As my late mentor Tony Tyler used to say during our days at the NME, ‘the paper should be about the music … and also it should be about what the music is about.’ Coming as I did from the underground press – where music was but one ingredient in a rich stew of politics, culture, subversion, sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll (indeedy!), this was – literally – music to my ears.

The end result was a paper in which you could write about (almost) anything, rather than having to leave all your non-musical interests at home when you left for the office. I wrote long pieces about Raymond Chandler and George Orwell, Marvel Comics and JG Ballard, HP Lovecraft and Elmore Leonard … which appeared alongside all the hardcore music stuff … and the paper soon grew movie, TV and book sections, as well as becoming more and more politically concerned. I know people a few years my junior who first heard of William Burroughs, Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac and Philip K Dick through their teenage exposure to the NME.

I’m still basically considered to be a ‘music writer’ (type-casting, ptooey!), but I’ve always walked a wider cultural beat than that, and continue to do so. A friend of mine once called me ‘the man with the hypertext head’ because everything in my exquisitely-shaped cranium was somehow linked to everything else. Hence some of this stuff on a whole herd of different topics.

Have fun joining the dots.

KULCHA MENU
Tha Kulcha menu
Kathy Acker, remembered
The OZ trial
Mick Farren: Give The Anarchist A Cigarette
The death of ideology
Dr Strangelove, revisited
Culture don’t travel …
God, America and Coca-Cola™
Alan Parker’s Evita
Cool Rules
Noir: a user’s guide
Gorillaz’s Monkey