Category: Culture

By Liv Thomas

The mid-19th-century pavements of Manchester and Salford would often bear the footsteps of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose encounters with the harsh industrial conditions kindled ideas that would reverberate far beyond the city’s rauch und ruß. In the 1950s, those same pavements felt the same steady tread of L.S. Lowry, an artist who, when his paintings failed to make any profit, turned to the prosaic vocation of rent collecting – wandering the less fortunate quarters of both cities, gathering his modest income, and taking in the quiet scenes that would later find their way onto his canvases. 

One cannot help but notice the irony wherein the very streets that bred The Communist Manifesto would later see an artist navigating them as rent collector, inspecting the homes of working class families and simply trying to make ends meet. Having missed his train one day in 1916, Lowry stumbled upon the loose end of a Manchester suburb with a happenstance ACME Spinning Company Mill in full churn. He would later recall, “The mill was turning out hundreds of little, pinched figures, heads bent down… I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.” This view, a boilerplate skyline of brick, chimney, and chilly smoke, suddenly brimmed with a new life under the realisation that no one else was painting this. Lowry thus decided to put the industrial scene “on the map because nobody had seriously done it”, and from then on, Pendlebury’s mills, Salford’s back alleys, and Manchester’s markets became his muse.  

Today’s Manchester is a hive of activity, its identity manifesting in the iconography of worker-bee souvenirs and a pulsing music scene. Much the same could be said of Lowry’s Manchester, though gift shops were much less in vogue and its soundtrack not yet touched by the likes of ‘The Smiths’ and ‘Joy Division’. Nevertheless, his canvases feature a similar population of matchstick figures in dense crowds, set against red-bricked factories and rows of terraced houses. 

In a 1957 BBC documentary on his life’s work, Lowry comments, “I just paint the people as I see the people in my mind’s eye,” a philosophy that creates an almost dreamlike process in which, rather than sketching soldiers or machinery from life, memories and local lore fill the scene – figures he described as “not exactly” Manchester workpeople but ghostly silhouettes that “seem to me so beautiful,” drifting through factories and streets. His speech was marked throughout by an insouciant “I don’t mind it at all,” and on the particular settings of his paintings, he observes, “I don’t mind it at all whether they’re today or yesterday or any other time.” A Christie’s curator notes that “Lowry is beloved by us for making the industrial scene his own. These works were created in his own unique way, poetic yet not sentimental, compelling… but never judgmental.” Indeed, Lowry claimed he did not paint to agitate or reform. “I was not thinking very much about the people in the way a social reformer does,” he admitted, “They are part of a private beauty that haunted me.” 

After all, it is not difficult to locate his work within the mid-century backdrop of Manchester’s smoking chimneys and flat caps, all seemingly tethered to a different alien to our own. The idea that it could belong equally to today or yesterday feels, at first, like a fragment of his time rather than ours. And yet. Watching that documentary during the final stretch of a degree in English Literature at Durham University (with all the existential static that attends a completed education and its ensuing blurry prospects), I found myself looking out of my bedroom window and recognising that today and yesterday. There is something in Lowry’s figures, drifting through those industrial thoroughfares, anonymous and unhurried, that refuses to be confined to any particular moment, and, for all the years that lie between Lowry’s world and our own, you may also find yourself absorbed into the slow ebb of a crowd. 

A self-proclaimed simple and lazy man, with little penchant for the “usual humdrum job,” Lowry occupies a peculiar position in the landscape of British Painters. Despite establishing an absence of ideology behind his art, it nevertheless maintains an air of its own reason. His canvases carry a certain passivity, the quality of an image recalled only in the fleeting, unfocused moments of everyday life: walking to the shops, walking through a familiar street, trying not to make eye contact with the strangers who are also simply getting on with things – reminiscent of the life my own grandma would describe to me. 

Yet. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had cast a long shadow over conservative British taste, its legacy of medieval romance and religious symbolism still colouring the expectations of what serious painting ought to look like. Within this same broad moment, artists like René Magritte were fashioning their ordinary figures within the realm of surreality, bending the everyday toward the uncanny and the subconscious. 

Stanley Spencer, with his quiet English churchyards and resurrected dead, transfigured the familiar into something devotional and intense. All of it, in its various ways, beckons beyond the everyday… reaching toward a distant past, an exploration of the self, or some higher plane of meaning which the visible and tangible world alone cannot contain. The Royal Academy, meanwhile, clung to its traditions of historical grandeur and mythological scene-painting, its Arthurian knights and Sunday School virgins dressed in a culture reluctant to look itself in the eye. 

Lowry wanted none of it, though not out of any particular rejection so much as something closer to indifference. Where his contemporaries turned the outward world into a framing for the inward one, Lowry showed little interest in being the kind of man who made his own mind the subject. He painted what he saw, and from this, he made something that the Southron art scene never would have thought to.

As such, within this peculiar space occupied by Lowry, and in spite of his assertions otherwise, he has come to embody a politics of representation, in that, by portraying the today and yesterday of Northern England, his art performs an act of attention that the broader culture had largely refused to make. The mills, back streets, and crowds filing out of factory gates were not the typical subjects that hung in the Royal Academy, nor the stuff of which artistic reputations were typically made, so much so that critics would describe the people in his paintings as “figures like insects”, one reviewer conceding he was “original but narrow and repetitive.” Yet Lowry paid them no mind: when asked why his figures always came out the same, he shrugged, “Because I can’t do them in any other way.” 

I would locate these criticisms in their own explicit form of classism towards the industrial North and its people; regardless, Lowry has made a legacy out of what these critics turn their noses up at, a legacy experienced by many. At a time when art was expected either to transcend its surroundings or to interrogate them, Lowry did neither. Within Lowry’s paintings, the lives of working people in the industrial North were as worthy of a canvas as an Arthurian legend. He did not sentimentalise them, and in doing so, preserved something that might otherwise have passed entirely unrecorded. 

While Lowry’s location is settled in Manchester, this legacy speaks to his future and our present. With the passing of Bradford legend David Hockney, the way in which northern artists offer us a grounding with reality seems more relevant than ever. Hockney, whose work occupies a much later decade than Lowry’s but who was also initially criticised for his simplicity and subject to mixed reviews from the Royal College of Art, is evidence of what Bradfordian journalist Ben Forrest writes: “Working-class people, and northern people more generally, aren’t afforded much of a foothold in the art world, and children are increasingly being persuaded to ignore their artistic sensibilities in favour of developing practical skills aimed at funnelling them into the job market.” And Lowry, the self-proclaimed simple man, demonstrates a similar trajectory – his mills may no longer churn, his crowds may wear different coats, but the ebb and flow stays steady. 

Featured Image: Pinterest

By David Bayne-Jardine

This year, on June 11^th, British artist David Hockney passed away at the age of 88 in his London home. 

A record-breaker on many fronts, Hockney’s iconically bright and bold paintings garnered him immense success within the market. In 2018, his famous Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sold for $90 million at Christie’s, New York, making it the most expensive artwork sold at auction by a living artist.

Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 in.

Despite this, his is usually not the most famous name associated with the Pop Art movement (we likely imagine the technicolour renditions of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol). However, David Hockney played a substantial role in defining not just the UK’s version of the trend, but also Modern British art more broadly. 

Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and educated at various prestigious art schools, Hockney found his success, like many of his contemporaries, in railing against the traditional aesthetic values taught to him at the Royal College of Art. Tired of being expected to engage with the lofty subject matter and conventional techniques of ‘classical’ art, Hockney and other likeminded Pop artists turned to mass culture for their inspiration. 

This is why 1960s California – a setting known for its post-war consumerist culture, booming media industries and shifting political landscape – served as inspiration for much of Hockney’s art when he was living out there. His use of acrylic paint on canvas, rather than oil, worked to capture the garish shininess of the swimming pools and glass houses that dotted the scenes of the American South West. A Bigger Splash (1967) depicts the almost eerie stillness of this lifestyle. Soaked and saturated in sun, with the splash of a swimmer frozen in time, this poolside scene captures leisure and wealth without a visible subject. 

Acrylic on canvas, 95.5 x 96 in. 

Returning to the UK and France in his later life, Hockney’s subject matter shifted to portraiture and the sweeping landscapes of his home county, Yorkshire. In the final decades of his life, Hockney became known for his iPad artworks of the area, with a print of his Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011) selling for $1 million at Sotheby’s in 2025, making it the most expensive iPad painting ever sold at auction. 

Beyond the successful and experimental artist, however, lay a man equally as memorable for his personal life. As a gay man who came out before the legalisation of same-sex relationships, Hockney has become an icon for the LGBT+ community – one who engaged boldly with touching scenes of same-sex love and intimacy in a time when many sought to bring down his emerging community. He was also an icon of style, famed for his signature round glasses, eccentric clothing and bright yellow Crocs, which he famously wore to meet the King at Buckingham Palace in 2022. 

It seems, then, that there are many versions of Hockney to be remembered upon his death: the artist, the activist, the fashionista… But perhaps it was Dame Tracy Emin, another titan of Modern British art known for her provocative confessional works, who summarises him best:

‘[Hockney was] a great artist and a wonderful man, who with the power of art changed the perception of Britishness. [He was] a proud chain-smoking homosexual, who flew the flag higher than any other British artist.’

Rest in Peace David Hockney, 1937-2026. 

Featured Image – Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, accessed at https://pallant.org.uk/perspectives-art-in-focus-kaisarion-hockney/

By Matthew Dodd

‘Change my dear, and it seems not a moment too soon’

–        The Sixth Doctor, Doctor Who, 1984

‘I don’t want to go’

–        The Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who, 2010

In the most unceremonious of ways, a midweek Instagram post, a British cultural institution of more than half a century was, not for the first time, put to rest. Or rather, it was, like a wounded dog limping from showrunner to showrunner, lifeline to lifeline, finally put out of its misery in an overwhelming cloud of indifference. Doctor Who – the British science fiction show launched in 1963, cancelled in 1989, temporarily resurrected in 1996, and brought back proper in 2005 – was confirmed by the BBC to not be returning to screens this Christmas, as was previously announced. Indeed, the show will not be returning to screens at all, until such time as a new co-production partner can be found. The current showrunner and production company have left the programme, and the property is to be put out to competitive tender in the coming months. Russell T Davies, the man who has the peculiar distinction of having both resuscitated and euthanised the programme, washed his hands of the show he credits with launching his interest in television – as well as, in no small part, his career – with curious detachment: ‘and so GOODBYE from me to Doctor Who but HELLO to a big new future for the show’, he wrote in a rambling Instagram caption. In the same caption, he admitted that he never had a plan for the show going forward, and that previous assertions to the contrary were but a clever piece of theatrical misdirection.

As any fan of the longest running Sci-Fi show in history will know, Doctor Who has long been lumbering through crisis after crisis, constantly battling an existential danger far worse than any Dalek or Cyberman. The show has been haemorrhaging viewers for over a decade and hasn’t been the nationally unifying Saturday night staple it once was since Matt Smith left the TARDIS. Their own worst enemies, Doctor Who fans will endlessly debate when it was that the show went off – after David Tennant morphed into a CGI goblin, after Russell T Davies left the first time, after Matt Smith made an erection joke with his sonic screwdriver, after Chris Chibnall rewrote the show’s mythology and cast Bradley Walsh, etc., etc. – but the truth is that the show has been held hostage by its own mythology from the very beginning. For twenty years it has grown heavy under the weight of its own narrative baggage. In this way, it has become the archetype for the kind of cultural inertia experienced across our contemporary mass media: a self-reflexive world of ‘fandom’ written by and for people who already know and love the property. For a show so fundamentally about change, Doctor Who – like so much of our modern culture – is terrified of the unknown.

The great trick to Doctor Who’s longevity is both narrative and practical. In 1966, when William Hartnell, the first actor to play the titular role, was becoming an increasingly difficult and unreliable presence on set, the show’s producers came up with a novel idea to continue the show without its hero: regeneration. In regeneration – the in-universe mechanism by which The Doctor is able to heal himself from mortal injury by changing his chemical construction – had the effect of offering Doctor Who a method to continue in perpetuity. Regeneration allowed for characters to be reshuffled alongside writers, directors, and design philosophies. If the show was failing under one team, regeneration offered a mechanism to swap them out, supported by the show’s own mythology. Under such a guise have instrumental changes been made to the show’s format, soundtrack, logo, and everything in between. More than that, however, regeneration cemented the central theme of the show as one of change. When Patrick Troughton emerged as the Second Doctor, he proclaimed to his questioning companions that ‘life depends on change, and renewal’. It’s that notion of constant evolution, of the way in which we all live many lives in our one, which has guided the show for sixty years. As long as the show believed in that conviction, it could live forever. In recent years, however, change has been overtaken as the driving force of the show by its more sinister cousin, regression. So then, we might contend that the moment Doctor Who precipitated its own doom was not with any shift in writer, actor, or storyline, but rather when David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor looked towards the camera in his final outing and, with tears mounting in his eyes, proclaimed, ‘I don’t want to go’.

The moment functions well in its context. It is the tragic sight of a character, burdened by years of narrative angst, finally buckling under the weight of trauma and accepting, as we all must, our innate fear of death. A few seconds later, Matt Smith arrived on screen and the machinery of the Whoniverse began running once more, with a successful rebrand under showrunner Steven Moffat. Yet it represented a paramount concession to fan expectation and the reluctance to change. It was, perhaps, not a major incident at the time – the show would achieve wide international acclaim in the Moffat era – but nevertheless planted a seed of reactionaryism that would come to the fore years later. Tennant was, and remains, certainly the most popular of the modern iterations of The Doctor. As such, it was no surprise that his leaving the show should be worth a teary adieu. Yet, compared to the departures of previous fan favourites, his can’t help but feel egregious. When Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor – by far and away the most popular of the original run – left the show, his final words were of hope and perseverance: ‘it’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for.’ The turn from one philosophy to the other, from the stoic farewell to the bleary-eyed plea, is a turn inward: the sign of a show rapidly becoming centred on itself.

Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese animator, courted controversy for his criticism of anime – a genre he helped to popularise – as being ultimately doomed in the modern day by its lack of inspiration. As a young director, he recalled being inspired by the films of Kurosawa and the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin, and how these broad multimedia influences came through and were synthesised in his animation. Now, he claims with regret, anime directors are expressly and solely influenced by other anime. As such, the genre becomes self-feeding and incapable of genuine growth. We can track the same trend in the sphere of western popular culture. In the 1980s, when Steven Spielberg and George Lucas wanted to make an homage to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the adventure films of their youth, they made cinematic history with Indiana Jones. In 2023, when James Mangold was tasked with making an homage to Indiana Jones, he made a sequel to Indiana Jones. In the same vein, we need only look at the most culturally ubiquitous of American cinematic exports: Star Wars.

