Sam Redlark

“When I die, when I am fully grown...” image generated by Craiyon Everyday, for years, I would listen to Prison - a spoken word record by the poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. The album was released posthumously, in 1992, on the Sub Pop label, a few months after its creator's strange and untimely death. Prison is a hard album to ignore: An unrelenting barrage of disturbing imagery – the sweepings of a broken and insolvent world – brutal in its self-loathing and unyielding in its nihilism. Even the occasional glimmers of humour are weaponised by their author to enlarge a hodgepodge of self-inflicted wounds. There isn't an ounce of hope to be found anywhere across the 55-minute runtime. Put it on in the background, at sufficient volume, in polite company, and it will soon extinguish all conversation, until it commands the full attention of everyone in the room. “I am considered a very dark poet,” Bernstein once told a TV interviewer. During the period when I was obsessed with Priso...

image generated by Craiyon This review first appeared on Goodreads ~ Brett Anderson mentions very early on in his selective autobiography that the last thing he wanted to write was “the usual 'coke and gold discs' memoir.” In keeping with his decision, this account of his formative years cuts off deliberately at the point where his band, Suede, sign their record deal with Saul Galpern's Nude label. His chronicle of a rock star in waiting stakes out unpromising territory in what is frequently the most turgid part of any musician's biography – the bit at the beginning where you get to learn something of their family background, prior to the arrival of the drugs and groupies. Fortunately, Anderson is good enough of a writer to breathe life into his early childhood and adolescence, lightly sketching the influences that would mould him into the frontman of Suede: A band that rose to prominence during the early 1990s, whose shop-soiled grandeur wobbled precariously between th...

image generated by Craiyon This review was originally posted on Letterboxd ~ There is a scene in Susanna Nicchiarelli's dramatization of the final years of Christa Päffgen (better known by her stage name - Nico) when the singer is being interviewed on the radio. The DJ mentions the enormous portable cassette recorder, that she carries around with her in an oversized shoulder bag, and enquires whether she is looking for a specific sound. Nico replies that she searching for a sound that she heard as a child, carried to her on the wind: The sound of Berlin being bombed by the allies. “It was a sound that wasn't really a sound,” she reminisces. “It was, many things at the same time. It was... It was the sound of defeat.” By the late 1980s, Nico was 20 years past her prime. A former model and actress. In the early 1960s, she had embarked upon a career as a singer, despite a perforated eardrum that, combined with her heavy German accent, sometimes resulted in her vocal performances s...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 10th July, 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use.   ~ Why is listening to music pleasant? I find that, as I get older, certain pieces of music merge with my internal biography and are thereafter inseparable from these points in space and time. The great unseen labour of my life has been a constellation of brief, yet potent, memories that can be rekindled by the right configuration of notes and vocal melodies. A neurologist in possession of the wherewithal to observe this process as it unfolds, might observe the crude foundational outline of a human soul staked out in architecture of a living brain. The memories evoked are bittersweet: The knowledge that I was ther...

Dear M  I like to think that the attached image is what flashed before George Michael's eyes as he died, in part, as a result of dilated cardiomyopathy, during the early hours of last, last, last, last, last Christmas Day, 2016: A beautiful mandala comprising multiple Wham bars. It would have probably been quite a bittersweet moment for the writer of 'Faith' and 'Too Funky'. On the one hand, he was dying prematurely, at age of 53. On the other hand, the universe was acknowledging the extent of his contribution to popular culture by referencing the band that he formed, during his late teens, with Andrew Ridgeley, prior to launching a successful career as a solo artist. You will have correctly identified what, to a layman, appear to be scattered Hundreds & Thousands, as Boltzmann objects of the kind that spontaneously come into existence as a result of thermodynamic anomalies in the universe; in this instance the fluctuations in reality that occur whenever a prime...

  Mark Lanegan's autobiography - Sing Backwards and Weep , charts the course of the tombstone-voiced singer's life, from his dismal, alcoholic upbringing in Ellensburg, Washington, up until the speedball-induced death of his close friend - the Alice in Chains frontman, Layne Staley, in 2002. Lanegan portrays himself as a piece of shit, with very few redeeming qualities: A bona fide drug dealer, whose band (Screaming Trees) happen to be signed to a major record label. For much of the book he is in the grip of twin addictions to crack cocaine and heroin; the latter requiring constant maintenance. From there on, it's a relentless downhill grind, to the point where he is sleeping rough while working as a dealer's lackey, stealing small quantities of smack from his employer, while pawning his last remaining possession of any value - a pair of filthy leather trousers that he purchased in Paris with the aforementioned Staley. This bleak downturn of events is sparsely seasoned ...