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Tales of lost, flogged and stolen old records, republished vintage fanzine interviews and musings on contemporary arts and culture from the perspective of one man in the north of England. you might like.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'expletive undeleted'
Hyperbole: Beefs and love, again and again
EARLIER this year, for reasons too complicated to go into here, I had reason to be looking for kids from an estate in Preston who made their own music. It turned out that the supposedly uncommunicative and hard-to-reach youth on this particular estat...
Feature: Overpaid, oversexed and over here
THE first time Charles Gettis came to the UK was as a private in the 91st Airborne Division of the US Army. His first sight of the country came through the early morning November mists covering the vast open spaces of the Greenham Common airbase near...
Interview: Amp Fiddler
JOSEPH ‘Amp’ Fiddler has a theory that conversations are the dynamic for change in our lives and I’m with him all the way. How true this is when you’re speaking over the phone, I’m not so sure. Surely you need to be clos...
Hyperbole: Punk is dead but music is free
WHERE are the old punks on Twitter? There are more 30-something DJs tweeting their brains out than you could shake a shitty stick at, but the generation of stay-up-forever party animals before them don’t seem to have caught the bug in quite the...
Feature: The Band on the Wall, reborn
THERE are plenty of venues in Manchester that are bigger than the Band on the Wall, and there may even be a few with a higher profile – but none of them can boast the same kind of musical pedigree. A tavern, pub and venue which, in one form or ...
Interview: Steve Albini
ANOTHER reprint from the annals of GRUNT magazine, this time an interview with legendary guitar-botherer, microphone enthusiast and In Utero, Surfer Rosa and Pod engineer Steve Albini. After Big Black imploded at the height of their dark, angry powe...
Hyperbole: Back to the Phuture
IT TAKES me a couple of seconds to realise that the Third Davyhulme Scout & Guide Marching Band are playing Hit The North as they turn onto Deansgate in front of us. Somehow their spirited instrumental rendition of Mark E Smith’s tale of us...
Interview: Antisect
ALONGSIDE Discharge with their “screeching haikus”, Antisect were right at the very limit of what I deemed acceptable in terms of hardcore punk adopting the dynamics of heavy metal. They were an intensely powerful live band, but it’...
Feature: Radio Mentals
WHILE Richard Curtis probably isn’t someone you would turn to for stark social realism, the story of pirate radio deserves a slightly more serious appraisal than that found in his latest happy-go-lucky comedy, The Boat That Rocked. Curtis’s Sixti...
Hyperbole: Flux and Freaks, Twitter ye not
EAGLE-EYED readers will have noticed that Expletive Undeleted now has its own ‘Twittery-Twattery’ feed (down there on the right) where I talk about all the things I can’t be arsed blogging about, in 140 characters or less. Come jo...
Interview: Shaun Ryder*1
WHEN Shaun Ryder – erstwhile actor, author, newspaper columnist, Salfordian crooner, lyrical genius and a man who was banned from Channel Four for saying the fuck-word at tea time – sits you down in his living room and says that he wants to t...
Interview: Crow People
CROW PEOPLE came from some pit village near Doncaster but they seemed to play an awful lot of gigs in the ‘industrial garden town’ of Scunthorpe. I first remember coming across them at one such packed, sweaty gig in the mid-Eighties, although whe...
Hyperbole: “Site will drive me crazy!”
PROVIDING a much needed unicorn chaser to the dark excesses of 1974, 1980 and 1983 – and giving you, dear reader, the opportunity to test the snazzy play/download option on zShare - the entirely appropriate Sergio Mendes & Brasil 77 bring us Lo...
Feature: Red Riding – It’s grim up north
WHEN the final volume of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet was published in 2002, the one thing that shell-shocked readers knew for sure was that his compelling saga of lost children, corrupt coppers and accidental heroes would never make it to the ...
Interview: Bebel Gilberto
I’D LOVE to be able to pretend that bossa nova has been a big part of my life for years and years, but the fact is I didn’t really get it - or any of that easy, lounge stuff - until I heard Bebel Gilberto’s major label debut, Tanto Tempo, in 20...
