Jimmy Brewer

"SOHPIE’s tragically early passing froze music in time. What stands, crowned by Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, is an impressive but truncated body of work. While we lament SOPHIE’s untimely death, we can also enjoy the music and celebrate the legacy left behind. SOPHIE continues to inspire – both as a person and as a musician – and stands as someone we all can look up to."

"A group as sartorially orientated as one named ‘The Oxford Fashion Society’ inevitably attracts those who care about what they wear. Fastidiously dressed, upright, serious-faced characters come in and sit down quickly. Tote bags are removed from shoulders. Sauntering in alongside, generally attired with less panache, are members of the photography society."

"last term I signed up, dutifully, to deliver copies of Cherwell, and was driven around by Timmy, Cherwell’s charismatic, 10-year-loyal delivery driver. Between anecdotes of farcically angry porters, the topic of conversation fell upon St Hilda’s College’s recently completed new buildings."

"As much as progress has been made, breast cancer remains a deadly, frightening disease that has cut many, many lives tragically short."

Maintaining a non-academic hobby alongside an Oxford degree is a challenge. Pressures from tutors, friends and oneself conspire to clog up time that could...

"Out from the November night an easy orange glow invited me into the Sheldonian. I trotted up creaking stairs to the top floor, into the jaws of death – the jaws of death being an archaically unintuitive seating set up. The seats on the upper stalls are just three big steps – if you arrive late, sidling along the upper rows in front of those already seated requires deft footwork and a lot of 'excuse me's."

"One of my favourite parts of Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, is a ferociously intense public wrestling scene. It buzzes with an ever-moving pulse, choreographed by the beating of drums. They rise with the intensity of the fighting, and older men 'remembered the days when they wrestled to its intoxicating rhythm.'" Jimmy Brewer explores how Kerouac, Proust and Achebe capture the experience of live music in their works.

"Alt-rock is characterised by experimentation with texture, timbre, and structure, especially drawing on the raw, distorted punk rock sounds and new wave’s energetic appeal." Jimmy Brewer takes a look back at five bands who defined the sound of the genre.