Article list

27.04.2023.

White Horse: the 1923 Cup Final, my Grandfather and Me

How one man's road to Wembley went through Egypt, East Africa and beyond

17.12.2022.

Stardust Soundtracks: Bowie, Britain and the Seventies

David Bowie's performance of Starman on BBC's Top of the Pops in July 1972 is one of the most mythologized four minutes in the history of British television.

10.07.2022.

Vinyl Idols

Released forty years ago, Odbrana i poslednji dani by Belgrade band Idoli has long been touted as the best Yugoslav album of all time.

10.07.2022.

Three Kings

The strange, subversive tale of the Vilnius Jazz Trio

06.07.2021.

Opatija Noir

It wouldn’t be a seaside town if it didn’t have a dark side

06.07.2021.

A Life in the Woods

Felix Salten, Bambi the Deer, and Twentieth-Century Vienna

26.05.2021.

Iron in the Soul

It is forty years since Andrzej Wajda’s epoch-defining Man of Iron walked away with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

17.12.2020.

Jazz Messenger

Komeda: A Private Life in Jazz by Magdalena Grzebałkowska tells the story of Poland’s most talented musician of the jazz generation, and reveals what exactly jazz meant to a Polish society in the throes of rapid change.

12.05.2020.

Dropping the baton: Tito, youth culture and the Slovene syndrome

Tito’s cult of personality prevailed for a few years following his death in May 1980. By the end of the decade, however, this legacy was in a serious state of dissipation.

06.09.2019.

Futurama 79

If London had been the birthplace of punk, northern England had become the incubator of whatever it was that was about to happen next.

24.06.2019.

Yugoslavia in the Year 2000

Throughout 1960, Globus magazine ran a series of articles about what they thought the country would look like in the year 2000. Casting their eyes over existing plans for concrete suburbs and high-rise cities, Globus’s writers were essentially saying that, thanks to socialism, the future was already here.

16.06.2019.

Robert Smith Rewound

In May 1996 I had the good fortune to interview Cure frontman Robert Smith. And then, with the interview still untranscribed, I lost the tape. It took me 23 years to find out what on earth I had done with it.

27.10.2017.

Vampire Holiday

The time is ripe for Croatia to regain its rightful place on the European horror map

06.06.2017.

What is a song without a sleeve? Jugoton’s place in art and pop

Zagreb record label Jugoton didn’t just nurture a unique music scene. It also set new standards in Croatian design

14.12.2016.

Sachertorte, Sacher-Masoch

So what is it that makes Vienna the capital of sex?

25.11.2016.

Hoochie Coochie Hoću Kući

Is Milan Manojlović Mance’s Man from Katanga the greatest Croatian album ever made?

22.9.2016.

Subversive Soundtracks

Forty years ago members of Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe were put on trial for playing music that the country’s communist rulers didn’t like the sound of.

22.9.2016.

(Come on Baby) Light my Choir

Traditional choral festivals provided a natural focus for the so-called Singing Revolution, which swept across the Baltic States in 1987-1990.

09.5.2016.

Rijeka Rock City

It was the port city of Rijeka that led the way when it came to Croatia’s relationship with the electric guitar, and it is Rijeka that preserves most in terms of rock and roll heritage today.

11.4.2016.

Throwing Shapes

Siluett was one of the most seductive fashion magazines of the 1960s. And it was produced in Soviet-occupied Estonia.

15.3.2016.

Power Ballads: Marta Kubišová and the Velvet Revolution

The story of Marta Kubišová’s song A Prayer for Marta reveals much about the power of popular culture - and the desire of those in government to place it under control.

4.6.2015.

Brushed off

Parts of the mural-covered wall running along Zagreb’s Branimirova ulica were demolished at the end of May 2015. The news was greeted by a wave of public indifference, despite the fact that the wall is one of the city’s defining visual landmarks.

27.4.2015.

Coast of Thrones

The more popular the Croatian Adriatic becomes, the less control it exerts over its own narratives