Free American Apparel goody bags? Drinks tokens? What is this madness? It can only be the launch of Vice!

Gone are the gender bending days of Culture Club. You’ve just got to wear a suit of lamb chops and you’re halfway to number one.

One of the UK’s biggest and most popular festivals returned this year with headline acts Muse, My Chemical Romance and The Strokes, but who stood out and who just flopped?

Tom Geddes gives a quick rundown of the highs and lows of this year’s Sonisphere, as headlined by Metallica, Biffy Clyro and Slipknot.

The decisive nail in the coffin of independent record stores?

Judas Priest, Slash and Dream Theater, to name but a few, graced the stages at this year’s High Voltage but who impressed Tom Geddes and your dad the most?

Blogging gets local

Manchester’s own end-of-exams summer festival returned with a sterling line-up, including names such as Chase and Status, Kelis and Mark Ronson.

The guy’s got solid Americana sensibilities.

Worth the art miles?

One artist’s take on the cells of city life

A comment on East vs. West buried behind a grid-like structure of mirrors

A library of our own provided an ironic lack of supporting literature for this complex exhibtion

Body Positive art show challenges the misrepresentation of body image in today’s society, urging participants to ‘kick crash diets’ where it hurts

is here

Jimeoin aka Eyebrow Man, lovely Irish chap who moved to the sunnier climes of Australia years ago, is coming to the Manchester Comedy Festival 2011 on 18th October and performing at The Comedy Store. At 1pm on 17th October I had a quick chat with him before he scarpered off for more interviews, about stand-up, […]

If you haven’t heard of/seen the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Force of comedy-cabaret sauciness, your ears have not lived. On 20th October Frisky and Mannish are making their way to our humble-land (Frisky’s home-town), for the Manchester Comedy Festival and performing at The Lowry. Their production, School of Pop, taught its audiences Tudor history using the […]

For the newbies you may not have seen Manchester in the daylight hours yet: it’s grey drizzly with a splash of colour graffittied to the walls every few metres. Manchester is famously nicknamed the Rainy City, and when you first arrive it’s hard to see anything but the concrete blandness, especially if you’ve moved here […]

The Strokes, Arcade Fire and Elbow come under Tom Hickman’s scrutiny in the first of our summer festival highlights.

A peek at the labyrinthian mind of Haruki Murakami