As a fifteen year old, I did not care one bit that Gay Dad’s expansive media coverage was due to their roots as music journos rather than traditional hard graft. Cutting out pictures of frontman Cliff Jones and faithfully sticking them to my GCSE English folder, it didn’t bother me that such unashamed glam-rock influences [...]

Having chatted about music at work recently, someone suggested that I actually wasn’t an indie snob. The proof of this? Girls Aloud. Well, I don’t really see why they should be seen as a guilty pleasure. Girls Aloud have consistently released great nuggests of pop music, at a time when most of the charts is [...]

It’s 1994. My swollen belly swathed in bandages, I’m lying down watching the other kids on Hydes Ward B playing outside in the quad, while I’m indolent in bed, forbidden by the nurses to join the rest of my sickly brethren. Dad comes in. It also happens to be my tenth birthday, and tucked under [...]

Ah, Take That. Proof reunions don’t necessarily have to be all about the money. If it’s at all possible, they seem even more popular now than they were in the 1990s, and with some of the best material they’ve ever done. Patience easily topped the charts on their much hyped return, which was to be [...]

Like death, taxes and raising children, your first turn at The Fugitive Motel’s infamous Guilty As Charged feature comes around one day. Upon learning that I was next on the cards, I recoiled in alarm and protest, purely selfishly, about the very fact that my editorial superiority at the helm of this fledgling operation would [...]

It has to be said that I struggled with this one. Obviously this is not because I am far too cool to have a guilty pleasure – anyone who knows me can attest to that; after all I am the girl who managed to fall off a space hopper in the middle of a rather [...]

Much maligned for not being particularly ‘cool’, I feel it is time that Dire Straits were accepted for the value of their music, smirking about bad shirts and headbands aside. Accept it – Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler have produced some of the most exciting and uplifting guitar music of our lifetime. Although this choice [...]

Not all of the Motel’s contributors are quite as down with the kids as they’d have you believe. Even where they vociferously deny it, each and every one of them has an affinity for at least one band or artist that they’d rather not reveal. However, over the coming months, a small minority will be [...]

Not all of the Motel’s contributors are quite as down with the kids as they’d have you believe. Even where they vociferously deny it, each and every one of them has an affinity for at least one band or artist that they’d rather not reveal. However, over the coming months, a small minority will be [...]