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Friday

28 Jul 2023

Sinéad O’Connor deserved better than the music industry

It started with That Song on the World Service in the early hours, the one I’ve always loathed; for me it symbolises the start of the state we’re in now whereby perfectly good toe-tappers are routinely strung out in slo-mo by interpreters for whom misery passes as creativity. OK, the Prince original wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but it wasn’t anywhere near as dragged out as the Sinéad O’Connor cover. So when I heard that the singer had died at the age of 56, my first thought was, selfishly ‘Oh no – they’ll be playing That Song all day!’ The second was ‘The tearleaders will have a field day with

Jonathan Ray

Come off it, English wine is delicious

I hate to pick a fight with a fellow Speccie scribe but, as this august organ’s drinks editor, I must take issue with Dr Andrew Cunningham and his recent dismissal of English wine. Andrew lives in West Sussex and I live in East Sussex. He explains that he’s near Nyetimber, Nutbourne and Kinsbrook (not to mention Ambriel, Roebuck and Tinwood); I’m near Breaky Bottom, Court Garden and Ridgeview (not to mention Artelium, Black Dog Hill and Bolney). There’s no question that we both live in bona fide wine regions. I don’t drink English wine because it’s English, I drink it because I love it There are 950 vineyards in the UK and over

James Innes-Smith

Love architecture? Visit Vienna

When asked how his production of Goodnight Vienna was going down with audiences in Huddersfield, Noel Coward is reputed to have replied ‘about as well as Goodnight Huddersfield would be going down with audiences in Vienna.’ I cannot vouch for Huddersfield’s cultural riches but there has never been a better time to visit Austria’s ‘City of Dreams and Music’. Over the past couple of years, many of Vienna’s most important buildings have undergone a thorough clean in preparation for the 150th anniversary of the World’s Fair. The sprucing up has certainly paid off; buildings once shrouded in layers of soot now gleam sugar white against the clear summer sky. Meanwhile, an epidemic of cholera swept

Thursday

27 Jul 2023

John Sturgis

My Sinéad O’Connor story

It must have been late 1993. She was at the height of her fame and I was in the earliest days of my journalism career. I was working for a small press agency in Clerkenwell whose stock in trade was day work for newspapers: court cases, press conferences and particularly door knocks and door steps. As a rookie, I did an awful lot of these. With my cover story now established, I went back to bed on that sofa Away from work I was in my twenties in London and had quite the party lifestyle – clubbing every weekend. The club of choice was Subterranea in Ladbroke Grove and I’d go