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As part of our on going ‘We Are One’ week we’re pleased to share this special broadcast from Lias Saoudi with you. Lias’ posts for us have been a hugely important part of The Social Gathering, he’s been with us since the first week (a year ago) and contributed some truly brilliant writing. Big thank … Continued

The clock is ticking…soon you will be allowed out again and you won’t need this handy guide to a random list of new and old things to watch to stave off the ennui and help you ignore the familiar walls and ceiling. Unlucky thirteen. If only there was some catastrophe that could keep me writing….. … Continued

We’re delighted to be able to share with you this cracking extract from Craig Taylor’s new book New Yorkers. The book is drawn from hundreds of interviews over six years and is ‘a grand portrait of an irrepressible city and a hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people’ and a fantastic follow up … Continued

TL:DR Review: 2020. Shit Year. 0/10. Would not recommend. Oh, you still want a long read? Alright then. When I was asked to review 2020 for The Social, I had three thoughts: 1) I’m not Charlie Brooker 2) I said I’m not Charlie Brooker and 3) 2020 hasn’t ended, not really: we’re actually in 2016, … Continued

Thank you to everyone who contributed and turned up to celebrate a year of the Social Gathering! For those that missed it here is what happened at our virtual event on Monday 29 March 2020. White Rabbit Books Twitter drinks with Lee Brackstone at the controls Will Burns in conversation with our own Carl Gosling … Continued

A year ago today, we started our pandemic posts at The Social Gathering. Carl, or Robin, called me up – I cant remember which, they are both interchangeable to me – and suggested we turn the bar into an online iteration of itself for the two months or so we naively expected ‘this’ was going to be … Continued

In 1703 a student returned from studying at Oxford to the family home in Worcestershire. His name isn’t known – it might have been Thomas Appletree – because he did not mark his name in the weather diary he kept that year. While his diary predates the Met Office by 150 years, even by the … Continued

This coming Monday is be the anniversary of our first Social Gathering post. We thought when we started that we’d be doing something online for a month or two before the bar reopened and we forgot all about that weird time when we weren’t allowed out. 365 days, over 400 posts and one book later, … Continued

My sister, Anna, messaged me on Monday morning (22nd March) telling me that the musician Dan Sartain died over the weekend. He was 39 years old. The news shocked and saddened me. Since his first full album, ​Dan Sartain Vs. the Serpientes​ was released in 2005, I have been a fan of Sartain’s brand of rockabilly garage … Continued

A few years before the outbreak of the war I set out on a walking tour of Scotland, she began. I was caught in much the same conundrum. I pictured my calling as being somewhere out there, wrapped up in experience, secreted in a future that could be unlocked with a precise series of actions, … Continued

The night sleeps tight and thick as ink, wrapped around the house, head tucked under its tail. On the top road, a solitary car’s headlights thread a needle through its matted fir without it waking. The night dreams alone, fathoms deep, sensing the approaching sun coming to slit it open like a diver’s blade splits … Continued

HEALING STUDIO Come for a half-price ear-clean therapy service. Limited time only! Or 25% off shoulder massage Exclusive organic candle and soap sale I’m proud of the flyers. Printed on thick, linen cardstock at the Office-Mart. There was a queue behind me, and so I’d typed them up so quickly on the self-serve machine, that … Continued

It’s All Sensations – Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay. Reviewed By Will Burns How do we come to our musical heroes and heroines? How do we find them, those figures from our own young and emergent tastes, and through that finding start to build ourselves? Jackie Kay’s book on Bessie Smith, originally published in 1997 … Continued

We were surrounded by streets of tenements. They were constructed like impregnable medieval forts in a rectangular shape. Our block consisted of four streets: Springburn Road at the top, Palermo Street and Vulcan Street directly opposite each other and Ayr Street at the bottom.  Each tenement consisted of three storeys. There was a space outside … Continued

