Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 116

London’s Cinema Of Sin Is Coming Back

A million people walked (or often fell) through the doors of London’s Scala cinema between June 1978-June 1993. Most of them staggered out. Now my old friend Jane Giles, who was the life and soul of the 24 hour party that was London’s Scala Cinema, has written a book on this scurrilous subject, which promises […]

The Sunday Song!

The new-look blog is taking it out of me. It’s a lot of work keeping it fresh every damn day. Sunday is therefore the new Friday today, and you’re getting a song, but it’s a good one. Some years back two plays about London’s club scene played off against each other. One was ‘Taboo’ with […]

Aspects Of London: The Writers’ Retreat

‘Literary London’ has become a phrase in itself. Here is a city that has nurtured the world’s greatest writers for centuries, but while hopeful artists go to Paris to paint (the light is several degrees brighter than that of London’s) you never hear of writers going to London to write, because this occupation is associated […]

A Few Good Scares

Having reviewed books on and off for twenty years I’ve inevitably built up a spectacular stack of them, mostly good – I don’t see a point of reviewing books you disliked because press space is valuable. The one exception I was forced to make was for a surprisingly weak Stephen King tome about farting aliens, […]

Nymphs Begone!

One of my favourite art galleries is the Manchester Art Gallery, with its astonishing collection of Pre-Raphaelites and figurative paintings displayed at ideal heights for close study. It has always amazed me that you could walk in there on a Saturday morning and have the place virtually to yourself while everyone else is creeping around […]

Sublime Moments: Films To Catch

When watching stories on film. I live for the moments when everything comes together in a sublime meld of imagery, language and sound. Watching God’s Own Country, one of the year’s best British films, it seemed at first to be another BFI-funded test of patience, especially as it began with a monosyllabic farmer putting his […]

‘Murder Your Darlings’

From Franz Kafka and Robert Louis Stevenson to Nabokov and Gogol, writers have always wanted to destroy their work. Often their instructions to burn everything after their deaths is ignored. Franz Kafka was famously dismissive of his own writing and wrote a letter to his friend Max Brod saying that he was leaving all his work […]

Why James Bond May Be Over

We currently live in a world of virtue signalling, safe spaces and trigger warnings, in which jargon in the new illiteracy. While I applaud the more practical elements, like the long-overdue attempts to redress the gender balance and the dumping of racism and sexism in the US creative industries, many people fail to understand that […]

The Sixties Return In March

They say if you can remember the sixties you weren’t there. I wasn’t. By which I mean I was at school, and being a tiresomely studious child I knew absolutely nothing about what was going on in certain select (ie wealthy) parts of London. The heady smell of patchouli and dope, the sounds of the […]

London Buildings, Good & Bad (Part 2)

So yesterday, a very potted history of how the developers arrived. Ultimately, the greedy inherited the earth. Step forward Julie and Magnus Davey, property developers and, by various press accounts I read, Grade A scumbags who have exploited government schemes and asylum seekers even as they knock down listed buildings. It would be nice to […]