_Golden Brown_ works on two levels. It's about heroin and also about a girl

From a band torn apart by drugs to songs about drugs, starting with a 1986 EP from The Jesus And Mary Chain, featuring Bobby Gillespie in his final appearance with the band before hotfooting it...

So much music, so little time. So without further ado, I present The House of Love guide to blowing it:

Sublime took the day off yesterday, but it’s back. Just about sneaking in by virtue of having released this, their debut single, in 1989, The Sundays recorded only three albums. The last of these, “Static...

Right, can’t sit here in the corner all night. I need to start work on MY INVESTIGATION. Blinds on the window. And by the window. And a pain behind the eyes. Perhaps staring for a...

While casting around the murkier waters of youtube for 80s tracks, I received a message from the numbskulls that simply said: “Knight Moves”.

Today’s video is brought to you by Goths Against Motion Sickness (GAMS). Goths just can’t stand motion sickness (I think it’s the motion aspect that they find troubling), abhorring it almost as much as they...

Never say I can’t be topical. As you watch this video, Limahl (real name Chris Hamill, anagram fans), the man, the hair, is over in the Australian jungle raising awareness of the dangers of wrong-headed...

2nd April 1983, and “Don’t Talk To Me About Love” reaches its highest chart position at number 7. One place below, also reaching its peak is “Rip It Up”, by Orange Juice.

Next year’s Let’s Rock The Moor promises a stellar lineup: Tony Hadley, Howard Jones, Bananarama, Midge Ure, Five Star, Rozalla, Imagination, and Brother Beyond are already all confirmed. Brother Beyond! I had assumed they disappeared...

This is more like it - disco lights! Fancy transition effects! Roller dancing! Glittery confetti raining down on coiffured hair!

Practically defining bleakness, in the summer of 1981 “Ghost Town” catalogued a disaffected and angry youth amid depressing and thoroughly depressed surrounds (in the words of Michael Bracewell: “the doomed youth of a doomed town”)....

As it’s the 60th birthday of the charts today, here’s a super-special bonus post. The singles chart was invented by the NME in 1962 when they rang around a few shops to ask what was...

Somewhere on the line from the straightforward three-piece of earlier-days Jam taking on the Eton Rifles to the soul gloss of The Style Council, messing about on the river Cam (if you can’t beat ‘em,...

The same week that Paul Simon’s album Graceland, partly recorded in Apartheid-era South Africa and featuring South African musicians, entered the album charts, another new entry would include a title track dealing with the US...

While this piece of lyrical wonder was settling into its top 10 berth, Nick Berry was number 1 with “Every Loser Wins”, a song not even written for a real band (but a band called...

There’s a brilliance and a genius at the heart of the Pet Shop Boys that for whatever reason some people didn’t like to acknowledge. In the music, the art and artifice, the act (or apparent...

So there I was, trying to figure out how to segue from The King of Rock n Roll, and at the same time thinking it was about time we had some female vocals. I was...

Another mondegreen for a name, or so some sources would have you believe, with singer-songrwiter Paddy McAloon supposedly mishearing a line from the song “Jackson” (“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper...