Burt Bacharach is a legend, with over fifty UK top forty hits. His ensemble’s performance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage last Saturday received raves. No surprise that he drew a packed house for his first visit to Nottingham. Only question is, with over 600 songs to his name, how many could he fit in? Answer: just about all the ones you’d want to hear – excluding only his 1999 collaboration with Elvis Costello, Painted From Memory. He enters to a standing ovation, a frail figure in the trademark that seems too big for him. He plays a single note on his piano. Each of his three singers sings a line of What The World Needs Now (is Love). Bacharach plays delicate piano with jazz progressions while…
Nottingham’s free monthly listings and culture magazine, Leftlion, has been unfailingly supportive of the city’s UNESCO City of Literature bid, and this month’s issue carries a long interview with me about the bid. If you live in Nottingham, you can pick up a copy all over the place, from my local greengrocer, Thompsons, through to Broadway, Five Leaves Bookshop and Rough Trade. But if you’re not, and want to read it online, click here. Oh, and, the online version has an extra question, towards the end, where I talk about the next Bone and Cane novel, due this autumn. More on that anon. A week tonight, I’m off to see Elvis Costello for the umpteenth time over the last 35 years. Solo, for, I think,…
Last night I went to see Amir Amirani’s feature length documentary, ‘We Are Many’, which centres on 2003’s world-wide demonstrations against the imminent invasion of Iraq, which is officially released today. I had three reasons for going. I met Amir many years ago and his older brother Taghi (also a renowned documentary director) is an old friend. I was unable to go on the massive march, because my mother had died suddenly just three days before. My youngest brother, Richard, went on the family’s behalf and I remember my dad talking about ‘warmongers’ at Mum’s funeral, which took place the day before the invasion. Thirdly, I’m about to start writing the next novel in my Bone and Cane sequence, which will be about the parliament…
Dawn of the Unread is an interactive graphic novel aimed at celebrating Nottingham’s literary heritage and encouraging literacy in the city’s schools. There have been thirteen issues so far, each eight pages long, featuring such diverse authors as Alan Sillitoe, Mary Howitt and DH Lawrence, along with even more diverse writers, from Michael Eaton to Nicola Monagahan and Alison Moore to Al Needham. Artists have included Brick, who I’ve often collaborated with and the brilliant Eddie (‘From Hell’) Campbell. The fourteenth comes out this weekend. It’s online now, with a couple of embeds still to be added. I wrote it, and Ella Joyce, daughter of author Graham Joyce – who was going to write one of the stories before his untimely death – has illustrated…
Time for my annual reading blog. Spent most of the last week above the clouds, at the edge of the El Teide national park in Tenerife. The photo above was taken just below the space observatory there, near the volcano that is the highest point in Spain. The clouds are so close that sometimes it feels like you can walk out onto them (see first photo). But when you find yourself driving through then, they become dull, wet mist. We didn’t take any CDs for our hire car, or I would have been playing my Calexico collection to death: felt like we were driving through a Western movie. I associate Tenerife with overbuilt resorts, and on our drive back to the airport we passed some…