During a road trip across America in February 2007, I made a visit to the UCLA open studios. On the whole I found the work surprising — in a bad way — for its conventional appearance. There were a few notable exceptions, one being the work of John Kilduff. My encounter with Kilduff’s work was…
‘Work is more fun than fun’ When I was waiting for Kirsten Glass at New Cross station I didn’t expect her to pick me up in an old Vauxhall Rascal that she’d bought off eBay. It wasn’t the van that amused me, it was the idea of her driving it. It didn’t seem right…
First of all, I should come clean: much as Mariah Carey doesn’t ‘do stairs’, for many years I simply didn’t ‘do’ music festivals. In this, as in so many matters, I had long fallen in, as it were, behind The Fall’s Mark E. Smith. The Salford bard would routinely dismiss the festival scene as the…
In the ABC/dot-to-dot/colouring-book version of post-punk, Malcolm McLaren tells us that everyone picked up an instrument and changed the world. What is often overlooked is the surge of fringe creativity that emerged in the wake of The Pistols et al. Some picked up guitars (Joy Division, Buzzcocks) some picked up pens (Mark Perry with Sniffin’…
Visitors to London’s parks this summer will find something new to admire and interact with along with the sculptured landscapes and the scampering antics of grey squirrels. From June to September unique artist-designed temporary pavilions will be installed in four of the capital’s green spaces as the first stage of an ongoing public art Project called Portavilion. Curated by UP…
Jonathan Richman epitomises the term ‘cult singer’: he doesn’t sell many records but the ones he does are treasured. You don’t hear his name very often but when you do it is spoken with reverence. He has been writing songs and singing them in public for forty years, always on the outskirts of popular consciousness,…
Eddie Peake is a London-based artist who has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions since leaving the Slade in 2006. Now he’s preparing to travel to Rome for a one-year residency. Peake met Bear di Menna after she had vomited from the mouth of a bear costume as part of an art performance at a gallery in Shoreditch. Interested…
Before a man was put into space, even before we fired a dog out there, we sent up music. In October 1957, the satellite Sputnik was the first man-made object to achieve Earth orbit. It was a metal ball, 58 cm in diameter, with a radio transmitter and a single oscillator that went ‘beep beep…
The eternal search for the aural unholy texts that will save our damned, rotten souls can lead to psycho-geographic trawls through the diluvial stench of the city, down through the years, just in case you missed some golden moment, some brief supernova. In the same way that groups like the Velvet Underground and Big Star were once like buried, Gnostic,…
Sebastian Sharples studied photography, but has made his career as a documentary film-maker. Working for the BBC and on independent projects alike, he had been an unseen presence behind the camera for nearly twenty years. Sharpies’ photographs find the poetic in the mundane. To him, everyday situations are working still lives- all objects are subjects.…