It’s our great pleasure to share with you the opening chapter of author Lesley Chow’s new collection You’re History here on The Social Gathering. It’s a great introduction to story that offers an explanation as to why Lesley chose the twelve ‘strangest women in pop’ as the basis for her book. The artists I write on at length in the … Continued

22/10/1884 A letter has been delivered to Gordon of Khartoum. The small boy with the limp was entrusted to carry it from the lines to the palace. Gordon of Khartoum read it to his mouse and laughed. It is a forgery, a dastardly piece of ill prophecy. It claims to be from the Mahdi himself. … Continued

If I asked her why she was always trying to need more than she needed, she’d say that borrowing brought you closer to other people, while buying mostly made you lonelier. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Alexandra Kleeman Vaporwave is happening to you. It’s a way of seeing, of being, pitched somewhere … Continued

We’ve always been big fans of Cold War Steve over here, The Social put on his first ever exhibition back in 2018 and then last year with everything closed we stepped in to host the amazing Benny’s Babbies on The Social Gathering. So when we heard that a guy from Bristol called Nick had been … Continued

We Are I.E. was one of the first records to signal a shift away from the European and American music that had dominated the raves of the late 80s. With its Amen break, reggae bassline and gunshots it laid the groundwork for a style that would become uniquely British and eventually develop into what would … Continued

When you write a book about foghorns you end up in strange and unexpected places.  Jennifer Lucy Allan The last entry in the logbook at the Flannan Isles Lighthouse was the morning weather readings on 15th December 1900. When the relief boat turned up on the 26th December, there was nobody to greet them, and … Continued

The view from the back yard. ‘Conquer your way of being.’ Speaking desperanto on the road to Lyon. Early morning, before sunrise. Bleary-eyed in the back of a cab. Hurtling down Ronda Litoral. Head still spinning. Stumbling and mumbling through a conversation in broken Spanish—mine broken, the taxi driver’s rapid-fire and of the mother tongue … Continued

In 2009, on our honeymoon, my wife and I went in search of Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the west coast of the USA. We carried two books with us, Ferlinghetti’s 1993 New Directions collection, These Are My Rivers, and Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. In San Francisco we dropped into City Lights Books and asked if Ferlinghetti was around, but … Continued

The Dianettes! The Cerazettes! The Yasmins! The Ciliques! The Aranelles! The Karivas! The Levoras! The Nordettes! The Ocellas! The Seasoniques! The Velivets! The Lessinas!  What a line-up of great, lost, girl groups.  Backcombed hair and matching outfits, lavish passions and makeup, how many of the members are jealous of that one girl who has been … Continued

‘Here comes the wine,’ Abigail told me. True enough, the waitress was approaching with the wine in her hands. I noted that, though full, the bottle had already been opened. Obviously if I had been in New York – say at Lutèce – I would have immediately sent it back. You don’t open a bottle … Continued

When Serge Gainsbourg died 30 years ago, he was a musical footnote outside of France. Gainsbourg was considered a novelty artist in Britain – the answer to a nagging question down at the local pub quiz, and remembered, if at all, as the guy who had made ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ with Jane Birkin. … Continued

The perfect performance of the music of J.S. Bach would consist of a setting of ‘Cantata BWV 172’, the cantata for the first day of Pentecost that begins ‘Ring forth, o songs, resound, you strings!/ O most blessed time!/ God Himself shall prepare our souls to be His temples’, followed by Bach’s setting of the … Continued

Reviewed By Martha Sprackland ‘all days have their inheritance’, the anxious narrator of little scratch muses. This particular day – the single, threaded day of Rebecca Watson’s debut novel – begins with a mild hangover, an almost-missed train, and proceeds through the mundanity of a day at the office. Soup for lunch, chitchat with anonymous … Continued

Doomscrolling, as wikipedia defines it, is “the act of consuming a large quantity of negative online news at once. Mental health experts have stated that the practice can be detrimental to mental health.” Isn’t that the understatement of the new decade, lol: you’re stuck at home because Covid said no, you can’t see your mates, … Continued

