Entertainment

By Michelle Ryan (@ShellRyan33) It’s been over 20 years since a young Peter Andre melted millions of girls’ hearts as he walked out of the waves with his shiny abs and tropical super-hit ‘Mysterious Girl’. Now with a past peppered with reality TV shows and a tumultuous love life in the public eye, Mr. Andre has landed a prime time spot on Strictly Come Dancing beaming into our living rooms every weekend. So what better time to strike while the...

By Grant Bailey (@GrantDBailey)   Nondescript shoegaze band posts inflammatory hate tweets about superior punks. Gets dropped by label. A win for music. That's the story in a nutshell. Bay Area post-rockers Whirr thought it would be a good idea to hurl some misguided abuse at G.L.O.S.S, a punk band from Washington who have just released a pretty smashing demo of transgender anthems. Twitter was quick to utterly destroy them, just in time for their label, Run For Cover, to give them the...

“When someone pitches a “performance video” in the HECK video think tank, they are generally met with stony faces and rolled eyes. Music videos are a chance to show more creativity visually. Straight up performance generally say fuck all except “this is what we look like playing our song” which, you know, is great and all, but is worth about 10 seconds of your YouTube time before going back to watching compilations of people braining themselves whilst trying to surf...

By Jack Peat, Editor of The London Economic  The troubling thing about Jennifer Phillips’ performance on Sunday night’s X Factor is that irrespective of her profound talent, she can never hope to win the competition. I have a number of gripes with X Factor, most of which are axiomatic and probably not worth stating here. But asides from it being a blatant set-up and presided over by a talentless bunch of judges, and the fact that it’s a soap opera...

By Daniel Mackenzie (@EkcaLiena) The unstoppable streams of information that wrap tangles around our brains can get a little confusing to say the least. These restless beams carry huge amounts of images, opinions and sounds around the world, almost blinding in quantity and depth, and navigating to a place of interest can take up as much time as digesting the details found on arrival. One such area that both benefits and suffocates from this endlessness is music. That feeling of...

By Nathan Lee, TLE Correspondent Historians have revealed what London would have looked like today had Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot not been thwarted by the spies of the past. The images show how intelligence and espionage during the Tudor and Stuart times shaped Britain’s culture, religion and even architecture. Events such as the famous Gunpowder Plot, several plots to kill protestant Elizabeth I and Henry VIII’s new religion could all have led to a very different city were it not...

By Grant Bailey (@GrantDBailey) This morning I popped along to an Electric Jukebox press event in glittering Soho. In the chill morning air the streets felt particularly clear and spotless. A man selling the Big Issue waved a cheery hello as I gawped at a load of big trees. I think they were part of Ai Weiwei’s new exhibition. Admittedly, having failed to do my research (though there was an air of secrecy to the whole event) I went into the...

By Abeer Sharma  “Dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum dum…” Oh yes, a new series of the BBC’s The Apprentice is back on our screens this week, launching with a double-bill. Expect haplessness, back-stabbing and stomach-churning desperation galore as 18 candidates battle for the opportunity to set up business with the indomitable Lord Sugar. The show’s return has already invited groans of derision. Reputable miserablist Paul Mason recently wrote a piece decrying the...

By Kane Power (@ElHeavio, @DeathInTexasUK)   Long-time visitors to this site will already be aware of how much we love Blacklisters. Their latest album Adult is still ringing in our ears with its black-humoured fuzzed-out racket, grown in the fertile soil of the Leeds hardcore scene. In his review of Adult TLE contributor Kane Power described Blacklisters as 'one of the best bands I’ve heard in years. Maybe the best of the lot.' So when Blacklisters frontman Billy Mason Wood said he would be available for...