Two years ago, The Arctic Monkeys hit Nottingham on their first arena tour and most fans felt they didn’t pull it off. The well-worked sardonic wit that worked so brilliantly in a smaller space became a hard rock dominated set which only satisfied hard core fans at the front.   Two years on, the Ice Stadium has sold out again. The Arctics have become used to playing big gigs in the last two years, and their fourth album, ‘Suck It And See’, is their best since the first, full of glorious, pithy pop songs. This summer, in the weekend of its release, they played two huge Sheffield shows that were staggeringly good. Can they keep it up?   The Vaccines come on to ‘Rock’n’Roll Radio’…

Literature happens in the provinces. In a week when the metropolitan literati fall over themselves to boast that they’ve never heard of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the great Tomas Tranströmer, Sue and I recalled seeing him read in Huddersfield, twenty odd years ago (Did she read with him? The mists of time won’t part). And I found myself on a panel at a new literary festival, entirely about independent presses, chaired by Simon Thirsk, founder of Bloodaxe Books, who publish Tranströmer in this country and will have all of his books reprinted by Tuesday. This was the first States of Independence West, after two very successful SoI East days in Leicester over the last two years, and it was good to see so many…

We booked our ‘Othello’ tickets the hour they went on sale: two for ourselves and one each as birthday presents for my sister and oldest friend. My youngest brother and his partner, who also live in Sheffield, decided to join us. We’re all huge fans of ‘The Wire’ and go to a lot of theatre at The Crucible, one of the UK’s best theatres, where productions cost half what they do in the West End. It’s the first week of term, so we decided to go for the matinee, rather than evening show, so as to leave more weekend free for preparation. On a good day, it’s a fifty minute drive but we allowed an hour and a half for traffic. We’d been on the…

If you were to ask my readers which their favourite of my novels is, most crime fans would say Bone & Cane, Young Adult readers might well say Love Lessons (or, if they’re big music fans, Festival), but the majority, I know, are fondest of The Pretender. It’s my favourite, too, having taken me over twenty years to get it right, then get it published. The novel is about a young man, Mark Trace, with a precocious ability for literary forgery. During the story he successfully fakes Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Roald Dahl and more. As a coming of age story, it straddles adult and young adult fiction. The YA aspect is one reason why I put Dahl in, that and a rather…