In the latest in a series of collaborative exchanges with Lias Saoudi of the band Fat White Family – which I’m thinking of titling ‘Have They Nothing Better To Do?’ – Lias sent me a few dozen subject headings; I randomly plucked fifteen of these from a bowl and wrote about them. I present the … Continued

There was a moment a week or so ago when I thought about the next guide and wondered if there was anything left to write about. Sure, there is plenty of stuff I haven’t covered here that is worth your time, THE SERPENT being probably top of the list, but I figure you already know … Continued

From next week, we’re going to build a library.  This will be an ever-expanding bookcase full of recommendations from the people behind the Social Gathering (the Social and White Rabbit Books). Each month, one new favourite will be written up as a book of the month by one of our contributors and added to the … Continued

Riots? In the Netherlands? Many UK pals have asked me privately what’s going on. Most Brits think the Dutch walk around (when allowed out of course) drawing on a joint the size of Wales whilst preaching free love for all sentient beings. Others – usually my more well-heeled pals – love it that the country … Continued

Our aim in collecting these stories together is to take what scares us seriously. Fear is rarely treated with the same respect as other more prestigious or edifying emotions, and, in the horror genre particularly, fear is often dismissed as a technical contrivance or mere gimmick. As such, it is diminished, and employed as an … Continued

I recently asked the Irish novelist Rob Doyle to make a contribution to an edition of AMBIT magazine I’d been asked to guest edit (more on that later) and he suggested we attempt an Oulipo; a kind of literary exercise built around prescribed constraints. He asked me to send him fifty or so prompts which … Continued

“I have come to rescue all of the disappeared, to reunite all true loves, to turn history to dust.” – Frater Jim, Monument Maker. I started writing Monument Maker in 2008 (back when it was called The Tomb of the Song) but stopped after a year as I felt myself descending into the book like … Continued

There was a certain man I used to see almost every weekday night in the pub. This man was a builder and worked for another man here in the village, and at the weekends he would travel back to the Kent coast where he ‘lived properly’, as he called it, with his wife. One night, … Continued

As a teen in the 80’s, I didn’t need Henri Bergson to explain to me the idea of objective and subjective time.  Sure, a minute was a minute, but how that time stretched, became elastic in the lesson where the teacher droned for forty minutes without stopping, or at the old relations’ house, where we … Continued

Back in April last year I was on Dobbins Lane in ‘the village’ where I live when I chanced upon Will Burns out walking. I think he was coming back from the allotment which isn’t remarkable in itself except I hadn’t seen him in almost six weeks. We instinctively made space for each other, he … Continued

If you were walking near Tottenham Court Road underground in the late 1970’s – and if you were lucky – you may have heard a haunting, hypnotic sound reverberating through the tunnels and surrounding streets, merging with that peculiarly Soho scent: cigarette smoke, unsettled fresh beer, sweat, strong Italian coffee and the acrid residue of … Continued

First things first: if this is the first time you are hearing about Gamestop, in relation to Stocks, or – and I can’t believe I’d ever have to type this – Elon Musk, please understand: you are already too late. You’re worse than a spectator: You’re watching a re-run of the match, mate. You’re playing … Continued

Boredom was having a night of it.  He stood alone in front of the bar. Dead in the centre. Legs spread like a flightless sparrow, sweated tight into his one good pair of skinny jeans. Bone-thin arms ready to burst into flames if they ever met sunlight. Gripping the surface. Palms staking a claim in … Continued

Gordon Burn wrote in a prescient way about celebrity, its glitz, tawdriness and corrosive power.  In his fiction and non-fiction, there are tabloid journalists who confer it, and people – singers, serial killers, sports stars, parents of missing children –  who gain it, as well as those for whom celebrity ebbs slowly  away.  When he … Continued

There’s a Sleaford Mods song called Elocution on which Jason Williamson announces, in the kind of mock-posh voice the hard kids at school used to put on when they were about to duff in a Walter The Softy type: “I’m secretly hoping that by agreeing to talk about independent venues, I will then be in a position … Continued

