Sex pistol

Salvador Ramos and our crisis of masculinity

From our US edition

There's a well-done, nasty piece of filmmaking available on Hulu right now called Pistol, ostensibly a Sex Pistols biopic but so much more. The series is only partially about the Pistols themselves and more about the post-war Britain that formed them. Pistol seems to suggest that all that anger and despair was going to have to come out somewhere, either repressed and hidden, crunched deep down inside, or allowed to lance out as "music," more screaming than lyrical. I wonder if America isn't somewhere similar. Post-war Britain was a terrible place to grow up.

salvador ramos

Celebrating Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records

To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation that came of age in the late 20th century he was a guide to the future. We have him to thank for ushering in the strangest, most revelatory pop music to the cultural mainstream. Wilson was among the first to spot the significance of catalytic bands such as the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Happy Mondays and to champion them through his countless media projects. Factory, the scrappy record label he co-founded in 1978, produced some of the biggest-selling records of the 1980s, with a spirit of ‘subversion through inefficiency’. Wilson opened the Hacienda in 1982, the best nightclub in the city.