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Claire Biddles is a freelance music writer and radio host.
The short-lived but lore-heavy career of early 1980s northern synth-pop duo Soft Cell is catalogued and reappraised in a compelling new oral history, from working-class 1970s Leeds to the excesses of downtown New York City in the 1980s.
Today, experimental television is hidden away on specialist platforms. Once, though, leading European public service broadcasters made and transmitted radical and strange programming by cinema auteurs.
Steve Albini, who has died aged 61, was one of the most uncompromising figures to ever defend art against its corruption by market forces, and for musicians to be considered as workers who deserved the full fruits of their labour.
A new documentary celebrates London’s iconoclastic Scala cinema, whose all-nighters and cult programming in the Thatcher era shaped British cinema to this day. But what is its legacy in the 2020s, and what are the movie histories that remain untold?