Ben Graham

Just watched The Butthole Surfers: The Whole Truth And Nothing Butt. A great documentary on an amazing band that really captures their disturbing, hilarious, chaotic psychedelic punk spirit and is unexpectedly moving as well. Catch it if you can!

Apart from everything else wrong with Musk's post, T*mmy R*bins*n isn't a "hard man", he's a soft Gollum constantly whimpering about his precious that he thinks was unfairly taken from him.

25 years ago today I was at Motorhead's 25th anniversary show in London. Is 2000 really as long ago as 1975 was from then?

1. mortal
2. lethal
3. venomous
4. virulent
5. baneful
6. murderous
7. fatal

Seven deadly synonyms.

Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion Volume 4/Issue 1 PREORDER PLEASE NOTE: This is a presale and copies will be posted when available in October. If you have other items included in this order they will be...

Happy 68th birthday Julian Cope! The first part of my epic celebration / exploration of his transformation from psychedelic pop star to shamanic archdrude at the turn of the 90s, and what it meant to me, is in issue 4.1 of Undefined Boundary zine temporalboundary.bigcartel.com/product/unde...

It's parkin season in Morrisons!

Don't forget Sowerby! (Sore-be)

I edit website copy for a well-known high street brand. Increasingly the copy is AI generated. Often it's so bad it's easier to scrap it and rewrite from scratch. But the results are doubtless seen as AI making great leaps forward.

The sad passing of the great Danny Thompson made me remember being at Way To Blue, the Nick Drake tribute concert at Brighton Dome in 2010, with Danny leading the house band and singers including Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan & Green Gartside interpreting Nick's songs. Such an incredible night.

I'm a voracious reader of fiction, but I'm not actually interested in plots. I like characters, setting, atmosphere, ideas- the feel of a book. My favourite novels are those where hardly anything happens, or plenty happens but it's more of a collage than a linear journey.

2. Farage (far-rayj): state of splenetic, pointless and performative anger over something that has no actual impact on your life, e.g. "He went into a right farage, shouting something about trans immigrants in keighley, then threw his dinner on the floor and stormed out of the caff"

1. Farage (fu-ridge): to rummage around in a nation's psychic undergrowth, looking for fears and prejudices to cultivate and exploit. e.g. "with enough faraging, even the most liberal democracy can be made to vote itself into a fascist state"

The twist could be that the poem turns out to have been a bit crap after all. Which is why they only read it once.

Great piece - boys in eyeliner and androgynous girls was my britpop too. And I also experienced it from the perspective of a small Yorkshire town- I was living in Halifax through the mid-90s. Loved Echobelly and Tiny Monroe, and had the Flamingoes 'Chosen Few' single and played it to death.

I still refer back to PAOC and recently replaced my battered promo paperback with a proper hardback copy. And it still stands next to England's Dreaming and Electric Eden in my big three books that put 20th century pop scenes in their broader context and actually bring a new perspective to them.

Other Colours: Rob Chapman On Psychedelia And LSD | The Quietus "I hate that view of the sixties that just invites us all to look in the window at fifty or so people in Chelsea or Soho having a private party, and we weren’t invited," says Rob Chapman, author of a ...

We had a nice chat around that time for The Quietus though. thequietus.com/culture/book...

Declare yourself a magician. Can't recommend it enough.

Guys, you're meant to hang the fascists from the lamp posts, not just their flags.

C86 and all that The Urban Spaceman, Volume Two, issue Eleven, August 2025

New blog post! bengraham23.substack.com/p/c86-and-al...

So thanks to Bexhill Record Fair I now seem to own John Peel's vinyl DJ-only promo LP of the indie-defining NME C86 cassette, presumably the same copy he played almost every track from on his Radio 1 show when I was 15 and listening in while doing my school homework. What a magical talisman!

We'll be there between 5 and 6 - have emailed you.

The Velour Underground

This includes the first part of a long article by me on Julian Cope's 1989-1991 transformation from psychedelic pop star to visionary archdrude, incorporating how I failed my history A-level.

Hoping to pop in on Wednesday before going to see The Warlocks at the Piper.

Little-known music journalist superstition: it's considered bad luck to mention the second-to-last track on any album in a review.

Watching Matt Smith-era Doctor Who in the height of summer and it feels like every other episode is a Christmas special set in Victorian London where an evil figgy pudding is plotting to take over the world.

A Lard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

"The Clash were correct," Professor Tolkien told Smash Hits "In saying that, despite their deep love of music, there was no Elvish 'Beatles' or 'The Rolling Stones'. Now hobbits, on the other hand, had a great many pop groups playing the length and breadth of The Shire, such as... (snip!)

NOt only country dancing but ballroom dancing at my comprehensive school. It was led by our PE teacher who told us quite seriously that it was an essential social skill we'd need at the parties we'd be invited to as adults. I'm still waiting...

"When it's discovered that the Hobgoblin's Hat causes spontaneous mutation of anything placed inside it, events are set in montion that climax in the devastating Dark Mymble Saga."