It can be difficult having a sibling who is a high achiever but imagine if that sibling was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the child prodigy, composer, and multi-instrumentalist with an unquantifiable talent that would astound the world with his genius. By…
Did you ever hear the one about the CIA-employed sex workers who were trained to drug, bed and interrogate unsuspecting American citizens while they were unwittingly tripping on LSD as government agents secretly watched? You’d think you’d remember a story…
Before the Juke Box, there was the Juke Joint, a reverberating sanctum of the Mississippi Delta and the indefinable heartbeat of southern African American culture. The traditional Juke Joint seems to have grown out of the landscape more than it…
By 1994 David Bowie’s musical career was in a bit of a quiet phase, let’s say. He hadn’t managed to recreate the massive success of his 1983 album Lets Dance. Ziggy Stardust had long since departed back to the cosmos,…
When you were young, what did you want to be? An astronaut, a princess, maybe a superhero or president of the world. Mike Stevens dreamt of being a soul super star, he wanted to tour the world, to write and…
You’ve probably never heard of Walter Schnackenberg, a draughtsman, and illustrator of the early 20th century who could conjure up nightmarish images as easily as he could convey the decadent and jovial bourgeois Berlin of pre-war Europe. From his flowing…
Who was Claude Cahun? As ambiguous as an empty page, a radical and an indefinable surrealist who traversed social construct; artist, performer, photographer, sculptor, writer, WWII resistance fighter, female, male, other; Claude Cahun was all of these things, or none…
When we think of Vogue we visualise a vibrant, striking, photographic image adorning the front cover of the seminal publication, but the first pictorial cover would not appear until 1932. Before the likes of Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Annie Lebovitz…
You know the sound of ragtime even if you don’t think you do. “The Entertainer“, a classic piano rag, is one of the most recognisable melodies of the 20th century (go on, have a quick listen). But it was written by…
In 1924, a truck accidentally sank into a backlot in Washington DC, opening a sinkhole and revealing a labyrinth of tunnels. People were aghast at what had been found; there was talk of bootleggers and spies that would later make…
