Biogs
London born, bred and based, I am a writer with a degree in English from the University of Liverpool.
Since I graduated in 2015, I have worked by day as commissioning editor, copyeditor and staff writer for Caught by the River, an arts/nature/culture clash posting regularly at caughtbytheriver.net.
By moonlight and probably sheer madness, I am also a writer-for-hire, mainly covering music; I write regular reviews and features for The Quietus and DIY, as well as album and artist biogs for the likes of Cate Le Bon, Bradford Cox and Working Men's Club.
Adjacently: I DJ, co-host a monthly show on Soho Radio, and occasionally co-host the Heavenly Jukebox radio show too.
Say hello/commission me: [email protected]
Biogs
Heeding the call of the electric clarinet, the crooning song of a frog, you crunch across the forest floor, open the door, and step into the vigorous green, your edges shimmering as you ascend.
Revival Season tell straight-shooting tales of our golden age — chop, cops, badass bitches, self-snitches; drug-dealing and revolution — chronicling and critiquing the culture over baselines and beats that kick squarely in the teeth with a platform boot.
Devendra Banhart is suddenly freer than a bird. He is as free as a wig that transcends the body, transcends the head, and makes for the clouds.
Press your ear to the conch, and if you’re lucky, you may just catch a missive from the unknowable depths — a song from a mythology in which Homer’s Sirens honed their craft in the French psychedelic rock/alt-pop scene of the 2010s.
An echo in the serenity of an empty church, the spectres of Bert Jansch, Nick Drake and John Renbourn float nearby [...] whispering in Hayden’s ears as he bends a beam of light through the past, present and future.
A kaleidoscopic son of cowboy country steps into frame, wearing chain mail or a pinstripe suit or at least ten gallons of hat.
Beauty flourishes in the corners of grief's desecrated church; jewelling the cobwebs, gilding the dust, and making a relic of its creator's arrow-shot heart.
A man in trousers of artful proportion pours tender tales into your ear; my ear; the tubes-and-funnels ear of a retrofuturistc listening device.
Life’s sublime push and pull poured into hotpants, primping, pumping and bumping their way (and yours) to a god damn good time.
Mattiel Brown and Jonah Swilley proffer songs which ponder the American everyday of the 2020s, teeth to the flesh of a tender Georgia peach as they serve up an album tasting more like home than ever before.
As a solitary janitor buffs the floor of a tired high school building, a furtively jazzy bassline slips under a door and down the hallway. After-hours in the teachers’ lounge, perhaps someone’s smoked a little confiscated weed.
A few years in the not-so-distant past, a clairvoyant delivered an indelible message to Connan Mockasin. Inferring a project involving his father that had not yet been started, a woman he’d met only by chance told him: “You need to make it your priority, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life”.
A sublime voice — stardust and moonshine, perhaps pressed into the wax five decades ago, or perhaps only last week — wafts from a jukebox grille, regaling you with tales of tight hearts, needles in haystacks, cloudy night skies, minor miracles, rodeo kings and bolted horses.
Gritted teeth, nuclear fizz and fissured rock. A dab of pill dust from a linty pocket before it hits: the atom split, pool table overturned, pint glass smashed — valley fever breaking with the clouds as the inertia of small town life is well and truly disrupted.
As sure as if it had been mapped in the stars, or written in a prophecy buried deep beneath the sands of the Marfa desert, a collaboration between Cate Le Bon and Bradford Cox was always something of an inevitability.
Good ol’ fashioned country heartache to the left; effortless pop hooks to the right.
By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned — for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out.
Features
Caught by the River editor Diva Harris brings Shadows & Reflections season to a close, looking back over a year of gorse, grasshoppers, and plentiful sausages.
Like all the best collections, this one started accidentally, and its parameters are kind of fuzzy. I guess it's mostly depictions of legs, with the odd boot thrown in for good measure. I think it started with a single, unworn antique boot that I bought for a quid on Portobello Market.
Diva Harris pays tribute to the life and legacy of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: the composer, pianist and nun who died last weekend aged 99.
Caught by the River editor Diva Harris delights in the autumnal abundance of Dartmoor.
'Why would a woman want to be a DJ?' writes Annie Nightingale in the opening pages of her book Hey Hi Hello, recalling the bureaucracy and bewilderment that met her determination to become the BBC's - and Britain's - first female radio DJ. 'Why worry your pretty little head with such technical matters, dear?'
We are standing in the future, and also in the past - or maybe in no time at all. A sensual, looping beat drops from the sky as the conceiver, sculptor, and breathless orator of this simulated reality steps up to the tannoy.
On John Cooper Clarke and BBC Four: The 2012 BBC4 documentary 'Evidently... John Cooper Clarke' was the first time I became properly aware of The Bard in all his stick-legged, perma-sunglassed, rapid-fire, big-haired, fag-on-the-go, Salfordian-lilted, no-fucks-given glory.
Amidst enforced solitude and Westminster weaselry, Tim Burgess has single-handedly transformed Twitter, 40-or-so minutes at a time, from infamous internet hellpit to place of love, unity and shared musical enthusiasm.
Here endeth the annual series of postings we like to call Shadows and Reflections, in which our contributors and friends look back on the past twelve months. The final piece of the season comes from CBTR editor and staff writer Diva Harris
The course of true love never did run smooth declares Lysander 135 lines into A Midsummer Night's Dream; and so too sings Poppy Hankin 1 minute 16 seconds into Girl.
Seven years after Jerkcurb emerged comes first full-length, 'Air Con Eden': a Lynchian prom night woozy with eclipses, chicken bone wishes, slow-motion love affairs and punch-drunk riffs.
For Jesca Hoop, the process of choosing these 13 records was largely an exercise in nostalgia. "This is a difficult career path, and sometimes I have to tune out of the game", she says. "Right now I'm not listening to any [current] music.
It is ten years and five albums late - and on the promise that I will be met at the door by 'a Pacific Northwestern rodeo child with an unmistakable laugh, who was allegedly cursed upon conception'- that I arrive at the Mega Bog party.
Ever since I first heard 'The Barrel', the first song to be released from Aldous Harding's Designer, some two months ago, I haven't stopped thinking about the peaches and ferrets and eggs of its lyrics.
It is radical, in a world of constant sensory overload, to use quietness to make yourself heard: something I realise as I attempt to listen to the new Jessica Pratt album over roaring central London roads, office babble, the racket of the Victoria Line.
"Come on down from that cloud / And cast your fears aside," urges Bradford Cox in the opening bars of the new album from indie beloveds Deerhunter. Gently, dreamily, and with a slight baroque flourish (he is singing over harpsichord - played by fellow winner of alternative hearts Cate Le Bon, no less) we are coaxed into Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, the band's eighth album.
Photo by Naomi Yates Some context before I ramble on about how blisteringly good Crack Cloud were on Friday: it's well-documented that the Canadian 'multimedia collective' functions as a form of rehabilitation for its seven members.
I don't know if it's the manic pre-gig jazz that was just playing or something in the air, but when Drinks (and their fellow low-key-indie-celeb-studded backing band - hiya Euan from Younghusband) take to the stage and fire up their multitude of instruments (guitar guitar bass keys drums cowbell cowbell miscellaneous percussion) at Hackney's Oslo on Tuesday night, everyone seems to be making out.
"There are a zillion quadrillion incredible songs that have shaped me", Chan Marshall, better known to your iTunes as Cat Power says, thoughtfully and audibly dragging on a cigarette. "[But] most of my favourite songs in the history of music are, sadly, not part of my favourite albums in the history of music."
Ordinarily, it would take some convincing to get people to haul their arses down to a tiny, oddly painted room on a drizzly night to watch a band's first ever London gig. But not last Sunday, when rhythmic-space-disco-hungry hordes squished into the Shacklewell Arms for a sweaty slice of The Mauskovic Dance Band.
Connan Mockasin, with his seedy spoof-sultry riffs, his croony vocals and his unsettling pillow-talk lyrics, makes me uncomfortable in the way that using somebody else's toothbrush or being stared at by a cat while I'm having a wee makes me uncomfortable.
"In the press there's always been an exploitation of my vulnerability that has demeaned my professionalism, has demeaned my stature," said Chan Marshall - aka Cat Power - in a recent radio interview with Mary Anne Hobbs.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard photograph by Rowan Allen There is truly something magical about Green Man Festival. The specific source of this magic is impossible to pinpoint, but there's a lot to be said for the festival's location, nestled in the heart of the Black Mountains.
On Madonna's 'Amazing': Let's get one thing straight: cowgirl Madonna is the best Madonna. Not only is that blue satin shirt a certified Look, but a country slash French club banger album just should not, on any level, work - should it? And yet it does, doesn't it?
Legend has it that Kadhja Bonet was born in 1784, in the back seat of an intergalactic seafoam-green Ford Pinto. Her glittering, celestial debut The Visitor - an eight-song album of baroque and stardust-smattered R&B/soul/jazz beamed down for earthly consumption back in 2016 - can certainly be taken as evidence for this claim.
From behind a slowly drawn pair of velvet curtains, flecked with motes of dust and moth wings, appears a cobbled town square in the south of France. Haphazardly handpainted scenery drops into place: a crumbling stone mill set against a green, rock-lined river.
Radio/audio
Listen to Token Girl DJ's (28/02/2024) by Soho Radio for free. Follow Soho Radio to never miss another show.
Chickens, sheep and frogs wander through Daisy and Diva's latest show - which features brand new music from the likes of Tapir!, Group Listening and Vanishing Twin.
Diva and Daisy's final show of 2023 bids goodbye to the year in twinkles, jingles, harps and angelic voices. Featuring tracks from the likes of Mary Lattimore, Ernest Hood, Daphne Oram & Kelsey Lu.
Diva and Daisy play two hours of spook-adjacent tunes - featuring off-kilter chords, seven-headed beasts and organs played by mice.
Diva and Daisy provide a laid back soundtrack to the turning of the seasons, with music from the likes of Mildred Maude, Baba Stiltz, Fievel Is Glaque and Tara Clerkin Trio.
Diva and Daisy fill your ears with 2 hours of sunflowers, angelic bugs and starry night skies - with tracks from the likes of Mitski, Laura Groves, JIM & Huw Marc Bennett
Listen to Token Girl DJs at Spiritland Kings Cross - 12th August 2019 by Spiritland for free. Follow Spiritland to never miss another show.