Mozart’s Sister, the Forgotten Prodigy

It can be difficult having a sibling who is a high achiever but imagine if that sibling was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the child prodigy, composer, and multi-instrumentalist with an unquantifiable talent that would astound the world with his genius. By the time he died at 35, he had composed over 800 pieces of music and…

Sex, Lies, and LSD: The CIA’s Untold Story of Operation Midnight Climax

Did you ever hear the one about the CIA-employed sex workers who were trained to drug, bed and interrogate unsuspecting American citizens while they were unwittingly tripping on LSD as government agents secretly watched? You’d think you’d remember a story like that but Operation Midnight Climax has conveniently evaded the public consciousness for decades. We’re…

America’s Last Juke Joints

Before the Juke Box, there was the Juke Joint, a reverberating sanctum of the Mississippi Delta and the indefinable heartbeat of southern African American culture. The traditional Juke Joint seems to have grown out of the landscape more than it was constructed. A ramshackle collection of lost and found, partner to the barrel house and…

What David Bowie Learned from the Gugging Psychiatric Institution

By 1994 David Bowie’s musical career was in a bit of a quiet phase, let’s say. He hadn’t managed to recreate the massive success of his 1983 album Lets Dance. Ziggy Stardust had long since departed back to the cosmos, The Thin White Duke had been retired, and Bowie’s latest incarnation, Tin Machine, had disbanded.…

The Fantastical World of Mingering Mike, the Imaginary Legend of Soul

When you were young, what did you want to be? An astronaut, a princess, maybe a superhero or president of the world. Mike Stevens dreamt of being a soul super star, he wanted to tour the world, to write and produce award-winning albums and run his own record label. He would star in, write and…

A German Toulouse Lautrec, his Dancers and the Darkness

You’ve probably never heard of Walter Schnackenberg, a draughtsman, and illustrator of the early 20th century who could conjure up nightmarish images as easily as he could convey the decadent and jovial bourgeois Berlin of pre-war Europe. From his flowing effervescent studies of costumed dancers to his dark ethereal post-war illustrations, he would mix a…

The Many Faces of a Forgotten Gender-Neutral Hero

Who was Claude Cahun? As ambiguous as an empty page, a radical and an indefinable surrealist who traversed social construct; artist, performer, photographer, sculptor, writer, WWII resistance fighter, female, male, other; Claude Cahun was all of these things, or none of these things. As a largely unknown early pioneer of queer culture, Claude found later…

Vogue’s Fabulous Five: The Golden Age of Illustration

When we think of Vogue we visualise a vibrant, striking, photographic image adorning the front cover of the seminal publication, but the first pictorial cover would not appear until 1932. Before the likes of Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Annie Lebovitz and Steven Meisel, it was the time of the illustrator. Early 20th century artists George…

Before Jazz, Ragtime gave us America’s First Music Stars

You know the sound of ragtime even if you don’t think you do. “The Entertainer“, a classic piano rag, is one of the most recognisable melodies of the 20th century (go on, have a quick listen). But it was written by America’s greatest musician that we’re betting you’ve never heard of – an African American composer…

What Lies Beneath: The Curious Underworld Of Hobby Tunnelling

In 1924, a truck accidentally sank into a backlot in Washington DC, opening a sinkhole and revealing a labyrinth of tunnels. People were aghast at what had been found; there was talk of bootleggers and spies that would later make the front page of the Healdsburg Tribune, but no one had any answers. Eventually, a…