My thirty albums of the year, ordered by how much I’ve enjoyed them rather than attempts at spurious objectivity. A terrific top 21 & the best of the also-rans. Downloads of many featured artists in the post below. A tight fight for the top spot, Leonard’s first. Hopefully, Frank will have plenty more opportunities to compete for this coveted honour. 1 Leonard Cohen – Old Ways 2 Frank Ocean – Channel Orange 3 The XX – Coexist 4 Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Psychedelic Pill 5 Dirty Projectors – Swing Low Magellan 6 Bob Dylan – Tempest 7 Aimee Mann – Charmer 8 Bobby Womack – The Bravest Man In The Universe 9 Simone Felice 10= Rumer – Boys Don’t Cry 10= Beth…
This is the last post of the year bar my best songs of the year cd countdown, which starts tomorrow. I’ve been to three gigs in the last four nights. Follow the links to read about Squeeze (disappointing) and Beth Orton (outstanding) in the Nottingham Post. I wasn’t reviewing last night’s gig. In fact, until a week ago, I didn’t have a ticket. Tried to get good seats the moment they went on sale, months ago (couldn’t stand, because of going with an ill friend) but was only offered ones at the back. Finally found a pair near the front on eBay and they arrived on Tuesday. Phew. Funnily enough, the seats were very close to where Mike and I sat the first time I…
Last year I did a reading and talk at Leicester De Montfort University, after which the organiser, author and academic Jonathan Taylor, asked me whether he could use the story I’d just tried out in a new anthology that he was hoping to get published. My copy of Overheard: stories to read aloud arrived last week and I’ve been dipping into it ever since. It’s a very nifty idea for an anthology, with nothing over 3,000 words long (I had to ruthlessly edit my story, Games In Bed, to get it down to 2,999 words!), so each story take only a few minutes to read or – at most – fifteen minutes to read aloud. I’m one of those people who will read a poem or story aloud…
Hot on the heels of ‘Student’ (scroll down the page) I have a new eBook available. It’s exclusive on Kindle until the new year, but other formats will follow. Dead White Male is a stand alone novel that was written as part of The Beat, a police procedural series about young police officers in Nottingham that ran from 1994 to 2000. It’s the series in which I learnt to write mystery novels (as against the one-off whodunits that were aimed at a young audience). I chose this novel to digitise because I think it’s one of my very best mysteries and serves as an introduction to the series as a whole. If all goes well, I intend to digitise the other eleven books over the next…
Over forty years after buying my copy of School’s Out, which was as popular at Calday Grange Grammar School For Boys as it was in the rest of the English speaking world, I got to see Alice Cooper. I took my 18 year old nephew, who’s a big fan (he’d actually seen him before, at Download). This is a very slightly extended version of my review for the Nottingham Post, whose photo is above. Last year, Alice Cooper reunited his original Billion Dollar Babies band for the sequel Welcome 2 My Nightmare. For his Hallowe’en Night Of Fear tour, he has a crack band half his age, who threaten to, but never quite, drown out their leader. The sell-out show drew a multi-generational crowd, many…