Luke Turner

In the row behind me, a couple of seats to my right, Geraldine couldn’t believe that I’d never seen Dead & Company before.  “Wow, really?” “Nope.”  “This is, like, my eighth show this year.” “God. And here’s me, a perfect virgin.” It was a grey night at Citi Field, the home of the New York […]

John and Luke discuss one of their favourite films, 1995 French masterpiece La Haine. Set over the course of a day and a night in a Parisian suburb, the high-tension film charts the lives of Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, three young Frenchmen of immigrant ancestry, as they speed towards a terrible conclusion. La Haine is an exploration of […]

As part of Big In Japan, The Slits, Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Creatures, Budgie (born Peter Clarke) was one of the stand-out drummers of the post-punk era. His forthcoming memoir, The Absence, tells the story of Budgie’s life from a childhood in working class St Helens overshadowed by the death of his mother, […]

It’s 1999, and a school IT lesson deep in the south east London suburbs. Our teacher asked who had a “home PC,” and everyone except me raised their hands. I’d been late to the party before, when at the end of the 80s my family finally brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, long after the […]

Payola in the music industry has always had a PR problem. For some reason, the many different forms it has taken over several decades are all seen as inherently bad. Why anyone would view the handing over of envelopes of cash, the procuring of drugs and the carving out of shares of music copyrights, none of which […]

The Quietus’ founders Luke Turner and John Doran had planned to have a gladiatorial contest to work out which was the finest Sonic Youth album, either Evol or Dirty. But, when they got down to it, they realised that they just really bloody love Sonic Youth, and that these two albums (from 1986 and 1992 respectively), are high-water […]

Hope Sings Eternal: Can Listening to Music Help you Cheat Death?

The last episode in our series exploring Ukrainian music, made in collaboration with Kyiv's 20ft Radio, explores music trends post-Maidan and being “a rhizomatic thing” during wartime.

As regular listeners to The Quietus’ Low Culture Podcast might be aware, our Luke Turner doesn’t really cope well with horror films. Having said that, John Doran loves them, as do many of our Subscribers, so we decided to do one this month in the form of a chat about Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon which, […]

It’s getting dark outside, the tonsured creature above is looking at me funny – time to get out these monthly playlists before things get weirder. Firstly, we had a rush of new members signing up over the weekend, to all of you, thanks very much. Secondly, as John is away at the moment your Low […]