With the first film in 1977, George Lucas was drawing on his love of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress – at one time considering Toshiro Mifune for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi – and concerns about the imperial machinery of the United States. In the franchise’s most recent outing, The Mandalorian and Grogu, the inspirational roots of the film are found nowhere deeper than those previous Star Wars films, as well as the attached apocrypha of television shows and comic books. The leads – heralded as the faces of a new era – are, in effect, stand-ins for two of the franchise’s original characters, Boba Fett and Yoda. This, concocted with a culture of ‘fandom’, has created a cultural ouroboros. As Roger Ebert observed in 2009, ‘a lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It’s all about them. They have mastered the “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion.’ It is these extreme fans who now hold the keys to our popular culture: either as the creative minds behind the latest Star Trek reboot, or else the ‘influencers’ endlessly agitating about their pet franchises. The studio system upholds this cultural stunting: why take the risk on a new property, or even a new character, when you can endlessly resuscitate an old one? In 2026, we reach a new low in this chronic resistance to the new with HBO’s Harry Potter. After J.K. Rowling’s prequel series Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them failed to live up to the box-office juggernaut which was its predecessor, Warner Bros have returned to the, by now, decomposing horse of the Harry Potter corpus to create a reboot which shares music, designs, plots, and even actors with the original films. There is nothing new to be extracted from this project, only subscriptions to the newly launched HBO Max streaming service. Popular culture is becoming a simulacrum of itself.

Doctor Who provides, perhaps, the clearest and largest scale example in British popular culture of this destructive self-reflexivity. The seeds of Doctor Who’s undoing have always been rooted in an over-reverencing of the show’s canon. When the show returned under Russell T Davies in 2005, it presented itself as something genuinely new. The original show, though a national institution, had become something of a laughing stock by the time of its cancellation. It was a show for strange, emotionally stunted men in anoraks, replete with over-complicated plots, flimsy sets, and saltshaker robots. With Christopher Eccleston, it became must-watch television. It was well-written, funny, and grounded. The world of the show felt genuinely relevant and rooted in the experience of 21^st century British life. Rose Tyler, the Doctor’s companion across the first two series of the revived show, was a shop assistant who lived on a council estate, offered the keys to the universe. The monsters were analogues for trauma, weight loss fads, the Iraq war, and modern slavery. The stories were personal and drawn together by coherent thematic threads: escapist fairy tales that were never afraid to touch on the real. After twenty years in the wilderness, Doctor Who was a show that meant something again. Two decades later, with Russell T Davies once more at the helm, Doctor Who has never felt more out of touch.

A popular prognosis for Doctor Who’s decline has been its surrender to so called wokeism. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, blamed the BBC for ruining a show he once loved with its flagrant kowtowing to the militant left (we are to assume this was an allusion to the recent introduction of Ncuti Gatwa, the first black Doctor). In their autopsy of the show, The Telegraph contended that its downfall was having become ‘mired in preachiness and identity politics’. The suggestion that Doctor Who had suddenly shifted towards social and political concerns in the last few years is both laughable and ahistorical. Genesis of the Daleks, one of the original run’s most acclaimed stories, drew direct comparisons between the creation of the villainous Daleks and the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany; in 1971’s The Claws of Axos, Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor admonishes the nationalist Minister of Defence Mr Chinn for his cries of ‘England for the English’; the Davies written Turn Left depicts an alternate timeline where economic crisis leads the British government to intern settled immigrants, whilst the war veteran Wilf laments, ‘labour camps, that’s what they called them last time.’ Indeed, when it launched in 1963, Doctor Who was helmed by the BBC’s only female producer, Verity Lambert, and directed by the gay, Indian-born Waris Hussein. All this to say, the heart of Doctor Who has always been one of progressive social and political conviction. The issue with the contemporary show is not that it has become exceptionally left-wing, but rather that it has become painfully reactionary.

The major turn to wokery, in the popular consciousness, came about with the announcement in 2017 that Jodie Whittaker would portray the first female incarnation of The Doctor. The news was divisive: Fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison mourned ‘the loss of a role model for boys.’ Yet the show under Jodie Whittaker was not a polemic work of left-wing propaganda. Quite to the contrary, in Kerblam!, The Doctor comes face to face with a disgruntled worker at a space-age version of Amazon who turns to domestic terrorism to protest the harsh and dehumanising conditions at the company. Her response to him is one of chronic centrism: ‘the systems aren’t the problem! How people use and exploit the system, that’s the problem!’ In the same series, the Malorie Blackman penned Rosa sees The Doctor and co. have to help ensure that Rosa Parks ends up launching her bus protest – portrayed in the show as a random accident rather than a coordinated act of political disruption – and find themselves forced to sit and watch her be racially abused as, were they to leave, they would create enough space on the bus for the white man to sit down. The most egregious case, perhaps, occurs in the episode Spyfall, when The Doctor’s nemesis The Master – played by Sacha Dhawan – appears as a Nazi officer, using a perception filter to disguise his race. Having already foiled his plans, The Doctor deactivates the filter and warns that ‘now they’ll see the real you’. The rest of the episode implies that The Doctor had his archenemy sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Such episodes display a deeply noncommittal if not conservative politics, buried under the veneer of progressivism.  

With the return of Russell T Davies, the disconnect between how the show presented itself and how it operated only deepened. His first episode back in post, The Star Beast, has The Doctor berated by his old friend Donna for his inability to just let things go – ‘something a male presenting Time Lord will never understand’ – mere moments after asserting the character’s fundamentally non-binary nature. The show integrated social politics in the most oblique and clunky of ways – often fundamentally misrepresenting sensitive issues – to become a kind of self-caricature, characters operating less as psychologically grounded figures but conduits for well-intentioned but frequently malformed social critique. Beneath this dusting of progressivism persisted the undercurrent of conservatism: in The Interstellar Song Contest, The Doctor appears to take pleasure in torturing a genocide survivor for his attempt at revenge against the corporation that destroyed his home planet. What has become increasingly clear is that the issue of ‘Doctor Who gone woke’ and the issue of its self-mythologising are one and the same.

During the ‘Wilderness Years’, those between Doctor Who’s cancellation in 1989 and return in 2005, the franchise was kept on life support by a dedicated fan culture, manifest in books, comics, and Comic Relief sketches. A key element of this culture met regularly in London’s Fitzroy Tavern, where they would, over some number of pints, wax lyrical on their love for the programme, and notions of how they might write it if they were only given the chance. Amongst this crowd were Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Chris Chibnall, Mark Gatiss, Nicholas Briggs, and Paul Cornell – to name a few. When Davies was offered the chance to bring back Doctor Who in 2005, he brought the Fitzroy set with him. Twenty years later, they have not left. This group of upper middle class white men have controlled the show’s direction since its return, and, like any group that governs for decades, the waning of their creative insight has become ever more apparent. Instrumentally, the show has not been allowed to change. This is, of course, not entirely the fault of the writers. When Chris Chibnall left (in something of a cloud) in 2022, the rumour mill suggested that Davies returning was the only thing that would stop the BBC from pulling the plug entirely. Just as Hollywood studios favour established IP over new ideas, the BBC sought the certainty of the old guard rather than risking anything on the new. Davies brought back Doctor Who in 2005 as a bright young thing, fresh off his groundbreaking series ‘Queer as Folk’, and made it something new and exciting. Increasingly clear now is that, despite his great recent successes with shows like ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Years and Years’, the attitude he brings to Doctor Who, alongside his Fitzroy peers, is quite simply at odds with the freshness of his original stint and instead feels blisteringly stagnant.

