Kate Bush – always quite hippy, dippy, ‘out there’
With Bush, the unexpected is about the only certainty, having the bravado to do what she wants rather than pandering to the public’s longing for hits
At last, a private education that wasn’t unmitigated misery
Robyn Hitchcock describes how his musical tastes were formed listening, aged 14, to Dylan, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix on the school gramophone at Winchester
How Liverpool soon outgrew the Beatles
For the bands playing at Eric’s, the celebrated Merseyside punk club of the late 1970s, even to own a Beatles record was considered embarrassing
The folly of garden cities
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…
The story of Sealand – a most improbable sovereign state
In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never…
How a faulty map led to the discovery of America
Reflecting on the genesis of Treasure Island, the adventure yarn that grew from a map of an exotic isle he…
Pirates and puritans
In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just…
