Deep
Cuts
Long reads. Essential listening. Vinyl culture without the rush.
The Birth of Goth: Bauhaus and the Invention of a Genre
January 1979, one nine-and-a-half-minute take. How Bauhaus founded a genre — goth — almost by accident, and spent a career wary of the label.
Read The Birth of Goth: Bauhaus and the Invention of a Genre
January 1979, one nine-and-a-half-minute take. How Bauhaus founded a genre — goth — almost by accident, and spent a career wary of the label.
Trojan Records: The Reggae That Conquered Britain
From Jamaican sound systems to the British charts. How Trojan carried reggae into British life — and how skinhead reggae, a multiracial working-class scene, was later hijacked.
Steven Wilson and the Remaster Industry
Steven Wilson, the Mobile Fidelity scandal, the loudness war. When a remaster is restoration, when revisionism, when just the same music resold forever.
Factory Records: Design as Manifesto
Manchester, 1978. A label with no contracts, a designer obsessed with detail, and sleeves worth as much as the records. How Factory Records turned design into a manifesto.
Mumford & Sons at Hyde Park: The Gateway to Folk
Hyde Park, 4 July 2026. Sixty-five thousand people, surprise guests Hozier and Shania Twain, and Mumford & Sons come home. A report from the barrier.
Impulse!: The House Where Jazz Dared
Englewood Cliffs, 1964. How Impulse! turned jazz into radical art — and made orange and black a manifesto. The house that Trane built.
ECM: The Sound Next to Silence
Cologne, 24 January 1975. The wrong piano, an exhausted pianist. From that night Manfred Eicher built an aesthetic no one has managed to copy.
Stax Records: The Day It All Ended
Memphis, November 1975. Union Planters Bank padlocks the door on McLemore Avenue. The greatest soul label in American history closes this way.
Mod Story
How a British subculture born in Soho basements in 1958 redefined the relationship between music, fashion and youth identity. One chapter a month. Each episode has its records, its pressings, its buying guides.
All chapters →
Born in the CD Era
1990s albums released when vinyl was a niche. Every instalment asks the same thing: original or reissue, and what actually changes?
All instalments →
The Jazz Shelf
Jazz records from my own collection, copy by copy: the pressing, how to identify it, how it sounds.
All instalments → The Complete Blue Note Recordings of the Tina Brooks Quintets
My hand-numbered copy of the Mosaic Tina Brooks box: the four sessions, how it's made, the mastering, how it sounds, what it's worth.
Dizzy Gillespie's Big 4
My numbered copy of Big 4 on Analogue Productions: what the sleeve says, the matrices, how it sounds, what it's worth.
Placebo, Without You I'm Nothing: Buying It on Vinyl
A 1998 album, released in the CD era, when vinyl was a niche. The record's material story: original or reissue, and what actually changes.
From Rocksteady to 2 Tone: How Jamaica Reached Coventry
2 Tone wasn't a ska revival. It was Britain's second generation re-accelerating their parents' Jamaican rhythm and grafting it onto punk. In Coventry.
Den Harrow: The Voice That Never Was
Den Harrow wasn't just a singer who didn't sing. He was an Italian pretending to be American: Italo Disco's founding fiction.
Who owns a song
Tribute bands, prog, and the point where imitation stops producing originals: the tribute that generates versus the one that only conserves is the most honest gauge of a culture's health
Prefab Sprout: Pop's Great Underrated Recluse
Paddy McAloon wrote some of the finest songs in English pop, then vanished. The story of Prefab Sprout, his writing, and the albums he never released.
The Crate-Digger's Grails: Records Worth the Hunt
What makes a record a grail? Not the price, but the meeting of scarcity, myth and sound. A tour of the records collectors truly hunt.
Masters of Their Own Sound: Strata-East, Tribe and Black Jazz
In the 1970s spiritual-jazz musicians built their own labels to own their music. Today those records sell for four-figure sums. A late, strange justice.
Understanding Krautrock: Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk
Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk: three German answers to one question. The story of krautrock, the motorik beat, and how West Germany rebuilt rock without the blues.
Frank Ocean's Blonde: How a 2016 Record Became a Grail
How Frank Ocean's Blonde went from a $35 Black Friday drop to a four-figure grail in record time — and what it says about collecting in the streaming age.
Nick Drake: Three Albums, No Stage, a Posthumous Afterlife
Three records, barely any sales, no touring. Then a car commercial turns the quietest folk singer of his era into a permanent fixture.
Understanding Folk: The Voice Before the Amplifier
The history and culture of folk music: from Woody Guthrie to Greenwich Village, from Nick Drake and Fairport Convention to De André and Guccini.
The Velvet Underground and the Banana
500 copies sold on release. Millions of bands born after. The story of the most influential rock album ever made.
Blue Note Records: 85 Years of Sound That Never Ages
Alfred Lion, Van Gelder, Reid Miles and the Tone Poet Series. 85 years of jazz on vinyl.