As with Star Wars and Miyazaki’s anime warnings, Doctor Who has become a show that self-destructively recedes into itself. In Davies’ second run as showrunner, he has leant on the show’s back catalogue in lieu of creative advancement. When David Tennant said he didn’t want to go sixteen years ago, we could accept it as a tragic denouement for a beloved character, rather than a genuine resistance to progress. When, twelve years later, Tennant was returned to the role in a move that amounted to little more than exaggerated fan service, it became more difficult to write off. In bringing back David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, Davies seemed to concede that the best ideas were behind him, and that there was nothing wrong with regression into the familiar. Across the next two series he would make similar allowances – bringing back characters largely unremembered by those of us who hadn’t pored over the 700 episodes of the show’s original run. This kind of writing does nothing to bring in any new audience members, playing purely to those already caught up on at least two decades of narrative lore. For a show like Doctor Who, at its core a family show, this is especially fatal. No child can stumble upon an episode of this new series and be drawn into its wonder, because it functions in effect as half a story, with the other half scattered across 700 previous episodes. Davies’ final blaze of glory, the image on which Doctor Who appears to be left for the foreseeable future, was Ncuti Gatwa, having killed himself to ensure that his companion remains a single mother, regenerating into none other than Billie Piper, the actor who played The Doctor’s companion Rose twenty years ago. It was, perhaps, one wink to the camera too many, and an ultimate declaration that this was a show no longer concerned with change, or indeed anything other than itself. As Davies had sinisterly declared on returning to his role, the intention was simply ‘to generate content’ by an endless retreading of the past. No more were episodes inspired by geopolitical conflicts, or philosophical debates, or even simple interpersonal dynamics. Instead, the show is governed by a principle of content creation: of which surprise reveal can get the most engagement on Twitter. Doctor Who has become a show, more than anything else, about Doctor Who. Every episode, good or bad, is an argument for or against its own existence; every success is read as a manifesto on how the show ought to be.

Aside from its position as one of the longest running television shows ever made, Doctor Who is an institution of paramount importance to our national culture. It has, across the last sixty years, become a kind of oral poetry, passed down and shared, reiterated and expanded upon. It was a triumph of collaborative creativity – a germ of an idea, rolling through the minds of other writers until it became something far bigger than any one author – and remains a testament to the possibilities of televised storytelling. In its current state, it has become, like so much of our contemporary culture, drawn into its own centre of gravity, under the pull of which it is slowly crushed. If it wants to survive, it must be about something again. It must be a show both escapist and humanist, about the broad spectrum of experience and the wonder of the universe’s infinite beauty. Whether it’s with an allegory for radicalisation or a story that preys on an innate human fear of the dark, Doctor Who must blossom out of a novel idea, not a recession into its own history. No longer can it be inward-looking, speaking only to the faithful with no care for the as-yet-unconverted. Should it be allowed to wither away, a martyr for our modern culture of inertia, it would be a colossal failure of imagination. Doctor Who has, by nature, a concept of boundless inventiveness: an open invite to a universe of possibility. To turn from that, and regress instead into known territory, is to place a limit on our self-belief. Fundamentally, Doctor Who is a show that has meant perhaps too much to too many people – this writer included – and one whose personal importance to countless self-styled whovians cannot possibly be overstated. At its best, it is a grand narrative of hope, compassion, and growth; of triumphing good and the dignity of life; of the monsters who live under the bed and the imaginary friend who will always be there to save us. Like all of us, it must be unafraid of change, of jumping into the unknown with nothing but belief and hope. To be held hostage by our pasts is an affront to the possibilities of our futures. We all regenerate throughout our lives, casting off one skin for another, and it is the readiness to change and evolve that makes a life, to coin a phrase, fantastic. Our culture is a mirror, and what hope can there be if it reflects only itself?

‘One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine’

–        The First Doctor, Doctor Who, 1964

Featured Image: The BBC

By Edward Clark

Today, gender variance is politicised. In the West, the liberty of transgender people and drag performers continues to be restricted by socially conservative politicians who see a minority population as a political football. For conservatives, resistance to gender variance is often connected to tradition and a belief that subversion of gender norms is a modern phenomenon. Cross-dressing revue troupe Les Rouges et Noirs, a critically acclaimed group made up of World War One (WWI) veterans, suggests the opposite – that a century ago, male gender variance was a commercialised form of entertainment with mainstream appeal.

‘The most attractive girl with short dress’

After refining their act during the war, where they performed at concert parties for other soldiers, Les Rouges et Noirs toured their debut show Splinters across England during the 1920s and 1930s, releasing a film of the same name in 1929. Rather than performing a mocking stereotype of femininity, the troupe were celebrated for the accuracy and sexual allure of their feminine beauty. In a 1919 review of Les Rouges et Noirs’ performance at the Savoy, the Evening Standard celebrated how lead performer Reg Stone ‘makes up into the most attractive girl with short dress’ and a ‘bewitching smile’.¹ The Times similarly lauded how the ‘illusion [was] wonderfully good’ and the audience refused to believe the performers were men until they removed their ‘golden tresses’.² The ‘real sex’ of the performers was an aspect drawn on comedically by the revue and Stone in performance. The show was alternatively titled Which is Which in reference to the sex of the performers, and the 1929 Splinters film contained a scene where a ‘Stage Door Johnnie’ pursues Stone to his dressing room after being enticed by his feminine appearance.³

Les Rouges et Noirs were extremely popular. The troupe performed to sold-out audiences across England and at Windsor Castle for King George V. Further, Les Rouges et Noirs’ cross-dressing performance was successful enough to inspire post-WWII veteran cross-dressing revues: Soldiers in Skirts and Forces in Petticoats both became widely popular.⁴ The mainstream appeal of Les Rouges et Noirs and its post-WWII successors rested on their ability to connect home front audiences to the experiences of soldiers. The troupe’s name itself, Les Rouges et Noirs, was a reference to the regimental colours of the First Army – red and black. Splinters was also key in expressing patriotic memory. Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War, Ana Carden-Coyne, has argued that visual language was the ‘vernacular’ of wartime memory – this is exemplified in Splinters.⁵ By watching material which had been performed on the front lines, audiences felt connected to the soldiers they revered. In an article in London Life, writer Charles Dryhurst noted that he ‘admire[s]’ Reg Stone ‘so much’ because he helped British soldiers to ‘forget for a moment that there was such a thing as a front line’.⁶ A review of Splinters at the Savoy by the Pall Mall Gazette suggested that the performance was more enjoyable because it had ‘eased the monotony of life at the front for thousands of our fighting men’.⁷ The repeated use of war imagery in performance and on screen invited audiences to engage with patriotic wartime memory.

‘16 Soldiers and Every Soldier an Artiste’

The performers’ veteran status protected them from accusations of sexual immorality. Cultural historian Graham Dawson has argued that soldiers were the ‘quintessential figure of masculinity’, and although Stone’s cross-dressing act seemingly opposes Dawson’s argument, his masculine image allowed him to avoid accusations of sexual immorality.⁸ Notably, this was a period of British history where minor deviances from masculine norms were sensationalised in newspapers. After the 1932 raid on a ball at Holland Park Avenue where men were wearing women’s clothing, the Morning Advertiser boldly headlined ‘MEN DRESSED AS WOMEN’.⁹ Cross-dressing in private was also policed harshly. For example, twenty-three-year-old Thomas B. served three months in prison for ‘importuning male persons for an immoral purpose’, with the evidence simply being his possession of a ‘powder puff, powder and a small mirror’.¹⁰ However, at the same time as male gender variance was policed for its association with these ‘immoral purpose[s]’, Reg Stone was performing nightly to sold-out audiences.¹¹

This was facilitated by the ex-military status of the performers, which was repeatedly emphasised in their publicity. The programme for the revue’s 1919 Savoy Theatre performance detailed a story where the soldiers ventured under ‘shells screaming overhead’ to recover frocks left on the front lines – simultaneously emphasising their valour and their commitment to their revue.¹² The importance of the troupe’s military background is reflected in a poster advertising their 1919 performance at the Kennington Theatre, which reads ‘16 Soldiers and Every Soldier an Artiste’ on the left and ‘16 Artistes and Every Artiste a Soldier’ on the right.¹³ The troupe also negated potential accusations of immorality by emphasising that their cross-dressing was purely performative and a ‘huge joke’, as stated in their own promotion. In the Splinters film, Reg Stone’s onstage femininity is juxtaposed with his offstage masculine traits, as he is pictured smoking a pipe and removing his wig backstage. In the aforementioned scene where a soldier enters Stone’s dressing room, Stone is assertive, responding ‘Well what do you want?’ and ‘Now hop it!’ in a deliberately masculine tone, emphasising the divide between performance and reality. This has comic intentions: the soldier is embarrassed once he realises Stone’s ‘true’ sex. However, it also functioned to make clear Stone’s lack of effeminacy, and defuse potential connotations between cross-dressing and sexual immorality. The framing of the film itself as a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ depiction of the troupe’s wartime performances allowed for this distinction between performance and reality; through this juxtaposition, Stone and the other performers made clear their lack of effeminate or otherwise perverted traits offstage.  

