Category: Culture

By Aliza Hussain 

It’s 1990, and a 28-year-old Meera Syal walks into Channel 4 commissioner Karin Bambrough’s office with a modest pitch: a comedy about a coachload of British Asian women on a day trip to Blackpool, lifted straight from the outings she used to take with her aunties. She gets about five minutes in before  Bambrough cuts her off with a ‘Mmh, sounds great,’ and greenlights it on the spot. 

At some point during the past decade and a half, we seem to have decided that  the 1990s were a golden age. I’m sick to death of the compulsory nostalgia  loop, but when I hear my parents talking about their youth again, I can’t help  but understand the mythology. The picture comes quickly. It’s the mid 90’s and  you’re young and South Asian in London; it was only twenty-five years ago  that your parents started from scratch in Hounslow, cursing the bare knees  and booze. You grow up not allowed to speak English in the house and wear  your first pair of jeans at the ripe age of seventeen. But that all didn’t matter  now, they were remixing your music and playing it at Ministry of Sound, you  had Talvin Singh winning the Mercury Prize, Apache Indian and Cornershop  on MTV. Nights like Anokha at the Blue Note and Outcaste at Heaven pulled in  mixed crowds. You could buy T-shirts from Club Kali, read about Goodness  Gracious Me in The Face, and hear a dhol loop sampled on Radio 1. For the  first time, the British Asian sensibility felt legible to itself, there was a humour  built on self-consciousness, that diasporic reflex to pre-empt the gaze, to mock  what you love before someone else does. With this came a wave of British  Asian filmmaking that was stylistically self-authored, produced by artists  operating in a space with no market to please.  

Syal’s 1993 Bhaji on the Beach follows a coachload of British Asian women  heading from Birmingham to Blackpool, a trip rendered with warmth and  acuity, and what sounds like a throwaway premise comes, in director  Gurinder Chadha’s hands, a kind of moving chamber piece. The film gathers  women at different stages of life and lets their fault lines rub up against one  another: Asha, whose dutiful calm keeps slipping into lush Bollywood reveries,  Ginder, brittle with the knowledge she might not survive her marriage,  Hashida, gifted and frightened in equal measure, and the older women, who seem so sure of their authority it’s easy to miss the deep fear humming  underneath. 

Blackpool, with its rain slick neon and end-of-the-pier melancholy becomes a  kind of diasporic purgatory, and, like David Leland’s Wish You Were Here or  Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, Chadha understands the British seaside as a  liminal space, a landscape that reveals the tension between who the women  are and who they might briefly imagine themselves to be. Chada leans into this  tension formally too, with the deliberately clashing colour palette  externalising how the British and diasporic world never blend, only rubbing  and scraping against one another. Saris flare violently under the North Sea  light, and we are left with a sensory excess that becomes a kind of emotional  distortion, with the environment exaggerating the feelings the women have  learned to mute at home. We see this most clearly in the fairground mirror  scene, where Hashida, pregnant by Oliver, a Black man her family would  never accept, finds her crisis reflected back at her in warped glass, a private  fear becoming theatrically public, with the carnival brightness stretching it  into something almost surreal. 

Ultimately, the cheap magic of Blackpool drains away, leaving the women  back on a Birmingham pavement with nothing resolved, only with the film’s  ending leaving us with the salty aftertaste of a long day. Chadha rejects the  tidy dramaturgy of a social-issue film; her ending is closer to the British New  Wave’s open wounds, but with a reconfigured centre of gravity. Instead of the  working-class man railing against the system, we get women whose interior  lives have simply been made visible, and that visibility is its own form of  political charge. The movie’s themes; double lives, cultural drift, the  choreography of belonging, have since become familiar to the point of cliché,  but only because Syal and Chadha made them possible. 

Around the same time, Hanif Kureishi was scripting My Beautiful Laundrette,  folding Thatcherite greed and queer desire into one clammy Soho bedsit; Asif  Kapadia was reshaping the British epic with The Warrior; and Chadha herself  would soon make it to the mainstream with Bend It Like Beckham. These films,  emerging under the flush of Cool Britannia, were made possible by conditions  that now feel unreal. Public broadcasters still believed in cultural risk;  Channel 4’s minority-voices remit had teeth, the UK Film Council was throwing real money at first-time writers, and London, under the soft-touch optimism of  early New Labour, was busy selling itself as Europe’s great multicultural  experiment. But that civically confident Britain is gone, and what replaced it  could not be less hospitable to that kind of filmmaking. The broader guttering  of working-class film culture, youth theatres, public bursaries, regional  workshops, took this locally rooted, auteur-driven style of British Asian  cinema down with it. What remains isn’t absence but attenuation. It’s not hard  to spot a British Asian face in Netflix’s new wave of London-set diaspora  romances; charming, energetic, but speaking the lingua franca of a global  market where representation is inherently branding. And of course,  immigration has become a permanent election-cycle bogeyman. We’ve lost the  sense of a world built from the inside, and what’s taken its place is a cinema  that performs identity outwardly. It’s telling that the two of the most  interesting British Asian figures of the past decade, Riz Ahmed and Dev Patel,  became themselves elsewhere. Ahmed’s most radical work has been funded  across the Atlantic; Patel’s most substantial roles have come from directors  who aren’t British at all. Their talent is unmistakable, but it has flourished in a  vacuum. Britain grows the artists; it no longer grows the conditions that let  them tell stories at home, and in a landscape where fewer artists can afford to  begin in the margins, this realist, first-generation strand of filmmaking has  dissipated.  

This is where the 90s return in sharper relief. That brief British Asian cultural  boom; the fusion records, the fashion, the films made from inside the  community rather than at its expense was an infrastructure. A moment when  Britain was porous enough, and publicly funded enough, for new voices to  shape the culture rather than just appear within it, as Syal once did. Its  disappearance matters less as a pang of nostalgia than as diagnosis: proof of  how thoroughly we’ve dismantled the conditions that once made artistic risk  possible.

Featured Image: BFI

By Honor Adams

I first encountered Aubrey Beardsley in a solid red shop on Oxford’s fading high street. Amid draws of outdated maps and horticultural prints, his intricately simple woodblock prints began to creep out. Black and white visions writhed into life – their elegance tinged with irony, excess and restraint. 

