How To Fight An Orc

The current FHM is out now, including my epic tale of being beaten senseless by a pack of orcs in a forest at 2AM. Or, to put it another way, what happened to me when I hooked up with Heroquest, the UK's oldest Live Action Role Playing society. The superb photos are by Peter Kindersley.

They're compensating for the world around them – one which just doesn’t offer men the excitement and challenges that it used to. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many LARPers are IT guys who came of age at a time when boundless futurism promised that come this millennium, we’d be living in an evolved world of circuit boards and video wrist-watches. The escapism, excitement and utopian future that they hoped technology would deliver never quite arrived. But every two weeks it actually exists in an old youth camp on the Welsh border.

The Most Corrupt Man In Music?

The new edition of Q is out now. As well as a nice looking cover shot of the goon from Razorlight, it features my lengthy feature on the rise, fall and criminal lunacy of Backstreet Boys manager Lou Pearlman.

Anvil in Arena

The current edition of Arena is out this week and includes my lengthy article on Anvil! The Story of Anvil, Sacha Gervasi's superb documentary about the early Eighties Canadian heavy metal legends. Ultimately, the film - and the article – are a celebration of the little man.

"Watching these two men, bound together by nothing more than a childhood pact to always rock together you realise that failure doesn’t have to be – and wasn’t always – something to be mocked or despised. Historically there was always a tension between creative and commercial success in the arts. It’s only relatively recently that the market has become so dominant that even self-style ‘indie’ bands will happily sell out to any commercial enterprise going and art only has a worth if it can be measured in sterling. Watching This Is Anvil you see that failure, when realised so completely and when still allied to an unshakeable belief in the righteousness of your own cause, can be truly noble."

Here they are proving my point at the Tokyo Rock Festival in 1984: