Blog Archive: August 2026

Prolapse At The 100 Club
On Friday night I popped down to the Pump & Tap in Leicester to meet Mr S Wilkinson for a drink or two before going to see Prolapse at The Princess Charlotte and...

No, hang on a minute, that's not right is it? No, because on Friday night I popped down to the King & Queen in London's Fashionable Fitzrovia to meet Mr S Wilkinson for a drink or two before going to see Prolapse at The 100 Club. Yes, that was it, how on earth was I getting that confused eh?

For LO! The club may have been 100 but the night itself felt extremely NINETIES, as it was full of old pals and old tunes, all of which I was DELIGHTED to be experiencing again. This was, of course, not the first time I have been to see a fellow Validator at this venue - thinking about it, technically it's not even the second time I have been to see a BANDMATE there either - so maybe that's another reason it felt so Princess Charlotte-ESQUE, as a place I knew well and rather liked. INDEED my various experiences of going to gigs there meant that when we arrived I was able to steer Simon over to the far side of the venue where I knew there to be a much less busy BAR, space to stand, and also easy access to the LOO!

These are all important things for me at gigs these days, and looking around I felt safe in the knowledge that I was not alone in this. The VAST majority of the audience were people who, like us, had likely seen Prolapse MANY times the first time around, and of these almost ALL had made the decision to wear SHORTS. I had SEVERAL conversations with different people saying "Phew! I thought I'd be the only one wearing shorts tonight", as there was an idea in my BRANE and clearly other people's that everyone else would be wearing skinny black jeans and long raincoats, but no, it was all 6Music Dad casual. Or to put it another way, it looked like about 300 BARBECUES had been rained off and made to shelter indoors.

We got there just in time for the end of Jetstream Pony, who I have seen and played with several times OUTDOORS, but I don't think I've ever seen them INDOORS before and I must say they sounded GRATE. Can sound be more COMPRESSED inside a venue than out the back of one? Either way, it really suited them!

After that there was a LOT of bumping into people which, as the estimable Mr J Jervis pointed out later, is one of the main JOYS of these sort of gigs, especially now that we don't have the annual reunions of Indietracks. It was lovely to wander round going "Oh HELLO, how are you?" about 17,000,000 times, and there was much hugging!

This was then followed by Prolapse themselves, featuring our very own Mr T Pattison who played SO HARD that I believe he broke a drumstick! Here they all are in ACTION:



After seeing the high quality photographs in the previous blog you are probably thinking that this was also taken by a pro photographer with expensive equipment, but NO! Incredibly these were taken by ME using a simple mobile telephone!

The gig was GRATE, as per - the sound levels took a couple of songs to bed in, or rather to SMUSH TOGETHER into the massive sonic RACKET of Prolapse - but once that was done it was FAB. As with last time I saw them there was a definite move towards What They Used To Be Like Back In The Previous Century i.e. not the all out HITS PACKAGE of when they first got back together but rather a ramshackle, chatty, slightly dishevelled but then SUDDENLY ENORMOUS sound that I for one really really like. It even included Pat leaving his guitar up against the amp at the end - really all it needed was for there to be some old TV sets on stage getting smashed up and it would have been PERFECT!

It was thus a ROCK SATISFIED Hibbett who left the venue, after further HUGS VARIOUS, with a spring in my step and a sudden urge to go to GRANBY FISHERIES on the way home!

posted 8/8/2026 by MJ Hibbett
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Pints of Knowledge
On Wednesday evening I had a DREAMLIKE journey across London to distant Chiswick, where I was due to give a TALK for Pints of Knowledge. I say "dreamlike" because it was a series of delays, errors (on my part), more delays, and lots of other trains overtaking us as we tried to get to An Important Appointment with time running out. If my legs had turned into tree trunks and/or I had forgotten to wear any trousers then I would not have been AT ALL surprised.

Still, we got there in the end with approx 7 minutes to spare to find the lovely people who run Pints Of Knowledge entirely unruffled, possibly because this was NOT technically a gig and so there wasn't any real need FOR me to be there until the whole thing actually started. On the way there I had rung them and said "I'm playing at Pints of Knowledge tonight", and The Acts On My Bill pointed out that this probably wasn't the correct terminology. In related news, I also spent about half the journey realising I hadn't got my guitar, panicking I'd left it somewhere, and then remembering I didn't need it.

