The Last Mixed Tape

“This is not a rebel song.”
For more than forty years, Bono has introduced Sunday Bloody Sunday with those six words.
But why?
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, Stephen White explores the history, controversy and enduring legacy of one of the most important songs in Irish music.
Beginning with the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, we trace the writing of the song during the recording of War, its first performance in Belfast, the legendary Red Rocks concert, and the debate that has followed it ever since.
Rather than asking who the song supports, this episode asks a different question:
What happens when a piece of art leaves its creators and begins a life of its own?
Along the way, we explore:
• The real events behind Bloody Sunday
• Bono’s reflections from Surrender
• The Edge’s writing of one of rock’s defining guitar riffs
• The Belfast performance that tested the song
• Red Rocks and the white flag
• Why Bono tore up Irish tricolours on stage
• How music shapes politics and how politics reshapes music
If you enjoy long-form conversations about music, culture and history, follow The Last Mixed Tape for new episodes every week.

Brat became one of the defining cultural moments of the decade.
Rather than trying to recreate that success, Music, Fashion, Film asks a far more difficult question: what happens after the breakthrough?
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, Stephen White explores Charli XCX’s latest album through the lens of artistic identity, modern fame and the growing expectation that musicians must become far more than musicians.
From the satirical mockumentary The Moment to the Vincent Cassel-starring video for Camera, and the closing words of David Cronenberg, Music, Fashion, Film becomes less a traditional album than a meditation on creativity, performance and what happens when an artist no longer owns the meaning of their own work.
Is this Charli XCX’s most challenging record yet?
Or is it something even more ambitious a reflection on what it means to continue making art once the world has already decided who you are?

Music doesn’t just soundtrack history. Sometimes it captures emotions before we have the language to describe them.
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, Stephen White explores how Dublin’s Gilla Band became one of Ireland’s most important cultural voices, not simply through noise rock, but through their uncompromising portrayal of anxiety, recovery and modern life.
From Dara Kiely’s struggles with psychosis and schizophrenia to the panic attack that became the opening of The Talkies, this documentary traces how the band’s music evolved alongside Ireland’s changing conversation around mental health.
Along the way, the episode examines housing insecurity, burnout, late-stage capitalism and why albums like Holding Hands With Jamie, Most Normal and the new single Placeholder feel less like records and more like emotional documents of a generation.

Julian Casablancas sparked controversy after comparing American Zionists to Black people living under slavery on SubwayTakes. It was a comparison I believe was historically clumsy, rhetorically reckless and ultimately damaging to the point he was trying to make.
But five weeks later, at the Oxford Union, Casablancas returned to the subject with a clearer argument centred on settlements, expansion and the reality facing Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, Stephen White explores why context matters, why criticism and clarification can coexist, and why the conversation about a musician’s words can sometimes eclipse the people living through the reality those words were attempting to describe.
From The Strokes’ politically charged Coachella performance to Douglas Murray’s comments on Irish voices discussing Israel and Palestine, this episode asks a broader question:
What happens when a bad analogy becomes more famous than the reality it was trying to describe?

Phoebe Bridgers is back with Lost Boys, her first solo music in six years — a song haunted by nostalgia, isolation, masculinity and the machines we carry in our pockets.
At its centre is a dark inversion of one of the most famous slogans in protest music. Where Woody Guthrie wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists,” Bridgers sings: “This machine is killing me.”
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, Stephen White explores what Lost Boys tells us about smartphones, social media, male loneliness and generations who no longer simply use technology, but have grown up inside it.
From the reckless young men haunting the song’s lyrics, to Bridgers’ phone-free Lost Tour and her attempts to rebuild a more direct emotional connection with audiences, this is a story about the machines built to connect us, the people getting lost inside them… and what happens when we decide to leave the machine at the door.
The song identifies the machine. The tour attempts to dismantle it.