

“We weren’t trying to overthrow capitalism,” recalls Canon John Collins, an English-American priest, activist, and one of CND’s founders. “We were simply trying to prevent the incineration of humanity. It was a more modest ambition, but in its way equally urgent.”

The anti-apartheid movement perfected this approach over the following decades. Beginning in the early sixties, it combined traditional tactics, boycotts, protests, lobbying, with innovative approaches that made distant injustice personal and immediate. The boycott of South African goods meant that every shopping trip became a political choice. The campaign against sporting contacts meant that cricket and rugby matches became sites of moral conflict.

This movement also pioneered the use of celebrity endorsement. The 1988 Wembley Stadium tribute concert for Nelson Mandela reached a global audience of 600 million people, using entertainment to advance political goals. It was a technique that would become standard practice for later campaigns, but still revolutionary at the time.

The Digital Natives

Walk through any university campus today and you’ll find young people who carry the world’s suffering in their pockets. Their iPhones buzz with updates from Gaza, Myanmar, and Ukraine. They receive real-time footage of air strikes and refugee camps, police violence and peaceful protests. The question is not whether they know about global injustice, they’re drowning in it, but how they can possibly respond to such overwhelming information.

Previous generations had the luxury of ignorance, today’s students know more about global crises than foreign correspondents did thirty years ago. But knowledge without power can be paralysing.

The response has been to develop new forms of engagement that previous generations struggle to recognise as political action. Hashtag campaigns can generate millions of posts within hours. Online fundraising ‘crowdfunding’ can raise substantial sums for distant causes. Viral videos can shift public opinion more rapidly than years of traditional campaigning.

The #MeToo movement demonstrated the power of these new tools. Beginning with a simple hashtag, it created a global conversation about sexual harassment that achieved swift legislative changes and cultural shifts across dozens of countries. The climate activism organised through social media has brought millions of young people onto the streets in coordinated global protests.

Yet digital activism faces unique challenges. The rapid news cycle means that even severe crises can replaced in the news and disappear from public attention within days. This can be manipulated by senior management of media organisations in favour of their own political affiliations. The personalisation of social media means that activists often speak primarily to those who already agree with them – an echo chamber. The volume of information can lead to compassion fatigue, where audiences become numb to repeated exposure to suffering – it becomes less painful to scroll on by.

The Palestine Question

Nothing illustrates these challenges more clearly than contemporary activism around Palestine and specifically Gaza. Social media platforms enable rapid sharing of information and imagery from the territory, creating immediate and highly emotional connections between British audiences and distant suffering. Young people encounter footage of destroyed homes and dead or severely injured women and children with an immediacy that traditional media could never achieve. Traditional media older generations might recognise is perpetually behind the curve now.

The movement has achieved remarkable success in shifting public opinion, particularly among younger demographics. Polls consistently show that 18-34 year olds are more likely to support Palestinian rights than their parents’ or grandparent’s generation. This shift has occurred largely through peer-to-peer education disseminated via social media platforms.

Digital tools have also enabled new forms of economic pressure. Some activist movements use apps to help consumers identify targeted products, whilst campaigns against particular companies can generate thousands of emails and social media posts within hours. University students have occupied buildings and demanded divestment from Israeli companies, echoing the tactics used against apartheid South Africa – specifically contra to government policy causing an authoritarian shift in the rules around assembly and organising protest.

But the digital nature of much contemporary activism also creates vulnerabilities. Online harassment can be severe and persistent. Employers increasingly monitor social media activity. The Israeli (also Russian and Chinese) government has developed sophisticated techniques for countering digital campaigns, including the use of artificial intelligence to generate pro-Israeli content. Just this week the Israeli-supporting US Government has severely sanctioned Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a pro bono lawyer employed officially by the United Nations to report on the abuse of human rights and contraventions of international law. The contradiction is stark, they host an internationally wanted world leader while sanctioning a person working for free trying to protect innocent civilians. This is not unique to modern democracies, the UK proscribes civil disobedience organisations, both human rights and climate, arresting peacefully protesting grandmothers while simultaneously hosting murderous former ISIS leaders. Geopolitics, hard and soft power work in mysterious ways.

