I’ve been a professional musician for around fifteen years now, and while the inspirations that first prompted me to pick up a bass guitar all those years ago still remain a constant in my life, the opportunities and media for artistic expression have changed in fundamental ways. Last year, I…

In a culture running out of ideas, the new Young Legionnaire album has something to say— even if it’s just goodbye — “Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death” ~Don DeLillo, ‘White Noise’ Do you know what the end of something is like? Have you felt your belief in what’s right growing in concert with a shrinking…

What happens between the ear, the heart, and the memory — As part of my podcast series ‘Exploded Drawing’ — which is about music from the 90s — I recently sat down with great relish to discuss Mansun’s second album Six with Transgressive Records co-founder Tim Dellow. Admittedly, the exercise of picking a particular era of music as a starting point…

If we all have a voice, who’s actually being heard? — “Deep down inside you know, everybody wants to love big companies…” The Fall, ‘New Puritan’ — Peel Session, September 1980. Scientists say that punk was not ‘a revolution’ in music, and much as I admire science for its ceaseless exploration of the boundaries of understanding, in this case scientists have…

‘I wanted to compete with minds I never knew…’ I was planning to write about rage. About the kind of powerful, articulate, justified rage that seems to have drifted away from today’s guitar bands, but which was so central and intricately wound into the music of Solar Race. Instead as…

I am no scientist. I am a musician, but like many artists I’m as inspired by the minutiae of life as I am by huge metaphysical concepts. After all, art is one of the ways we’ve chosen to depict philosophical ideas, to grapple with life’s mysteries. So when, about four…