‘Of course, they get love letters’

Whilst the soldiers sought to protect themselves from accusations of sexual immorality, the homoerotic undertones of the troupe’s performances should not be separated from interwar LGBTQ+ communities. Reg Stone was interviewed by London Life, a well-circulated magazine which gained popularity due to its kinky subject matter.¹⁴ Cross-dressing was frequently addressed in the magazine’s regular correspondence column, and although these stories deliberately avoided sexology, they were told from a fetishist lens.¹⁵ Photos of cross-dressed members of the public were even included in some printings.¹⁶ Stone’s interview with this magazine indicates his appeal to those with a personal interest in cross-dressing themselves. Although the interview was largely concerned with Stone’s technical skill as an ‘impersonator of the fair sex’, complimenting his ‘distinction and artistry’ and lauding him as ‘the cleverest artiste of his kind in the country’, it was conducted to appeal to cross-dressing hobbyists.¹⁷ The troupe even emphasised the homoerotic undertones of their production in promotion. The programme for their Savoy Theatre performance in August 1919 bragged about how ‘of course, they get love letters’ from male admirers.¹⁸ The Splinters film includes moments where soldiers overtly flirt with Stone in female dress – Stone makes flirtatious eye contact with a soldier, eventually blowing him a kiss which the soldier mimes receiving. The cross-dressing performers adopted female dress, female mannerisms, and female social roles through implicitly sexual relationships with men.

Les Rouges et Noirs subvert modern arguments that gender variance is a twenty-first-century phenomenon. The troupe show that cross-dressing was a mainstream and popular facet of British interwar culture. Les Rouges et Noirs also challenge a popular narrative within LGBTQ+ histories of Britain: that queer expression remained largely ‘invisible’ and underground before the post-WWII gay liberation movement.¹⁹ The Splinters tour and film emblemise a unique moment in British history, as its cross-dressers simultaneously represented soldier-like masculinity and an idealised femininity. Whilst many modern politicians want to keep trans and gender-variant representation out of the limelight, it is clear that British history may not be as simple as they want to make it: a century ago, cross-dressers headlined the Savoy and performed for the King.

ENDNOTES:

¹ ‘“Les Rouges et Noirs”: Army Entertainers’ Programme at the Savoy’, Evening Standard, 5 August 1919, quoted in Jacob Bloomfield, ‘Splinters: Cross-Dressing Ex-Servicemen on the Interwar Stage’, Twentieth Century British History, 30.1 (2019), pp. 1–28 (p. 20).
² ‘Les Rouges et Noirs’, The Times, 5 August 1919, p. 8.
³ Bloomfield, ‘Splinters’, pp. 12, 21–22.
⁴ Bloomfield, ‘Splinters’, p. 26.
⁵ Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 82–83.
⁶ Cross Dressing between the Wars: Selections from ‘London Life’, 1923–1933, ed. by Peter Farrer (Karn Publications, 2000), p. 247.
⁷ ‘“Splinters” at the Savoy: Capital Performance by “Les Rouge et Noir”’, Pall Mall Gazette, 5 August 1919, quoted in Bloomfield, ‘Splinters’, p. 4.
⁸ Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (Routledge, 1994), p. 1.
⁹  Matt Houlbrook, ‘“Lady Austin’s Camp Boys”: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London’, Gender & History, 14.1 (2002), pp. 31–61 (pp. 31–32).
¹⁰ Matt Houlbrook, ‘“The Man with the Powder Puff” in Interwar London’, Historical Journal, 50.1 (2007), pp. 145–71 (pp. 145–46).
¹¹ Houlbrook, ‘The Man with the Powder Puff’, pp. 145–46.
¹² Bloomfield, ‘Splinters’, p. 10.
¹³ Poster advertising the revue Splinters, Kennington Theatre, 15 September 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum, Theatre and Performance Collection.
¹⁴ Lisa Z. Sigel, ‘Fashioning Fetishism from the Pages of London Life’, Journal of British Studies, 51.3 (2012), pp. 664–84 (pp. 664–65).
¹⁵ Sigel, ‘Fashioning Fetishism’, pp. 665, 672.
¹⁶ Sigel, ‘Fashioning Fetishism’, p. 670.
¹⁷ Cross Dressing between the Wars, ed. by Farrer, pp. 249–51.
¹⁸ Bloomfield, ‘Splinters’, p. 20.
¹⁹ George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. (Basic Books, 1994), p. 3.

Featured Image: Splinters (1929) on Letterboxd

By Matthew Dodd

On the second night of Indio, California’s 2026 Coachella Festival, a musical singularity event of sorts occurred. Across one day, audiences were able to watch on as the ghosts of indie rock past and present performed from opposite ends of their respective careers. This is to say, Geese and The Strokes were scheduled to play on the same day. Since their rapid ascent to the centre of the cultural zeitgeist at the end of last year, Geese have been dogged by comparisons to their New York indie forebears. Both bands were touted as heralding a revival of guitar-rock, both were products of New York private schools, and both were fronted by messianic lead singers who seemed incapable of washing their hair. Sonically, both seem guided by the same philosophy, though pursuing divergent methods. The appeal of The Strokes, 25 years ago as now, was that they were remarkable musicians who seemed broadly disinterested in the excellence they were dispensing. Julian Casablancas would lazily groan into an old-fashioned microphone, rarely deigning to move around the stage, while the rest of the band would remain focused on either their instruments or their bandmates, unbothered by the imposition of any audience. Geese seem to have carried this attitude to its logical extreme, disregarding any notions of established performance conduct: altering tempos within songs, duplicating verses to throw off any singing audience members, and randomly leaping into covers of Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’. Chief amongst their similarities, though, is that both were thrust into the musical ecosystem as the prototypical ingenues. Both Casablancas and Geese singer Cameron Winter were 23 when they had their breakthrough; both bands were promoted as much for their music as for their status as a group of bright, young things. Coachella’s accident of scheduling is a reminder that, as The Strokes prepare to release their seventh album ‘Reality Awaits’, they are no longer the wunderkinds of the scene, but the godfathers. 

The joy of the early Strokes output, primarily their debut ‘Is This It’, had a lot to do with a self-conscious attitude towards their own youth. Indeed, theirs was an appeal conditional on their youth, and one which deliberately toyed with the melancholy of memories still being made, an actively forming nostalgia. ‘Last Nite’ is a paean to nights out nobody will ever understand; the title track is a forlorn reflection on the disappointments of the adult world. On ‘Someday’, Casablancas pines that ‘when we were young, oh man did we have fun’ – again, nobody in the band was over 23 at the time of release. The aesthetics they played with – grainy music videos of the band members hanging around in bars, concerts modelled after Elvis’ 68 comeback gig – only bolstered that image of crystalised youthful expression. To this day, ‘Is This It’ remains an unimpeachable masterpiece of 2000s indie, a flash-in-the-pan moment of musical ingenuity. It was an album that, practically overnight, made The Strokes the most important band in the world. They were as influential as The Velvet Underground, as derivative as Oasis, and as cool as The Ramones. It was their impact which shook the UK out of its post-britpop daze and launched the careers of countless awkward, jangly guitar bands. As Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys would reflect on the opening track of ‘Tranquillity Base Hotel and Casino’, ‘I just wanted to be one of The Strokes.’  