Hyperbole: It’s a drug, it’s a cult .. and I think I like it
WE’VE already established that a million monkeys randomly tapping away on a million typewriters for a zillion years are unlikely to produce the complete works of Shakespeare or anything like it – but what would these strangely conscientious lite...
Interview: Bogshed
THOUGH it’s now routinely derided by the latest crop of fat, bitter and aged pop historians – that’s my gig, thank you very much – the NME’s C86 cassette was an essential purchase for those of us not in thrall to the emerging sound of h...
Interview: Andrew Weatherall
HE MIGHT describe himself as the “classic underachiever”, but Andrew Weatherall doesn’t seem to have done so badly. A music and fashion nut from Windsor with an unhealthy obsession for the minutiae of the rituals and mores of a string of differ...
Hyperbole: God bless America
“WE’RE supposed to be a republic, that’s what we were founded on, not a democracy, dumbass. Now, thanks to morons like you, we will be neither ..” I managed to provoke this comment from one of our online colonial cousins the other day (ne...
Feature: Gothic and proud
IT’S easy to take the piss out of Goths - well, it was until the fashionistas went all Gothic-luxe on us. I’m sure it must have absolutely horrified original Goths, bless ‘em. They must be an awful lot happier (it’s all relative) ...
Interview: Chuck D
I DID this interview with Chuck D in August 1999, ahead of the release of Public Enemy’s seventh album, There’s A Poison Goin’ On. Can you tell that I didn’t really know what I was talking about when it came to all the downloa...
Interview: Neon Leon
MORE tales of house music madness. I was editing a short-lived Leeds listings magazine by the name of Brag and went down to Nottingham with Earnshaw to interview Neon Leon, a San Francisco DJ who was on tour in the UK at the time, ahead of a couple o...
Hyperbole: Sweet dreams
HOLY verbosity, scream insanity! All you ever gonna be is another great fan of me .. posting twice in the same week. Yes, it’s a veritable shit-storm of uninformed opinion, reckless conjecture and outright lies. What can I say? Buy an umbrella. Me ...
Interview: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost
AS PROMISED, here’s an interview with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost which I wrote up for The Big Issue in the North in early 2004, just ahead of the release of their rom-zom-com Shaun Of The Dead. * * * IT’S all very well for the Americans. T...
Hyperbole: Loving the aliens .. plus everything you ever wanted to know about Rudimentary Peni but were afraid to ask
ONE-TIME Playboy bunny Marion Benoist and ex-Motherfucker feedback enthusiast Fred de Fred (aka the Lovers) have been making beautiful music together since they were introduced by a mutual friend in London on September 11, 2001. Now based in Sheffiel...
Interview: Sonic Youth
THIS is a reprint of an interview with Sonic Youth I did for Airstrip*6 fanzine in mid 1987. Note fake Americanisms and early cut-and-paste plagiarism. * * * “BOLLOCKS!” Thurston Moore, one quarter of this week’s ‘Best Band in the World Eve...
Interview: Brian Eno
PRODUCER, artist, music theorist, writer and anagram fan Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno first came to prominence in the early Seventies as a member of Roxy Music. Using an early VCS3 synth and a Revox reel-to-reel, Eno warped ...
Hyperbole: Old punks don’t die, they just go online
STUFF that has been floating my boat this week: Although it’s new to the Expletive Undeleted blogroll Kill Your Pet Puppy has been online for just over a year. It’s a blog by the same people - Tony D, Al, Penguin - who put together the le...
Feature: The vinyl countdown
FOURTEEN years after he was name-checked in Shakermaker, Peter Howard - alias Mr Sifter - still gets fans turning up at the shop he runs on Fog Lane in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury. “We get them coming from all over, and they say, where else i...
Interview: Flux of Pink Indians*2
UNLIKE Spinal Tap, Colin Latter, Kevin Hunter and Martin Wilson didn’t have any unexpected chart success in Japan to tempt them into reforming Flux of Pink Indians. But they did have Steve Ignorant. Although there had been many lucrative offers to ...
