An Evening with Donovan at Nottingham’s Albert Hall, 2015

Here’s another Post review I never got round to posting on the blog, probably because I was meant to be at this gig with my oldest and dearest friend, Mike Russell, who was in hospital that night and died a few days later. Anyway, a Greil Marcus piece about ‘Season of the Witch’ (which he played that night, not that I mention it) reminded me of going to this show. This review manages to avoid saying how irritating I found Donovan’s personality, though that may come through between the lines. I was surprised by how good the show was. The photo above is from the Smothers Brothers show in 1969. Here’s hoping that we’ll be hearing ‘Season of the Witch’ again as the theme song…

A Farewell to Ambit

I was sad to spot on Instagram yesterday that Ambit magazine is closing down. Its final issue, number 249, is launched tonight. 250 would have made for a round number, but Ambit was never the sort of journal to be interested in neatness. I can’t make it to London, so offer this brief tribute instead. Ambit is nearly as old as me, first published in 1959 with a heyday that coincided with the swinging sixties and went on long beyond it. Founded by Dr Martin Bax, it was closely associated with the artist Ralph Steadman, who drew for it frequently, Bax’s close friend, the great SF writer J.G. Ballard, poet Adrian Mitchell and artist Michael Foreman. It always combined cutting edge literature with art and…

2022: The Sleevenotes

Every year since 1988, we’ve put together a best of year compilation, initially on cassette (C90, C100 and, one year, C110!), then, since 2000 on CD (where you’re limited to 79.57). For two years we’ve also put together a Spotify playlist, and I’ll be doing that this year, too (with one notable, unavailable selection, the last track on the CD). Given that so few people now use CDs, we’ve added a note to this year’s, asking people to email us if they want to be sent a CD in future (& tell us about their favourite 2022 track). What with postal strikes, the increasing impossibility of sending things abroad due to Brexit and printing costs (this year’s cover image cost more per copy that the…

Forty Years of the Royal Concert Hall

Thanks everybody who came to Metronome on Wednesday night for the launch of Don’t Mention the Night. Especial thanks to John Holmes, for interviewing me (you can read his autobiography here) and all the members of Gaffa, whose classic line-up reunited for the occasion. Here they are playing ‘Man with a Motive’ and below is a video of them performing the opening track of their recent album ‘Beaks and Bones for Buttons’. It’s an apt choice, as this week marks the release of a five CD version of ‘Revolver’, the album where parents decided the Beatles had gone weird. That was when my parents stopped buying them (we lived near Liverpool when I was growing up) and Wayne, Gaffa vocalist and lyricist, a few years…

An Accidental Memoir

A few years back, my friends Eve and Anthony published an original writing handbook called The Accidental Memoir. However, if you bought their book and used its pointers as the basis for writing your own memoir, there was little accidental about it. The new book that Five Leaves are about to publish is, by contrast, happened almost entirely by accident. Some time pre-pandemic (that other world whose contours blurs more each day), Ross Bradshaw asked me to contribute an essay to one of his occasional series of themed essays, entitled ‘Rock’. I’d contributed to two of the previous three (‘Maps’ and ‘Crime’) and was happy to do so, until he told me the proviso. He wanted me to write about Nick Drake. I’d already written about…