Screen Time for Rent: Granada TV Commercial, 1977
This 1977 TV commercial for Granada TV Rental opens a window onto an almost forgotten aspect of the relationship the British viewing public once enjoyed with their television sets…
Chaos, Magick: The Sorcerers Apprentice Occult Bookshop
Grimy, esoteric capital of the ‘80s North of England, post-Thatcherism Leeds was a peculiarly dual-natured place. An increasingly moribund industrial economy still haunted by the atrocities…
Life in the Hive: Franco Leprino’s ‘Integrati… Disintegrati’
The work of 24-year-old Sicilian musician Francesco Leprino, Integrati… Disintegrati is a suite of music and sound that constantly oscillates between euphoria and anxiety, blending the “organic” sounds of “real” instruments like acoustic guitar and flute, with Moog synths…
Drive and Survive: Milton Bradley’s ‘Thunder Road’, 1986
Incredibly, it took only four years for the spectacle to regurgitate the absurdist nightmare future that George Miller had assembled in 1982’s Mad Max 2 as that most inane and transitory of commodities: a children’s board game…
“The Sightings Take Place Only in Their Minds”: Bob Rickard’s ‘UFOs’, 1979
First released in 1978 by Archon, a publisher based in London’s Soho district, UFOs gains some added legitimacy from the fact that it was written by Brit Bob Rickard, who in 1973 founded what would eventually become the Fortean Times, a monthly magazine devoted to…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Possessed’
Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973’s The Exorcist, the same year’s Satan’s School for Girls, and 1976’s The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period’s ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom…
Alien Renaissance: An Interview with Illustrator Bob Fowke
Of all the visionary artists to emerge from the illustration boom of the ’60s and ’70s, Bob Fowke must be one of the most unfairly neglected…
“No Glue or Glass Bottles”: The Gateshead Music Collective
An oral history of the Gateshead Music Collective (or GMC) in the words of the young people who started it, ran it, and frequented it in the 1980s…
You Weren’t Supposed to Be Spooky: Non-Halloween Songs for Halloween
By The Mutants
So read on to discover the songs that, despite having no actual connection to the 31st of October, yet produce a frisson of seasonal alarm in the paranormally persecuted inhabitants of mutant mansions…
“Left A Galaxy of Dreams Behind”: Joe Banks’ ‘Hawkwind: Days of the Underground’
I don’t really remember anybody actually mentioning Hawkwind in my youth. You just seemed to absorb an awareness of them from the landscape by osmosis, the same way you absorbed knowledge of the locations of short-cuts, haunted houses, and the more dangerous potholes…
