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Little Empires IV: Everybody Hates a Tourist

This is the fourth in an overlong and overthinking-it series of posts on Wales, history, identity and the Manic Street Preachers, as filtered through the song ‘Ready for Drowning’. Stay tuned with...

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Little Empires V: Coming Up For Air

This is the fifth AND LAST in an overlong and overthinking-it series of posts on Wales, history, identity and the Manic Street Preachers, as filtered through the song ‘Ready for Drowning’. Part One:...

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Beneath the paving stone, the plug.

Welsh edition: 1. I wrote this piece for the Wales Arts Review on Welsh history, politics and identity. Yes, again. 2. In the next issue of Planet: the Welsh Internationalist, I have written on the...

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The Manics’ Next Step

We cannot get rid of employers and slave-driving in the mining industry, until all other industries have organized for, and progressed towards the same objective. Their rate of progress conditions...

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Borrowed Nostalgia for a Half-Remembered Nineties

You may be wondering why I haven’t leapt into the current wave of 90s/Britpop nostalgia with all the teeth-bared alacrity of a pseudo-academic Berserker, desperate to point out that the career of Alex...

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From Olympia to the Valleys: What Riot Grrrl Did and Didn’t Do for Me

[This essay first published in the Wales Arts Review, with artwork by the tremendous Dean Lewis.]   With riot grrrl now approaching the status of a heritage industry, not to mention Courtney Love’s...

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On talking about pop when you want to talk politics.

Alex Niven’s book on Oasis’ Definitely Maybe is out now and worth your time. It’s a book about working-class art, working-class politics, and the decline of both in Britain since the 90s, but there’s...

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Links to things I’ve written elsewhere.

1. ‘Crumbling Pillars of Feminine Convention’ – on Viv Albertine’s memoir Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys. Sex, punk, feminism, the usual. 2. ‘Living Fast: Revisiting Oasis’...

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  I’ve just finished reading Sylvia Patterson’s book on her life as a music journalist and felt instantly compelled to recommend it. It’s very like Viv Albertine’s memoir, being full of not only the...

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Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible is my next book, co-written with Daniel Lukes and Larissa Wodtke, coming out in February next year from Repeater Books. My bit looks at...

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