The surveillance tools are more powerful as are the forces arrayed against change. Young activists today face surveillance and repression that previous generations couldn’t imagine.

The Persistence of Conscience

Despite these challenges, certain constants persist across generations. Each era produces individuals willing to sacrifice personal comfort for abstract principles. The 1930s volunteer who risked death in Spain, the 1980s activist who spent weekends outside the South African embassy, and the contemporary campaigner who faces online harassment for posting about Gaza all demonstrate the same fundamental impulse: the refusal to remain passive in the face of injustice.

The forms of engagement have multiplied rather than simply evolved. Today’s most effective activists often combine traditional tactics with digital tools. They might use social media to organise, but still attend physical protests. They might share information online, but also donate money and contact elected representatives.

Take Greta Thunberg, who began her climate activism with the most traditional gesture imaginable, a solitary protest outside the Swedish parliament. Yet her message spread globally through social media, inspiring millions of young people to stage their own protests. The combination of personal witness and digital amplification created a movement that achieved more in two years than traditional environmental groups had managed in decades. The cost to her personally, years of targeted abuse and harassment as she expands her activism from climate to human rights – recently her own courage and fame protecting those around her.

The Measure of Moral Courage

The temptation is always to romanticise past forms of engagement whilst dismissing contemporary ones. The Spain volunteers have achieved heroic status in progressive mythology, whilst today’s digital activists are often dismissed as “slacktivists” who mistake online participation for real engagement.

This misses the essential point. The British volunteers to Spain were no more inherently virtuous than today’s activists; they simply operated within different constraints and opportunities. They faced a clear enemy at a time when physical courage was the obvious response. Today’s activists face more widespread threats in a world where information warfare is often more important than physical confrontation.

The measure of any generation’s moral response to international crises should not be whether they replicate the actions of their predecessors, but whether they fully utilise the tools and opportunities available to them. By this standard, contemporary British activism, from the climate movement to international solidarity campaigns, demonstrates both the persistence of moral concern and the creativity required to address global challenges in an interconnected world.

The man who walked across the Pyrenees to fight fascism and the student who organises boycotts through Instagram are part of the same tradition. They have recognised that injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere, and they have refused to be bystanders. The methods change, but the conscience remains constant.

Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps that is everything.

PS. If you are reading in the U.K. I suggest switching to Channel 4 News.

ART POP / POP ART: The Surrealist Madness Of Vivian Stanshall

| IZui0uMTe2

In the pantheon of British eccentrics who emerged from the art school movement of the 1960s, few figures loom as large or as magnificently unhinged as Vivian Stanshall. The towering frontman of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band represented something rather special in the landscape of British popular culture, a genuine surrealist who happened to stumble into rock and roll, bringing with him all the anarchic spirit and intellectual rigour of the art college underground.

Stanshall’s journey began at the Central School of Art and Design in London, where he arrived in the early 1960s with a head full of ideas and a theatrical sensibility that would prove impossible to contain within the conventional boundaries of fine art. The art schools of this period were hotbeds of creative ferment, places where the rigid class structures of British society seemed temporarily suspended, allowing working-class lads and middle-class misfits to rub shoulders with genuine bohemians and intellectual provocateurs.

At Central, Stanshall encountered not just the formal education in painting and sculpture that one might expect, but a whole universe of avant-garde thinking. The influence of Dada and Surrealism was particularly strong, movements that had already begun to seep into British popular culture through the work of figures like Spike Milligan and the Goons. For Stanshall, these weren’t merely historical curiosities but living, breathing philosophies that could be applied to everything from performance art to popular music.

The formation of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band in 1962 represented a natural evolution of Stanshall’s art school sensibilities. Originally conceived as a traditional jazz band with a twist, they initially called themselves the Bonzo Dog Dada Band – the group quickly evolved into something far more ambitious and bizarre. Stanshall’s vision was to create a kind of musical vaudeville that would incorporate elements of Victorian music hall, dadaist performance art, and rock and roll rebellion into a coherent (if completely mad) whole.

What made Stanshall particularly remarkable was his ability to synthesise high art concepts with genuinely popular entertainment. His lyrics displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of British cultural history, from music hall traditions to surrealist poetry, yet they were delivered with such theatrical panache that they connected with audiences who might never have set foot in an art gallery. Songs like “I’m the Urban Spaceman” and “The Intro and the Outro” demonstrated his genius for creating pieces that were simultaneously sophisticated artistic statements and genuinely catchy pop songs.

