Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Grade: C A derided year in pop music, 1975 — and yet a great one. The mainstream was horrible, but we had Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night, Patti Smith’s Horses, Guy Clarke’s Old No. 1 and Television just beginning to break through. It is in the lacunae, before the next big wave, that we hear
Grade: D+ I promise you this isn’t simply class loathing. Yer toffs have contributed to British rock and pop and it hasn’t all been unspeakably vile. There were moments when Kevin Ayers held our interest, for example, and even Radiohead. And then there’s that man of the people, Joe Strummer. So let’s excuse Mumford &
If we are to ban states of mind, my vote would be for self-righteousness first, followed by sententiousness, with maybe imbecility as third choice. That would criminalise most of the people in the country I cannot abide, including all of the Lib Dems, Momentum and Justine Greening. Sadly, the state of mind which the government
Grade: A+ Ooh, you can have some fun with this when the unwanted guests swing by this Christmastide. These are the ‘greatest hits’ of a serially indulged caterwauling loon with the political disposition of a spoiled seven-year-old, redone to make them even worse than they were before. So, put on ‘Why’ as you hand around
Peasants’ Revolts tend not to work out too well in this country, for the peasants. I suppose that is why we have so comparatively few of them. There is a flurry for a while and then normal service is resumed. It is often said that Wesleyan Methodism helped to quell any uppity tendencies among the
I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in the icy rain. Black coat, black hood, black trousers. And so the hunter saw this hunched, awkward, shambling black beast, stumbling over sodden logs, and immediately raised his rifle to his eye and cocked the
Another well-heeled luvvee who knows better than the working class people he patronises in his dreadful films. Mike Leigh, then, in an interview from the Nonexistant, I mean Independent: Cut to Brexit,” he continues. “Some boneheads might say; ‘Hang on a minute, we’ve got the vote now and 52 per cent [voted to leave the
We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to put this right a little by drawing your attention to last week’s 2018 Maste rs Track Cycling World Championship — in particular the sprint category for 35- to 44-year-old women. The gold medal was won,
Grade: A+ Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly tired old men. Cypress Hill are now in comfortable middle age, almost as old as me, ffs. But they were ever ludicrously inventive and idiosyncratic, right back to that first album in 1991, which wrote
Grade: B– Ooh goody — a parade to rain on! You wouldn’t believe the hyperbole expended by the rock critics on this middle-class French lass, real name Héloïse Letissier. Or maybe, being used to such mass gullibility, you would. ‘Bogglingly intelligent’ and ‘a thrillingly uncompromising artist, playing with ideas of gender, identity and individuality to
There is a new book out about the sun — the bright thing in the sky, not the newspaper. It sounds very interesting. ‘Science Museum The Sun — One Thousand Years of Scientific Imagery’. You can get it from that place ‘Science Museum’, which I seemed to remember was once called the National Science Museum
There are no necessary truths any more. Everything is contingent. And those contingencies are the consequence not of what happens in the real world, but of the derangement in our own minds. Some will insist it was ever thus. Well, if so, it’s never been more evident. Take just two examples. We will never know
The main problem with lefties is that they can’t decide in their own minds what exactly they want. And sometimes want two paradoxical things simultaneously. So, among the Twitter reactions from Corbynistas to my appearance on Question Time last Thursday was this: ‘I hope he dies a long and painful death TONIGHT.’ I mean come
I took part in a debate organised by the Times this week about reform of our divorce laws. Well, I say a ‘debate’. There wasn’t much of that. Not much in the way of dissent. The four other panellists, who included a government minister, all wished to liberalise our divorce laws. And it was chaired
I was delighted to see Claire Foy win an Emmy award for her portrayal of the Queen in the fine Netflix series The Crown. It may have helped assuage her annoyance at initially being paid £200,000 less than her co-star, Matt Smith, who did a fairly good impersonation of a young, brooding Duke of Edinburgh.
[Update: Mark Knight, the Australian cartoonist accused of racism for drawing Serena Williams, has deleted his social media accounts after receiving death threats to his family. References to his social media accounts have been removed from this article]. I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being
Shocking news emerges that Sandi Toksvig is paid 40pc of what Stephen Fry was on to present the lamentable programme QI. Really? It had never occurred to me that Toksvig was paid anything at all. She is boring, smug and bereft of wit. I assumed she did it out of delight at being beamed into
I remember the moon landing very well. I was nine years old. I can remember too my sense of outrage and disillusion. ‘This is a blatant violation of the moon’s dignity and sovereignty,’ I told my parents, as the astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong attempted to secure the US flag to the lunar surface.
The very best impressionists do not simply mimic the mannerisms, speech patterns and facial expressions of their targets — they also cleverly satirise the beliefs, character and political dispositions of those targets. Most of us would not remember Mike Yarwood with great fondness because he was quite unable to do any of that. It was
Grade: C+ Mumrock. A lucrative genre, dating from the beginning of the 1970s, when Mums suddenly wanted something a little bit hip. My own mother briefly succumbed to the inane imagery and kindergarten melody of ‘Song Sung Blue’, sometime in 1972, before she moved on to more sophisticated stuff (Gilbert O’Sullivan, as I recall). This