Hair today

A little over a year ago I wrote about Belgian band Hooverphonic for Little White Lies magazine. Not long afterwards, lead singer Geike Arnaert quit the group.

Now main songwriter Alex Callier is back with a new project, a very different sound and one of the worst band names ever: Hairglow. Hooverphonic's psychedelic feel has been replaced by a very '80s sound; Callier is programmer, producer and mixer here, and has taken over the vocals, a move that always seemed to be on the cards. The trippy lyrics (Hooverphonic album titles include Blue Wonder Powder Milk and The President of the LSD Golf Club) have given way to more mainstream pop concerns: song titles include You're the One, Is It Love, I Do Love You and One Night Stand. No doubt we'll hear from Arnaert soon.

This used to be the future

I must recommend pop documentary Synth Britannia, which screened (four times!) on BBC4 over the weekend and is available on iPlayer until 26 October. Not only is it the best programme I've seen on the scene director Ben Whalley tracks loosely from The Human League to the Pet Shop Boys, but it boasts some amazing archive footage of England in the 1970s and '80s. The visuals are beautifully assembled, almost as if remixed with the music.

Talking heads include Daniel Miller, Phil Oakey, Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke (all very good), plus there's some great footage of Shoreditch in the period (and now). John Foxx, who comes across very well, talks about how he moved from Lancashire to find something 'sinister' in this then-decrepit area built on plague pits.

While Whalley focuses on British synth pop's alienated pioneers - individuals who disparately formed a movement - there's less room for their decline, and none for their influence, unfortunately. There is, of course, a lot of Ballard.

Get your texts out

Sampling, of course, has had its place in pop music for some time. In art or literature it's usually couched in the form of homage, but a few of my favourite authors seem to have taken to dropping in quotes, and more, in their books as a form of literary parlour game. Though Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance was described by Tim Pears as 'A Tender is the Night for the ecstasy age' on its cover, Dyer took instead to dropping lines from Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises) by Ernest Hemingway among his pages. 'It was amazing champagne' (p120), 'He took a big gulp of coffee...' (p218) are among the book's handful of what Dyer refers to, typically engagingly - and in his engaged manner - as 'samples'.

Arthur Phillips notes of his latest, The Song is You: 'beginning with its title (Kern-Hammersmith), this book incorporates in its text several song names'. He namechecks such estimable - and notaby UK-centric - sources as the Beloved, the Blow Monkeys, David Bowie, of course, Leonard Cohen, the Dream Warriors, EMF, Haircut 100, the Pet Shop Boys, Swing Out Sister and They Might Be Giants in his book of pop voyeurism.

And now The Escape, by Adam Thirlwell, 'contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by WH Auden, Mel Brooks, Alfred Hitchcock, Groucho Marx, Marcel Ophuls, Saïan Super Crew, Tupac Shakur' [my editing, again, of his much longer list]. Considering its form, verging on pastiche of the elderly lothario's antics in a generic mittel-Europa spa, there's also Saul Bellow, Bohumil Hrabal, Ladislav Klíma as well as Mann, Nabakov and Tanizaki.

Most appropriate of all, though, is probably the quote from Milan Kundera on The Escape's cover - and perhaps most important to the potential buyer of this very readable work. Credit, also, the book's designer, who seems to have spent some time matching the breasts of the cover's model with the description of the novel's gamine central character, Zinka: 'Her nipples were long, and almost black, with stained pools of areolae.'

Pocketful of riches

Two new French films reflect the flipside of long movies. Born in '68 examines the legacy of that year's protests on the next generation while Rien dans les poches ('empty pockets') takes a 17-year-old post-punk popstrel and follows her through to her forties. So, roughly the same time span, just a decade later.

The two movies touch on some of the same themes: the Mitterand and Chirac years; the threat of the far right and, notably, AIDS. You might expect Born in '68 to be the weightier, considering its starting point, but it struggles; director-writers Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau fail to find convincing parallels between the revolt of the late '60s and the fight for access to HIV drugs a generation on. And while their hearts are very clearly close to the latter battle, they fatally lose their sense of humour at this point in proceedings.

Both films are nearly four hours long and focus on a central female figure but Emma de Caunes' turn in Rien dans les poches hopelessly outstrips vapid model Laetitia Casta in terms of presence. Born in '68 seems to think that ensuring Casta looks stunning on screen throughout is enough to keep us hooked, but it makes everything that passes look like a shallow fashion spread.

Conversely, and somewhat ironically given its early setting among TV shows and cover shoots, Rien dans les poches feels much more real. Even its fictional pop songs are spot on. Director Marion Vernoux says she wanted to make a 12-hour film originally so this is virtually a trailer; I would happily have more of its world of Plastic Bertrand and Rubik's Cubes. Best of all are the performances, notably de Caunes, who's never less than watchable, but watch out too for producer Alain Chabat, best known over here for his roles in comedies (I Do and The Science of Sleep), as a wonderfully understated drag queen.

Vernoux's film is reminiscent of some of the best episodic family TV dramas; BBC2's adaptation of Tim Pears' In a Land of Plenty springs to mind. She makes us care about the characters and shows, rather than telling. So avoid Ducastel and Martineau's dry thesis and turn instead to the much more fun Rien dans les poches.

May the cube be with you

Late notice, I know, but the Invader exhibition at Lazirides on Rathbone Place is due to finish; the website variously has the closing date as 12th or 17th September. The show features some of his Rubik's Cube versions of classic album covers and, as I mentioned last month, it's heralded another wave of alien sightings in the capital, the most stunning of which is behind the Holiday Inn on Old Street.

East meets East

I love these colourful pictures by BR1. As a statement on the Wooster Collective site makes clear, these images are especially appropriate for the Brick Lane area. In breaking news, I'm happy to report a Space Invader sighting at The Foundry, on Old Street. Welcome the new aliens, as it were.

Walls of nothing

I'm quitting Shoreditch soon but before I go I wanted to commemorate some of the most popular graffiti sites in the area. It's somewhat minimalist, as I've deliberately caught them when they've been painted over, but aficionados will no doubt recognise these street art hot spots.

Unfortunately this is what the area is going to look like as it becomes increasingly developed and landlords take greater interest in keeping their properties pristine as rents go up. I began photographing graffiti in the area nearly one-and-a-half years ago; I suspect EC2 will be almost unrecognisable in another 18 months.