On successive releases across the next two decades, The Strokes never really managed to return to the heights of ‘Is This It’. 2003’s ‘Room on Fire’ was well received but criticised for being little more than a continuation of their debut. The spectre of shrinking youth persists throughout this second album: ‘talk to me now I’m older’, croons Casablancas on ‘12:51’. ‘You Only Live Once’, the lead single from third album ‘First Impressions of Earth’, offers a 28-year old’s reflections on life’s lessons: ’oh men don’t notice what they’ve got, oh women think of that a lot.’ An alternate version of the track, a piano lead number entitled ‘I’ll Try Anything Once’, makes this spirit of maudlin introspection all the more obvious. Removed from the hard-rocking verve of the original track, this parallel take foregrounds the anxiety of youth with greater melancholy than on previous efforts – ‘ten decisions shape your life, you’ll be aware of five about’. Nevertheless, after their explosion as the new faces of youth rebellion and the vanguards of guitar rock, The Strokes were held hostage by that image such that they were never truly able to expand beyond it. Their next two albums, ‘Angles’ and ‘Comedown Machine’, were received lukewarmly, and the creative attentions of the bandmembers seemed turned towards other projects, such as Julian Casablancas’ electronic rock outfit The Voidz. For much of the 2010s, then, it had seemed that the great rockers of the century had failed to make it out of their early-20s excitement.

Their return in 2020 – at the height of worldwide lockdown – was nothing short of a resurrection. ‘The New Abnormal’ was a revelatory album. It was as musically brilliant as anything they’d ever done but, crucially, it was as relevant to the band as 40-somethings as ‘Is This It’ had been to them in their early 20s. The album is full of middle-age regret and gestures towards a lost past. ‘Bad Decisions’ deliberately interpolates Billy Idol’s ‘Dancing With Myself’ into a knowing reflection on the band’s evolution and the inevitability of alienating its audience. The sound of the album is a world away from the band’s garage-rock roots: a breezy mix of synth-pop and new wave that sits closer to The Psychedelic Furs than Arctic Monkeys. Opening track and TikTok megahit ‘The Adults are Talking’ is a masterful sermon from the aging rockers towards the strata of teenage rebels from which they are, by time, estranged. On the fame won so early by Casablancas and co., the message is clear: ‘don’t go there ‘cause you’ll never return’. Album closer ‘Ode to the Mets’ sets the band’s own history against that of their native New York and their home baseball team. The overarching theme is one of regret and introspection. It is an apology to their fans for ‘the silence you’re hearing’ and a dismissive creation myth for the band itself: ‘I was just bored, playin’ the guitar, learned all your tricks, wasn’t too hard.’ With the release of ‘The New Abnormal’, The Strokes had finally made a true successor to ‘Is This It’, a bookend of a record which was as inventive and essential as its ancestor. As the band had grown up, so too had their music.

Six years later, we find the Strokes once more on the verge of revival. ‘Reality Awaits’ is set to release at the end of June, with two singles put out in anticipation. It is hard not to listen to these tracks, ‘Going Shopping’ and ‘Falling Out of Love’, without a sinking of the heart. The Strokes have always been chasing a new sound, for better of for worse, to maintain an edge: a glimpse of the creative insight that burned through their initial success. On ‘Going Shopping’, The Strokes sound, for the first time, out of touch. It doesn’t sound like a new evolution, or indeed a knowing homage to the old, but a misstep into the middlebrow. The instrumental is fine – a groovy-enough synth line with a classically Strokesy guitar accompaniment. A good, if not great, song seems buried within the track. Yet, the decision of Julian Casablancas to mire his vocals in deliberately janky autotune makes the song sound like the product of a secondary school band messing around with Pro Tools for the first time, rather than one of the most important acts of the century. They feel, in a way they never have before, like an act disconnected from the zeitgeist. If ‘The New Abnormal’ was their great reflection on ageing, ‘Reality Awaits’ sounds like the album on which The Strokes get old. This, accompanied by widespread allegations of AI usage in the creation of the album’s promotional art, gives the band an aura of awkward tastelessness which can’t help reminding us that they are rapidly approaching the dominion of the Classic Rock station. 

At Coachella, The Strokes seemed to reassert their position as the great ones of indie-rock: a performance as good as any they’d given in years, coupled with a political intervention braver than any at this year’s festival. Even Cameron Winter was forced to look on in awestruck wonder. In their new music, however, none of that spirit of rebellion seems to have found creative footing. Perhaps this is solely an accident of single choice, or an elaborate prank by Julian Casblancas. We can only hope, for the sake of the 21^st century’s greatest band.

Featured Image – GQ

By Tess Cato

You’re sitting under your kitchen table in Pendlebury, Greater Manchester. It’s the early forties, the height of the Second World War, and your mum, aunty, gran and neighbour chat – about the war, but also about literally anything. Their voices are raspy from too many cigarettes and too many spirited conversations. You don’t sit there because you’re hiding or scared, you’re just listening because you like to. These women are the pillars of your world, and the inspiration for your life’s greatest artistic achievement.

This was the childhood Tony Warren recalled. Born Anthony McVey Simpson, Warren grew up, like most children brought up in the midst of the war, in the absence of a father. Instead, he was surrounded by women from the working-class English north who chatted away with that charming rhythm that can only be found in Manchester. These women and these completely mundane conversations inspired Warren to write Coronation Street. “I used to sit under the kitchen table, on a cushion, on the flagged floor, and listen to how people talked.” he told Charles Sturridge, who wrote the Bafta award-winning film about his career. “Here’s me Auntie Renee who married money and she talks posh, and here’s lovely Auntie Gladys whose husband is a prison warder and she doesn’t [talk posh]. It was wonderful training.”

In the sixties, seventies and eighties, when Corrie was watched by a good 18-21 million viewers, the characters that dominated it included Elsie Tanner, Betty Williams, Diedre Barlow and Hilda Ogden. And what do these characters have in common? They were women, northern, working class and ‘of a certain age’. Most importantly, though, they were sharp-tongued and sharp-witted. Their husbands seemed almost like secondary characters, moaning about their wives behind their backs while the women laughed, fought or gossiped, or did all three simultaneously. It was these women that were the true stars of the show. Corrie wasn’t just revolutionary for normalising proper good ol’ northern-ness on the TV – “eh, chuck”, “nowt” and “by ‘eck”with the Queen’s English being the preferred dialect of the BBC and ITV, Corrie put probably the most under-appreciated demographic in the limelight for once: the working class, middle-aged, northern woman. She who was the backbone of British society during the war, as the men went off to fight. She whose strength, humour and love has been acknowledged far too infrequently, but which Warren captured like flies in the amber.

Fast forward to today. While still carving out space for this type of woman – Mary, Rita, Tracey and Sally bringing classic feminine northern charm to the show – Coronation Street‘s story lines get wackier, less realistic and often more depressing. There is always someone with a terminal illness, someone who’s been kidnapped and someone who’s been wrongly accused of murder – and that’s just before the first advert break. It almost seems like Corrie gets sponsored by so many charities that its storylines feel forced, and thus the natural funniness that came so easily in the earlier days is lost.

Without a doubt, less people watch Corrie today. Even I – once a superfan who was starstruck to see Dev walking around the Trafford Centre – must confess that I haven’t properly watched it for years. Its presence on social media is stark, an indicator that ITV desperately needs to engage with younger viewers in an age of Tik Tok and dwindling attention spans. But when there are millions of creators on social media platforms, I wonder how many kids ditch their phones full time for the soap. 

For me, Corrie lost its way when the classic Corrie women lost their ‘main character energy’, so to speak. They were strong, hilarious, fiery and proud. Not twenty-something year olds with perfect legs, refined accents and swanky jobs reminiscent of the chick flick heroine. Just real, normal, hard-working women you would be proud to call your mum, aunty or nan. Women like this carried the show on their backs, and made Corrie the success that it was.

Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary revealed that there is a crisis in how women are presented in the mass media today. Kids who stumble across a HS Tikky Tokky video may grow up thinking that women are powerless, worthless and unintelligent – the very antithesis to the classic Coronation Street woman. If only Corrie would return to its roots, and focus its stories on the types of women Tony Warren grew up to be inspired by, the world might be a slightly brighter place.

Featured Image: Coronation Street, ITV

By Ashley Zhou

From the first electric twang, I’m in a battered middle-of-nowhere gas station, back burning against a Toyota in the dry heat. Grit blows freely; my white socks are closer to brown and I feel speckled rocks in the crevices. It clings to the car as I wait for a refill and there’s the gurgling of oil, the murmur of other trail chasers, the groan of rusty, wheeled miracles melting onto potholed tarmac.

A lady in a mid-60s yellow dress pops out from a vehicle I don’t recognise, somehow wholly, perfectly in-time in the time-stopped place. The sky seems to ebb as she walks, flows as she tilts her head. She speaks and the melody draws dust into a swirl, wrapping around my ankles and stuttering smoothly, like a Hollywood animation flipbook. Sock rocks rumble. Torrid air crackles with electricity; I feel it in the shock of metal on skin when I  move my hand. 

I squint and Vancouver blurs into the extraterrestrial.

In the filmy light, antennae spike from her scalp, round at the tips and glinting. Blink and they’re gone; she’s asking for a receipt. Spacey and lilting, her words are accompanied by a dirty baseline, tin-can drumbeats, singing violins. Tilt your head and it melts into the onomato-poetic brown noise of the outpost. badum, badum. Dreams of you / Visions of doom.

Car keys weigh down my pocket; they cut a bit, they’ll leave a mark. Everything hovers over the edge of humdrum revelation.

I think to ask a lanyarded someone if they could fix my radio, but decide against it. Static ripples, already in the air. If I concentrate just enough, my body aligns with a frequency; off-tune charity shop guitars, repurposed patchy sofas, a voice that might be the same—possibly if it was underwater and I was behind glass. My rings feel tingly where they wrap around the fingers. 

Wild one, you can do what you want.

Over there, she trills: something to do with nearly-expired shop chocolate, gas station money, darlings. There’s a murmur in my ear. Everything I must’ve heard before; excitingly different, comfortingly familiar. Schmaltzy, sour on my tongue. I test out the words myself, a burning memory,

and time has absorbed me. Heady, calm, blistering, breezy, shockwaved. The line ends, time resumes, and I realise my chest is heaving. I try it again and I find I can’t—everything tilts a little to the left, rotated something like 20 degrees.

My vision is fisheyed when I light one up and ground myself with char. The blazing heat crawls into my chest. I check my gas meter. I drop cigarette ash on cheddar chunks of the moon and it falls next to crumpled coke cans. Oil glug halts. 

But I left it all behind. 

The voice stops and we’re back in Canada, at the ‘Durham City Limit’, one much farther away. Familiar and different. The lady in the yellow dress heads back into her car and it grumbles to life and away. Desert heat and waves of sound warp in her wake. Full-bodied, round-edged tinkling; drowning harmonicas, slanted strings. They chorus mournfully as she’s dragged away by the dunes. The cutoff is abrupt.  

I get into my car and swipe my hand over the scorching dash. The signal’s suddenly good enough for Spotify, and I ditch the crackling radio for Bluetooth. Freak Heat Waves comes on, as does a vaguely familiar voice with an undertow of the outlands. I shake alien blues off my shoulders and drive.

Featured Image – Cindy Lee

By Bel Radford

It is a truth most unfortunate that Fashion’s Great Pervert, as we know it, has been thoroughly domesticated. You could send a rubber clad ponyboy with a ball-gag down any runway and it would fail to register as particularly transgressive, The object can no longer be abject when it’s been cannibalised by the market, as chronicled over the past half century.   

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Vivienne Westwood and Malcom Mclaren freed fashion from the chains of sexual conservativism. Littering the streets of Chelsea with sexual paraphernalia, from hobble straps, crotch zips, and bum flaps, thrusting forward the fin de siècle cultural breeding ground of revolution regarding the body politic. As such, the iconography of perversion clambered up the runway and became the enfant terrible of the fashion world. Provocateurs of the fashion world began to circle the drain of vulgarity; 90’s Mugler collections found themselves peeling with latex whilst Versace ventured into the depths of the red room in their 1992 Miss S&M collection. Soon, such indulgence into perversion trickled down into the market at large for the ritual of commodification to begin. It’s now rather normal to wear leather chokers, studs, maybe a harness in a somewhat casual register – and so it’s clear we’ve flipped over the clandestine underbelly of perversion and gutted it of all substance. For instance, when Dua Lipa wore the bondage gown from Miss S&M at the 2022 Grammys, it was worn and received as a museum drag piece that celebrated the history of the pervert, but certainly not the presence of one. However, paraphilia, as per the human condition, will prevail, and as a matter of principle must remain transgressive. And so it’s wriggled its way out of the spiked collar the market walks it by, and has reinvented itself in all its slippery countenance; hang up the gimp suit, the contemporary freaks are wearing office formal. 

I came to this realisation while seeking solace in Haneke’s remarkably apt film The Piano Teacher (2001). For the uninitiated, the film follows Erika Kohut, a cold, sensitive, and sexually repressed middle-aged piano teacher at a Viennese Conservatoire, who finds herself in a sadomasochistic liaison with her student, Walter Klemmer, whose sexuality is gauchely overt, and as such absolutely cannot match her freak. Perversion lies at the crux of the narrative, yet Erika clads herself in stiflingly mundane outfits, attempting to reassure herself of her similarly rigid character. She wears sensible and nondescript knitwear, stiff starch blazers layered over dainty silk blouses, drab pleats and beige monoliths, punctuated by the occasional smear of colour and the pair of gloves she wears every time she leaves the house to go to the porn shop. Erika’s wardrobe is banal and conventional, yet it carries immense ontological weight, its stiffness actualises her repression, creating a dichotomy between character and clothing whereby her outfits become vectors of calculated and powerful libido, and objects of psychosexuality.

The power of her clothing has not gone unignored by the fashion zeitgeist. Erika Kohut was the muse of SHUSHU/TONG’s SS25 collection The Pleasure Of Rejection, shown at Shanghai Fashion Week. Liushu Lei (Shushu of SHUSHU/TONG) told Culted that the emotional tone of the collection was informed by restraint and introspection, noting how ‘In [Erika’s] mind, the lines between attraction and rejection seem to blur, creating a chaotic unity. This dynamic felt like a deconstruction of the binary between the two concepts, offering immense dramatic tension’, adding that ‘Erika Kohut is such a complex female character, sensitive, conflicted and even mad. Beneath her restrained and reserved exterior lies desperation and chaos, with emotions that rage like a storm’. These observations illustrate the ways in which collections like The Pleasure Of Rejection re-project a film’s psychological weight back onto the body, the ways in which desire becomes most energised through the restraint of being tightly buttoned up – a new type of bondage.

Similar comparisons can be made in Shainburg’s 2002 film The Secretary, wherein a young woman, Lee Holloway, having been recently released from a mental hospital, gets a job as a secretary to lawyer Edward Grey, who she establishes a sexually sadomasochistic relationship with. Her wardrobe is particularly striking as it evolves in tandem with her sexual and professional literacy: she begins dressing soberly – wearing silk blouses, skirts and stockings – yet her capacity for sexual expression becomes compounded. By the time she’s saddled up and crawling around Grey’s office, the erotic logic has long been present in her wardrobe as a mechanism of submission, her pencil skirt as restraint and her buttoned up collar already a collar. The Secretary has also been an object of inspiration within the fashion world, with Enfants Riches Déprimés extracting and interpreting the infamous bondage rig look onto the runway in their SS25 collection Inside Capitalism. 

