Episode 3: Dan Hancox

This month I'm talking to Jake Crawford, singer and guitarist with the fantastic alternative metal band unpeople. unpeople's debut album, we are unpeople, is released today (9 October 2026), so please check it out! It's a brilliantly varied record; alongside influences from Deftones and Sikth, you can hear echoes of XTC, Cardiacs and Everything Everything. They're such an exciting and interesting band – brilliant musicianship, big pop hooks, proggy twists and turns, and heavy, heavy riffs. Jake was an absolute delight to talk to: passionate, knowledgeable and very funny. We talk about how the band came together and go through the album song by song. Hope you enjoy!

This month on The Allender Calendar I'm talking to the writer and visual artist Anwen Crawford. I met Anwen when she guested on The Clientele Podcast a few years ago and we stayed in touch. Anwen has such a precise and vivid way of writing, mixing personal biography with critical analysis. Her latest book, Morvern Callar, published by Fireflies Press, is about the 2002 film Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay's second feature film, which stars Samantha Morton. The film is based on the 1995 novel Morvern Callar by Alan Warner. These doublings/triplings (note Morton/Morvern!) are perhaps appropriate for a film that, as Anwen notes, contains 'eerie, impeded doublings – Morvern and the viewer, Morvern and the boyfriend, Morvern and herself'. The plot of Morvern Callar is decidedly gruesome, and yet the film is strangely hypnotic, moving, and darkly funny; a cinematic style that Anwen calls 'lyric realism'.

This month on The Allender Calendar I'm delighted to be joined by the music journalist Simon Reynolds to discuss his new book Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994. Simon has previously written about music's obsession with the past (Retromania) and the future (Futuromania), as well as publishing acclaimed volumes on post-punk (the essential Rip it Up), glam rock and rave. Still in a Dream is different from Simon's other books in some ways because it's less about a specific genre or musical impulse, and more about a particular moment in musical history, when bands sought to reimagine guitar music and challenge and intoxicate listeners with ravishing sounds and pure noise, offering an escape from grim reality into a narcotic dream. And Simon, as a writer for Melody Maker, was there on the frontline, in a team of young journalists working symbiotically with the artists they put on the cover.

In part two of my interview with William Doyle about Cass McCombs's Wit's End, we go through the album song-by-song. We even get the guitars out to play along.

This month on The Allender Calendar, it's a two-part special as I (Robin Allender) talk to the musician William Doyle about Cass McCombs's beautifully morbid 2011 album, Wit's End. In the first part, we discuss Cass's extraordinary lyrics, what makes him such a unique (and underrated) songwrite, and where we were when we first heard the album.