Canadian rock revisited

Derek Turner interviews Canadian rock titan EDGAR BREAU Q. Canada’s musical heritage is as varied as its landscape – from the Celtic-and French-infused “music of the maritimes”, via Portia White, Oscar Peterson, Paul Anka, Neil Young, Steppenwolf, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, to M.O.R. mega-acts like Rush, Bryan Adams, Céline Dion, Michael Bublé, and Justin…

Home learning

PETER KING says that houses are not machines, but ‘organisms’ animated by us I was lying in bed one morning, with no plans other than to roll over. It was too early to get out of bed, and I had nothing to get up early for. As planned, at 7.00am the heating system clicked into…

Secrets of the archives

MICHAEL WILDING remembers stirrings among the dead letters The first piece of writing for which I got paid was an article in the local weekly paper. I was just 18, marking time between leaving school and going to university. The paper, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, claimed to be the oldest newspaper in the world, dating from…

Moby Grape – the greatest rock-and-roll combo you’ve never heard of

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD recalls a brilliant, betrayed band All rock musicians carry a strong potential for disaster. On top of their youth and volatility, already a toxic combination, they swim in the notoriously shark-infested waters of showbusiness. Add the proximity of mind-warping drugs, uncomplicated sex and other inducements, and, notwithstanding the example of a few carefully…

Deep mapping the imagination

DAVID UPTON looks to the future of psychogeography Artists, academics, eccentrics, the flippant, the deadly serious, those with a plan and those without one, cluster around psychogeography like politicians round a fake news story, anxious to use it for their own objectives, or just to have a good time. It was largely with the last…

Chumservatives

KEN BELL enjoys an amusing and observant, if ultimately insubstantial, account of an eventful political period The Diary of an MP’s Wife, Sasha Swire, Little, Brown, 544 pages, £8 A diarist needs a good eye for the little details that makes the reader feel that he is in the room where the events are happening.…