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Just putting this up because I notice it's one of four articles of mine (I probably wrote 400 in the four years I was editor) that survived a Time Out website overhaul. Having applied the concept of “having an edge” to gambling and art alike, Walsh has now done the same with the format of the memoir. Each chapter is a late-night dinner party debate that gets the synapses firing – but the sort of dinner party that guarantees somebody will storm out. Sometimes David Walsh, aged 20, will talk to David Walsh, aged 50 and David Walsh, aged 80. Occasionally he’ll muse over the publishing process of Pan Macmillan in real time. (Apparently there’s an editor there who is refusing to work with him because he is “sexist”.) Then there are the hypnagogic ideas – theories streaking across his train of thought like meteors.

David Walsh interview (Time Out)

Just putting this up because I notice it’s one of four articles of mine (I probably wrote 400 in the four years I was editor) that survived a Time Out website overhaul.

Having applied the concept of “having an edge” to gambling and art alike, Walsh has now done the same with the format of the memoir. Each chapter is a late-night dinner party debate that gets the synapses firing – but the sort of dinner party that guarantees somebody will storm out. Sometimes David Walsh, aged 20, will talk to David Walsh, aged 50 and David Walsh, aged 80. Occasionally he’ll muse over the publishing process of Pan Macmillan in real time. (Apparently there’s an editor there who is refusing to work with him because he is “sexist”.) Then there are the hypnagogic ideas – theories streaking across his train of thought like meteors.

One half of the motel room is like a crime scene, wrapped in plastic. The other half is splattered with a fine spray of droplets. From my vantage point on the makeup stool I can see two tanning tents, like the pods in The Fly; a naked man in each. I’m next.

An exercise in discipline (The Age)

When Claire Lovering read the script for Gold Diggers, she thought she’d been miscast. Gert Brewer was described as “a sociopathic, alcoholic hornbag, liberated and robust and brash”.

Tent doofs and alcoholic hornbags: Gold Diggers (The Guardian)

eizing fate, I once placed a personal ad in a magazine, trying to track down a nameless, attractive ride operator who’d swept into my town with a travelling carnival. I was 13 and desperate to escape. Just placing the ad let in a ray of light.

The ride of a lifetime (The Guardian)

The young Ginger Taylor saw cartoons everywhere, as though she was living in her favourite film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Her father, Deane Taylor, was an animator for Hanna-Barbera, working on Yogi Bear, The Jetsons and The Flintstones, before moving on to the ’90s slapstick mayhem of The Ren & Stimpy Show and Cow & Chicken. Taylor’s mother was a costume designer. Dedication to the craft meant the family preferred to eat out than cook.

Ginger Taylor: How coloured pencils at the restaurant table shaped Australia’s new queen of kitsch (The Age)

This 2017 print mag interview is now archived online as well... Behind the imposing doorway of the Sisters HQ in Borough, south London, is a four-storey hive of mischief. The workshop is the enclave of Alannah Currie, one of pop’s great dissenters, and her shadowy feminist army, the Sisters of Perpetual Resistance. It’s strewn with furniture she builds, and silk protest banners, stitched with expletives. The basement belongs to her husband, Jimmy Cauty, who creates post-riot landscapes in miniature, along with riot shields bearing the ‘Smiley’ symbol of acid house – the genre he once dominated with The KLF.

Alannah Currie/The Thompson Twins in Classic Pop

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Everything Harder Than Everyone Else

When Jenny Valentish wrote a memoir about addiction in 2017, she noticed that people who treated drug-taking like an Olympic sport would often hurl themselves into a pursuit like marathon running upon giving up. What stayed constant was the need to push their boundaries.

Woman of Substances

Journalist Jenny Valentish investigates the female experience of drugs and alcohol, using her own story to light the way. Her travels around Australia take her to treatment facilities and AA groups. Mining the expertise of 30 leading researchers, she explores the early predictors of addiction, such as childhood trauma and temperament, and teenage impulsivity.

Cherry Bomb

Word is The Dolls got their record deal through nepotism, but if it wasn’t for Nina sleeping with the right people they wouldn’t be anywhere at all. Now her aunt’s career is threatening to take off again and eclipse her own, and nobody likes her new material. A stretch in rehab’s starting to look like a good career move.

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