Mark Simpson gets mixed messages on the High Street (Another ‘lost’ Attitude column – this one from 1999) It was one of those indecently mild winter days. The sort that makes everyone feel a little bit naughty. As if you’re bunking off school or cheating on your partner. Walking… Read More »Cruising the Streets
Mark Simpson meets Mr Devo turned Mutato (Details magazine, 1998) Before the First World War, a bunch of Italian avant-gardistes called the Futurists, who didn’t get out much and got turned on by steam trains, thought technology offered the possibility of a revolution in human consciousness and believed that artists… Read More »Mark Mothersbaugh’s Mutation
This year is the 25th anniversary of the launch of the much-loved UK sitcom Father Ted. This unpublished interview with writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews – in which I pointed out how many priests drop dead in their hit sitcom – was commissioned by Deluxe magazine in February 1998.… Read More »How I Killed Father Ted
Mark Simpson tests Essex’s coastal defences against gentrification (The Times Magazine, 2001) Whitstable, Broadstairs, Brighton and most of Suffolk have gone already. Swept away forever under a tsunami of renovation. These once proudly tatty towns have been lost forever to the unsmiling, unfriendly, label-dressed invaders who prey on coastal towns… Read More »Fight Them On The Beaches
Mark Simpson totally relates to the author’s 1970s childhood war-fetish, but has to draw the line at Ernest Hemingway. (Independent on Sunday, 31 March 2002) Robert Twigger is a man who wins awards. The jacket of Being a Man… In The Lousy Modern World boasts of the Newdigate Prize for… Read More »Slit-Trenches & Eternal Comradeship