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You know this smile. The wide-open, jaw-unhinged, I’m-happy-or-I’ll-get-fired smile. A smile so stretched it’s basically a crime scene. A hostage video with better lighting. No human has ever smiled like this without a camera pointed at them and a marketing intern shouting, WIDER. WE NEED TO SEE YOUR SOUL. AND YOUR ROOT CANAL. This isn’t a smile. It’s a compliance checkpoint. A forced display of emotional nudity. The facial equivalent of turning out your pockets for the polic

I keep finding myself arriving back here Back on this spectred isle This septic tank Like I’ve washed up after a storm of cultural confusion Carrying a small bag of sounds I’m not sure anyone asked for And people look at me Politely baffled Like I’m a parcel that’s been delivered to the wrong address Because here on this spectred isle This septic tank You can walk into a venue carrying an actual sound A real one Still warm And someone will say Oh Did you go to Oxford Or Cambr

With the rise of the corporate landlord, maybe there is no such thing as liminal space anymore but liminal people Because I’ve noticed, lately, that I seem to have developed this talent, a sort of slow dissolving at social events. a gradual thinning. A polite transparency. tracing paper laid over a gathering. At these events/evenings/occasions these rooms full of people performing acquaintance, I slip in, stand briefly in the penumbra of a lampshade, and somehow become optio

I ran into the director of a major contemporary music festival. A major one. The kind with funding streams. And sub-streams. And little tributaries of subsidy flowing quietly into the pockets of people who know where the tributaries are. He said almost absent-mindedly, as if remarking on cloud cover that no one over fifty should be allowed to vote. Only the young. Only the hopeful. Only the ones not yet aware that hope is a muscle that fatigues if you keep asking it to lift b

The Brighton i360 has gone out of business. It still stands there, the i360 or rather trying to stand a thin, hesitant finger of ambition pointing at a God that, frankly, long ago stopped taking Brighton’s calls. And still the i360 stands there, long and lean and lonely, a monument to a stirring that never quite stirs. A rising that never quite rises. A promise swollen with potential And you look at it, this tower, this promise, Iron filings of optimism gathering around a mag

The General Data Protection Regulation. Or, as it’s known in Human Resources departments across Britain, our Magna Carta. A sacred scroll, ensuring that no one may ever again receive a birthday email from Accounts. GDPR was supposed to protect our privacy. What it’s actually done is unleash an army. An army of smiling compliance clerics, armed with clipboards, clip-on microphones, and a kind of deathless zeal. These are the people who say 'touch base offline. People who use t

“Now you are awake, it is still a dream. Let me ask you, who knows the difference?” That’s what it said. In pencil. Folded once. Left by my head in Hove Library. I don’t know who wrote it. I don’t know what they meant. Maybe they didn’t mean anything. Maybe they were bored. Maybe they worked there. Maybe they never existed. They’re closing the libraries now. Or reducing the hours. Which is what you say when you want to kill something slowly enough to call it care. I was 14. A

You know the Cage organ piece in Halberstadt? ASLSP. As Slow As Possible. It started in the year 2001, and it will end in the year 2640. 639 years. Longer than the rise and fall of most civilisations. Longer than the shelf life of UHT milk. Longer than my career, though admittedly that bar is low. And every time they change a chord on the organ, every decade or so, the people come. They come from all over. Pilgrims. Like me. Like you. Like us. They lean forward, expectant. An

The Danish post has stopped delivering letters. Letters. Remember letters? No, you don’t. The Danes don’t get letters anymore. On average. Statistically. Mathematically. Scientifically. So. No letters. You can’t deliver what isn’t there. They’re pulling up the letter boxes. Out of the ground. Like weeds. Like rotten teeth. From a rotten mouth of a rotten country that doesn’t want letters. Doesn’t want words. Doesn’t want connection. Just wants parcels. Parcels, not letters, t