Marc Riley’s heartfelt tribute to David Bowie on Monday night was incredibly powerful radio, and should be on the unmissable list for anyone fortunate enough to be in a country where you can access BBC i-player and listen again. The last half hour features archive recording of the equally lamented John Peel introducing a pre-Hunky Dory ‘Bowie and Friends’ concert in typical style, and is pure radio heaven.
There are three good reasons to visit Cromford in Derbyshire. First, Richard Arkwright’s cotton mills on the edge of the hamlet were the birthplace of the factory system. Second, the nearby John Smedley shop, itself a survivor from the late eighteenth century, sells the finest woollen and cotton pullovers in the world. Third, the Scarthin bookshop boasts a cafe hidden behind a revolving bookshelf. Finally, my old history professor has edited a cracking volume of essays about Cromford’s role in the Industrial Revolution.
The souks of Marrakech are buzzing – the annual Best Carpet Seller prize is soon to be announced and markontour has made it to the shortlist. Well, not really, but this is the premise of Marrakech, the tactile game of rug trading that I enjoyed as bank holiday evening entertainment yesterday, and which boast both simple rules and tactical challenges.
Despite having no aptitude for science, I have been fascinated by space travel and the stars since I was a teenager. So I had to borrow a friend’s son for an excuse to visit the Science Museum’s nostalgic tribute to the Soviet space programme – Cosmonauts.
It’s time again for my annual round-up of markontour’s favourite new songs of the year – the Festive Fifteen 2015. As usual, they music isn’t festive and there aren’t 15 tracks, and it remains a tribute to John Peel’s wonderful annual Festive Fifty.
While the gentrification of Walthamstow Village continues apace with the addition of a wine bar (I’m not complaining), it was nice last weekend to be able to enjoy one of E17’s long-lasting attractions, the Vestry House Museum.
Put your finger up to the night sky and there are 15,000 galaxies under your fingernail. Earth may be an extraordinary and unique combination of the universal elements found across all those galaxies, & it contains enough variety in nature to astound & intrigue the average human mind for a lifetime. But 15,000 galaxies under one fingernail? You can’t help but want to explore it. That’s why we need sci-fi & Alastair Reynolds is the best living purveyor of it.
We took advantage of the end of British Summer Time this morning to get out ahead of the dog walkers and were rewarded with four hours of Epping Forest in golden glory.
A fellow punter at recent Lexington gig tweeted afterwards “I defy anyone to go to a Euros Childs gig and go home without a smile on their face”. That is generally true about any performance by the former Gorkys Zygotic Mynci frontman, but the back-in-love exuberance of Sweetheart means that this tour is likely to be particularly grin inducing.
It turns out that the ancient Greeks coined the label Keltoi to categorise non-Mediterranean Europeans. Plato and his intellectual mates regarded the Keltoi as war-mad alcoholics with a penchant for fancy jewellery. But as the British Museum’s exhibition shows, the Celts were far from shallow. The Greeks might have corneed the early market in naturalistic art, but the Celts were already well into abstractionism 2,500 years ago.
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