Unlike most Neil Young fans my age, I didn’t get into him via ‘After The Goldrush’ or ‘Harvest’. I heard the single ‘Heart of Gold’ and been blown away by its live B side, ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’. Finding a new live album at the Record Mart in Burnley, I bought it. Turned out NATDD wasn’t on it. Indeed, it was rather a shambolic affair. However, in those days, buying an album was such a major investment that you played it to death even if you weren’t sure about it. I had a routine. Three plays on the day of purchase, two on the second, once a day after that, to stop myself getting sick of it too quickly (thirty odd years later,…

This is an extended version of my review for yesterday’s Nottingham Post. I don’t do tribute bands, but I kept hearing good things about Nearly Dan, who have been playing together since 1997. The friends who accompanied me to the show had seen them four or five times each. Any band that originally named themselves after a Coronation Street factory (‘Baldwin’s Casuals’) must have something going for them. Plus there’s the choice between paying £75 and travelling to London (for the original Steely Dan’s last UK date, several years back) or £12 and a bus into town. The sound at Glee was better than I’ve heard for many bigger bands at bigger venues, with crisp guitar and chunky bass. I’m a huge Steely Dan fan…

My friend Jenny Swann has been producing these terrific pamphlets called ‘Instead Of A Card’ for two years now, and doing very well, with the support of writers like Carol Ann Duffy. The latest is Ten Poems About Tea. It’s a beautifully produced pamphlet that includes Duffy, Eavan Bolan, John Betjeman and others. I bought two copies, one of which is about to make its way to New Zealand. Given my proclivity to bang on about the perfect cup of tea (got to be made with leaves, brewed for five minutes, in a pre-warmed pot), this is an appropriate time to plug the whole series. Oh, and here’s a song of the week by Gilbert O’Sullivan, who’s touring soon. If you ask me, it’s the…

I’m delighted to discover that Laura Cantrell, who hasn’t put out a new album since 2005, is doing a short tour later this year. In Nottingham, the excellent Cosmic American Music are putting her on at Glee. I’m not sure what she’s been up to for those six years. She used to work as a Wall Street banker and do music at weekends, but I read somewhere that she’d quit that. I googled around to see if she has a new album coming out, to follow her career high Humming By The Flowered Vine and discovered that there’s a tribute album to Kitty Wells imminent. I initially wrote ‘the late, great Kitty Wells’, but turns out Kitty, born in 1919, is still alive. I also…