Josh Homme is taller than you might think. Sure, he has a reputation for being a big guy, but somehow in person he manages to be greater than his actual height. It’s as though the rest of the world has been shrunk around him. I met him a handful of times several lifetimes ago when Queens of the Stone Age put out their first record on Matador, and his presence in a room was never anything less than significant.

Even in the presence of other luminaries he somehow always managed to steal the spotlight. I was once having a conversation with Josh in the hallways of Later… with Jools Holland, when Jimmy Page strode over and joined us. Whilst I was midway through having an out of body experience — a common occurrence if you knock around the music industry for as long as I have — I noticed that as other people filed past us, no one was paying attention to Jimmy. All eyes were on Josh.

Josh Homme isn’t just tall, though. He has range.

This new Queens track — still on Matador — is quite unlike almost everything in their back catalogue that proceeds it. It’s not heavy, but it is quite beautiful. I’ll be honest, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been excited by a new Queens record, but it’s a nice feeling to revisit.

Confusingly not about The Cure, even though Olivia Rodrigo has history with the lovable lipstick goths. I once traded emails with Robert Smith when working on a compilation of Paul McCartney covers which he was a part of, and unlike all of the other artists who both a) had managers to deal with the multitude of tedious questions I needed answered for b) clearly didn’t care one jot about the project, Robert was utterly friendly and gracious throughout. Olivia brought out Robert to do ‘Just Like Heaven’ and ‘Friday I’m In Love’ at Glastonbury, and it was a highlight in a set full of highlights.

Her new album is shaping up very nicely, and this second track sounds a bit like Everlong by Foo Fighters, which is not a bad thing to take a melody or two from, is it?

My experience so far with Blondshell is one of slow and gradual appreciation — both 2023’s self-titled debut and last year’s ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ ended up being played on repeat.

I wasn’t expecting a new album so soon — one is apparently coming later this year — but this first taste picks up right where the last record left off.

I am unsure which is a bigger obstacle to overcome in the quest for music credibility; having famous parents, or being a breakout actor. And yet Maya Hawke has both, and seems utterly unperturbed by the whole deal.

She’s being making great lo-fi singer songwriter stuff for a while now, but this new album is a step up, and ‘Terms of Estrangement’ is my favourite so far (although both ‘Devil You Know’ and ‘Bring Home My Man’ run it close).

I did, though, have a knack for computers — a genetic trait, seemingly, as I ended up doing roughly the same computer science degree as both my parents and brother. That degree took me to working as a graduate at a Mac software developer — an ideal job, perfectly suited to my at-the-time quite specific skill set, in a field that wasn’t exactly awash with roles.

I got made redundant after six months.

In hindsight, it was the most fortunate thing that could have happened, but it sure didn’t feel like it at the time. It led me to bouncing around doing various freelance things, which turned out wasn’t all that sustainable, and so I started looking for jobs. I applied for many — this post could have looked quite different if I got the one looking after AutoTrader’s website — but there wasn’t something that felt “right” until I came across an advert for a Web Developer role at legendary label group Beggars. Fortunately, they seemed to see some potential in me, for which I am forever grateful.

I turned up right when they were entering their imperial phase. The first thing I worked on, according to the scrawled notes on an old paper pad I found recently — I was clearly keen, taking notes never stuck — was a free MP3 download page to promote the latest album “Alligator” by then-new signees The National. The “new media” department, as it was called then, went from strength to strength. I got given a team to manage within less than two years, with a ludicrous lack of anything approaching “management training”. We went from uploading White Stripes music videos in RealPlayer in 320×240 resolution to live streaming Adele gigs to hundreds of thousands of people.

It was a wonderful time of experimentation, with new technology appearing seemingly every week. I remember setting up Jack Peñate on this new site called Twitter, not so that he could send tweets (they weren’t called that yet), but simply so that we could send txt messages from the road that would get piped onto the home page of his website. To my knowledge, Jack was the first musician on Twitter, for what that’s worth in 2025. We let people download stems for a track by Radiohead and let them remix them, mostly because the band thought it would be a fun idea. We did a live streamed AR-generated video with British Sea Power, using Xbox Kinect cameras to bring 3D objects amongst the band as they performed.

AR then — this was probably late 2000s — was, of course, a bit ahead of its time. You could make a pretty good argument the AR still is. So many of the things we tried were. We did fan apps, with communities, live streams, exclusive content — all the things that people are talking about again, but fifteen odd years ago. They worked then, but were hard to keep going, because while some things change, some things really don’t.

Now, it’s easy to look back through coke-bottle-strength rose tints, and it is difficult to separate the macro music and technology industry shifts from, well, being in my twenties, and all of the hope and possibility that brings. I have a sense, though, that some of that experimentation, that excitement, is back. It is, I guess, the natural ebb and flow of things, that following a phase of change, comes a consolidation and status quo, only to be followed again by a push back against that stasis.

It is remarkable looking at all of this in hindsight, because it looks like a straight line when you tell the story, but so much of where I am now — still working in music, with a wife I met through work, kids, the rest — is down to a series of chances, and a bit of luck, that led me to walking through that door in Wandsworth twenty years ago.

Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.

Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.

This would be a wonderful trip down memory lane just by itself — and I say this as someone who remembers well everything from about 1991 onwards, which is far too long a go to consider.

But! You realise after a moment that the computer screens throughout aren’t static images, they’re fully working emulators of the damn Macs. The whole thing, Finder, ancient versions of iTunes, Control Strip — history in a bottle, through the narrative of system settings.

Sometimes I struggle a little with everything that the internet has become, but then every once in a while something like this comes along, a piece of art that could only be born on the web, like a pearl in a river of sludge. It’s not all bad.

It would be unfair to say — like many others already have — that ‘What Was That’, the new single by Lorde from her upcoming fourth album ‘Virgin’, is a return to form. That would perpetuate the prevalent narrative that 2021’s ‘Solar Power’ was a dud. The internet has decided so, therefore it is so.

Which is tiresome, isn’t it?

Not only am I a ‘Solar Power’ apologist (both record and power source), but it speaks to the exhausting nature of online music criticism. Which has, for the most part, shifted from the professional to the amateur, with a million comment sections, every social post allowing for a snipe, gripe, and reinforcement of the aggregate cultural opinion. ‘Solar Power’ is a good record, a subtle record, that for me fits a slightly different space than a lot of Lorde’s other work. I suspect that, in a decade or so’s time, it will get a reevaluation once there’s a better perspective on her breadth of catalogue.

None of this is to say that ‘What Was That’ isn’t a banger, though, because it is. But interestingly, it still carries through some of the previous records’ lightness of touch, like how the chorus never quite lives up to the build-up, replacing the drop you think you might be getting with a squelchy synth line. Subtlety doesn’t often carry well in the ‘discourse’, but for me Lorde is wielding it on this track with great power (no pun intended).