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Archive for the ‘music’


There Are No Rules 82

Posted on March 16, 2023 by

This is the SNP members’ website tonight.

Looks like anything goes, folks.

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Victims of circumstance 177

Posted on January 01, 2023 by

In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.

At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.

But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.

And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.

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Song For The Yes Movement, 2015-2022 88

Posted on December 31, 2022 by

Things change very slowly, then very suddenly. Here’s to better days, readers.

Past and future.

It’s the same old song 482

Posted on June 22, 2022 by

Half a decade apart, almost to the day.

So what are we expecting?

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Armageddon 2 128

Posted on March 25, 2022 by

Just for a little bit of fun. This is actual footage of North Korean TV news (source: NK News) from today, but I thought it deserved a more moving soundtrack.

Under Her Thumb 437

Posted on September 26, 2021 by

When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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The Ship Song 1,078

Posted on May 12, 2021 by

Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.

Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.

This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.

And I’ve had enough of feeling that way.

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Trans Greens Are Greens 89

Posted on May 11, 2021 by

Misogynist racist midget Patrick Harvie is furious this week, which is always nice.

It seems he really doesn’t like it up ‘im.

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If it means nothing 187

Posted on May 06, 2021 by

The polls have closed. We have no idea what’s going to happen.

This is how we’re feeling.

What A Waster 227

Posted on February 11, 2021 by

So it looks like The Spectator spent a lot of money on a lawyer for nothing today.

Because while pretty much every journalist, pundit and legal expert reporting the case agrees that the amendment made to the Section 11 order protecting the anonymity of the complainers in the Alex Salmond case is an important and significant one, it hasn’t impressed the only person whose opinion actually matters: Andy Wightwash.

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Song For Peter And Nicola 46

Posted on February 01, 2021 by

You’re gonna fall.

Yeah, you’re gonna fall.

Song For Linda Fabiani 172

Posted on January 21, 2021 by

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