Within the quiet confines of Saunders of Oxford, I found myself entranced, flicking through each leaf of shocking, ironic, and playful illustrations, where line and curve dissolved into a theatre of desire and defiance. Poised between the quaint and the transgressive, my experience felt like an initiation into the strange allure of the fin de siècle. 

Shocking the modern viewer has become increasingly difficult in the progression of contemporary art. However, Beardsley’s fictitious illustrations snipped from Wilde’s Salomè, Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur or The Savoy, left me gawking through a window into the world of Victorian England. For Beardsley, audacity was a simply humorous exercise; continuing a tradition of political and societal mockery. And as with any contentious creation, objections were, and remain, multiplicitous.

Beardsley’s grotesque, scandalous, and immoral subject matters gave him the attention he desperately desired. The bulk of his illustrations depict women, many of whom embodied deviance and corruption in the eyes of the conservative Victorian reviewer. Beardsley drew upon the taboos of the era, forming a subversive commentary on societal norms. Synchronous to his short working life, the feminist ideal of the ‘New Woman’ was salient, a term coined by the novelist, Sarah Grand, in 1894. These ‘New Women’ challenged values already being attacked by fin-de-siècle modernism and the societally deviant dandies of the Decadent movement. Women demanding social opportunities and emancipation were boxed into the same category as prostitutes or the promiscuous. Rather than attacking such unruliness, Beardsley mocks the ludicrousness of a dated categorization, gaining attention whilst revealing his progressive mindset. Despite backlash, gender was being redefined, and Beardsley harnessed such change as a platform for recognition and contentiousness. 

Subversive subject matters and a tendency towards sexualised themes were often associated with his infliction of ‘consumption’ (Tuberculosis), a bizarre 19^th-century perception with no medical affirmation. Ironically, with continually poor health, Beardsley turned to Catholicism and rejected his previous work on the subject. 

The question of Beardsley’s own sexuality, or his advocacy for homosexuality more generally, has been debated. Despite this debate, his early death and contemporary taboos prevented any conclusions on his part. Linda Gertner Zatlin argues that he “advocated neither homosexuality, androgyny, nor heterosexuality”. Although, I would contend that his true nature or beliefs can never be uncovered, and any speculations produce no valuable theory. His work remains sexually ambiguous on a personal level, presenting us with a distinctly asexual depiction of Victorian taboos. The fluidity within his work was rare by Victorian standards, but the artist’s lack of comment on such matters reveals little of himself other than a liberal and risqué attitude. What cannot be doubted is that Beardsley was an eccentric dandy (a contemporarily mesmerising characteristic) and his confrontation of evolving issues came at a turning point in women’s and sexual history. 

“I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing” Aubrey Beardsley, 1897. 

Beardsley initially drew inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites, taking motivation from his desire for fame and encouraged by his mother’s expectations. He followed the works of William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones. A shared interest in the medieval, symbolic subjects, as well as a rejection of contemporary art, drew Beardsley to these characters. Burne-Jones specifically acted as a mentor, strongly supporting his initial work. However, Beardsley grew tired of his Morte d’Arthur commission and the two diverged as the illustrator began to embrace his own more individualistic and increasingly erotic style. Morris held an unsupportive stance from the outset, leading to Beardsley breaking away from the Pre-Raphaelites and migrating towards a Parisian clique, further alienating British reviewers. The xenophobic normality of the late 19^th-century criticised his French connections and grumbled over the otherness of his Japanese style. Nonetheless, contemporary judgment was not universally negative, and the elegance of his line and precise decorative style landed praise from several critics, including Joseph Penell.

His hard-edged line forced his work to become visually aggressive. Contradictions weave throughout, blending elegance, classicism and purity of line while meshing between the scandalous and perverse. The result is a definite visual power. The line block technique and Japanese influence remain a thread throughout Beardsley’s work, allowing for its mass reproduction at a time when printed culture was particularly prevalent. Beardsley pushed back against the self-proclaimed cultural superiority of the British art scene, lacing ironic and mocking messages into his work. In contrast, Japanese artistic practice didn’t acknowledge erotic or sexual themes in the same disgust as the Victorian Brit. Distinct parallels can be drawn both in style and motif to artists such as Kitagawa Utamaro or Katsushika Hokusai. Prints such as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (Hokusai) or Lovers in the Upstairs of a Teahouse (Utamaro) portray undisguised sexualised themes far more shameless than those of Beardsley and almost a century earlier. 

Irony and satire weren’t unknown to the British media, and Beardsley himself often found himself the brunt of such commentary.  Beardsley and his subversive advocacy saw him riddled with salacious scandal in the eyes of Victorian England. A poem from April 1894 in Punch magazine mocked the artist in a distinctly fin-de-siècle way:

Mr Aubrey Beer de Beers,
You’re getting quite a high renown;
Your Comedy of Leers,
You know,
Is posted all about the town;
This sort of stuff I cannot puff,
As Boston says, it makes me “tired”;
Your Japanee-Rossetti girl
Is not a thing to be desired.
Mr Aubrey Beer De Beers, 
New English Art (excuse the chaff)
Is like the Newest Humour style,
It’s not a thing at which to laugh;
…
(Owen Seaman: “Let’s Ave A Nue Poster” (Punch, 21 April 1894, p. 189))

In April 1895, two weeks following the arrest of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley was fired from his position as art editor of The Yellow Book. Wilde was thought to be carrying a copy of the controversial periodical during his arrest. This was revealed to be simply a yellow-bound French novel, and the two men’s relationship was by now hardly amicable. However, the need to disassociate Wilde’s scandals from the periodical cost Beardsley his job. The Book’s sales fell with his illustrations no longer adorning the pages of Decadent writings. Beardsley is often associated with the life and literature of Wilde, and whilst his work depicted the society that Wilde inhabited, Beardsley’s creations hold their own gravity. 

