A Little Man, a House and the Whole World Window
For me, Cardiacs was love on sight — sharing a bill at the old Wardour Street Marquee with John Shuttleworth, the first incarnation I witnessed in 1987 featured Tim on vocals and guitar, his brother Jim (the only other constant in the line-up) on bass, his wife Sarah on saxophone, William D Drake on keyboards, Tim Quy on percussion and Dominic Luckman on drums. All except Sarah, who wore a ballgown, were dressed in oversized school uniforms, their faces grease-painted deliberately badly. They looked almost scary, a shade of something from a half-remembered folk tale, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were some future members of The League of Gentlemen in the audience that night taking notes too.
Cathi Unsworth salutes The Cardiacs in the company of Bic Hayes.
The Funnies
“I’m just trying to pull together my ideas in the best possible way, and I’ve never tailored those ideas for a particular audience. I bet I could do a pretty good teenage vampire story, for example. It would have plenty of romance, and just the right amount of titillating sex, but I think I’d wind […]
The Riddle of Poetry
Jorge Luis Borges‘ Harvard University lecture (1967). Parts two, three, four, five.
The Unportable Borges
Martin Schifino on five new Borges anthologies: Jorge Luis Borges was an eminently portable writer. He favoured various forms, but everything he produced was brief. He once claimed that his reluctance to publish novels was due to laziness, and that his works of short fiction were summaries of imagined longer works. Either he was teasing […]