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…

Don’t Mention the Night

It was never my intention to write a memoir, and I’ll explain how it came about nearer the time, but I’m pleased to announce that my next book will be Don’t Mention the Night: a memoir from Five Leaves Publications. It covers how writing about Nick Drake led me to Nottingham in the 1970s, studying Law at university and writing for Liquorice magazine, through which I discovered Kevin Coyne, the formidable singer/songwriter from Derby. Most weeks I’d go to The Imperial pub, to see local legends, Gaffa. The book weaves the three acts’ stories in with mine, from teenage depression to life as a writer. No cover to show you yet, but we do have a launch date: October 19th at Metronome, where the BBC’s John Holmes…