By 1898, Beardsley’s health had deteriorated. An awareness of his impending death led to his conversion to Catholicism. Before he died, he wrote to his publisher, Leonard Smithers, to dispose of his work Lysistrata and many other shocking pieces. This request, for the sake of artistic appreciation and historical study, I am glad was never completed. Aubrey Beardsley’s career spanned less than 7 years, dying of Tuberculosis in 1898. He will forever be associated with The Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde and the controversial characters of Victorian Britain’s evolving society. For those who, like me, find themselves flicking through Beardsley’s work in an antique print shop, it is evident that his work has impacted far more than just a yellow bound book.

Featured Image: Tate Britain

By Lucy Atkinson

There’s a moment on every student’s walk to a 9am lecture- mist hanging low over the river, your headphones in, tote bag swinging, when you catch your reflection in a café window and think: yes. This is cinema. 

You’re the protagonist. The world revolves around your inner monologue. You are misunderstood, artfully exhausted, and probably wearing something that attempts to look like it was stolen from a 1970s film student. 

Then the bus splashes you. The moment’s gone—the soundtrack cuts. You’re suddenly an extra again — damp, anonymous, and late for French grammar.  

We are a generation raised on The Main Character Moment. TikTok taught us that any walk can be romantic if you tilt the camera up 10 degrees and add some Phoebe Bridgers. Instagram captions whisper, “romanticise your life.” Pinterest boards promise “dark academia” as if tragedy and stress were an aesthetic rather than a cruel reality. The result? A cultural obsession with being seen, even if no one’s actually watching – the art and behaviour of constant performance.  

It’s tempting to laugh at it — the earnestness, the self-mythologising — but this desire for narrative coherence isn’t new. Virginia Woolf did it with stream-of-consciousness; Baudelaire did it in a crowd. As Joan Didion famously wrote in The  White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The main character complex is simply our generation’s spin on that instinct — to turn chaos into continuity, to edit experience into meaning, more often than not through the lens of social media.  

Didion’s insight lands differently in the era of the front-facing camera. We still tell ourselves stories in order to live, but now we do so publicly, performatively, with filters, and the perfectly chosen snippets of songs in our stories. We construct our lives like screenplays — plot arcs, redemption moments, personal soundtracks — as though meaning can be manufactured through aesthetics alone. 

Didion goes on to say, 

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” 

It is human nature to romanticise the tragic and mundane. And now, more than ever,  it is expected to do so for the viewing pleasure, or envy, of others. As Didion states,  we are affected by “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience”. 

But what once felt like an act of defiance — the assertion of interiority, and the forceful reigning of the self’s own ‘story’ — now feels like a performance review.  How’s my narrative arc going? Am I developing as a character? Have I had my midpoint crisis yet? Ultimately, how do people view me? What am I worth if people don’t see my aesthetic? 

To be a main character today is to curate the illusion of intimacy. It’s to drink an overpriced flat white and pretend it’s plot-relevant. To view a breakdown as nothing  more than “character development.” To confuse aesthetic coherence with emotional authenticity. 

And yet, beneath the irony, there’s something tender in the attempt. To romanticise one’s own life is, at its core, to refuse invisibility. Maybe filming your sunset walk isn’t narcissism, but a tiny rebellion against banality. Perhaps the self that’s performed online isn’t fake, but aspirational — a draft of who we’d like to become, a fake-it-till you-make-it projection.  

So perhaps the real question isn’t “Am I main character enough?” but “Am I paying  attention?” 

The main character is not the loudest person in the room — it’s the one who happens to notice the way the light hits the library steps at 4 p.m., the one who finds narrative in the in between. To live like that — alert, romantic, a little ridiculous — might actually be the most honest kind of protagonism there is. 

So yes, maybe you are the main character. Just don’t forget that today, everyone else is too.

Featured Image Credit – Teresa Zabala / NYT / Redux

By Matthew Dodd

As I cowered outside Wembley Park tube station, sheepishly shielding four cans of Carling from the view of patrolling police officers, and watched in semi-intoxicated wonder as a parade of bucket hats flowed towards the stadium, it seemed self-evident that I was observing a national cultural reckoning. Oasis were back. The great bastion of 90s Britishness had returned home to their natural place, extracting millions of pounds from millions of adoring fans. All over the nation, the tidal wave of Adidas Spezials and misjudged haircuts heralded the return of a cultural phenomenon. Across their two hour set, they more than clarified their enduring excellence, the anthemic barrage of power chords and vaguely aspirational lyrics turning thousands of fans – myself, of course, included – into a drunken congregation, joined together in the great fraternity of Gallagher-ism. And yet, this tour didn’t seem to reconsecrate Oasis as the biggest band in Britain. Rather, it seemed to be a reaction to the fact that Oasis still are the biggest band in Britain. Their physical reunion is almost perfunctory; they still occupy the same place at the centre of Britain’s musical ecosystem. Their return three decades on doesn’t toss them into a foreign cultural environment, an antique guitar cable awkwardly plugged into a state-of-the-art amplifier, rather it seems like they never really left.

It’s thirty years exactly since their seminal second album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? established Oasis firmly as the pre-eminent British band of the 90s. In the same year, The Beatles Anthology 1 was released, a sprawling multi-media project reflecting on the band’s body of work and legacy, thirty years on from their heyday. Such a project was and remains so interesting because it reacts to how The Beatles shaped the course of popular music, placing them into a totally foreign musical environment – the 1990s – and arguing for their enduring relevance. This year, The Beatles Anthology 2025 is set to be released, a further argument for their continuing influence in an even further removed world. It’s interesting, then, that when Oasis, like their Liverpudlian icons, made their own return after thirty years, it was not to a totally foreign cultural zeitgeist against which theirs was an anomalous presence, but rather to a British musical sphere more amenable to them than ever. Just a year before the reunion, Liam Gallagher had sold out a tour performing Definitely Maybe in full. This isn’t a time-won reflection on an era’s defining music, it is a direct replay of that era. In the three decades between 65 and 95, British rock and roll went from A Hard Day’s Night to Wonderwall; in the three decades since, it’s gone from Wonderwall to Wonderwall again. Bloke-core, a wave of 90s nostalgia, nichetok edits, aAdidas brand deals and the spectre of Radio X continues to propel Oasis into the cultural mainstream, decades after their time. Of course, it isn’t just Oasis at fault. Blur sold out Wembley in 2023; Pulp made headlines at Glastonbury just a few months ago; Radiohead are set to embark on their own blockbuster reunion tour this autumn. These groups persist in shaping our national music conversation. In the 90s, kids queued up for hours to see these godlike bands. In the 2020s, it is the same bands who occupy this space, the same bands kids are queuing up to see. Oasis and their contemporaries continue to dominate Britain’s musical culture in a way that veers beyond reverence and towards stagnation.

