John Doran

1 week ago | buff.ly | John Doran

The international news headlines were pretty grim in 1975. Lest we forget or never knew in the first place, events that year included the Angolan civil war, a flood in China that led to the deaths of 230,000 people, an Australian submarine leaking nuclear waste, a bomb at LaGuardia Airport in New York, a German embassy siege in Stockholm by the Baader-Meinhof gang and two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | John Doran

Five years ago everything was changing for Jerskin Fendrix. His debut album Winterreise had garnered acclaim from those paying attention. Its spatial and temporal criss-cross of lyrics and genre-hopping compositions told the story of his first serious break-up and created a well of gravity that pulled Instagram stories, a sincere supplication to morph into Ezra Koenig, and Franz Schubert’s 19th century song-cycle of the same name towards it.

2 weeks ago | thequietus.com | John Doran

There’s no denying that Songs Of A Lost World was a monumental latter-day triumph. But let’s be honest for a minute: how many times have you re-listened to it since its release in November 2024? Be honest now and take into account how morbid it was, even by the standards of The Cure. For 50 minutes, Robert Smith told us again and again that one day he was going to die. Also, that one day you are going to die. And that everyone you know is going to die.

2 weeks ago | thequietus.com | John Doran

Music writers. Who needs ’em? We recently had the opportunity to get artist, author and industrial music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti together with visionary film maker Peter Strickland, so we left them to interview one another with no interference from us. Cosey Fanni Tutti, artist, musician and writer, has cut a unique path through the musical landscape since the initial termination of the Throbbing Gristle/TG mission in the early 1980s.

2 weeks ago | thequietus.com | John Doran

In the mid-1980s, the proliferation of samplers provided, for many musicians, a mere means to filch the choice elements of a  supposedly superior past, from old soul licks to John Bonham’s gargantuan kick drum. The sampler became an instrument of postmodernism, a wry admission that there was supposedly nothing new under the sun and all that was left for modern music was to pick at the carcass of its history.