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• Music (naturally...)
• Theatre (...ditto...)
• Cinema (...pur-lease!)
• Burlesque and striptease (Yes, please!)
• Fine art, design and photography

And for pure relaxation:

• Real ale and Belgian beer
• Floatation tanks
• Being an uncle (less of a hobby, more of a vocation)
• Cats (and dogs, in small doses): large personalities in little, furry bodies.

Footwear: Like Chelsea boots; hate trainers.

Beards = bad; hats (except baseball caps) = good.

More people need to realise that good coffee is an essential food item, not a luxury! Ditto Green & Black chocolate.

I haven't eaten meat in over 20 years now, and that's how it's going to stay!

My own band, Makshow: www.myspace.com/makshow - we rock and we're about to take the country by storm!

A small selection of tracks that I like:

Playlist removed by MySpace 20/12/08, due to copyright issues. I will endeavour to replace it with something more copyright-friendly, provided that the right tracks are available, as opposed to corporate pap!

In general, my taste in rock 'n' roll runs towards post-punk and indie:

• A Certain Ratio
• Early Adam & The Ants (pre-Kings Of The Wild Frontier)
• The Associates
• Bauhaus
• The Cure (during their Seventeen Seconds / Faith / Pornography phase)
• The Dead Kennedys - one of the few American bands which 'got' punk the first time 'round.
• Echo & The Bunnymen
• I didn't really 'get' The Fall until fairly recently, but I now understand why Mark E Smith is a genius.
• Gang Of Four
• The Jam - any album from All Mod Cons onward.
• The Jesus & Mary Chain
• Killing Joke - Paul Raven RIP.
• The Monochrome Set, who didn't get the fame that they deserved.
• Siouxsie & The Banshees
• The Sisters Of Mercy
• The Smiths!!!
• Soft Cell (not sure if they quite fit the genre, but what the hell).
• The Stranglers (before the departure of Hugh Cornwell)
• Ultravox (John Foxx era)

And of course, punk-before-punk/indie-before-indie-was-invented, The Velvet Underground.

But I also have a long-standing love of modern jazz:

• Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
  
  
• Bill Bruford
• Gil Scott Heron
• The Last Poets:
  
  
• Miles Davis - any album, but I like his seventies stuff the best:
  
  
• Thelonius Monk:
  
  

I don't really know enough about industrial music to produce an exhaustive list, but here are a few bands I like:

Cabaret Voltaire

Einsturzende Neubauten, Laibach, NON, Throbbing Gristle / Psychic TV. And in a related vein, albeit with a trashy edge and almost too much neo-punk attitude, the inimitable Gob$au$age!

Finally, one of my favourite pop bands of the eighties, Propaganda:

• Annie Hall - Woody Allen is a comic genius, and this is one of his finest. I've started to relate to the Woody Allen character recently, which is a little scary...
• Breakfast At Tiffany's: I really didn't expect to like this (although it was written by Truman Capote and directed by Blake Edwards), but I ended up finding it both funny and deeply moving, despite myself.
• Citizen Kane...well, it stands to reason, doesn't it? Orson Welles at the height of his powers.
• National Lampoon's Animal House - erm, I have a weakness for John Landis movies! First-rate comic performances, a screenplay full of keen period observations and a killer soundtrack.
• The Producers: "Sprrringtime for Hitler and Ger-man-yyy...". Mel Brooks provides the antidote to political correctness.
• Rumble Fish - Francis Ford Coppola: file under 'Guilty Pleasures'! Visually stunning with a haunting soundtrack, but totally lacking in substance; Tom Waits had an impressive cameo role, though.
• Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. Actually, there are several Pedro Almodovar films I could have listed, but this was the first one I saw and it made an impact on me.

(Notice how I carefully avoided mentioning Ingmar Bergman, Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein? That took some self-control!)

I'd like to give a huge mention to my local independent cinema, the Phoenix, at 52 High Road East Finchley N2 9PJ, believed to be the oldest purpose-built continuously serving cinema in the UK. URL: http://www.phoenixcinema.co.uk

I'm also partial to one or two things directed by Anna Span, but that's another story...

Television? How quaint!

Mind you, I'd probably watch it if they still made programmes like this:



Or this:



Or indeed, THIS one:

"Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up every time." - Alfred Hitchcock

"Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own." - Arthur Schopenhauer

Fiction

• The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges: two or three pages can create a whole new world, or turn one's head inside-out (in a good way!); he defined the genre, as far as I'm concerned.
• Valis by Philip K Dick - "The Empire never ended". Horselover Fat is an unlikely everyman, and P K Dick's books always question one's assumptions about the world. Also enjoyed A Scanner, Darkly and The Man In The High Castle
• The 'Danzig Trilogy' (The Tin Drum / Cat And Mouse / Dog Years) by Gunter Grass. Novels can often say more about a given period of history than history books.
• Ulysses by James Joyce: a long, hard slog, but felt a profound sense of satisfaction having finished it (on the second attempt). Unfortunately, Finnegan's Wake read beautifully, but turned to so much mush in my head seconds later!
• Immortality by Milan Kundera; I re-read several of his novels quite recently after a gap of several years, and found different things in them this time 'round. The daddy of post-modern literature, and this is his high-water mark.
• The Colossus Of Maroussi by Henry Miller: part Greek travelogue, part philosophical critique of human 'progress'.
• A Spy In The House Of Love by Anais Nin is excellent, both as a novel and a psychological study. Can see some influence on the style of Naked Lunch...
• Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jnr. Looking out for a copy of Requiem For A Dream at the moment...
• Candide by Voltaire: satire at it's finest, by one of the giants of the Enlightenment.

Currently reading: the collected short fiction of Oscar Wilde.

Non-Fiction / Journalism

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: a chilling true story, written to read like the best kind of fiction. The tale of a very human kind of evil and the many factors behind it.
• Baby Oil And Ice by Lara Clifton and others: a book that gets past all the PC cliches about striptease and finally presents some truth, in the words of strippers themselves.
• The Motorcycle Diaries (Otra Vez) by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.
• Death In The Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. As a long-standing vegetarian, I really shouldn't like this book, but it presents a fascinating insight into the tradition, techniques and spectacle of bullfighting.
• Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson, for reasons I won't need to go into for anyone who's already read it! A marginalised genius who shouldn't have killed himself, in my opinion; we need his talents more than ever right now.

Black Gull Books at 121 High Road East Finchley N2 8AG (and in Camden Lock) is an absolute goldmine for bibliophiles and deserves your custom if you live nearby - support your local, independent book shop. And no, I don't own shares in it! Telephone: 020 8889 7112 / 077 9078 6351

"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter." - Aleister Crowley.