Tag Archives: music

That Moment: A good rave, on a good night

Surrender – Charlie Marseilles

The music starts, and it feels like heat rising under my skin. I move without thinking — a slow, trembling rhythm that begins in my ribs and spills outward. My shirt clings, half open, heavy with sweat. Each breath feels like it’s carving light through me, and I let it. There’s no audience, just the sound of air, the pulse of my own heartbeat echoing through the floor.

The world shrinks to the movement of my spine, the slip of fabric, the catch of breath. My body feels thin, electric, fragile — like something lit from within. I close my eyes and lean into the rhythm until it blurs the edges of everything. There’s a strange kind of pleasure in it: the way exhaustion burns into something tender, almost holy. I don’t know if I’m dancing or dissolving.

When the music fades, I’m still trembling. The air is warm against my skin, every breath thick and slow. I can taste salt on my lips. For a moment, I stay there — suspended in the quiet — before the world comes back into focus. My body is mine again, but it feels changed, like it’s remembered something it shouldn’t have.

Both sides untouched. Not for listening. Display only

Betty Blue – 37°2 le matin – Gabriel Yared (1986)

A second-hand record store. Old French chansons played over the speakers. “Très bien,” Charlie beamed, because it made him feel at home. But this wasn’t France, it was an English suburb on a quiet Saturday afternoon. I Shazamed a song on my phone. It was Jeanne Moreau singing Les Voyages. 

Charlie rummaged through a cardboard box of old cassette tapes and I pointed out that had he found something interesting, then he wouldn’t be able to listen to it, because we didn’t have anything to play it on. 

And besides, I told him, I was surprised that he even knew what they were because they were obsolete before he’d been born. “That is not the point,” said the Millennium Child. “I have a good reason for looking.”

At last, he found something that pleased him. “This is what I want,” and he held up the soundtrack album to Betty Blue, or 37°2 le matin, if we want to give it the proper title. (I later discovered that it was released in 1986).

“But how are you going to play it?”

“I am not going to listen to it. If I wanted to do that I would listen to the music on Spotify. I have something else in mind.” With that, he borrowed a pound coin with which to buy it. 

The apartment. The office (which used to be Levi’s bedroom). The cassette tape is stood upright on a shelf alongside vintage postcards, pebbles and shells collected from beaches, and a wooden model of the Arc de Triomphe. “It is simply for show,” said Charlie.

Boys, Brass and Billie


He was once a boy who listened to punk rock. Sex Pistols. The Clash. The Damned. That was almost fifty years ago. Back then, if he’d rolled back half a century from the seventies, then he would have landed in the 1930s with a big war to come. Benny Goodman. Glenn Miller. Duke Ellington. The music was as far removed as he could ever have imagined. It brings us to now. The kids of 2025. Billie Eilish. Drake. Taylor Swift. His punk rock is as strange to them as the 1930s were to him.

Where strangers take you by the hand, and welcome you to wonderland


A fat girl in a prom dress sings Club Tropicana on karaoke. She has quite a good voice but looks like an elephant dressed as a ballerina. I think of an oversized Miss Haversham with an unhealthy obsession for Wham.

Stolen Words / I tell you in music the diary of my life between truth and regrets

Image: GionnyScandal, Italian rapper (Vito Delaurentis)

“I don’t like labels. I simply feel like a boy who needs to express himself in the ways and times he feels. Sometimes with a song, sometimes with a book. The label limits you, forces you into a defined space. I want to stay free. Maybe, if I really have to, I would call myself an artist. Period.” – GionnyScandal

*****

“When Gionata opens his eyes, he sees only a bright white tube hanging from the ceiling. He needs a few seconds to focus on everything else – the hospital room, the IV in his arm – to understand why he is there and to realise that he is still alive. Gionata’s story, aka GionnyScandal, starts from here, from the decision to put an end to his pain once and for all, from the extreme and dramatic gesture made when everything seems to have lost meaning and direction. But it also starts from the rush of a friend to save him, from the affection of those around him, from the desire to live that returns to inhabit his thoughts after the drama; from the need to deal with one’s past to move forward and face the future. And so, once out of the hospital, he decides to go through the darkness to understand the origin of his suffering. To do so, he will have to face the ghosts of the past – the death of his adoptive parents, the disappearance of his beloved grandmother – and track down his biological parents who he never knew anything about. And in this journey he will learn to really know himself, perhaps to make peace with his story. To once again put hope and beauty at the centre of his world and his music.”

A cream-filled, drug-hazed memory of a nineties Saturday night

Image: Archer Iñíguez

Saturday slaughter. Pumped up courage. Vodka fuelled Valkyries. Vanilla Valentines. Red Hot Chilli Poppers. Up and down. Cock teasers. Blonde bullshitters. Fag filled fags. Sweaty sex toys. Blue Adonis in Disco Cop. Twink paradise. Twink hell . Be damned by Twinkdom. Boys to men. Romeo, Romeo, Where the fuck are you Romeo? Smooth skinned sluts. Spray tan twiglets. Ba lamb babies. If you could read my mind, love. What a tale my thoughts could tell. Just like an old time movie. A movie that plays every Saturday. The boy shouts louder and louder. What’s he gonna look like with a chimney on him? Up and Down. An ecstasy-stained erotic dream. Screaming queens and disco lights. Screaming queens and fist fights. Shy guys and sly guys. Sugar daddies and fairy cakes. I need you. I want you. I can’t have you. No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me aside, and I can’t break through. Listen to me. I can’t see through the smoke. There’s no talking to you. The Vengabus is coming. And everybody’s jumping. But you’re not coming. Do you believe in life after love? I can feel something inside me say, I really don’t think you’re strong enough. Robin Hood and his band of boyfriend thieves. Cry babies. Jelly babies. Dolly mixtures. Sun up. Slow down. Come down. Vamos a jugar en el sol. Todos los días son días de fiesta. Vamos a jugar en el sol. Todos los días son días de fiesta. Sex in a Ford Fiesta. Sexy, everything about you so sexy. 

That Moment / Jeff Buckley climbed into bed beside me

Last night, Jeff Buckley visited while I slept and he climbed into bed beside me. I told him that he was dead, and he whispered gently into my ear. “That’s for the best. If I was alive I’d be 57-years-old and you might not like me anymore.”