Since the end of britpop – somewhere between the release of Oasis’ Be Here Now and Pulp’s This is Hardcore – few British acts have managed to break the mainstream and capture the cultural zeitgest in the same way. The Libertines seemed primed for a time to inherit Oasis’ spot as the tabloid-courting rock n’ roll ascendants before their abrupt implosion after only two albums. Taking a purely commercial view of things, one British band stands out as undoubtedly the most successful since Oasis. That said, as much as we all might like a late-night singalong of Yellow, we can hardly point to Coldplay as the paragons of modern rock. As Super Hans famously noted, ‘people like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people.’ What, then, has happened to the Great British band?

The post-britpop indie movements of the 2000s, what we might broadly call the landfill indie era, was a far less sure thing than its 90s predecessor. Fuelled by the panoptical tabloid furore of NME and its peers, bands were thrown in and out of the spotlight at a breakneck pace. A few names survive – The Fratellis, Kaiser Chiefs, Courteneers – but a whole wave of lesser bands stand, deservedly or undeservedly, forgotten – The Hoosiers, The Paddingtons, Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong, etc. etc. Where the britpop era saw a centralisation of culture, a nation crowded around Oasis and Blur, the landfill period was marked the vast proliferation of upstart outfits. The band who emerged unscathed from the skip, surely the only band to get close to filling Oasis’ vacant seat, is Arctic Monkeys. From grassroots beginnings – both in Sheffield and on the nascent world wide web – and headline-grabbing romances to, most crucially, massively successful and zeitgeist-capturing music, the Monkeys fit the bill more than any band this side of the century. Like Oasis, they remain lodged in the firmament of the contemporary indie scene: you’d be hard pressed to find a teenager with Doc Martens and a superiority complex who doesn’t know A Certain Romance by heart. Unlike Oasis, however, Arctic Monkeys had the boldness to allow their music to grow up with them, to not continue singing about nights out and Smirnoff ices into their fourties. It’s that artistic bravery that has held them back from becoming the nostalgia-fuelled ouroboros Oasis risks turning into. Nevertheless, their mainstream success is indisputable, especially in comparison to their contemporaries. Over their career, every one of Oasis’ eight albums reached number one on the UK charts. Six of Arctic Monkeys’ seven – blame Taylor Swift – achieved the same feat. By contrast, The Kooks and The Wombats have two number one albums between them.

Since the Monkeys swapped guitars for keyboards in the mid 2010s, what has become now the ‘indie’ scene has failed to produce an act to the same level of popular success. In the years since, UK indie has been collapsing into itself and into a nostalgia for the scenes that once were. For many British bands post-landfill and post-britpop, the object has been less to push the genre forward and more to recreate the feeling brought about by those earlier bands. Consequently, we end up with acts like Catfish and the Bottlemen, whose songs seem custom-built to be chanted drunkenly in a field on the shoulders of your best mate from school. There is nobody in the crowd of a Catfish or Inhaler or Reytons gig who wouldn’t rather be watching Oasis in 1994 or Arctic Monkeys in 2007. For at least a decade, the British indie scene has been running on the fumes of those bands, hoping that this year’s Latitude festival might be at least something like Spike Island.

Naturally, this isn’t all the fault of the bands. There are those acts which overtly chase the high of a bygone era of UK indie – The Reytons’ refrain that ‘everybody round here’s got a cousin or a mate who’s best friends with Alex Turner’ is certainly guilty – but there are of course a whole host of those from across the British Isles which are making genuinely new and genuinely brilliant music. Wolf Alice, Black Country New Road, Sportsteam, Black Midi (R.I.P), Fontaines D.C., Stereo Tuesday, English Teacher, Wet Leg, Mary in the Junkyard, Wunderhorse – the list goes on. But in today’s post-Spotify society, music isn’t the centralised thing it once was. Gone are the days when a nation would sit around the television set and let Top of the Pops reveal who the next big thing are. Similarly, the media landscape of the 90s and 2000s does not exist anymore: no NME reporters are on the ground looking for the gossip about Grian Chatten or Ellie Rowsell. Now is the age of the algorithm, the indie zine, the subgenre, the niche. Bands like Black Country, New Road play deliberately to a niche crowd, revelling in the kind of experimentation only possible outside the mainstream. Today’s answer to Oasis or Arctic Monkeys, the kind of bands that headline festivals and sell out small arenas, are still playing to an audience a fraction of the size of their predecessors. Perhaps the biggest band coming out of the British Isles currently, Fontaines D.C. played their largest gig to date in Finsbury Park over the summer. 45,000 turned out, this punter included, to see a mesmeric line-up of new-age superstars. Between Fontaines, Kneecap and Amyl and the Sniffers, the gig felt like a festival in its own right: a statement of intent from a new generation of rock n’ rollers. And yet, whilst Fontaines reaches five million monthly listeners on Spotify, Oasis reach thirty-one million. Therein lies the central paradox: the market for British/Irish indie is apparently a shadow of what it once was, but the market that once was is still listening to Oasis. The days are past when a band of loud-mouthed Mancunians could, with nothing more than some power chords and a tambourine, sell out the largest stadiums in the country for weeks on end. And yet, that’s just what happened this summer.  

