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Life Tracks: Ike and Tina: River Deep-Mountain High
Love songs, true love songs should only be written by the insane. To fall in love is to be party to your own self destruction, to pull the trigger to complete annihilation, the loss of self through the bizarre idolatry of another, an idle worship that can last…
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Live Review: Frankie Cocozza – The Academy 2, Dublin
When Gary Barlow made the seemingly bewildering choice to put skunk-headed Frankie Cocozza into The X Factor the jig was finally up. Here was a boy that looked like a sore that had fallen off Pete Doherty and mutated like a fungus into a fully-grown human being paraded around…
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Live Review: Girls Aloud – The 02, Dublin
We seem to have gotten used to the idea of ‘reunions’ now. The cash-ins and fake smiles, the backstage bloodbaths, the aching dead-eyed misery etched into familiar faces as they canter once more round the circuit begging to be adored, desperately trying to invoke that sliver of genius that…
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It’s Different For Girls
There has been some chatter around the local Twitter hub of late about that old thorny issue of women in music. Last week when a music website decided to publish a Daily Fail style reader-trolling/baiting review that ‘ironically’ rolled out that old ‘hilarious’ observation that having a vagina means…
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Brit Awards 2013
This year really should have been all about One Direction’s hair. It should have been a camera-trained tribute to the five gleaming superstar pompadours sitting on their polished heads like official pop-star halos. They should have opened the show, should have exploded from beneath the stage in a humid…
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Teenage Scream : Hollyoaks & Tea-time Rape Culture
Telly teen girls will always be commodities. Ever since poor old Nabokov gave the lazy architects of tea-time droolfests a teasing template, there has been the slippery of lip, bony of hip, school uniform seductress, a bit of ‘innocent’ distraction for the Dads to make soap-time bearable. This used…
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Pop Life: My Idea of Fun
Let’s get 2013 ready! Let’s get excited about some baby mouthed, zygote bands, tripping over ourselves to congratulate them on the half-song we kind of heard at a festival that time. Let’s win this race and be the first to like everything, the first to recommend everything, the first…
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Singles Review: Singles of 2012
Solange: Losing You Like a perfumed ghost of the 90s it rose from the ether, a rush of glowing familiarity followed by the strangeness of its sharp coolness. Its blank simplicity and dour repetition exposing the black magic of heartache, like blinking into the sunlight from the sour daydream of the…
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A.A Gill & Guilty Pleasures
Never has a phrase made me dissolve into tears of righteous anger quicker than ‘Guilty Pleasure’. Guilty BLOODY Pleasures, what self hating simpleton thought this up? How utterly, miserably Catholic to have to feel shame and turmoil about quite liking something that’s not deemed retro enough to be ironic….
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Pop Life: Loving Laverne
Heroes seem to come in colossal form. Giant-size tornadoes of drama like Bowie, Dylan, Morrissey that whisked into your tiny life in the nick of time to save you from dingy normality and focus you on to the path to secret brilliance that no-one had yet recognised. They were…
