Baby it’s cold outside – so here’s freezerRoom

In the final month of 2011, I was finally properly acquainted with the music of Cork collective freezerRoom, a band I’d heard plenty about but somehow managed to avoid. With a name like that, I’d expected them to be purveyors of stark, chilly electro or experimental neo-Krautrock. But no, they’re anything but; their sound is […]

Did I tell you you’re Wonderful?

Adam Ant is my pop hero. I think it’s fair to say he’s gone through something of a rough patch in the past few years and my heart goes out to him and his family. All the same, he is still, at the age of 56, the most original, colourful and damned entertaining pop star […]

He. Is. Not. Appreciated.

Great Fall line-up: Mark E. Smith, Brix E. Smith, Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley, Simon Wolstencroft, Marcia Schofield. Brilliant opening track to a brilliant album. Introduced by Tony Wilson.

Bona, darling

Moz reissue isn’t such a Drag Some might say: “Oh, not another Morrissey reissue.” And they would have a point. This past decade has seen a ridiculous quantity of Moz re-releases, not all of them good quality, ensuring that one of the most loyal fanbases in popular music forks out time and again for material […]

Ham roll with the changes?

How did I miss this? Have Ham Sandwich have done a ‘Sugababes’ and changed their entire line-up? This photo beside the review of their new album White Fox in this morning’s Metro Herald is the first I’ve heard of it. Either that, or it’s the first published result of a wacky new Hot Press photoshoot, where Podge and […]

Arthur and the nights around the pub table

A doffed hat and little bow to Irish Times’ reader Michael McEvaney, who had this excellent letter published in today’s paper: Madam, – Happy Arthur’s Day, our annual celebration of Guinness’s stranglehold on the Irish brewing industry for the past 50 years or more, a stranglehold that means Ireland is the only beer-drinking country in […]

Conspicuous Consumers: Sue Lawley

You know how record shop staff are: bored, indifferent, clockwatching, hate dealing with enquiries or, indeed, any member of the general public. Well, having celebrities stroll into your shop is easily the highlight of any day/week/ month/ year. Incredibly famous people have to go to the shops too! And so it was one day in late 1994 when I was […]

Those albums I’ll always go back to…

This started life as another one of those silly Facebook distractions but then turned out to be a far more pleasant excursion that I’d first imagine. The basic rule was to write down 15 albums that always stick with you and share them with 15 friends whose 15 albums you’d like to see too. I automatically picked from […]

Coals To Newcastle, balls to Christmas

The starvation diet, the back-of-sofa coin-searching and the redemption of those saved-up bus change tickets now begins in earnest; the best Scots band ever Orange Juice release a 7-disc box set in November. Full details are here, but the release does, regrettably, mean that several of my family will be receiving only Christmas cards this […]

Bobby Hebb 1938 – 2010

IHGN mourns the passing of brilliant singer and songwriter Bobby Hebb, who died on Tuesday this week from lung cancer aged 72. Hebb will always be remembered as the writer of ‘Sunny’, one of the happiest songs of all time. Amongst my favourite versions of this often-covered classic (aside from Hebb’s own) are those by Andy […]