The quality of music is there, as is the appetite, yet for the most part the UK music industry is submerged under the corporate hegemony of American pop. When homegrown artists like Olivia Dean or Sam Fender do break through, it feels like an exception rather than a rule. National musical character is, now more than ever, defined by our Atlantic neighbours: what was once a back-and-forth trade – The Rolling Stones for The Beach Boys – is now decidedly one-sided. The internet has, for the most part, homogenised much of our popular music culture. As such, the once dominant British music scene – the scene that produced The Beatles, Bowie and Fleetwood Mac – has faded away, its vestigial remains reforming into the indie scene. It’s that scene which now remains paralysed between 1994 and 2007, forever replaying Live Forever and 505. The money is in surefire hits from Disney channel stars, not local bands playing back-end pubs. This summer hasn’t been a Britpop revival, it’s been a rerun of the last time British music felt truly relevant. In other words, it’s been a Britpop summer for thirty years. Until the indie scene can get out of its britpop stupor, until the music industry pays attention to the upstarts and, most decidedly, until audiences listen, our national music scene, once our great pride, risks remaining forever stuck in the past and the great British band, one of our finest national exports, risks becoming history. All is not lost, however. Just last year, Charli XCX’s Brat made pretending to be British cool again (see: The Dare) and the continued success of artists like Raye and Olivia Dean point to a revival in the UK’s pop-soul scene. Whether a phallocentric music establishment would accept the new faces of British music as female is another matter entirely. Nevertheless, we can but wait for the next great British band to arrive and tear Radio X asunder. Oasis spoke to a dispossessed post-Thatcher Britain about living forever, chasing the sun, feeling supersonic; about years falling by like rain and dreams being real. If ever there was a time for a band like Oasis, it’s now.

Featured Image: Jill Furmanovsky

By May Thomson

There is a short fragment of Sappho that simply reads: ‘you burn me.’ With these three words (just two in ancient Greek), she exquisitely conveys the intense, consuming nature of love. They can also be read as one of the earliest uses of burns as markers of queer love – a metaphor Chloe Michelle Howarth reanimates and makes titular in her debut lesbian novel, Sunburn.

Sunburn, true to its name, is a stinging, red-raw account of first love. The novel follows Lucy as she falls in love with the startlingly unapologetic Susannah. But, of course, there is always Martin – Lucy’s doting, handsome-enough friend, who everyone in the claustrophobic Crossmore expects her to marry. Martin is safety, while Susannah is, in the fullest sense of the word, divine happiness.

It is Susannah – loud, passionate, and fiercely loving – who wins the reader’s heart (as well as Lucy’s). The other characters lack the same depth; Martin is a flat character who exists to perform a narrative function and Lucy is a dull mirror, at once uncompromising and reflective, prioritising her reception over her internal reality –  pleasing no one in the process. Susannah, conversely, is depressingly patient, clawing at the idea that Lucy will choose her loudly and leave the ‘sweet wastleland’ of Crossmore behind. Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the novel is that, even after choosing Martin, Lucy loses everything she has so desperately clung onto. And none of the pain was worth it.

Like love itself, Howarth’s imagery is starkly contrasting – blending the thematic threads of sunlight and faith with visceral, bodily imagery: ‘I am all wounds, Susannah, and you are the loveliest pus. Flooding in to heal me. Yellow as the sun.’ These lines reflect the unlikely blend of the corporeal and sunny. The text feels, as a result, as grounded as it is lofty – as solar as sickening. A study in cognitive dissonance, Lucy’s wild emotions set the rhythm for the text, sending us volleying back and forth between mad, unapologetic love, and guilty, repentant cowardice. Despite being a girl, Susannah is more than Lucy could ever have imagined and later, when she leaves to travel and take other lovers, she remains unresolvedly present.

There is threefold value in the sunburn metaphor for queer love. First, it represents queer joy; lesbian love is sun-like – dazzling and bright. The sun becomes a figure of vitality and affirmation, casting queerness as something vivid – even life-giving. Second, the sun motif represents truth, picking up common associations with light and honesty. To step into the sun is to step into visibility – but this comes with risk. Exposure can be painful, and the resulting ‘burn’ reflects the often painful and strikingly visible cost of living openly. The metaphor thus captures the ambivalence of truth: it is illuminating but not without harm. 

Sunburn also speaks to the themes of pain and visibility. Unlike a hidden wound, a burn is raw, blistering, and marked on the skin for others to see. It is a public record of one’s exposure, suggesting that queerness (or, at least, the reception of it) leaves traces that are not easily concealed. Thus, sunburn becomes a kind of memory, imprinting on the body beyond the moment of exposure and contact. Likewise, the temporality of sunburn elevates this representation; it’s a delayed reaction, surfacing hours after a day in the sun. 

Queerness, likewise, is latent – often belatedly realised. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us, shame is not only wounding but generative – a mark of exposure that both hurts and makes queer identity legible. Sunburn, in Howarth’s novel, works in exactly this way: a searing trace on the skin, painful yet luminous, a record of love lived under the risk of visibility. This exposure carries a double valence, then, as it is framed as at once vital and wounding.

This metaphor, standing in opposition to metaphors like the closet and the shadow in its focus on visibility, judgement, and joy, clarifies the dynamics between Lucy and Susannah. When Lucy lies in the sun, Susannah lies beside her. Susannah is no Juliet, however, and is not equated with the sun consistently. The sun represents something beyond a lover – an external force that shapes queer life – and it shines on both girls. The metaphor also has implications for heterosexuality. While heterosexuality, for Lucy (or the queer subject more broadly), might be imagined as a life lived in shadow, queerness is figured in searing light. The sun figures as a metaphor for queer love that does not simply encompass judgment and shame, but also the conditions of unapologetic and honest existence. 

For all its sadness, Sunburn cannot be reduced to a lesbian tragedy. By treating sunburn as both wound and illumination, Howarth adds to a wider tradition in queer literature that understands desire as inextricably bound up with exposure. This metaphor does not simply describe the romance between Lucy and Susannah, but reconfigures how we read the visibility of queer love – as something at once joyous, wounding, and indelible.

Feature Image: Pinterest

By Liv Thomas

17/07/2025 

Morning 

I was in the Tate Modern when I saw my first Giacometti statue.  

It was a grey day, blanketed by a sweltering heat, and I was alone in Paddington Station.  

No one around me knew that I’d started the day buzzing with that small, yet bright, excitement that comes from seeing someone you haven’t seen in half a year. 

They didn’t know that I was sitting on a bench in complete humiliation after receiving a response to my “here” text that read “I thought we were meeting tomorrow?”. 

