I was 15 and growing up in London at a time in the early 80s when your attire was a direct indication of the music you were listening to. I had already gone through a ‘Rude Boy’ and a ‘Mod’ phase, then a ‘Futurist’ phase in quick succession. (I was able to do this because my older brother had a pretty broad taste in music.) It was a time when you could wear make up to school and no one would star…

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My childhood was a fairly strict Catholic one and rock ‘n’ roll was frowned upon with a muscular brow. Mix-tapes were exchanged in shadowy corridors of the high school, to be auditioned privately with the aid of headphones and it was in this way that I first heard The Stooges’ Fun House - a record which for me, even to this day, serves as the benchmark for rock ‘n’ roll. Like a dog finally break…

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In anticipation of Clare’s appearance at the Happiness and Its Causes Conference (Wed 19 - Thurs 20 June), we asked her a few questions about what happiness means for her.

You’ve previously said that Leonard Cohen ‘inspired you to choose a new path’. Would you be able to tell us more about this?

Really, it was just the pleasure of watching a master musician decades into his career and being a…

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Hariklia Heristanidis writes on why it will always be vinyl.

I have about a shelf and a half of records. It’s not a huge collection, say, in comparison to the sort of guys (and they are usually guys) who have custom built shelves that line the walls of their houses, but I am loyal, like an addict who knows what they need. In the mid-80s when a lot of my friends got rid of their records, or at …

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