Interior Design Minimalist

Ok, so I'm happy to admit to being really quite inordinately thrilled about this. The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (Zero Books) is available for pre-order at Amazon. I have a contribution - about correlations between the design of Neverland and the transformation of Michael Jackson himself- in this collection of essays about MJ. Much more excitingly it includes contributions by Ian Penman, Barney Hoskins and Chris Roberts, as well as a host of excellent writers from the blogosphere including Dominic Fox, Evan Calder-Williams, Robin Carmody and Sam Davies. You could even buy a copy.

Many thanks to the editor Mark Fischer and to Owen (also contributing) for including me in such a fine array.

Ok, gush over. Back to business. (Straightens tie. Goes back to reading RIBA Standard Terms of Appointment).

Posted here as a sort of explanation for the title of the last post but mainly because I always really loved Suede. Not quite as much as my wife, who is still a member of the fan club, and not enough to tolerate Brett's dreadful solo output, but enough to jump up and down behind Simon Price's mohawk a half dozen times or so.....

Incidentally, Brett attended the same architecture school as I did although not at the same time. Remarkably, he's actually older than me. He was known then for wearing a bright yellow suit accessorised - when he was in the college workshop - with a pair of welding goggles.

I found Suede most appealing when at their most preposterous, circa either the camp bottom waggling hi-jinks of The Drowners or the stylised trashy outsider silliness of Coming Up, an almost, but not quite, unforgivably cliche-ridden album.

To The Birds also contains one of the best references to cycling in pop, as the title of this post testifies. It's not as good as Morrissey's magisterial and heart breaking line "When you cycled by, here began all my dreams" from Back To The Old House, but, then again, what is?