I didn’t want to catch the next train home; I’d paid for this journey, after all. So I walked through, in my head, all the things I would want to do in London if I ever found myself alone there. Art galleries are a great place to explore if you want to blend in among a crowd of people who are perfectly content to be within their own company. I decided on the Tate Modern – and that’s where my day turned from strange to true.  

Midday 

The spatial layout of most art galleries carries the intention of leading you from one piece to another until you finish your journey with a new sense of meaning. The Tate Modern, on the other hand, makes you feel very, very small. 

Upon entering, the concrete walls and glass panels on either side of me stretched above to what I can only vaguely remember as a bright light. Facing the entrance, I turned left; if you were to see a map of the Turbine Hall, this would be in the direction of a tumorous-looking structure leeching onto an otherwise square building. 

This tumour is where I saw my first Giacometti statue.  

You enter this space and you’re presented with several openings, each leading to its own exhibition. You look down the corridor to one and see an alien standing at the end. Except it’s not an alien, it’s L’Homme au doigt. 

Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the statue as “always halfway between nothing and being,” and that’s exactly how I felt when I found myself in this liminal space between the rest of the Tate Modern, and the works of Alberto Giacometti.  

The exhibition was lit in a way that made the square-shaped corridor look like a tunnel, with the dark corners of each four-pointed frame bending over the sculptures, as a light pointed directly at them stretched their shadows against the wall.  

My first association was with Plato’s Cave. On the one hand, this matter of perspective accentuates Giacometti’s study of the human form and its relationship to the environment. On the other hand, these silhouettes and the figures that cast them represent the dual significations between alienation and endurance, fragility and resistance, and our anxieties and hopes.  

Notes on Giacometti 

Giacometti is often regarded as a late modernist who reaffirmed figuration after World War II.  Similar to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — only translated here through plaster, clay, and bronze — Giacometti’s sculptures capture the fading afterimage of a society laid bare by war, fixating on humanity seen through a lens of thin, metal limbs, as if the world itself had been whittled down to its trembling bones. 

Despite their proximity, the figures wander aimlessly, with neither direction nor acknowledgement – their identities blur, yet they are completely disconnected. 

Giacometti rejected the artistic notion of replicating reality; instead he sought to uncover the truth of life by reducing it to its barest principles. His art serves as an alternative to the superficiality of hyper-realism in sculpting.  

This specific figure is inspired by Egyptian artistic traditions. While the name of the piece suggests otherwise, the sculpture conveys no sense of movement and rather reflects a wider awareness of varying 20^th century stylisations.  

Final thoughts 

My thoughts at the Tate Modern gather to the present day.  

Plato’s Cave tells the story of prisoners trapped in a cave, and the shadows cast by a fire are mistaken for reality. Mimesis is an illusion that distracts us from the fragmented nature of human existence, and authenticity is needed now more than ever in a digital age that conglomerates everything fed into it.  

When you cast a shadow against Giacometti’s works, you don’t see reality –  you see a half-starved person, a physical manifestation of psychological confinement, a charred body… or maybe you would even see yourself.

Seeing this for myself in London, surrounded by strangers, and with a lost purpose for the day – left with the lingering feeling of reading whatever was in the news that morning – I couldn’t help but let Giacometti’s shadows speak to me. A lone person faces another human in the form of a sculpture; both carry multitudes. 

Featured Image: Liv Thomas

By David Bayne-Jardine

I lock eyes with Paul Mescal in the newsagents – a vision in short-shorts that stops me in my tracks. The Gen-Z heartthrob and award-winning ‘sad boy’ actor glares at me from the front page of the magazine. Decked out in a skin-tight cropped leather tank top and matching tiny shorts, his hips thrust provocatively into the centre of the photo, his arms stretched above him in a gesture at once powerful yet vulnerable. 

Over recent years, Mescal’s name has become synonymous with two things: tear-jerking portrayals of emotionally troubled men, and a worldwide obsession with short-shorts. Launched into fame in 2020 after playing Connell in the Normal People miniseries, his character’s humble and revealing Gaelic football shorts soon caught the attention of the fashion industry. Since then, as Mescal and other style icons have played with showing a bit more skin, retailers have reported skyrocketing sales in a sort of menswear very different from the norm. From Milanese catwalks to trendy cafes, from red carpet evenings to early morning park runs, men across the world have been sporting skirts, crop tops, painted nails and thigh-high shorts like never before.

In this photoshoot, his GQ cover story from November ‘24, Mescal exhibits this androgyny and playfulness that is taking over men’s fashion. After all, who better to represent male self-expression than the king of emotionally troubled men himself? In this post-COVID age of mental health awareness, as boys swap the late-night trauma dumps for self-care and therapy, their fashion is changing too. Brighter, bolder, tighter, smaller, scantier, hotter, gayer and girlier, it seems that as men loosen up and express themselves, so too do their clothes. 

It was not so long ago that glossy quarterlies like this one sold themselves by smothering their pages in a very different brand of masculinity. From the front cover, the likes of Cruise, DiCaprio and Brando defined male design as an affair of take-me-serious simplicity – expensive watches, white tees and razor-sharp tuxedos. If men were to be leaders and protectors, then their clothes needed to perpetuate that image – ordered, uncomplicated, unemotional. 

Now, I think as I absently flick through the magazine, things couldn’t be more different. Most of Gen-Z’s most successful heartthrobs are inclined, perhaps even expected, to rail against the boundaries of male clothing. Harry Styles made history in 2020 when he appeared on the front cover of Vogue in a blue Gucci ballgown. Bad Bunny’s Instagram is awash with dresses and skirts. Pedro Pascal rocked the Met Gala in 2023 with a flamboyant shorts and trench coat combo. Jacob Elordi, Milo Ventimiglia and Jonathan Bailey have all been papped showing off their quads in tiny shorts. 

But where did all this come from? What has prompted straight men in particular to start dressing more like the groups they once sought so hard to distinguish themselves from? As is often the case with mainstream culture, we are at least in part indebted to the Queer community for this sartorial about-turn. The sort of bold, playful and scanty clothing that A-listers are wearing nowadays was for years the dress code of LGBTQ+ subcultures, used to question gender binaries, promote self-expression and embody an ethos of sex positivity. 

