Huw Thomas

Music and culture writer

United Kingdom

Portfolio
Shindig!
03/06/2026
Elvis Costello: Miracle Man (excerpt)

"Costello’s new songs were more intense than his last batch, more tactile. There were still vintage references behind them – ‘You Belong To Me’ was based on the Stones’ ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Pump It Up’ borrowed its breathless meter from Dylan and Chuck Berry – but The Attractions scrambled the signal so effectively that few noticed the old wave disturbing the new. The reggae-inflected ’I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea’ “sounded like ‘I Can’t Explain’ when I first played it,” Costello told The...

Rough Trade
03/26/2026
Ranked: Paul McCartney's Greatest Albums

"Most McCartney projects since Flowers in the Dirt have found him playing an end-of-history version of himself; a sweet, Yoda-like figure who wears a Nehru jacket and keeps positive. It's this McCartney you’ll find on legacy sequel records like Flaming Pie (1997), a wattled Beatle-fest with Ringo guesting, and McCartney III (2020), his Godfather Part III, created in lockdown (or “rockdown”)."

Shindig!
02/06/2026
Barry Ryan: Magical Spiel (excerpt)

"Parties with Hendrix. A screen test with Sinatra. Nepo baby allegations. BARRY RYAN lived a life of pure showbiz. With and without twin brother Paul he was incapable of making a bad record, or indeed a normal record; with the masterpiece ‘Eloise’, the Ryans inexplicably managed to inspire both Queen and The Damned."

Shindig!
03/23/2026
The Herd: Dandies in the Underworld (excerpt)

"The most striking of the album’s tracks must be the Howard-Blaikley contribution ‘Something Strange’, about a man leaving his girlfriend whilst on holiday and having a gay experience. The songwriters, both gay, had hinted at such themes in their songs before: ‘Have I The Right?’, their number one for The Honeycombs, evokes the jeopardy of same-sex love in ’60s Britain and many of their Dave Dee hits trade on camp desperation. ‘Something Strange’, however, was their boldest ever lyric, and...

Bristol 24/7
02/16/2026
Review: Sofar Sounds, Bristol Old Vic

"Next is Ciarán Moran, a Dublin singer-songwriter who uses music to make sense of the paradoxes of his hometown. Moran has cemented himself in the Irish music scene over the last few years, playing sold-out headline shows and attracting praise from old hands like Christy Moore and Finbar Furey. He doesn’t share some of the weather-beaten folk stylings of those forebears but his songs, performed acoustically tonight, speak to the modern Irish experience in documentarian detail."

Shindig!
01/02/2025
Linda Ronstadt: Different Drum (excerpt)

"Unbeknownst to The Stone Poneys, ‘Different Drum’ was a Mike Nesmith composition; he’d written it in ’64 but it had been passed over by the producers of The Monkees, perhaps due to the decidedly grown-up lyric, a flustered rebuke to an unwanted admirer. It’s a song built for a rugged drawl, dripping with a certain kind of condescending masculinity. It’s remarkable it found its way to Ronstadt. Her vocal flips Nesmith’s lyrics completely without changing a minced word (not even “I ain’t...

Shindig!
05/02/2025
The Who: Our Music is Cybernetic (excerpt)

Townshend had been emboldened by the reaction to ‘I Can’t Explain’. That was about a failure to communicate – in Townshend’s words, it concerned “a pathetic little boy who can’t explain to the most beautiful girl in class he loves her” – but its lyrics had struck a chord with scores of young men. “It happened at The Goldhawk Club,” Townshend raved to Simon Witter in ’94. “This deputation came back and said, ‘You wrote that song, didn’t you? You’ve got to write some more like that… because we...

Rough Trade
09/13/2023
Ranked: Talking Heads' Greatest Albums

"Remain in Light is the lopsided centrepiece of Talking Heads’ career – their coldest work and most rewarding. Brian Eno encouraged the band to work like human samplers, deconstructing their jams to build music with no beginning or end, dividing and dissolving. The result sounds like sounds like dance music performed by Martians."

We Are Cult
01/21/2023
'Climb Aboard My Roundabout! The British Toytown Sound 1967-1974' reviewed

"One of toytown's key figures is Mark Wirtz, the Abbey Road auteur who built an aural Trumptonshire through his Teenage Opera concept. Several highlights here are from that ultimately aborted project. The set also showcases the work of other studio town planners such as Jeff Lynne and John Carter. Is all of this a bit sickly? Absolutely not. The productions are often as ramshackle as they are sugary. Close your eyes and you’re watching not a technicolour dance sequence but a murky film insert."