Hello there. My name's Spank The Monkey, and I'm an australopithecine of a certain age based in ThatLondon, England. When I'm not tied up with my Moderately Responsible Job In The Computer Industry, I can generally be found experiencing the various aspects of artistic endeavour that can be found across this great city and beyond. And then, shortly afterwards, I can be found spewing my opinions about them all over the internet, with frequent use of nob gags as filler.
Between July 14th 1998 and July 13th 2006, those opinions appeared regularly on a Demon Internet site called The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey. Don't look for it, it's not there any more, although you can see what it used to look like thanks to The Wayback Machine. On July 14th 2006, I moved the whole operation over to this Typepad blog, which has now become my primary means of hurling arts and entertainment reviews at the outside world. Some sort of explanation of the thinking behind the move may be found here.
If you're enjoying this site, and want to be notified whenever any updates appear, three options are open to you:
1. Subscribe to the site's RSS feed, using this feed link or the equivalent one in the menu bar at the top of the page (it's in the hamburger menu if you're looking at this on a mobile device). If you have no idea what any of that means, this may help.
2. Join the site's mailing list, and get an email from me whenever a new item is published on here. Click the relevant links to subscribe or unsubscribe from the list.
3. Follow me on Twitter, where I'm @SpankTM. I mainly use Twitter for site announcements: you won't get minute-by-minute updates on the state of my bowel movements, but you might get the occasional joke.
If you're not enjoying this site, then you may be outraged to discover that there are a few more of mine that you could visit. For example, this blog has a massive set of posts titled BrewDogging, in which my pal The Belated Birthday Girl and I attempt to visit every BrewDog bar in the world (well, we have a pretty good go). On a similar theme, in 2018 we launched a site dedicated to the Bermondsey Beer Mile, London's premier walking route of trendy brewery bars. It's got descriptions of all the places you can visit, along with handy maps showing you how to get from one to the next.
There are a couple of places to go to if you want to see pictures that I've taken. One of them is The Unpleasant Moblog, originally set up in 2005, at a time when basing a blog around pictures taken on your mobile phone was a radical thing. These days it tends to only get used when I'm liveblogging epic drinking sessions like the BrewDog CollabFests.
For large photo sets along the lines of What I Did On My Holidays, you'd be better off visiting my Google photo albums, which have been migrated over from the now-dead Picasa site. The only problem is, Google have taken away one of the most useful features in Picasa: the ability to link to all of your public photo albums from a single place. I'm working on a possible solution to that, but it may take a while.
I also have a channel on YouTube, which is almost entirely devoted to videos I reference here on the site. You can see all of my uploaded videos below:
(There's also a second YouTube channel called The Felix Project, in which I occasionally re-edit old Felix The Cat videos to contemporary songs. It works a lot better than you might think. This is the best one.)
If you're interested in the sort of music I like, have a peek at my Spotify profile, where you can look at various public playlists I've compiled. You'll see my annual Pick Of The Year lists, which I've been compiling since 1982: a collection of recent favourites called Spank's Audio Lair, which I update on an approximately quarterly basis: and a set of songs that each last the amount of time it takes to soft boil an egg that you've just taken out of the fridge.
Additionally, between 2011 and 2018 I was one of the contributors to MostlyFilm, a film review website (mostly) set up by refugees from the old Film Unlimited talkboards. There's loads of stuff there written by lots of brilliant people, but if you just want to see what I wrote for them you can find my posts here. The MostlyFilm category on this site links to a series of backup pieces I wrote to support those posts.
And finally: how can you help me make some money out of all this? Well, whenever I review an item that you could buy from Amazon, at the bottom of the page you'll find a link allowing you to do just that, which will make me a small amount of commission in the process. You can also use the search boxes below to buy anything from Amazon in the UK or Japan, and I'll get a few bob off the back of that too. (Nobody ever buys anything from these links, and obviously Amazon are tax-dodging bastards who should be avoided where possible, and Amazon US actually closed down my account because I didn't respond to an email they sent me once which I didn't notice until some three years later. But the option's open to you anyway.)
Also, I should point out that some of the content on this site can be purchased in book form, thanks to the good people at lulu.com. You can visit my Lulu store to see the range, or click on the individual book covers in the sidebar once you're back on my site again.
But for now, have a look round here and see what you think. Feel free to comment on the individual posts, or drop me a line here if that's more convenient. All mail sent to this address will be automatically assumed to be for publication on the site, unless you explicitly say otherwise. But don't be scared, I won't bite. Being a monkey, and all.