As men are starting to open up, they look for inspiration in groups that have been expressing themselves for much longer – women and queer people. Of course, this is not the first time men have dressed like this (see John Travolta in Grease or Sean Connery as Bond), but it is certain that as previously marginalised narratives enter the mainstream, and as the playing field becomes more level, 2020s fashion is developing a distinctly gay and androgynous flavour.

Of course, it would be foolish not to acknowledge the deep irony that runs through this trend: when men dress scantily they’re hailed as transgressive; when women dress scantily they’re slut shamed or attacked. Feminine and queer fashion that was once dismissed as distasteful or offensive is now considered the epitome of good taste. 

As true as this is, it is refreshing to see men taking more risks when they dress themselves. In showing more skin, they make an attempt at vulnerability and have fun in doing so. As with all fashion, it is used to make a statement – ‘I am emotional, empathetic, a listener’ – that expresses allegiance to a new type of masculinity that tries to be less domineering and more empathetic. Of course, a pair of tight-fitting booty shorts, painted nails and a tank top won’t miraculously transform a misogynist into an ally (we’ve all seen the ‘performative male’ trend online), but it does signify an attempt by some to rebrand their masculinity into one with more tolerance. 

Naturally, this won’t be the only thing influencing menswear’s latest pivot. As summers get hotter clothes inevitably get lighter, and in our heavily pornographic society sex sells as much as ever before. After all, in an age where adult content is always a few taps away, when weight-loss drugs promise us almost any body we want, when daring sex stunts grab national headlines, is it not inevitable that we become more hooked on glimpsing our favourite celebs’ bodies?

In an era of momentary microtrends, the fact that the skimpy men’s clothing obsession is still going strong after half a decade signifies that something significant is shifting under the surface for men. Sure, it’ll all probably go out of fashion as quickly as it came in, but for now there’s nothing more stylish than a guy in unmanly clothes. So roll up that waistband and dust off mum’s skirts – showing some skin seems here to stay.

Featured Image: Paul Mescal / Vogue, 2024

By Robin Reinders

I don’t remember when I began to drink because I liked it. The first furtive sip of my mother’s vodka-cran, returned with a puckered mouth and distasteful shake of the head. Smirnoff Ice soaked in the saccharine aftertaste of a sticky American suburban desert summer. That cheeky ornamental sparkle in the family-fridge OJ; bubbles and Benedict before noon. I remember thinking adults must be something very far-fetched to have acquired not simply the taste but the temperament to tolerate something that looked like maturescence crystalised, and yet tasted of soap in the mouth. What we seem to forget when we’re piss-taking over pints and pre-rolls at the pub is that apprenticeship in alcohol comes about through mimicry.  

For most of us, this education begins in embarrassment.

Every culture of taste has its shibboleths – the books one must be versed in, the films one must feign to have seen, the discographies one must recite top to tail. To carouse, per contra, is to discover that your body will reject the canon, and that each bitter pill you swallow merits you that much closer to an earnest drinker. I don’t like dirty martinis. I tell you this as a truffle-foraging, cornichon-crunching creature of brine and salt and savour. I was cresting twenty when I asked my barman-retiree father to chill me a glass and uncork the Hendrick’s. I wanted to love it for its poise, its cosmopolitan severity. I didn’t laugh so much as bark, embarrassed by my own disappointment, balking at the opaque peridot of the frosted glass, like a birthstone that didn’t belong to me. I am not a dirty martini person. I accept this with a quiet, cognizant sort of amusement. There is a peculiar humility in discovering that you cannot love a drink you so chronically hope to love. It punctures the vanity of discernment. The drinks we abandon tell the truth of our appetites more eloquently than the ones we order ever could.

More and more I find it true that there is a certain choreography inherent to preference. Culture has always been coded in the minor details of consumption; cocktails simply render those codes portable and potable, able to be performed in the theatre of a hotel bar or an airport lounge or the local pub.  The process of taste-making – the literal kind, that is – is not unlike the making of a self. There are phases, fads, flirtations. A person’s drink becomes a form of shorthand. The girl watching her weight – Targaryen-blond and terribly boring – perching neatly on a barstool with her vodka-soda. The bubble-skirted, ballet-flatted Instagrammer bending over the counter for a birds-eye of her Aperol. The twenty-something berlioz bloke quoting Bukowski (incorrectly) while he swirls his single malt and checks his crypto portfolio when nobody’s listening.

We were all performing then: in the dewy-eyed dream of our parents’ kitchen, in bolshie adolescent company, in the sticky arena of a student bar. We still are. Drinking, not dissimilar from dressing, belongs to the theatre of self-definition. Every order at a bar is a small audition for the role of ourselves as imagined by others. The city itself colludes in the casting: cafés advertising ‘artisanal’ tonics, bars lit in imitation of some universal nostalgia, menus printed on textured paper that promise depth of field if not depth of flavour. Boozing has always had an anthropology attached to it. The tiki Mai Tais of the 1950s, a sweet postwar reprieve; the vodka revolution of the ’80s, a distilled form of corporate yuppie (in)efficiency; the craft-cocktail revival of the 2000s, a Buzzfeed-bloated mode of taxonomy. What your cocktail screams about you! To drink bitter is to be sage and perspicacious; to drink sweet, jejune. Even taste, it turns out, has a class system.

It’s no accident that bitterness has become the aesthetic of adulthood in our time – espresso, kale, dark chocolate. A comestible sort of cynicism that feels less cringe inside our mouths than it sounds projected out. Holistic, antithetical zoomer ‘wellness’ has a certain flavour, doesn’t it? I like a Negroni alright – what do you want me to tell you? A graduation from the half-hearted G&Ts of early adulthood. I don’t actually remember when or where we were introduced. I don’t remember the first whiff of pine and peel, the first wink of arterial red like the garnets in my jewellery. I didn’t like it, but I did. It’s not a drink that courts indulgence. Quite the opposite; it begs attention with a cruel rather than a kind hand. All this to say at some ill-defined, perfunctorily romanticised moment, I understood I was a bitter drinker. Fond of the acrid, the tannic, the aromatic. It’s a far cry from the pink cosmos and perfumed spritzes of my younger years, but when I order one I don’t do so with panache. I don’t fancy myself some maverick patron with a palate worth priding myself on. I order it because it’s my drink.

