The Shrug File
Apparently there’s a thing I used to do at dinner parties back in the day. If there was somebody new at the table, I’d always ask them what music they were really into. I never really asked them whether they were into music, because, you know, everyone’s into music. I wanted to get to the gist of what music meant to them. And when they answered, I examined the answer probably a little bit too closely for comfort. You see, anybody who shrugged and said, “Oh, I like a little bit of everything,” would go into this secret file I had, marked especially for those people I don’t entirely trust.
I knew it wasn’t a defensible trait, but I couldn’t help myself doing it anyway.
Yes, some of it’s about snobbery. Of course it is. But I’ve got this thing about music and it being the most efficient way into somebody’s inner life. Compared to other forms of the arts it’s devastatingly quick. A painting wants you there in the gallery. A book wants a fortnight of your life. But a song only wants three minutes and in return, it gives you so much more. It takes you right back to a place and time without ever asking for permission. I don’t think anybody’s ever properly explained how music does this and I’d like it to remain a mystery.
So when somebody tells me they’re not really into music, I take it to mean that they’ve opted out of the most direct line there is into their own feelings. I might be wrong about that and I’m willing to take that chance. They probably go to pieces at lakes or engines or birdsong and their inner life is perfectly well stocked with all the good stuff. But the other thing about music is that it does a thing that a lake can never hope to do, and that is getting strangers moving in time. When you’re at a gig or a festival you’ll witness the unique spectacle of separate people becoming one animal for four minutes. Any person with little or no song or music in their life, I see as somebody who’s never handed themselves over to anything. And I think that’s arguably what I’ve really got a problem with.
I admit that it’s a lot to hang on a shrug over a main course and I’ve probably been wrong about my conclusions many times. But I don’t care if the theory’s not 100% reliable. It’s good enough and I’m keeping it.
All that said, if ever I was asked the same question about music, my mind goes blank, and even if it didn’t, I probably wouldn’t tell you. Which would land me in the same file as the shrug people. Ain’t life great.
Welcome to Issue 35. No shrugs.
Matt
i
Ten Questions
Roman Candle started out in the basement of The Golden Eagle in Chester. These days it’s up the hill at St Mary’s Creative Space, a church that was decommissioned in 1972 and has been missing the top of its tower since 1745, when Lord Cholmondeley had it knocked down to get a clear line of fire at the Jacobites. Carl Bennett books the music. Ryley Walker, Laetitia Sadier, Cedric Burnside, Terry Reid and Michael Chapman have all played under what’s left of that tower.
He’s got GA-20 in on 22 October, Erin Rae on the 27th and Romeo Stodart on 5 November. The rest of the season is at romancandlepromotions.co.uk.
We asked Carl to step away from the box office long enough to pick ten questions from our archive.
If you could time-travel to witness one musical moment in history, when and where would you go?
I’d love to be there to witness Townes Van Zandt singing this song from the documentary Heartworn Highways, the tears in his friend’s eyes are so emotional and the performance is so raw.
What’s the last album or song that made you stop whatever you were doing and just listen?
Joshua Burnside – It’s Not Going to Be Okay, the song was ‘With You’ which is sadly about his friend who passed away, he sings about climbing into his grave and it’s just heartbreaking. He’s an incredible Irish singer-songwriter.
What’s your favourite sound that isn’t music?
A snooker ball being potted in the heart of the pocket at power, I play snooker.
What’s the most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard live?
Peter Broderick – ‘It’s a Storm When I Sleep’, at Future Yard, Birkenhead.
What’s your favourite album to listen to alone in the dark?
Elliott Smith – Either/Or, it’s a true masterpiece.
What genre or artist did you come to embarrassingly late, kicking yourself for missing out?
Leonard Cohen, I got into his music after he sadly passed and I’d have loved to have seen him live.
What was the last gig that genuinely surprised you?
Robert Finley for us (Roman Candle Promotions) it’s insane how good that guy is, yet he’s not a huge star.
What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?
Kevin Morby at End of the Road Festival, the whole audience was totally into the show, it was crazy powerful.
What artist do you think is criminally underappreciated?
Lisa O’Neill, but she’s starting to get noticed!
What new artist or band are you most excited about right now?
