Above are the promised photos from inside and outside the Hold Steady gig in Vancouver. Below is an early version of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song To The Siren’, a bonus track from the compilation Morning Glory. I first heard this song (like most people of my generation) on a single by Coctea Twins’ spin-off This Mortal Coil, which is lovely, but is more about the sound than the lyrics. The version that turned me onto is was the one played live by Robert Plant’s Priory of Brion (the band never made an album – the version I heard at Glastonbury was far superior to the over arranged one on Plant’s subsequent Dreamland). I was never a big Buckley fan, maybe because the only album anyone had…
The Vogue is a lovely old restored theatre in downtown Vancouver and when we get home I’ll put up some shots Sue took of the place and the band. We got there ten minutes before The Vogue’s Facebook told us the band were onstage and were warned there were no passouts. The guy on the door insisted on opening and smelling my water then let me take it in. You were allowed to drink in the theatre, but £5.50 for a small can of Bud made the prices at Rock City look wonderful (and at least most British venues sell at least one good beer). We were told that the support band were the Au Pairs, which seemed unlikely, but put me in a good…
Summer’s in retreat but I still managed to spend most of my last Nottingham Sunday afternoon in the allotment, reading Stanley Middleton’s final novel A Cautious Approach. Meticulously edited by Philip Davis, it brings to an end the 45 novel career of my old friend. Odd, for the first time, not to be able to discuss it with him afterwards. But odder still that, for 13 years, I was able to talk about novels with a writer 40 years my senior, one who I read with huge admiration before I’d begun to seriously write myself. The new novel is beautifully written and, as so often with Stanley’s novels, contains unexpected scenes that shift your perceptions of the characters. Like nearly all of his novels, it’s…
I’ve been a fan of Texas born singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett since 1986 and had tickets to see him four times. Unfortunately, for myriad reasons (schedule conflict, death in family, poor ticket sales) three of those shows were cancelled, so I’ve only seen him the once, opening a double bill with Mary Chapin Carptenter. He was great, but it was an arena, and he only played an 80 minute set. So when I saw that he and his large band were playing Toronto while we were there, I had to get tickets. Massey Hall is a beautiful old venue with legendarily great sound and (we discovered) legendarily uncomfortable seats, half of which seemed to be broken. However, this worked in my favour as the man mountain…
I first came across Tracey Thorn when I heard a beautiful, very articulate love song called ‘Plain Sailing’ on a sampler cd in the early 80’s. I put it on the first mix tape I made for my partner. Tracey met her partner, Ben Watt, at university and they formed Everything But The Girl. Nearly thirty years on, they’re still together, but a lot of their friends aren’t. Her second solo album, ‘Love And Its Opposite’ came out recently and is a kind of concept album about divorce. It’s a brilliant record, full of thought provoking, intelligent songs that are also growers. Here’s the one that keeps getting stuck in my head. Initial copies of the album came with a Berlin Demos bonus disc and…