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Alan Garner on Televison: The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Keeper
PART THREEThere is a tension in Garner’s work between the intuitive consciousness, sensitive to time, place and feeling, and the rational, empirically ordered mindset, which seeks to make sense of the...
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Stephen Volk's Leytonstone and the Secret Heart of Hitchcock
Stephen Volk’s new novella (novelette? I never did work out the fine distinctions) Leytonstone is a tangential follow up to Whitstable, his acclaimed 2013 book, also published by Spectral Press. He...
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Bloody Homage: The Hammer of Dr Valentine, Terrors of the Théâtre Diabolique...
The golden age of British horror movies continues to exert a fascination over successive generations of fans. The films of the late 50s through to the mid-70s belong to a distinct period of post-war...
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3000 Years with Ottilie
This record, which came into the Oxfam record shop in Exeter yesterday, is a real discovery. Ottilie Patterson was the singer with the Chris Barber Band, belting out good time trad jazz. But on this...
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Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff - 40 Years of Art Walking
Walk On is a major exhibition loosely themed around the act of wandering and the art it has inspired over the past 5 or so decades. It is distributed around various venues in Plymouth, allowing the...
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Nick Talbot of Gravenhurst
It was tremendously sad to learn of the passing of Nick Talbot, who died on 4th December at the desperately premature age of 37. Talbot had been the creative force behind the group Gravenhurst for 12...
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Hunting The Demons of Ashcombe
It was on a sharp, blue-skied autumn day that I set out to hunt down the demons of Ashcombe. I’d seen pictures of the strange, distorted faces carved into the dark oak of 17th century bench ends in...
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Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at The British Library
PART ONEThe British Library exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination began, appropriately enough, with a descent. After a brief introductory film in which four explorers of diverse Gothic...
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Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at the British Library
PART TWOCharles Dickens is the perfect figure to usher us into the Victorian world, and into the dark, narrow and crowded streets of the rapidly expanding, noisily industrial capital. A clip of the...
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Songs of Free Men
A remarkable cover from a collection of Paul Robeson 78s which has just come into the Oxfam Music and Art shop where I work, vintage dust and all. Released in 1943, the illustration explicitly connects...
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The Holcombe Rogus Time Traveller
It was a freezing January morning when I lifted my bike off the train at Tiverton Parkway station and wheeled it down the ramp into the carpark. The station is nowhere near Tiverton (it’s actually just...
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Midwinter Rites and Rituals
This is a slightly longer version of the essay included in the splendid Folklore Tapes release Calendar Customs III.Midwinter is the low ebb of the year, the heart of the lifeless season when the sun...
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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Notes for a filmclub screening.Valerie and her Week of Wonders is a Czech film made in 1969, the year after the Prague Spring and its brutal suppression by the Soviet Union. It’s a colourful fantasy,...
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Folklore Tapes: Occultural Creatures Vol.1 - Black Dog Traditions of England
The latest offering from the Folklore Tapes folk (Ian Humberstone and David Chatton Barker in this instance) is a treasure box filled with exquisite objects, a reliquary as the promotional copy casts...
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Midsummer Traditions and Folklore
A longer version of an essay included with the Folklore Tapes box Calendar Customs IV: Crown of LightMidsummer is the most natural time of the year for a celebration marked by simple pleasure and...
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The Little Gift by Stephen Volk
I’ve attempted to avoid mentioning one of the central incidents in the story, but surrounding allusions will inevitably give a good deal of the game away. So to avoid disappointment and irritation I...
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Children Of Alice
Originally published as a Warp Records press release for the debut LP by Children of Alice. Children of Alice have been quietly producing amorphous and intoxicating soundscapes as part of the Folklore...
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Paradoxical Undressing by Kristin Hersh
Asked to come up with a book from the library shelves I would recommend, I decided upon Kristin Hersh's wonderful novelistic memoir of the early days of Throwing Muses, her struggles with strange...
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A Canterbury Tale
Notes for an introduction to a film club screening.Powell and Pressburger – an alliterative pairing whose enunciation immediately summons up an aura of magic and enchantment for me. I first came across...
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Folklore Tapes: The First Five Years
An overview originally uploaded for a Bleep.com 'advent calendar' release of a special 5 year mix in 2016. FTV. Five years of Folklore Tapes. It feels odd writing it down, both because it feels like...
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