Even if we discount the screenfuls of web-outpourings, media coverage of the Morrissey-NME affair has been ubiquitous.

We’ve seen everything from a Sun Trevor Kavanagh feature accompanied by ghoulish Mozza graphic to a Question Time discussion with Dimbleby’s incongruous RP enunciation of the singer’s name.

Yet in all this no-one seems to have sought the most obvious opinion of all: the Bengali (in platforms). [...]

Given the recent hyper visibility of Asians on screen with Channel 4 drama Britz and the Brick Lane film (both on a billboard near you), it’s easy to forget how rare sightings of Asians on British TV in the 80s were. Back you either got the stern aunties and uncles presenting Hindi language specialist programming on BBC 2 or the terrified victims of school-bully Gripper on Grange Hill

Only [...]

Exotica was written by the music journalist David Toop in the aftermath of his wife's suicide, and one wonders if his dissection of the west's long-standing fascination with exoticism in popular music was a cathartic exercise. Toop certainly describes the writing of the book as "a matter of survival, then, and fuck anybody who failed to see the point". Charming.

The result is an intensely personal memoir that reads simultaneously [...]