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2023: A Year in Music
Lana Del Rey’s ‘diarist era’ has surely reached its apogee with Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard. Sprawling, eccentric, and soul-baring, it has more in common with her poetry...
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2022: A Year in Music
My favourite album of 2022 – Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow – arrived quite recently. It’s dream-pop with passion, as Natalie Mering’s cut-glass vocal mines for hope amid post-pandemic...
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Madonna and the Breakfast Club
“I have been a fan of Madonna from the first time I saw her perform at a small suburban night club called Images on Long Island back in 1983. She was something otherworldly to me … I was mesmerised by...
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2021: A Year in Music
As the world’s big sleep entered its second year, Lana Del Rey turned away from social media and gave us not just one, but two albums: Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Banisters. The latter...
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Sooner Or Later: Madonna and Stephen Sondheim
When the news broke on Friday, November 26, that the legendary Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim had died aged 91, the world’s theatrical community went into mourning. That evening, fans...
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Sweeter Than Ever: Nick Kamen 1962-2021
“If you didn’t have a crush on Nick Kamen in the 80s, you probably weren’t there.” – Matt Lucas Ivor Neville Kamen was born in Epping in 1962, second-youngest in a family of eight, and grew up in the...
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Madonna, Alan Parker and the Battle for Evita
Sir Alan Parker was born in Matlock, Derbyshire in 1944, and grew up in Islington, North London. His father was a house painter, and his mother a dressmaker. After studying at grammar school he began...
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Soledad 4: Madonna’s ‘Madame X,’ and More
The fourth issue of SOLEDAD Arts Journal is out now on Amazon, for $7.71 (US) or £6.28 (UK.) And at 186 pages, it’s a content-heavy issue, with a cover story on filmmaker Cosmotropia de Xam. Inside...
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Mark Blum 1950-2020
Mark Blum was born in Newark and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey. As a teenager, trips to Broadway shows taught him to love the theatre, though he never considered acting as a career. “I was raised in...
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2019: A Year In Music
This year brought defiant statements from masters old and new: the iconoclastic Madame X, reuniting Madonna with ‘disco god’ Mirwais; and the epochal Norman Fucking Rockwell from Lana Del Rey. Among...
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‘Madame X’ is a Birthday Girl
In my 35+ years of fandom, this is the first time a Madonna album has dropped on my birthday – and it’s a masterpiece! As well as the delectable Madame X, I also got a copy of Marilyn Monroe In Spain,...
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Penny Marshall 1943-2018
Carole Penny Marshall was born in the Bronx in 1943. Her mother Marjorie ran a dance school, and her father directed industrial films. Of Italian descent, he had changed his name from Masciarelli to...
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2018: A Year in Music
She may have left the stage decades ago, but 2018 was a vintage year for die-hard fans of the mysterious Bobbie Gentry, with a rare vinyl release on Record Store Day followed in September by a...
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‘You May Be My Lucky Star…’
From the age of eleven, my Saturdays would often include a trip to the record department at Boots to buy a 7-inch single. One of these was ‘Lucky Star’ by Madonna. Along with ‘Holiday’, it was one of...
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Reggie Lucas 1953-2018
Reginald Grant Lucas was born in Queens, New York in 1953, the son of a doctor and a teacher. “Although no one in the family was a musician or singer,” he recalled, “music was an important and natural...
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When Avicii Met Madonna
In March 2012, Madonna made a surprise appearance at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami alongside the twenty-three year-old Swedish DJ/producer Avicii. She had enlisted him to remix her latest single,...
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Madonna’s ‘Erotica’ At 25
In 1991, Madonna’s fame was at its height. Truth or Dare, her behind-the-scenes documentary filmed during the Blond Ambition tour a year earlier, caused a sensation with its revealing take on the...
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Liz Smith 1923-2017
Liz Smith, the veteran gossip columnist known as the ‘doyenne of dish’, has died aged 94. She was born Mary Elizabeth Smith in Fort Worth, and graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in...
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Art Decades 8: Prince, Madonna and More
“Most people are born dead/But I was born alive,” Prince Rogers Nelson sang on one of his final cuts, ‘Way Back Home.’ In Art Decades: Volume 8 I pay tribute to Prince and explore his volatile...
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‘True Blue’ at 30
Madonna’s third album, True Blue, was released on June 30, 1986. Recorded during the honeymoon period of her stormy marriage to Sean Penn, and revealing a sleeker, more sophisticated style, True Blue...
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