SHINY AND NEW, is a completely new take on the Eighties, a book which not only shines a light into the decade’s dark crevices, but which also used ten moments of pop perfection to illustrate the extraordinary musical variety that decade encouraged. The Eighties will never die, they just keep mutating! The Eighties is often … Continued

Dear John Niven, Nothing good ever came after the phrase “Let me just start by saying I’m a fan”, so let me instead start by saying I am a massive, massive fan, mate: Kill Your Friends was a boom ting (see, me as a struggling artist, that bit where you break down what happens when … Continued

FOOLS! LUNATICS! NUTJOBS! How dare The Social Gathering ask me to write this – what is it – thingy thing blog whatsit – here, when I am finally here, amongst such meagre refuge as is this desk, this IKEA shelving, this door – only just secured against those bitter whinnying voices that seep through every … Continued

Back in 1988 life as a closeted gay teenager felt to me like being a spy in a cold war thriller. Not the sort with loads of sex and glamorous locations, but the kind where shady figures lurk by dead letter drops and quietly surveil the world – a place that wasn’t to be engaged … Continued

New Year = Groundhog Year. Having barely made it out of my lounging clothes for most of the holidays, I find that the New Year only requires a top half change for the obligatory Zoom calls meaning that I can save precious minutes getting back into my favourite hoodie for long nights in front of … Continued

We asked our correspondent in Pennsylvania, Lenny Kaye to write some words about his friend and fellow mid-70s rock n roll genius, Sylvain Sylvain. Proud to be presenting this tribute to him here. Sylvain Sylvain, the heart and soul of the New York Dolls, bearer of the Teenage News, passed into his next astral incarnation … Continued

I lived in an ancient tenement building decades ago, that was so creepy and weird I knew it would one day form the basis of a novel. It takes a long time before we are ready to write certain books and others will always be a small act of madness at any time, Luckenbooth was … Continued

Our story starts in the jungle. The man who whistles is the harbinger of chaos. But we don’t see him at first, we only hear his shrill call-to-arms. Instead, our attention is on another young man, shirtless and wearing a black balaclava. He’s climbing down a rope into a steep red ravine. A third man, … Continued

‘How did it come to this?’ The commentators wailed. Lemme help you out…  As I watched the mob rampaging through the Capitol, numb on the sofa along with the rest of the world, I thought back to when I first began to worry about America.    It was twelve years ago, early in 2009, not … Continued

There’s a big Sainsbury’s in Stockport and I go there all the time. I walk there from my house; it takes about twenty-five minutes. It’s not a giant superstore but it’s bigger than your average. It has some size on it. It’s sizeable. Stockport Sainsbury’s is closing and I’m sad. 31st January 2021 is D-Day. … Continued

We clapped for carers every week like our lives depended on it. Because they did.  That weekly trip to the front doorstep was both a genuine display of appreciation and the mobilisation of a nation of individuals, all selfishly pleading for those frontline workers – the people facing down Covid day after day after day … Continued

How much time have you spent daydreaming about going out dancing? In the past few months, in your kitchen, in the shower, walking along the pavement with your headphones on. Where will it be, who will be there? In your daydream maybe everyone is there, like you’ve arrived in heaven, although that would probably freak … Continued

It is traditional between Christmas and New Year for The Social (the real one on Little Portland St) to shut its doors after closing time on the Dec 23. By that point only Graeme, Simon and a few of the staunchest West End drinkers would remain in the Upstairs Bar after weeks of madness. The … Continued

It’s Christmas Eve. Hopefully you’ve got a mince pie, a carrot and two fingers of decent brandy ready to arrange near a non-existent chimney.  This year, we’re adding a printed out picture of the Guv’nor to our festive arrangement in an effort to usher in a bit of much needed love and light for the … Continued

Quick, there’s very little time to spare. We’re almost at the end. The weekends here are impossible as far as writing anything is concerned, and there’s only one of them left separating me from a reunion with my mum and my brothers, from the inactive sprawl of ‘the Holidays’. My father hasn’t got any software … Continued

