I am, you are, we are … The Fallen
- Nick Terrell
The Fallen by Dave Simpson
Canongate Books (Text Publishing). 323 pages. $Au 24.95
The Fallen, all 52 of them (and counting), are ex-members of The Fall. For aficionados, it’s something of a talking point – in the delicate blend of personality and ability which underlies any worthwhile musical grouping, changes in personnel are often lethal. There must be something unique about a frontman who can thrive in such uncertainty and flux, and continue to coax a characteristic sound from a diverse and ever changing line up of musicians. Read more
HEAT 20 - Plain Vanilla Futures
HEAT 20, soon to give way to summer … but the final days of withering spring seem a very suitable time to celebrate the astringencies, the grain of salt, the melancholia of the overblown – all that coming down. I have travelled the globe with the globe-trotters – to Peru, Beijing, Berlin, Bangkok, to Xin Jiang Province, London, Spain - and where has it left me? Read more
Overlord Overload - King of the Cross
- David Free
King of the Cross by Mark Dapin
Pan Macmillan Australia. $Au 32.99
Inside the inky slab of the Saturday Herald, there aren’t many things one flips to purely for the quality of the prose. Mark Dapin’s Good Weekend column is one of them. It’s like a pearl hidden under a mattress. Dapin is a genuinely talented comic writer. Mind you, aficionados of his column will generally admit that he has the occasional off day: days when he’ll spread a gag too thin, or go a bit overboard with the trademark footnotes. So I suspect I wasn’t the only confirmed Dapin fan who approached his debut novel, King of the Cross, with a bit of trepidation. How well would he fare over the course of a whole book? Read more
Tariq Ali Hears the Music of Time
- Nick Terrell
Protocols of the Elders of Sodom by Tariq Ali
Verso, 2009.
Protocols of the Elders of Sodom samples the last three decades of Ali’s writing. They present a writer and commentator who is often pleasingly acerbic, and always readily digestible. Ali is a publicist of the nineteenth-century tradition – gathering up and disseminating ideas for widespread consumption. Running through Ali’s writing there is a subtle polemical technique that complements his reasoning. Whether he is arguing, praising, rejecting or mourning, Ali is always pitching himself in order to further the pitch of his principles. Read more