‘I see some folk enjoyed South By so much they decided to stick around,’ James McMurtry said from the stage, spotting me in my baseball cap near the front of Austin’s Continental Club, the best music venue I’ve come to know. I was watching saw him perform for the second time in eight days. Indeed, I enjoyed myself so much that I went back a third time on my last Wednesday night out in Austin, to see a double bill of his solo show at the club’s upstairs gallery, followed by a raucous show by Jon Dee Graham and his band downstairs. I wrote about Graham a few months ago (scroll down) and now feels like a good time to write about McMurtry. There’s a big catalogue…

At the end of August I took voluntary redundancy from my Creative Writing lectureship at Nottingham Trent. Lack of teaching commitments meant that I was able to attend the annual Graham Greene festival from the very beginning (last year I dropped in for an afternoon, and heard Greene’s nephew Nick Dennys discuss Greene as a book collector and seller). As longtime readers will know, I have a deep interest in Greene, stretching back to my first term of doing a literature degree, back in 1977, when I read just about all of Greene’s novels during the space of ten weeks. My novel The Pretender features Greene on the cover. I invented a scene where, just before his death, Greene mischievously validates a forgery by my…

It was the final weekend of SXSW and the good weather had finally broken. There’s a great club high up South Congress called C-Boys. They have a sponsored festival (ie everything free to enter, tips only) called the Soco Stomp, a five-day, 50-band live music extravaganza with room for several hundred in the parking lot behind and maybe 150 in the club, where I’d just been watching Charlie Sexton’s band, Mystic Knights Of The Sea, with Ray Wylie Hubbard guesting. The main appeal of seeing SXSW shows is discovering new music, and, anyway, it was raining out. I bought another beer and waited to see who came on next. A grizzly bear of a man appeared and began teasing the sound guys about the length…

1978. My first full year at University, during which I spoke to Tennessee Williams, at the press conference for the an initially ill-fated play called Vieux Carre, at Nottingham Playhouse. I didn’t get to speak to Bob Dylan, who I’d loved since I was seven. But I did get to see him, not once but twice, on the opening night at Earls Court (having queued overnight for tickets) and the picnic at Blackbushe. I thought these might be my only chance to see Dylan, who toured so rarely, but there were at least thirteen more to come. I never thought I’d visit the setting for Williams’ play, but here I am in New Orleans, staying in Vieux Carre, and tomorrow I plan to visit the building…

Anybody who came here looking for my annual best songs of the year blog posts will, I’m afraid, be disappointed. The best of year compilations that I put together with my partner, Sue, who died in June, won’t be carrying on. I might do a playlist this year, and I might write about it. Or I might not. Everything, as they say, is still up in the air, and I shan’t begin to make any long term decisions until the summer, after I return from my long-delayed fellowship in the Ransom Center, Austin, where I will conclude research on my novel about Graham Greene’s four months in Nottingham, which I hope to publish in late 2025. In the meantime, if you’re interested in my current…