While the British media was getting its backside publicly slapped by Lord Leveson, came news that Ofcom has finally pulled the plug on the poster girl of media impropriety – Press TV. Iran’s state-funded 24-hour news channel has been barred from dispensing its loose approximation of current affairs on Sky channel 515 due to its Continue reading

Slouched in tatty and torn T-shirts and jeans in their downtown Manhattan recording studio, the Beastie Boys looked more like lazy students dragged from their beds than politicised hip hop icons when I interviewed them back in 2004. The trio’s sixth album, To The 5 Boroughs, was about to be released. Part bittersweet ode to Continue reading

Album review: Invaders Must Die, by The Prodigy 4/5 In light of the media’s renewed commitment to transparency, I feel compelled to declare a vested interest in awarding the Prodigy’s new album full marks from the outset. With whistle and glowstick in hand, I welcomed in the new year at Brixton Academy in 1992 to the Continue reading

The pride that swept the nation after the England cricket team’s famous 1968 Test series win in the West Indies masked the rising racial tension blighting a country absorbing its first wave of Caribbean immigrants. Back then, in the swinging (and seaming) Sixties,  the ‘Y’ and ‘N’ word were common pub parlance and modern British values of tolerance and integration Continue reading