The art school influence on Stanshall’s work manifested itself in numerous ways. His approach to performance was thoroughly theatrical, incorporating costume changes, elaborate props, and a kind of arch, self-aware humour that owed as much to conceptual art as it did to traditional comedy. The Bonzos’ performances were events rather than mere concerts, multimedia happenings that anticipated the performance art movement by several years.

Stanshall’s visual sensibility, honed during his time at Central, was equally important to the band’s identity. He was intimately involved in the design of album covers, stage sets, and promotional materials, ensuring that every aspect of the Bonzo Dog experience reflected his particular vision of organised chaos. The band’s aesthetic, a collision of Victorian imagery, psychedelic colour schemes, and surrealist juxtapositions became as important to their identity as their music.

Perhaps most significantly, Stanshall embodied the art school principle that popular culture could be a legitimate vehicle for serious artistic expression. At a time when the boundaries between high and low culture were being enthusiastically demolished by figures like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Stanshall demonstrated that a rock band could function as a kind of conceptual art project. The Bonzos weren’t simply making music; they were creating a complete artistic statement that encompassed music, performance, visual art, and cultural commentary.

The influence of particular teachers and movements within the art school system can be traced throughout Stanshall’s career. The emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration that characterised art education in the 1960s clearly shaped his approach to the Bonzos, where traditional hierarchies between musicians, artists, and performers were gleefully ignored. The group functioned more like a collective of artists than a conventional rock band, with members contributing visual ideas, theatrical concepts, and musical arrangements in equal measure.

Stanshall’s later work, including his collaborations with Mike Oldfield and his extraordinary radio series “Rawlinson End,” (find it and thank me) continued to reflect his art school background. His ability to create rich, detailed fictional worlds populated by eccentric characters drew heavily on the surrealist tradition of automatic writing and stream-of-consciousness narrative. The character of Sir Henry Rawlinson, in particular, represented a kind of literary performance art, a sustained act of creative imagination that existed across multiple media.

The tragedy of Stanshall’s career was that his artistic vision was perhaps too uncompromising for the commercial music industry. Whilst the Bonzos achieved considerable success in the late 1960s including a number one hit with “I’m the Urban Spaceman” their refusal to conform to conventional expectations of what a pop group should be ultimately limited their commercial appeal. Stanshall’s perfectionism and his insistence on creative control made him a difficult figure for record companies to manage, and his later career was marked by periods of creative frustration, alcoholism and tragic personal difficulty.

Yet this very uncompromising quality was what made Stanshall such an important figure in the intersection of art and popular music. He demonstrated that it was possible to maintain artistic integrity whilst operating within the commercial music industry, albeit at considerable personal cost. His influence can be traced through subsequent generations of British musicians who have sought to combine intellectual rigour with popular appeal, from David Bowie’s theatrical persona to the conceptual complexity of bands like Radiohead.

The art school tradition that produced Stanshall represented a unique moment in British cultural history, a brief period when the boundaries between different forms of artistic expression seemed genuinely permeable. The education he received at Central School of Art and Design didn’t simply provide him with technical skills; it gave him a framework for understanding culture as a kind of raw material that could be manipulated, subverted, and transformed through the application of artistic imagination.

In the end, Vivian Stanshall’s legacy lies not simply in the music he made with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, remarkable though that was, but in his demonstration that popular culture could be a vehicle for genuine artistic expression. His career represented a sustained argument for the possibility of maintaining artistic integrity within the commercial music industry, and his influence on subsequent generations of musicians who have sought to blur the boundaries between high and low culture cannot be overstated. He remains one of the most compelling examples of how the art school tradition of the 1960s could produce figures who were simultaneously serious artists and genuine eccentric entertainers, a combination that seems increasingly rare in our more compartmentalised cultural landscape.

He was also a collaborator with and close friend of Keith Moon which is a whole other story.