“I don’t want to go blind,” That’s what you said. You just came out with it. “I don’t want to go blind,” I was knackered from the drive, with a mouthful of tea, savouring the moment, you and me, perfect no wind, nothing, you picked your moment and launched. We’re in your garden, sunny Worcestershire, … Continued

For Z. In Slavoj Žižek’s documentary A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema there is an analysis of the famous opening scene from Blue Velvet, in which the protagonist’s father is peacefully watering his perfect garden in his perfect home, beneath a perfect sun in the idyllic town of Lumberton, North Carolina, where everything glimmers with innocence … Continued

Welcoming Nuggets legend, Mr Lenny Kaye to The Social Gathering for reflections on the photographs of David Godlis and the fabled streets of Manhattan. I run into Godlis on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village.  As I have for over forty years.  I’ve never called him by his first name.  We exchange pleasantries, whatcha … Continued

The foghorn sounds.  Its abrupt and terrific interjection comes from a square black mouth, a colossal metallic holler that is stupefyingly loud. It floods my ears and shakes my guts. I am overwhelmed. I freeze. Tiny hairs rise on my covered arms. Its moaning blast ends in a gruff grunt that jolts me from my … Continued

Long before Christan Marclay was proverbially dragging in people who don’t normally go to art galleries to see his conceptual masterwork, The Clock, he was creating musical mélanges with turntables in homage to some of the greats. Turntablism began in the 1970s, with early practitioners like DJ Kool Herc, then became a central tenet of … Continued

In keeping with the wider-held traditions of Macclesfield, my longsuffering girlfriend Gillian had been working at Halle Models’ lingerie mill as a machinist while continuing to sell children’s clothes on her parents’ Wythenshawe market stall at the weekend. The Gilbert family had moved to Macclesfield from Whalley Range in 1964. Dad Leslie, mother Florence, and … Continued

It was ages since I’d read a treatise on something. Too, too long. So I was holding one in either hand, weighing up what to get: the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s 1739 A Treatise of Human Nature, or the one by the Grammy-winning, Canadian musician Chilly Gonzales: Enya: A Treatise On Unguilty Pleasures. I … Continued

I’ve spent the past week engrossed in Erik Davis’ incredible High Weirdness (recently published by Strange Attractor).  A depth charge exploration of the weirder corners of 1970’s counter- culture, Davis paints a kaleidoscopic picture that homes in on the strange – often life changing – visionary experiences of some of the 1970’s most infamous psyconauts: … Continued

Between February and August this year, I listened to all Andrew Weatherall’s Music’s Not For Everyone shows broadcast on NTS Radio between 2014 and 2020.  Seventy-three shows, from which emerged five playlists and thirty hours of music.  My self-appointed task, originally embarked upon as an expression of grief, was done.  But then I found it … Continued

Having been sober for almost five years – sober through the death of my Mum and the grief of my Dad, through the brutal, public murder of a friend; sober through the Bre and the Cov words, through Johnson and Trump and the death of shame; sober through raising daughters, honouring a marriage, earning my … Continued

God, I miss the pub. With two harsh lockdowns, a fleeting partial respite and one period of baffling regulation apparently drawn up by a mandarin left over from when the temperance movement was still gaining traction, this year has presented something of a challenge to those of us whose social life revolves almost entirely around … Continued

When this crisis started, when every live music event in the entire world was cancelled pretty much over night for the foreseeable future, I was in disarray. I was one good festival season away from having saved up enough money for a deposit. An end to rent slavery seemed like a fair renumeration for sacrifices … Continued

Being a film-maker, there’s always a point after completing a film where you start thinking about all the things that got left on the cutting room floor…or to be more precise, left on a 5tb hard-drive. With Cold War Steve Meets The Outside World, there was a lot that didn’t make it in to the … Continued