There is a case to be made for how both films were released in the very early 2000s, yet are only now really being celebrated and explored within fashion. The market spent the intervening decades digesting and mainstreaming the more overt face of perversion until it became palatable and gutted of ontological weight, exhausting its typical forward-facing fetish iconography in the process. Fashion now reaches backward in the cultural milieu for a sexuality undefiled by the market with a visual language communicative of perversion in its truest form, as eroticism in today’s cultural landscape offers meagre viable alternatives, clinically administering desire through legible, sexless blockbusters and hyper-sanitised cultural output. This has left a vast black hole in the place of sensuality with any real dissolute underbelly, yet office wear arguably provides a visual language exploratory of this lack. As demonstrated by Erika and Lee, the rigidity of formal wear encrypts, contains and yet compounds perversion. Perhaps this is where the contemporary appeal lies: subverted desire becomes infinite. 

Featured Image: Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary (2002, dir. Steven Shainberg)

By Amelia Awan

Ever since I read the book, I have always hated the English translation of its name.  

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, while being a fitting title for many adaptations of the story  (including the Disney film and subsequent musical which  I am about to discuss), is not at all a  good descriptor of a book in which Quasimodo is arguably a supporting character at best.  Needless to say, this is not the original title of the novel. In 1831, Victor Hugo published a novel  simply called “Notre-Dame de Paris”, or in English, “Our Lady of Paris”. Having read the book, I  think that this is a perfect title for this piece. Not only does it refer to the dozens of pages dedicated to describing the monumental cathedral, but it also refers to Esmeralda. Referring to Esmeralda as  “Our Lady” not only puts her in the spotlight as the central character of the piece, but it also beautifully showcases how the narrative treats her just as a character: not as her own person,  but as a MacGuffin of sorts that each of the male characters wants to gain in some way;  she’s our lady.  

As much as the story of the musical changed from its original source material, Esmeralda’s role  in this regard is one thing that is conserved perfectly. Alan Menken is a composer who is known for his use of leitmotifs, a word which here means “a melody that is associated with a character or place in the story”. Most of the main characters have their own leitmotifs that they sing themselves throughout the musical; Quasimodo has his melody at the start of Heaven’s Light,  Phoebus has Rest and Recreation (a melody that exists purely as a leitmotif without text in the  original film), and Frollo gets pretty much the rest of them. When one looks at Esmeralda’s  songs, there doesn’t really seem to be any common link between them; even Esmeralda’s most famous song, “God Help The Outcasts”, wasn’t used as any kind of basis for any of her other  songs. The “Someday” motif, when it is sung, is mainly used to represent innocence and hope  more generally rather than Esmeralda herself, hence why we see it most often sung by the  choir rather than any of the cast.  

However, Esmeralda does have a leitmotif, it’s just not sung by her. The Esmeralda motif is first  shown in Rest and Recreation, in an otherwise forgettable section of the song where Clopin  welcomes her to Paris. The relevance of this motif comes back in full stride in the finale of Act 1, which is itself titled “Esmeralda”, and this time, the melody is sung angrily by the soldiers  (including Phoebus himself!) and then later by the soldiers with Frollo. At no point in her own  song does Esmeralda actually sing anything. The next time it occurs, just before the finale, it is  sung by Frollo, further cementing this idea of Esmeralda being ours; at this moment in time,  Frollo still believes Esmeralda to be his, as a feat that he has to reckon with, and that he is better off having accomplished this “feat”. The Esmeralda motif never appears after this moment.  Esmeralda is a much stronger and better written character in the musical than she is in the  novel, but her role as “Our Lady” still shines through. It is worth mentioning that the Esmeralda motif is sung by every character who falls in love with her (and also Clopin), with the notable  exception of Quasimodo. This is because Quasimodo’s affections for Esmeralda are deliberately painted as differently as possible from Frollo’s lust for her; there is a very good reason why  Heaven’s Light and Hellfire happen in immediate succession from each other (and of course,  the names of the respective songs are no coincidence). I would not say that the musical’s  choice to retain some elements of the book and some elements of the film is always done as well as possible. However, the decision to have the Esmeralda motif always be sung by her suitors and never by Esmeralda herself is the perfect addition to this story. The motivic  complexity of the musical, along with the precision of the choices made in this leitmotif  specifically make Menken’s score a true work of art, and a perfect embodiment of Esmeralda’s  role in the story.

Photo Credit – Alessandro Dobici

By Isobel James

It’s the first beer garden type evening of the year, but not an inch of me regrets spending it in the brick and buzz of The Grove. Pentire, the up-and-coming indie rock group from Herefordshire, didn’t come to play. Or, rather, they played in every sense of the verb.

From the moment that Pentire took to the stage, tellingly entering to Tubthumping by Chumbawamba (Google it; you’ll know it and chuckle), their set unravels into wit, electricity, and flourishing artistry. Launching into their 2022 anthem Watch Time with Me, it’s immediately apparent: Jack Morgan might just be the cheekiest frontman ever to grace this venue.

If there’s a fourth wall between Jack and the crowd, it’s there for him to obliterate. From the manneristic eyebrow raises adorning every song to a slapstick grimace after an on-stage stumble, Jack made every moment a conversation between him and the crowd. He had us spellbound, and vice versa: so attuned to the audience, it felt as if I so much as blinked for a second too long, Jack would catch on. He pointed at recording phones — sparse in a crowd too immersed — and gestured along to the strongest lyrics with a head point, a shrug, a growing smile. In an entrancing 90-minute set, Jack Morgan owned the room, intimate as it was, in a way that made you see Pentire headlining much bigger ones soon.

Jack may be the magnetic core, but the band around him are in no way peripheral to Pentire’s hypnotic act. Owen Seymour, perhaps the first (and not the last) cardigan-donned electric guitarist that I’ve seen, cruised through the gig nonchalantly. Yet the twangs of his riffs carried as the vital bedrock of Pentire’s nostalgic, coming-of-age indie sound. Throughout the set, Owen exchanged boyish grins with the bassist Jacob Beswetherick, whose basslines were the pulse powering every track, particularly in Get Up. Jake Weaver was the drumming dark horse of the set — quiet when the songs called for it, but every re-entry reminded you exactly why he’d been missed.

Together, Pentire make live music feel genuinely alive. Like the Cornish headland they’re named after, their music is the sonic equivalent of a summer drive to the coast: all warmth and easy rhythm, with the windows-down momentum of a sunny day. The bigger choruses carry traces of The Killers’ arena instinct; the quieter moments have something of Paolo Nutini’s soulful looseness. Pentire wear their influences lightly enough, though, that it mostly just sounds like themselves.

Much of the set drew from their January EP Love on TV. Standout moments included the witty lyricism of Fading Out (“Was there something else in my drink, or have I had a little bit too much to think?”), a longer-than-comfortable pause in the middle of I Won’t Waste Your Time — a characteristic tease from Jack — and the crowd’s sheer volume in Boy in the Machine. Even the setlist itself was opened to the room, with a surprise song voted for via QR code — proof, if any were needed, that the crowd are as much a part of a Pentire show as the band themselves.

To call the gig high-octane is an understatement: it felt as though Pentire would never tire. And yet, by the final stretch, there were glimpses of exhaustion in Jack — not that it ever faltered his on-stage fervour. If anything, it was the final tell-all: a Pentire gig is never half-hearted. Backed by BBC Introducing and festival slots at Truck, Y Not and Isle of Wight, bigger rooms are surely coming — but on Friday night, Pentire came to play with, not simply for, Newcastle’s crowd.

Featured Image: The Bodega