In the five years since its debut, The Sopranos has grown from an underground show with a small cult following to one of the most successful TV series' of all time. Paul Nolan traces the show’s development from its inauspicious beginnings on HBO to its current status as a transatlantic cultural phenomenon, and also examines our enduring fascination with a man called Tony Soprano.
Still scratching your head over The Sopranos’ enigmatic final curtain? To help you make sense of it – and to look back over its eight years – we talk to Frank Vincent, aka wiseguy Phil Leotardo.
Fun Lovin' Criminal, pizza joint owner and garbage mogul – Huey Morgan is a man of many talents. To that you can add a film stealing cameo as a psycho-tranny in Shimmy Marcus' beleagured but proud drug mule caper Headrush.
The miniscule number of you who bought their last album, La Peste, will know that the Alabama 3 have decided to tone down the Southern preacher bit and concentrate on the tunes. It's an attempt to get away from the "novelty band" image, which has resulted in savage critical maulings in the UK, and collective head scratching on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lift music written by William Burroughs, is how their cheerleaders will try to sell it. But anyone unconvinced by Becker and Fagen’s seditious intent may well find the atmosphere anodyne, airless and cloying.
From the profound and the insightful to the weird, funny and just plain daft, Paul Nolan rounds up what the famous and infamous had to say for themselves in 2004...
He plays guitar for Springsteen, plays The Clash on his radio show and plays it fast and loose as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos. Colm O’Hare meets the three-in-one Steven Van Zandt
Driven along by their now trademark keys, ‘Last Of The Big Time Benders’, ‘Sing Song Sung’ and soon-to-be-released single ‘I Built A Gun’ are as good a triumvirate of tunes as you’ll hear from any young(ish) Irish band.
The Hours' mainmen may not have the names or, indeed, the faces needed these days to launch a thousand fansites, but they have something much rarer in their lockers – a history.
Get ready for the first great Northern Irish record of 2009 – PANDA KOPANDA’s fantastic This Hope Will Kill Us. The band give us a blow-by-blow account.
Some people have a finely tuned instinct for what to do between the sheets. Others struggle to get beyond first base. So what do you do if you meet the partner of your dreams only to discover they don’t have the first inkling of how to satisfy you?
The way they’re building apartments nowadays, the walls really do have ears. And that means that your wilder sexual cavortings can be heard by all and sundry – as our intrepid reporter discovers when her brother and his girlfriend move in.
