This is my review of last night’s show from the Nottingham Post, with a download of one of the show’s highlights and a bonus cover version, which (if I remember correctly) Rumer put out to her fans on Valentine’s day this year.   It’s a year since Rumer played a six song set to Smooth FM competition winners at the casino down the road (my Post review here). That night, she was a nervous presence, yet won over the audience with the quality of her voice. The songs turned out to be growers, too, and Seasons Of My Soul got to number three in the album chart, going platinum with over 300,000 sales.   Tonight, on her second headlining tour, the concert hall was all…

Jackie Leven died on Monday night. I wrote at length about Jackie last year, on his sixtieth birthday, and the song link there is still live. I met him several times over the years. It was hard to reconcile the affable bloke with the fantastic humour and amazing songs with the intense guy I first saw perform. That was with Doll by Doll at Nottingham’s Garage in 1979. Man, he was scary. ‘One of the few good shows we played’, he told me twenty years later. DBD were a great post-punk group with a handful of really strong numbers (including ballads like Janis & Strip Show that pointed the way to some of the later solo work) but they weren’t his first venture. I have…

Dead Money by Ray Banks from Blasted Heath on Vimeo. Blasted Heath is a new epublisher co-run by my agent, Allan Guthrie, which launched this week. Al is a great agent and knows more about eBooks than anybody else I know. So I figure it’s going to be a huge success, but I’m going to wish them luck anyway. Blasted Heath are publishing an interesting range of authors including Gerard Brennan and Douglas Lindsay. I’ve already downloaded two novels from the site. For those of you who are quick off the mark, today they’re GIVING AWAY the new book from the wonderful Ray Banks. I like Ray’s tight, northern noir so much that he’s the only author to get two novelettes in the Crime Express series…