CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Laibach and think of what's to come
ATTILA THE STOCKBROKER celebrates four decades of the visionary Slovenian band, arch provocateurs who are always one step ahead musically and politically
Laibach in concert in Bochum in 2017
[Markus Felix/Creative Commons]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
JUNE 1, 1980 was the day US TV station CNN made its first (misleading) broadcasts to the world. It was also the day Laibach announced their formation in the radical-left mining town of Trbovlje, Slovenia, then part of Tito’s Yugoslav Federation.
Given Laibach’s sense of timing and history, you might think the two things were connected.
But it was also the anniversary of an anti-fascist uprising in the town 56 years previously and I’d say it was the latter that made them choose the date.
Or maybe both — that would be very Laibachian, looking East and West at the same time. Just like Tito did, and did indeed in a speech sampled on Panorama, the first thing I heard from them, blagged as a freebie from our mutual label Cherry Red Records in the mid-1980s.
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