SPIKE MAGAZINE

Gary Marshall House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel has been described as a "literary Blair Witch Project’

Gary Marshall If there was any justice in the world, it would be illegal to own Simply Red albums and Half Man Half Biscuit would be worshipped as gods. Unfortunately, the vagaries of the music business mean that the band who brought us the immortal

Gary Marshall Evil Genuises in a Nutshell – Illiad See all books by Illiad at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Even by the standards of American humour, Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell is unusual; a book of cartoons that should carry a set of minimum

Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with Naomi Klein’s No Logo “If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself… there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn, filling the

Gary Marshall on the history of gangsta rap as documented in Tupac Shakur: Rebel For The Hell Of It and Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records Amazon.com Widgets Under

Gary Marshall Miss Wyoming – Douglas Coupland See all books by Douglas Coupland at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com With the success of Generation X, Douglas Coupland found himself in the role of spokesman for a disaffected generation, documenting

Gary Marshall In a decade where most music was aimed at eight-year-olds, Crowded House were a band out of time. The unassuming Antipodeans had no image to speak of, no manifesto or world domination plan. Instead, they

Gary Marshall Rock and classical music make uneasy bedfellows. Whether it’s heavy metal bands performing with ‘real’ musicians, orchestras tackling the hits of the day or rubbish Britpop bands trying to be taken seriously, the results are usually

Gary Marshall During the Cold War huge areas of Russia were strictly off-limits to foreign visitors and, in classic tit-for-tat style, Russian visitors were allowed entry to the USA provided their travels didn’t take them

Gary Marshall It wasn’t a rock gig, it was an event. Journalists from all the major music papers were there, and even the local newspaper had marked the event with a special supplement. Celebrities air-kissed backstage, and

Gary Marshall damages his health laughing at The Onion’s Our Dumb Century and Max Cannon’s Red Meat According to popular belief, the phrase “American humour” belongs in the same oxymoronic category as “military intelligence”

Gary Marshall The Coen brothers are responsible for some of the most impressive feats of cinematic lunacy in recent years, from the slapstick of Raising Arizona to the pastiche of The Hudsucker Proxy, and this book is the first attempt

Gary Marshall Magnus Mills’ first novel, The Restraint Of Beasts, uncovered the sinister underbelly of rural England, as a team of feckless fencers found themselves drawn into a Kafkaesque nightmare. In All Quiet On The Orient Express, Mills

Gary Marshall The story of cocaine is a depressingly familiar one. Like many of the drugs now banned, it was originally hailed as a groundbreaking new chemical and was manufactured entirely legally throughout the world.

Gary Marshall Noam Chomsky was right, and Bill Hicks was a visionary. While we’re all distracted by politics, the world is actually being controlled by an unelected and unaccountable organisation with the power to

Gary Marshall I never liked Supergrass. “Alright” was cheerful to the point of inanity, and the band always seemed to have more facial hair than actual talent. Now, though, I want to join their fan club, follow the band around the world

Gary Marshall We like Feeder round these parts. Their single Suffocate is seldom off the SPIKE stereo, and we were pleasantly surprised to see the band supporting REM on their recent tour. The band’s recent string of singles has been spectacular,

Gary Marshall As far as John Diamond was concerned, cancer happens to other people. A columnist who is paid handsomely for spouting off each week about whatever is on his mind, he undergoes tests for the lump in his neck and, rather than panicking,

Gary Marshall Ethan Coen is one half of the deranged Coen Brothers, responsible for heights of cinematic lunacy including Saddam Hussein in a Busby Berkeley musical, attacks by squeaky-voiced German nihilists and Steve Buscemi in a wood-chipper.

Gary Marshall For anybody who read his first book, The Missing, it’s no surprise that Andrew O’Hagan has written a novel. While his debut book was non-fiction, its vivid evocation of O’Hagan’s childhood in Ayrshire

Gary Marshall In one of his routines, Eddie Izzard explains why supermarkets don’t have toilet rolls on display near the entrance in case you think “this is a poo shop! Everything in here is poo!”. Your first impression

Gary Marshall Steven Kelly is the editor of online UK literary magazine The Richmond Review and, being mature professionals, we were looking forward to sticking the knife into this, his fourth novel. All in the name of

Gary Marshall I was five years old when Elvis died and, like most of my generation, my knowledge of Elvis is derived largely from muck-raking biographies, shockingly bad films, sightings documented in supermarket tabloids and

Gary Marshall Citron Press has, perhaps unfairly, been derided as a vanity publisher. Billing itself as a writers’ collective and endorsed by none other than Martin Amis, the company certainly charge prospective authors

Gary Marshall It’s tempting to see Richard Dawkins as the Jeremy Clarkson of Darwinism, chainsmoking Marlboros and cackling as he writes in his diary: “To-do on Monday: wind up Creationists”. Although the image is perhaps a little