Caitlin Gilligan, my partner, I’ve seen how much she’s put into her debut album, it’s sounding incredible and I’m excited to see where it all leads!
ii
Magnetic North · Thirty-Five
Small Things
A fallen leaf from the Allerton Oak, a crow feather from Priory Woods, a thimble in a chest of drawers, a cigarette card in a leather wallet: the small things, objects possessed with phantoms, the trace elements of memory, or future memories, the pebble from the beach, the pinecone, the shell.
In my pockets there are always haunted objects - an acorn, a rusty bottle top, a conker, so many things in the pocket archive - reminding me of the autumn walks home from school with our daughter Pearl foraging for treasure on Southwood Road. If you roll a chestnut through your fingers, you might imagine you can feel a trembling heart.
I have envelopes full of photographs picked up in auction sales and flea markets of people I don’t know. Family gatherings, a birthday party, weddings and christenings. Photographs of seaside holidays, of children on donkeys, of picnics on a blanket and wild rides at the fairground. Photographs taken to remember that special day on the beach, the sacred place of ritual. When I look at the photographs it’s like looking through a telescope at people on a planet called The Past…
The people stand together, they present themselves to the camera in their swimsuits and summer dresses, in their sun hats and their summer smiles. And they are thinking, ‘This is our special day! We will remember it every time we look at this photograph!’ But now these people are ghosts, they’re no longer here to look at the photos and recollect that day.
I am the custodian of their seaside memory. The people in the photographs don’t know I am looking at them, in their happy moments, in their salty, sandy, suntan lotion bliss. Oh, the wistful sadness of not knowing who these people are.
And yet…
When I place the sea and snail shells, feathers and pinecone on the wooden floor next to the photos they become an altar to remembering. And then, as I arrange them it occurs to me that I am making a primitive radio – a technology of the sacred - as if the invisible wires connecting the objects are receiving signals - broken audio transmissions of lost voices, gulls on the wind, amusement arcades, the ice cream man along the promenade and laughter on the sands.
The people in the photographs almost certainly have seashells in their pockets. I too am holding a seashell in my hand, transported to a day at the end of a long-ago summer, sun setting across the vast expanse of memory. My memory of the seaside dissolves into the memories of the people in the photographs. And everything we need to know is in these small things we hold in our hands.
— Jeff Young, 21 October 2026
—
Jeff Young warms a conker in his left hand on October mornings until it’s the same temperature as he is. Only then will it tell him anything. The gulls over Otterspool still owe him for a Mr Whippy he dropped in 1966 and he’s told them to keep the change. He tunes the kitchen radio to the gaps between stations because that’s where the reception’s best. Last Tuesday it picked up a donkey on the sands at New Brighton.
iii
The Paphides Principle
Time To Heal
on Aniqo
Pete Paphides wrote this week’s piece in a Costa Drive-Thru in Solihull at six in the morning and took two photographs of the queue while he was at it. He’s brought us ‘Time To Heal’ by Aniqo, from Earth Love and Variations, the album she’s made with Bill Ryder-Jones.
Sometimes you don’t need the detail. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that – in matters of art – most of the time, you can skip the detail. For someone in my line of work, that’s not a great thing to admit. A large part of my job involves asking songwriters what inspired their latest opus. And, yes, sometimes that feels futile because: (a) they don’t usually want to replicate in a conversation something that they captured far more powerfully in a song; and (b) the emotional response that determines whether or not I like a song usually happens long before I figure out what it’s about. Example: My favourite K-Pop song of all time is ‘Advice’ by Taemin, an urgent yet incomprehensible entreaty that zig-zags between English, Korean and a phonetic hybrid of the two, all played out over an insistent piano hook that gets as close as is legally possible to the Succession theme without getting itself sued. Within seconds of the intro, I’m heavily invested in this psychodramatic puzzle. And yet, if you asked me, “What’s it about?” the most lucid answer I could give you is, “It’s about four minutes long.”
Yesterday, at around 6am, I pulled into the car park of a Costa Drive-Thru cafe in Solihull. I wasn’t there to drive thru it. I needed a warm, distraction-free place where I could sit down and write some words. Getting out of my car, I was surprised to see that, even though it was still dark outside and the streets were empty, there was a queue of under-caffeinated drivers in cars waiting to issue their order on the Costa intercom. Near the back of the queue was a neon sign which read “Great coffee starts here” – and I wondered why they bothered having it there, given that by the time you see it, you’ve already made your decision. I took a photograph of this tableau as a little memento of what some people in Solihull were doing at 6am in October 2026. But because it was dark, I forgot that you have to keep the iPhone still for a few seconds in order to avoid a blurry shot. So I then took a second photo – one where you could see what was going on. The second photo is ok. But the one where you can’t see the detail is much better. Look at those colours!
And so to my favourite song of the week. I couldn’t really tell you what’s happening in ‘Time To Heal’ by Berlin/Lisbon singer-songwriter Anita Goß – who records as Aniqo, and I tell you what, I don’t think their PR does either, but that hasn’t stopped them valiantly expounding upon it, comparing its lyrics to “pages from a forgotten book [that] open up universal questions and invite listeners to relate them to their own lives.” Never mind all that though. ‘Time To Heal’ simulates the elemental rush you get as you leave your house with collar up and your hat pulled tightly down and kick through autumn leaves that seem to have absorbed all the remaining magic hour light. The diaphanous drone of violin, trumpets and blood-temperature keyboards compounds the elemental ecstasy that lifts you with it. And presiding over the whole thing like some sort of imperiously beneficent earth mother is Aniqo herself – the cosmic ringleader you didn’t know you needed in your record collection. And if I sound like I’m getting a little too excited, please consider that this is now the third song I’ve heard from Aniqo’s upcoming album, Earth Love and Variations, which – as with any album bearing the imprint of Bill Ryder-Jones – is surely set to be a late qualifier for any sensible Best Of list come the end of the year.
— Pete Paphides, 22 October 2026
iv
Hallelujah Trial Album Launch Night
A Room Giving It Back
On Saturday night, if you were anywhere near Park Lane in Liverpool, you likely heard the city before you saw it. Fireworks were going off early with November not even yet here. There was traffic and noise and everyone in a hurry to get to somewhere even louder. Then you pushed the door of the Scandinavian Church and all of that dropped away behind you. You were standing inside what felt like a time capsule somebody had forgotten to open.
The Scandinavian Church, for me, is the best kept secret in Liverpool. It reminds me of a tiny version of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. To reach the main room you have to climb stairs from street level. To reach the toilets you have to descend. There are stairs, landings and turns that seem to be leading you the wrong way, a tiny labyrinth that narrows and narrows until it’s like being led through the inside of a rocket ship. All passage and no view. Then you enter a tiny door and the space opens around and above you. Ninety places to sit in the main room went on sale back in August and all were sold. On Saturday the people who’d bought them came up through that labyrinth and sat down inside the record.
I use the word inside deliberately here because Hallelujah Trial made the album in this actual room back in April. Tom Roberts and John Canning Yates played it end-to-end in the same room on Saturday 17 October, the very day it was released. Everyone who’d ordered a copy went home clutching one. So it was made in there, played in there and handed over in there. As far as I know, nobody’s ever closed a circle quite like this before.
Tom and John played the album front to back in sequence with no shuffling and no skipping to the singles. We’re forever told that nobody has the patience for all that any more. But here was evidence that ninety people sat and took the record in whole. In the same way you’d read a book or watch a film. Playing an album in order is a statement, maybe even a counter-argument. Played live in the room where it was recorded, it became something more like a retelling. It’s the same story in the same air.
Before a note of it was played there was a silence. Everyone had found their seats and the talk ran down to nothing. For that few seconds nobody in the church made a sound. Then Tom broke it with the first line of ‘On Each Branch’: “Sometimes I get trouble…”
Heard in order, the same images come back from song to song. A blossom grows on the branches of the first one and by the last, the reprise, a choir is singing through roses. In between there are flowers in the ruin and a night slept in petals. A line from side one, “God I hope God is on your side”, turns up again on side two in an A&E waiting room and picks up a second half: “God I hope God is on my side”. Truth gets broken down and then turned down like some kind of parlour game. The questions keep coming as well. “How will we ever know?” gets asked over two blue toothbrushes and the business of which of them will go first. By the middle of side two Tom has his answer. ‘Joy Is the Aim’ runs to eight lines and four of them are simply the word joy: Joy… joy… joy… joy.
