Otwituaries : Andy Jackson's tweet-length poetic elegies for the departed

I saw you on Top of the Pops, reeling from the suffocation of grinding Cabaret nights, your lipstick-smudged teeth and hen-night choreogra...

There are some places in the past that only the movies can take us to, designing, dressing and detailing the darkness at the heart of Americ...

I did not choose the Seventies, and yet it poured its light into me, offering an Elysium in bell-bottoms, promising summer without autumn, a...

He writes of homo finalis , last of the apes, up on its hind legs yet stooping under the weight of its own intellect. He writes the story o...

Today I heard a song I didn’t know I needed; born at the frontier of music and ethnography. Bring me real music from an unreal world, from R...

If the rain owned a voice it would sound like you. It would settle like dew, a shimmer of glissando, the plainsong of a people who still b...

I mourn the rhythm but not the man, wondering how such unforgiving beats could spring from one so unforgivable. Yes, there is a corner of t...

An earnest starlet frames the words of a song. A voice that is not hers melts through celluloid like a wave of heat; the Piaf of Mumbai, a...

When the planet is saved it will name its roll of friends, those few who truly saw it in its most fragile moments, who turned their lens u...

There is a spectrum of the absurd which reads like this: Kafka, Python, Zappa, Sisyphus, Trump, Milligan, Baxter, though tomorrow these name...

The jump is all we ever know; the run-up of youth, building speed for our stadium days, the explosion into the air of our prime, then the de...

The camera loves those who deal in damage; wives wed to madness, showgirls who smile to reveal just how broken they are, who play a role on...

I know facts about Chuck Norris: they invented a new colour for him for a belt beyond black; even when he played a bad guy he was good; all ...

Among the angst and anger of a nation in decline was the ubiquitous Scouser; weary, resigned, speaking the life of a worried man, waiting fo...

They are holding a funeral for an insubordinate spy; somewhere cold and damp, while a seedy war rages in the shadows. A man in NHS glasses...

There are stories that half of us strain to hear over the babble of small print. Broadcast this message to the unheard and unseen: turn yo...

And it’s 1-2-3, what were you fighting for? The music of sanity in an insane world. And it’s 5-6-7, open up the pearly gates; the lost patro...

There is a silence in the wings, then the boards creak, bearing the weight of an entrance. The first line is spoken in a voice rustling like...

I choose television; television without fear, that sings while others shrug, that shows the idiot in the lantern before pulling back to ...

Welcome to 1619 Broadway, a place where writers search for Sixteen among the keys of an old piano, where songs pay five dollars a line, bu...