Double figures! I have to say I am a little surprised to still be writing this, ten episodes in. What started as a way to justify my voluminous TV watching to a sceptical family has now become a highlight of the fortnight for me and, it seems, rather popular with at least a few people.  … Continued

Today Katy issuch a motherfucken bitch.I hate her guts somuch that she belongsin hell. She theUglyest, trashest, stupidest, fuckestmother fuckenassole damnhell AssFucken bitch,  I’m sat, Indian-style, on the beige shag carpet behind Katy’s parents’ black leather sofa from Finger’s Furniture, hunched over, furiously writing the most hateful words I can think of with a No. 2 … Continued

In a conversation with Michael Barbaro for the New York Times’ podcast ‘The Daily’, journalist Wesley Morris says “You know, there’s always a moment whenever I’m watching or listening or reading anything — you’re waiting for this moment for something in you to change”. When I heard this, a year and a half ago, I … Continued

There is – Phil Collins aside – something gloriously deranged about the very idea of the singing drummer. It’s the combination of physical chops – flailing limbs, strained larynx – in contrast with the steadying pulse, the yin yang of rock n’ roll brought into sharp focus: untethered chaos tempered by ruthless discipline. And John … Continued

Yesterday saw the publication of Robin Turner’s book …Believe In Magic: the First 30 Years of Heavenly Recordings. As you probably know, our bricks and mortar home The Social was set up by the people behind Heavenly Recordings. And, as you probably also know, that venue was an attempt to build a permanent home for … Continued

Its Friday. 5 o’clock is looming, work’s about to shut down for 48 hours. With all that in mind, why not wear the weekend? This Wage Packet Tee takes a timeless design classic and emblazons it on to your chest like a badge of honour. No deductions this week. Just wait for that whistle to … Continued

The Hissing of Summer Lawns is the story of the 1970s, according to The Snork, I read this in one of his catalogues, because according to The Snork, or, rather, according to this write-up by The Snork, the album spanned the mood of that decade, the sound of that decade, and that Blue was the … Continued

A Conversation About Bagpipes and Improvisations with Jennifer Lucy Allan Last year Richard Youngs popped up in my inbox asking if anyone I knew would be interested in releasing a record he’d made with a piper called Donald WG Lindsay. I had just presented a bagpipe special on Late Junction, and so I probably seemed … Continued

I’ve just moved to Hove, in East Sussex, a part of the country I know almost not at all, having spent most of my life up until now in either Merseyside, Madrid or London. I’ve been down this way only once before, for the TWT festival, running alongside the Labour Party Conference, a couple of … Continued

This is a reflection on time, a train and some presidents of the United States. It’s about the non-linear eddies created by people moving through time, and maybe it’s about the idea that our innate need to define life in a linear way defeats our understanding of how some things happen and are connected. It’s … Continued

This morning I was yearning for the umpteenth time for things to go back to normal- only to realise I can no longer remember what normal is. Office banter; conferences; flights; classes; bars; literary festivals…. all that was my normal, but I struggle to recall what that pre-Covid life was actually like. I have pictures … Continued

A friend suggested I call it a musical meta-biography, but until that catches on, here’s me trying to explain what William The Conqueror is by way of a story. I’d had eight years of breaking even as a non-offensive, red bearded, singer-songwriter. I wasn’t a failure as such, but I was creatively empty, skint and … Continued

Turquoise eyes, cherry lips, jelly bracelets, twist-a-beads untwisted, lace leggings, black heels, slick clip-on plastic hundred dollar bills; a nice touch that we used a cut piece from my homemade yellow crop top for the bandana, I was stoked on that for sure. We, is my mom and I. We always made my Halloween costumes. … Continued

When I was a small boy my best friend Richard and I created a game of startling complexity. It grew from the ground like a flourishing vine, twisting and transforming things until it had insinuated itself into the landscape. The game, and our uncritical playing of it, altered reality. Freeing itself from the confines of … Continued