Then at the end of the first side something quite magical happened. Tom left the front and walked the aisles singing ‘Ever Treat You Cruel Again’ with no guitar, no piano and no microphone. He used the building the way the record used it, pushing the low end of his voice up into the space above everybody’s heads and waiting while the room sent it back. It was simple and it was marvellous. And nobody moved.
I think the reason it especially worked is this building and what it does to the usual contract between performer and audience. A stage will separate and a bar will distract. Here there was neither. There was John at the piano and Tom with a guitar playing songs that began as a weekly ritual of tea and talk in a front room and until recently had an audience of two. Nobody had anywhere to hide, performer or listener. Some of the people sitting there were on the record. Angie Woolfall, Christian Burwood, Claire Yates, Helen Roberts and Matthew McPartlan sang on ‘The Hallelujah Chorus (Reprise)’ on the record back in April. On Saturday they sat among everyone else. They’d come to hear a piece of work and ended up feeling part of it.
I’m not a neutral witness here of course. I was occasionally in that front room, sharing their cups of tea and I’ve been part of this record since well before it was a record. When I tell you Saturday mattered, I’m someone who watched this thing get made and then watched it be born.
The first versions of these songs weren’t demo sessions. They were short voice memos sung into a phone mic over a kid’s nylon-string guitar. They were the kind of scratchy little file you’d record so you don’t lose an idea and then can’t bring yourself to delete because there’s definitely something in it somewhere. That’s exactly where this started. Then one by one the right room, the right people and the right night turned up, as if the thing had decided it wanted to exist and was arranging the circumstances itself. I’ve been around enough records to know it almost never goes like that. Mostly you push and push. This one you simply followed.
Every artist, every audience and every small label is reaching for what happened on Saturday, whether they’ll care to admit it or not. A thing made in a space and given back in the same space to the people who wanted it enough to be there. In 2026 that’s close to unique and I don’t think I’m romanticising it in any way. The normal way now is a file uploaded at midnight on Spotify or whatever into an ocean of other files. It’s a number on a dashboard and a playlist placement you have to beg or pay for. What happened on Park Lane was the opposite. You could hold it.
The record on its own is a very beautiful object. The record in that room, with these people inside it was the difference between a song existing and a song happening. I’ve thought about it a lot since Saturday and I keep arriving at the same place. The job was done. Not perfectly, because nothing is and we never design it that way, but in the only ways that matter. We make records for years hoping one of them gets to be what it’s supposed to be and this one did it.
And when the album was done they didn’t stop. They played a handful more, older songs and other people’s, then closed on a Cowboy Junkies cover: ‘Dreaming My Dreams With You’. They finished on a song that belongs to everyone. It felt like a nod to the lineage the night belonged to.
We seem to live our lives surrounded by music and almost none of it is actually in the same room as us. Everything is available instantly and endlessly, and it usually arrives through a phone speaker with something else happening on a screen or another thing in the front of your mind. Saturday was ninety people, two musicians, one building and a box of vinyl records. No stream, no re-press, no second chance.
The records ordered online go out in the post over the weekend. Put one on and you’ll hear the church in it. Ninety people heard it first on Saturday night.
Order Your Copy of Hallelujah Trialv
Ye Hole in Ye Wall
Ye Hole in Ye Wall is said to be Liverpool’s oldest pub. Whether the 1726 date above the door is accurate or not is the business of historians. What can be said for certain is that Ye Hole is a beautiful wood-bedecked city-centre boozer that pours a good Guinness. I don’t care if it is the oldest or not; it is the superlative I oppose. My dislike of them borders on phobia: something about the resoluteness of their proclamations makes my chest tighten and my back sweat.
Another verifiable fact – one infinitely more fascinating than its age – is that Hackins Hey, where Ye Hole sits, is the site of the unmarked graves of Liverpool’s first Quaker community. Whether they are truly buried beneath this pub (their interred bodies are apparently the reason the beer cellar is on the first floor and not underground) is debatable, but they’re down there somewhere. They’re close.