Professor Steve Cross was also there, wielding a camera for some snazzy pictures (some of which are BELOW), and after a quick chat with him and a hello to the organisers the show... sorry, TALK, began with the host asking if this was anyone's first time at Pints of Knowledge. To my surprise/delight about two thirds of the audience put their hands up, meaning they had come to see ME! Gosh!



I then took to the stage with clicker and microphone in my hands to begin talking about "Why Doctor Doom Is Better Than Batman (and How We Can Prove It)" and realised that OH NO I did not have access to Presenter View. For those who have not done PowerPoint presentations, this is a facility where the current slide is shown on the screen but on your laptop you get a smaller preview of what's coming NEXT as well. This is VERY useful if, like me, you tend to build a talk around the slides and have indeed come to RELY on it, so it was a bit scary to have to try and remember what was coming next, but I think I just about managed it. Also I remembered that many years ago I had gone to TRAINING with Steve at UCL where he spent ages trying to get academics to understand that you need to hold the microphone NEAR YOUR MOUTH, and was now highly aware of exactly where I was placing it. AND that the fact that the screen was MASSIVE meant I kept almost falling off stage in an effort to get out of the way!



Hopefully my multiple internal PANICS did not distract the audience too much, who were ATTENTIVE, ENGAGED and also GRATE. I talked about my Doctor Doom research but then veered off into discussion of how superhero storytelling differs from the conventional three act structure and why that causes problems for Hollywood adaptations, based on last year's book chapter Supervillains are the real heroes (which you can read for free at that link). I also did my usual bit asking for suggestions for characters to try out the unified catalogue of transmedia character components on, which got lots of fab suggestions (we did Wolverine in the end, which I don't think I've had before) and then when we got to the end there was a series of BRILLIANT questions.



My only disappointment was that I think I may have overrun slightly, and so there wasn't a huge amount of time for the Q&A session, which I'd been v much looking forward to. However, after it was over I was joined by a GROUP of people who all wanted to ask questions and we ended up having a BRILLIANT session of DISCUSSION about matters raised. I must say this made me very happy indeed, and also relieved that I have been doing some REVISION e.g. reading the first volume of "Absolute Batman" as there were lots of pertinent and also CURRECT points being made.

It was a pretty amazing evening all round, extraordinarily well organised, even in the face of me panicking, and attended by an overwhelmingly YOUNG audience who were there to expand their BRANES. Cor, imagine if things such as this had existed when I was in my twenties, where you could go to an EVENT and have speakers EXPLAIN interesting stuff to you and then DISCUSS it with other like-minded types - it would have been GRATE!

posted 7/8/2026 by MJ Hibbett
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Episode Two: Attack Of The Podcast
I arose bright and early this morning in order to update the Data and Doctor Doom episodes page with full details of Episode 2, FOR LO! Episode 2 of 'Data and Doctor Doom' has been UNLEASHED and is currently rampaging around wherever you get your podcasts and also HERE:



This one explains how my whole methodology works, fully defines what 'The Marvel Age' actually means, talks about the need for evidence-based research, tells you how to do random stratified sampling, and contains perhaps my favourite joke of the whole series. There's also a whole bunch of new songs, including My Unified Catalogue Of Transmedia Character Components, The Marvel Age and Random Stratified Sampling, plus a whole lot more.

I think it's Quite Good, but am gradually coming around to the realisation that it Might Not Be For Everyone. When I first started putting all of this together I was convinced that there was a huge market for it. It would appeal, I thought, to people who like my music OR people who know the MCU OR people who are interested in statistics. That is a HUGE audience, but I am now beginning to understand that the actual audience may just be people who like my music AND know the MCU AND are interested in statistics, which is - SHALL WE SAY - a slightly more exclusive grouping.

To be honest I do think there's a bit more too it than that, and that it should appeal to people with ENQUIRING MINDS who'd like to know how some aspects of our current culturual landscape actually WORK, but do have a listen and see what you think - DOOM COMMANDS IT!

(PS saying "DOOM COMMANDS IT!" at the end of everything is very very enjoyable and I am sure I am going to find myself using it at the end of work emails before too long)

posted 4/8/2026 by MJ Hibbett
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