Happy Halloween! In anticipation of what might be next week’s election horror, and to celebrate the season, Rough Trade Books has been filling the Social Gathering’s online pages this week with tales of goblins, ghosts, myth, folklore and much more. They kicked off with Simon Costin from Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft and Magic introducing All … Continued

There are plenty of reasons why Jeremy Deller is The Social Gathering’s favourite British artist. He consistently lifts pop culture – from wrestling to raving – onto the pedestals of ‘high art’ world like no one else; he manages to perfectly document the minutiae of people’s lives and political beliefs through a lens; he built … Continued

Halloween isn’t just for kids. No, it’s basically Christmas and New Year rolled into one for the true Metal Lords – those Gods of Rock who dance with the devil all year round. Today, our resident hell hound Justin Quirk brings Rocktober to an awesome end with the perfect playlist of Satanic sounds ready made and … Continued

Today’s Rough Trade Books treat involves two of the most exciting young writers around talking all things Goblin… Jen Calleja is joined by Rebecca Tamás to discuss her pamphlet Goblins, and along the way, the pair touch on shame and shamelessness, the monstrous, the other, gender, fantasy, Labyrinth, music, translation and much, much more in a conversation that is as … Continued

And… we’re closed. For now. It’s not as if we really had to. But we felt we had to. Recently, the Dutch government decreed a shutdown of all cafes, restaurants and pubs to stem a huge surge of infections. Events – including gigs – are still allowed, but with a 30 person maximum. WORM could … Continued

Aided by a witch and the magician Alan Moore, David Bramwell takes an occult journey back in time up the river Don, in search of the supernatural secrets of our waterways and to solve the mystery of a drowned village which has long haunted his memories. Travelling through the industrial destruction of our landscape he arrives in a pre-Christian … Continued

Today’s Halloween hangout is a conversation between Belfast’s Wendy Erskine and Glasgow’s David Keenan. Two of The Social’s favourite writers got together and discussed the inspiration behind their pamphlets Satan is Real: Two Short Stories and Empty Aphrodite: An Encyclopaedia of Fate both published as part of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic series by Rough Trade Books earlier this year. … Continued

Running The Light is the first novel by Denver stand-up comedian Sam Tallent. Electrifying the wider comedy community since its self-publication this year, Doug Stanhope recently called it “the best fictional representation of comedy in any medium”. The story follows the washed-up, thoroughly ruined but occasionally-brilliant aging comic Billy Ray Schafer across a string of … Continued

Like it or loathe it, Halloween is here to stay. It is a night of contradictions: a night of glitter and gravedust. But is it Pagan or Christian, ancient or modern, spiritual or commercial? Is it a time of diabolic fiends and scary ghosts or a sombre time to commune with the ancestors? Is it … Continued

When I’m wandering about by ours, popping the shops or walking the dogs, and I bump into someone I know, the most interesting and exciting conversations start with them saying ‘It’s fucking bullshit isn’t it?’ At this point it could go in so many directions, there’s normally a few seconds to think about it. Which … Continued

In a past life I travelled for work. I stayed in hotel rooms with starched sheets that smelled like industrial fabric softener. I washed with soap in plastic wrappers. I would have one last drink at the hotel bar with people on my press trip, and stumble in at the last minute to the morning … Continued

We first met Steve and Kavus at Glastonbury in 2016 when they played to the biggest crowd we have ever seen at our tent (Stonebridge). It was quite the sight, inside and out. Actually as far as the eye could see pretty much. When they started, people really didn’t have a clue what to expect. … Continued

Yes she did. Have you ever tried not being scum? Last week I wrote something about how in the 80s it was just Liverpool earmarked for managed decline, but this time round no-one is safe, for the simple reason that the Tories don’t need or even want the cities anymore, such is the level of … Continued

According to John Higgs, we gave up on the future in the 1980s. Before then our shining vision of a utopia free from disease, work and the laws of gravity was ingrained in our culture. We were always only a decade away from a world of economic equality, total sexual liberation and better waterslides. But … Continued