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| | | 'Invention, grace and bloodlust ballet': post-punk guitarist John McGeoch | | by Daniel Dylan Wray May 4, 2022 | | McGeoch sent a jolt through the scene with Magazine, Siouxsie Sioux and more. Johnny Marr, James Dean Bradfield and others salute an overlooked musician Manchester, 1976, in a flat above a fish shop that reeked so badly even thieves wouldn’t approach it, John McGeoch obsessively hammered away at his guitar. When the electricity meter ran out he would play for hours unamplified in complete darkness. McGeoch was a Scottish fine art student and when his flatmate Malcolm Garrett (who would design artwork for Buzzcocks, Duran Duran and Simple Minds) told Howard Devoto, who’d recently quit punk pioneers Buzzcocks, that McGeoch could play all the parts of Television’s Marquee Moon, Devoto was impressed. “That made me think he would be somebody worth knowing,” he recalls in The Light Pours Out of Me, a new biography on McGeoch by Rory Sullivan-Burke. Continue reading... | | | | | The Matter of Everything by Suzie Sheehy review – 12 experiments that changed the world | | by PD Smith May 4, 2022 | | How the quest for a deeper understanding of particle physics has transformed the way we live In 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen noticed that a phosphor-coated screen gave off a green light when exposed to a cathode ray tube. He quickly realised that he’d found a new invisible ray. Asked what he thought when he saw this green light, he replied: “I didn’t think. I investigated.” In fact he spent seven weeks investigating, locked away in his laboratory and only coming out when his wife, Anna, insisted he eat something. He rewarded her concern for his wellbeing by using the unknown rays to make an image of her hand on a photographic plate. It proved that they could travel through skin and flesh: the plate revealed her bones and wedding ring. When she saw the image, she was appalled, saying: “I have seen my death!” In his notebook, Röntgen used a letter to denote the unknown rays: “X-rays”. As Sheehy says, this is “possibly the best unintentional branding in the history of physics”. Within a year of his discovery, X-rays were being used to find shrapnel in soldiers’ bodies on the battlefield. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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