When I enter, shortly after opening time, the pub has a scattering of people: a tourist couple laden with Beatles memorabilia; a heavily bearded man in black; two young men who appear to have been awake all night. I buy a Guinness and take a moment to look at the old wooden phone box – next to the fireplace with its glorious hammered-bronze hood – imagining the lies that would have been fed into its mouthpiece. This pub is rich in folklore: it is said to have been a place where sailors were press-ganged into the navy; it is haunted by their drowned ghosts.
I go through to the snug. The room is lined with red-leather booth seating, separated by wooden partitions. Each partition is dark varnished wood with a leaded window in the top. I sit in the booth next to the heavily bearded man. He wears a long, black felt coat dappled with mildew, and a floppy buckled hat. As I settle in, I hear him slide across the seat and up to the partition. I find him now sitting beside me, an inch of wood between us. I glance across through the window. He stares straight ahead like a priest in a confessional. His skin is waxy, almost translucent under the interwar light fitting above him. There is movement in his beard – a maggot, perhaps.
I am Liverpool’s oldest man, he says – ostensibly to me. The superlative makes my head swim. I grip the booth to stay upright. He is certainly old: there is a triangle of skin lolling bloodlessly off his forehead.
Oh yeah? I say, regaining some composure. How old?
He shakes his long hair. Mud and sand scatter across the table in front of him. A beetle scuttles away. They buried me in 1728. I can smell his fetid breath through the wooden partition. He drinks a dark navy rum.
Was this place here? Was it really a pub then? I ask.
Age matters not, he says. If this tavern is oldest or smallest or biggest or best is not important.
Hot beads of sweat break out at the edge of my hairline.
What matters, he continues, is the clank of pennies in pewter tankards, the wet flames of whale oil lamps and the grey fug of clay pipes. The date on the doorway is abstract; only the moist souvenir of ale on your sleeve is real. Forget the age of the pub. You are drinking in the company of Liverpool’s oldest man.
The man turns and looks at me through the window in the partition. One of his eyeballs is shrivelled and brown, rattling around inside his socket. The word oldest ricochets around my head like a spasm. My face empties of blood and I shake uncontrollably.
Is there something disturbing in my appearance? asks the man. A worm pokes its glistening head out of his nostril.
No, I say, my dry tongue gumming to my cheek. Superlatives. Phobia.
Phobias, he says. The minister of our meeting was a man of great occult knowledge. He believed fear to be a premonition, a haunting from the future. A man afraid of blood will die by the knife. A fear of heights warns of a death by falling.
And mine? I ask. What does a phobia of superlatives predict?
He drains his rum and shuffles around to the bar on skeletal feet. I finish my drink in one deep gulp and concentrate on breathing. I think of comparatives: this pub is older than some; it is better than most. My heart rate drops.
You should not linger, says the man in black, placing a round of drinks on the table. My friends are coming.
I look to the door. A procession of men in anachronistic clothing. The first is so tall he has to get onto his hands and knees to enter through the door; the second, so fat he is forced through like a cork from a champagne bottle; the third so strong he bends the timber frame of the door until the whole building creaks.
I return my glass to the bar and slip out into Hackins Hey: an alley which is narrower than some and wider than others.
—
Dan Melling’s second-favourite album is Hunky Dory and he has never felt the need to put anything above it. On a fell walk he stops a few yards below the trig point and eats his sandwiches there. He orders the second-cheapest red on any wine list. On the Mersey Ferry he stands at the middle of the rail. The worst pint he ever drank was at a wedding in Spalding in 2011 and he refers to it as one of the worse ones.
vi
Forever Imprinted
Martin Brew has been around Violette for longer than either of us would care to work out. He was a regular at La Violette Società and played it too, as J-Walk. You’ll most likely know him for ‘Soul Vibration’, a banger and a half from back in the day. He’s kept putting out great records ever since. Beatowls’ ‘All I See Is Trouble’ got the J-Walk treatment with a pair of old Casio rhythm boxes and a lot of reverb and came back darker. His album Broken Beauty came out on Before I Die in November 2024. He made it in Stockport on a handful of vintage keyboards, a guitar, a bass and a row of effects pedals and got more out of them than most people get out of a studio.
He wrote to us on Tuesday night from his sofa, a week into a digital detox, with Issue 34 finally read and his son a few hours off turning eighteen.
