Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey) from Anon. on Vimeo.

Fragments of “found” video footage from British nightclubs are spliced together, repeated and slowed down, while a perfectly edited collage of ambient sounds – snatches of rave tracks, crowd noise, men bellowing across provincial shopping precincts – filters in and out. There’s a loose chronology – northern soul, soul weekenders, casuals, acid house – but the two defining themes of the film are timeless.This year sees the 10th anniversary of Mark Leckey’s short film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. Leckey is best known for his exhibition Industrial Light & Magic, which won the 2008 Turner prize.

Firstly, what deeply strange places nightclubs are; hundreds of strangers, all as high as kites, crammed together in a deliberately disorientating space. And secondly, how much poignancy there is in something ostensibly celebratory; the idea that “the best days of your lives” will be wiped away by a change in fashion. Leckey captures this beautifully in the occasional sound of tolling bells, the endless headlong rush of the video timecodes, the snippets of empty rooms and the suddenly frozen images of young, apprehensive faces.

Article by Justin Quirk

This work of extraordinary beauty is called the Rathcosgrieve Axehead, and was found by Simon Moylan whilst ploughing a field near Galway in 1980. It’s 24.2 cm long, 9.8 cm wide and 4.6 cm deep. It’s also the most amazing axe I’ve ever seen, and that includes every museum I’ve ever been in. Thanks to Colm O’Doherety, one of our computer trainers, for bringinging it in to the office to show us (it usually lives on his Dad’s mantlepiece!).

In other news, archaeological jobs are being lost by their thousand. But while there’s music, and moonlight, and Neolithic-stone-axes-visually-identified-as-mudstone-with-flattish-oval-cross-sections-and-slightly-asymmetrical-cutting-edges-due-to-some-chipping, and love and romance, lets face the music and dance!