These days I keep little in the cabinet. A bottle of gin with a label I like. A bitter that stains the glass vermillion. A dry white I cook with as much as I sip. Maybe a cheeky Italian liqueur for some frivolous, far-future dinner function. I suppose when you finally start to drink like yourself, you have been, in consequence, every kind of drinker: the precocious, the posturing, the self-appointed pundit. And in that gradual ledger of sips, one discovers that taste is no static inheritance nor fixed, natural possession, but some fluid, fey thing. A patient, unhurried negotiation between what we think we ought to drink and what, inexplicably and inexorably, becomes the second-round staple.

Featured Image: Alain Delon / Getty Images

By Edward Clark

Wayzgoose’s Head of Reviews, Edward Clark, sits down with Laura Simpson and Lydia Jane Pugh – the writers of brand new musical Radio Silence.

This summer saw the world premiere of Radio Silence, a brand new musical about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War. Performed locally at the Princess Royal Centre for the Performing Arts in Guernsey, the show received glowing reviews from audiences and critics alike. Grappling with oppression, freedom, and resilience, the musical asks the same questions of its characters as it does its audience: “what would you risk to resist?”. After their first leg of performances, I sat down with writers Laura Simpson and Lydia Jane Pugh to discuss the musical, island identity, and its uncertain future against the backdrop of shrinking arts funding.

The narrative of Radio Silence follows the fictional Tabel family’s involvement with the Guernsey Underground News Service (GUNS), a secret movement during the island’s Second World War occupation which disseminated British news to islanders, banned from using radios by Nazi invaders. The detailed set of the Tabel family home offers a warm domestic sphere to juxtapose the unforgiving Nazi regime, as rules and taxes are imposed onto islanders. In response to this cold authority, the family begins to rebel. 

The book and music are written by local writer Laura Simpson and musician Lydia Jane Pugh. Blending modern lyricism and raw emotion with period-accurate detail, the musical shines as an exciting exploration of Guernsey’s unique history. In the musical’s first moments, the string section’s discordant tuning transforms into the sound of an air raid siren. The oppressive atmosphere of the bombing of the Guernsey harbour in 1940 smoothly shifts into the opening number ‘Days of June’, setting a precedent for the rest of the play. Lydia spoke about her aim to embed the events and style of the period within the music itself: ‘the song ‘Spin That Dial’ is very much based on the Andrews Sisters, because we wanted that 1940s sound’. All six actors offer outstanding performances, imbuing Laura’s fictional characters with believable and gritty emotion – a believability necessary to match the detailed, period-accurate set. Many set elements were sourced from the Guernsey Rifle and Heritage Society, with genuine WWII identity cards, ration books, kitchen equipment and other elements utilised onstage. Props and costumes were recreated from original occupation artefacts. The generosity of locals speaks to the importance of art like Radio Silence. As Laura tells me, ‘we’re now at a stage where it’s coming out of living memory for the vast majority, and although it’s something that is an extremely traumatic period of our history, I think that because there’s that bit more space now, we can tell a more balanced, more human story’. 

Fundamentally, the musical brings a story to life in a way that actually honours our local community. As Laura tells me, ‘we’ve seen other media interpretations of what Guernsey was like during the war, and they’re all often very inaccurate. And it was just that kind of feeling: why are other people telling our stories when we’ve got fantastic creatives. Our island produces a phenomenal range of really hardworking creatives. Why are we not telling these stories?’. Accordingly, there is a notable effort amongst the team to celebrate the island’s history. ‘I did manage to get a little bit of Sarnia Cherie [our unofficial “national” anthem] into one of the songs, which was so subtle that the violinist didn’t even notice’. An effort to celebrate island identity is reflected in the team’s detailed research, especially concerning accurate names and locations. Laura tells me: ‘that’s the thing that often, other representations have just got so wrong. I took it to the extreme because I’m a nerd, but you know, if I wanted to write a story set in Gibraltar, how would I find out what the local names were? I’d spend half an hour researching it.’

These references are not intended to ostracise non-islanders, but to celebrate Guernsey’s own community. When asking Lydia about the importance of a narrative faithful to our identity and history, she told me: ‘with a lot of those kind of subtleties throughout, in the lyric and the script as well, we wanted this to be accessible to any audience. But there will be audience members who are really listening, that will clock all those easter eggs. And that level of detail that we kind of layered on over time was really important to making it feel authentic’. That authenticity clearly resonated with the audience when I watched the sold-out second night: as a recording of Sarnia Cherie was played towards the end of the musical, older members began singing along amongst the crowd. The team were amazed by local support: ‘The response has just been obviously overwhelming’. ‘I mean I guess the thing that we are continually being asked is ‘when can we see it again?’. Evidently new art such as Radio Silence plays a key role in uniting local communities.

Looking forwards, Pugh and Simpson are hopeful about the future of the show. Laura comments that ‘I don’t feel like we’re done telling this story. Locally, we know that this is an audience for anything ‘occupation’. But when people who aren’t even necessarily die hard theatre fans are telling you it was extraordinary, you’ve got to take this further’. The team believe that Radio Silence’s characters and story are universal. ‘I mean, I keep going back to the quote from the line in the first song. “We should have seen it coming / We should have seen the signs / but our heads were planted deeply in the ever shifting sands.” I don’t think that line will ever not be relevant’. However, the team are unable to share the story of the Tabel family with new audiences without support. ‘In terms of taking this further, and as with all arts projects, it ultimately comes down to investment, and whether there are individuals, companies, organisations that want to get behind this project and help to take that piece of our history to a wider audience. Because ultimately, theatre is not a cheap sport. But we are both very passionate about it, and we do an awful lot just because we love it. You know, we cannot be asking people to work for free because that is not appropriate. It’s show business, and the emphasis on business is getting more and more significant’. To continue to share stories which connect with audiences on an emotional level, the team needs financial support – an ever-prevalent barrier to entry for emerging artists.

You can find updates about the future of Radio Silence on Instagram: @radiosilencethemusical

Featured Image: Radio Silence. Pictured (left to right), Michael Sullivan-Pugh, Lottie Ewin, Eve Le Sauvage, and Laura Simpson.