It’s 7:38 pm on Tuesday 20 October 2026, and I’m sitting on my sofa. The keenly-embraced air of melancholy enveloping me is explained thus.
Behind me is a wall of MDF cubes, each stuffed with vinyl accumulated over decades. Behind that is a plasterboard wall, and beyond that is my son’s bedroom, where he sits entertaining himself on his mobile phone with a vibrantly-hued game most likely.
When I was at that exact point in life, I was listening to records and playing guitar. Times supersede other times, and a slow steady drip-feed of West Coast tech-bro conditioning has steadily replaced creativity with consumption. He’ll sometimes sit there editing photos for his Photography A-level, so not all is lost but it does sometimes feel like a battle in vain.
In 4 hours and 22 minutes he ceases, in the eyes of the Family Law Reform Act 1969, to be a child. At midnight, the construct defines him as an adult. We shall see how that manifests itself in the morning when he appears. Nothing will change, only the date and the name of the day. He knows that too, but the symbolism is intoxicating and exciting and he deserves to feel that.
I’m a week into a digital detox (such a ‘now’ phrase) away from all news and social media, and finally have chance to digest Science & Magic 34 in full and in peace.
I immediately know I’m in a good place at question 2 of Ian Prowse’s Ten Questions. Just the mention of ‘Over the Wall’ brings the goosebumps… the aesthetic chills… the ‘frisson’, as the French would say. I hear and see the magnificent iciness of the music and album cover as they occupy my mind while I write, and I know that will always happen to me for the rest of my life. Some things are forever imprinted.
‘Together We Lost’ by Hallelujah Trial continues the feeling, not only of the above song, but also of the evening, before my off-grid stance gets mirrored by Amy Collins’ ‘What Remains’.
Donna Enticknap’s wonderful images in ‘Whatever Comes’ is reminiscent of the artwork within The Fruit of the Original Sin, a compilation album released in 1981 on Les Disques du Crépuscule. The copious sleevenotes of said album have only this week been assimilated into a new song I’ve just written, predictably titled ‘The Fruit of the Original Sin’.
And then when Emelia Frances Powell addresses me I’m more than convinced that serendipity and melancholy are in some way invisibly and indisputably connected.
Lastly, ‘We Are Here’ by Angie Woolfall gently reminds us not to stay with such feelings forever.
I reluctantly agree, despite me currently enjoying myself so much.
Happy birthday beautiful boy.
— Martin Brew
vii
Pluto Goes to Ground
—
Donna Enticknap types out the planets every morning on a 1970s Olivetti in the order she learnt them at primary school. She has never once left Pluto off. When the ribbon starts to fade she stitches the week’s sheets together with white cotton and hangs them in the kitchen window so the light comes through the names. She calls it taking the register. Pluto has been present every day since 2006.
viii
The History of Mirrors
—
Ulrica Hume walks the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in her stocking feet and has never yet found the middle a disappointment. She holds that a mirror is a pond that has been asked to stand up. In the tearooms of San Francisco she sits facing the wall so the teapot gets the view. She taught scriptotherapy in England one wet summer and has written with the same Boots biro ever since. It still works. Her novel An Uncertain Age was longlisted for a Northern California Book Award.
ix
Théâtre de l’absurde
—
Angie Woolfall writes all her lists in pencil so the things she doesn’t get round to can be rubbed out with some dignity. The rubber came free with a copy of Smash Hits in 1983 and is now about the size of a pea. Wolfie has learnt not to leave paper anywhere near the bin. Somewhere in the house there’s a list with one thing on it. It says “scrap the list” and it’s been ticked.
x
The Fortnight
The Fortnight is our soundtrack to the last two weeks. It saves me keeping a diary.
The Lord’s Favorite / Iceage
It’s Summertime / The Flaming Lips
Toffee / Maddie Ashman
Nothing In This World Ever Stays Still / Allegra Krieger
Dreaming My Dreams With You / Cowboy Junkies
In The New Year / The Walkmen
Good to Me / Brendan Benson
Hey Harry / Waterpistol
Gown / Joanne Robertson and Oliver Coates
Asleep From Day / The Chemical Brothers
Any Other World / Deradoorian
xi