Ian Penman

Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy. 

A kind of transcendence is often demanded of Black voices, as singers or as political orators: the kind of voice that fills the heart, fills the hall, embraces the land. There’s an unspoken expectation that such voices gift us some exalted truth. But quieter, weaker voices can ruffle our feathers too. Maybe they chime with the murky or tattered voices in our own psychical crypts. They seem to befall us.

The rubble had been cleared away, but strange grasses and wild herbs had sprung up where the war-demolished houses had been.

Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

On​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’...

Kraftwerk performing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin on 16 January 2015

In​ the autumn of 1977, sober-suited Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of the German synthesiser group Kraftwerk entered a New York nightclub and were surprised to hear an apparently endless version of a track from their newly released album Trans-Europe Express. Hütter was at first delighted to hear...

One evening recently I was in the local supermarket, which always has a surprisingly tasteful collection of old pop and soul hits on its playlist. ‘Raspberry Beret’ came on and I just couldn’t help it: I was instantly transported, singing along and showing out, right there in Aisle 3. It still sounded so good: those unexpected violins, the slightly ‘off’ backing vocals (a white girl sound, reversing the usual formula where a so-so white male lead is vamped by phenomenally good black female singers), the down-home cornbread of the song’s narrative queered by tiny splinters of subtext that black listeners would immediately flash on (Prince’s store-owning boss ‘didn’t like my kind/cuz I was way too leisurely …’). Was there really ever such a phantasmagorically odd pop hit as this, or was it all just a dream?