RETROSPECTIVE: The Art Punk Blueprint Of Chairs Missing

| IZui0uMTe2

Nearly half a century after its release to a mixed response from fans and music writers , Wire’s ‘Chairs Missing’ continues to sound like a transmission from the future. While punk’s original fury has long since fossilised into museum pieces, this extraordinary second album remains as sharp, relevant and bewildering as the day it emerged from London’s art-school underground in 1978. No more punk of Pink Flag, synthesisers, atmospheric production and intricate arrangements had the hardcore punks scratching their heads.

What makes an album endure when so many of its contemporaries have faded into historical curiosity? How did four unassuming blokes in sensible jumpers manage to create a blueprint that’s still being copied today? And why does ‘Chairs Missing’ sound more modern than records released last week?

In this retrospective, I explore how Wire’s clinical precision, ruthless economy and gift for subversive melody created something that transcended its punk origins to become one of the most influential albums in rock history. From the metronomic menace of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ to the gorgeous brevity of ‘Outdoor Miner’, ‘Chairs Missing’ didn’t just predict the future of guitar music – it wrote the instruction manual.


Looking back from our vantage point nearly half a century on, it’s almost impossible to overstate just how thoroughly Wire’s ‘Chairs Missing’ rewrote the rulebook. Released in that feverish summer of ’78 when punk was busy eating itself and disco was conquering the globe, this magnificent second album stands as the moment when four art-school oddities from London quietly laid the foundations for post-punk, alternative rock and about a dozen other genres that didn’t even have names yet.

What’s most striking today is how startlingly modern it still sounds. While the Sex Pistols’ once-revolutionary racket now feels like historical tourism (if you’re interested there is an actual Punk Tour of London), ‘Chairs Missing’ could have been recorded last Thursday. The clinical precision of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’, with its metronomic pulse and Colin Newman’s clipped vocals, created a template that bands are still copying today, whether they know it or not.

Wire’s great trick was ruthless economy. Nothing wasted, everything measured, not an ounce of fat or self-indulgence. When they emerged from the punk scene, they ditched the bondage trousers and safety pins while keeping the urgency and directness. To this unruly mix they added something genuinely new, a cool, analytical intelligence that treated the studio as a sterile surface lab and pop music as an experiment worth conducting properly.

‘I Am The Fly’ still buzzes with menace, Newman’s proclamation that he’s “the fly in the ointment” serving as the perfect manifesto for a band who were always happiest disrupting expectations. They were provocateurs, but never pranksters because there was too much serious intent behind those deadpan expressions.

The album’s great revelation was how Wire embraced melody without sacrificing their edge. ‘Outdoor Miner’ remains one of the most perfectly constructed pop songs of the era, its fabulous hooks and harmonies smuggled in inside a deceptively simple arrangement. At under two minutes, it demonstrated Wire’s other great talent, knowing exactly when to end a song. No three-minute pop formula for this lot, no siree.

‘Heartbeat’, once merely impressive, now sounds positively prophetic, its pulsing electronic textures and detached vocal style laying groundwork for everything from Joy Division to LCD Soundsystem. When Newman asks “How many heartbeats will there be?”, he’s not just confronting mortality but questioning the very mechanics of existentialism heady stuff for a time when most guitar bands were still bellowing about getting pissed or laid, or even being let out at all.

What’s become clearer with each passing decade is how ‘Chairs Missing’ represented a road map for what intelligent guitar music could be, cerebral without being pretentious, experimental without disappearing up its own backside and genuinely challenging without being unlistenable. In their forensic deconstruction of rock conventions, Wire created something far more durable than the three chord thash and bash of contemporaries.

The influence is simply everywhere: from R.E.M. to Radiohead, Elastica and Interpol, even Blur – they all owe some debt to Wire’s clinical brilliance. Even younger bands today, with their angular guitars and oblique lyrics, are still dipping into the well that Wire dug with ‘Chairs Missing’.

Nearly fifty years on, this remains the sound of a band operating with absolute clarity of purpose, creating music that existed entirely on its own terms whether that was jagged or etherial. While countless landmark albums from the period have aged like milk left out of the fridge, ‘Chairs Missing’ stands pristine and untarnished, still bewildering, still thrilling, still essential and still played.

Not bad for a bunch of art-school refugees who looked like mildly rogue bank clerks – which of course was also relatable to anyone making do outside of the Seditionaries clique.