Contemporary’s café-bar is rammed for a historic reunion. There are plenty of half remembered faces in the crowd. Wasn’t that guy in Some Chicken? Aren’t they Fatal Charm? Most of the crowd are, like the band, into their fifties. The rest are here to see what they missed first time round. This is the band’s first gig since 1980. When Gaffa take the stage at nine, the years roll back. Lyricist Wayne Evans is on bass and vocals. John Maslen, who wrote the music, plays guitar and keyboards. Youngest original member and co-writer, Clive ‘Myph’ Smith, on guitar, is about to become a grandad (sorry, from where I was standing, I couldn’t fit Myph into shot, but you get half of him in the distorted…

Weekends don’t get much better than this. First, a terrific launch for my new novel, Bone and Cane, at Antenna on Friday night. Many thanks to everyone who came, and special thanks to the Antenna staff and everyone at Tindal Street Press, who organised it so superbly. Thanks to Mike TD for the photo above. I got to choose all the music, coming off from the Q and A to a great song about Nottingham, City Sickness by Tindersticks. On Saturday, the new album by my favourite band, REM, arrived early, and it sounds really good. Then, in the evening, we went to a packed Nottingham Contemporary, where Nottingham’s best band of the 70’s, Gaffa, reunited for the first time since 1980. It was a…

My first novel for Tindal Street Press, Bone and Cane, is published today and I hope to see loads of my Nottingham friends at the launch tonight. Those of you who own a Kindle might like to know that, for a limited time, you can get download the book at a price so ridiculously low I refuse to cite it here. Also, you can see the full size cover on the downloads page. Bone and Cane is set in Nottingham and, to a smaller extent, London. The titular characters are Sarah Bone, a New Labour MP for a fictional Nottingham constituency, and her ex, Nick Cane, who has just served a five year prison sentence for growing industrial quantities of cannabis. They meet, and the…

I’m between drafts of a new novel, so I’ve had time to work on a couple of short stories that lay, unfinished, in the ‘pending’ folder on my computer. This week I finished one called ‘The After Life’. This morning, when I saw a new song with the same name linked to on the whatevershebringswesing mailing list, I had to click through. This is the second song to be previewed from Paul Simon’s forthcoming album, So Beautiful or So What and it’s so good I just listened to it twice. Simon’s last album, Surprise, was a real return to form, as was the accompanying tour, and this sounds even more promising. Check out the song here. A former student of mine, novelist Chris Killen, published…

Teddy Thompson is single, and the songs on his new album ‘Bella’, released on Monday, let us know it. On each of his three visits to The Rescue Rooms the admiring throng of female followers has grown thicker. Hardly surprising, given his film star looks and rich, memorable singing voice. It’ll be interesting to see if ‘Bella’ emulates his last album, ‘A Piece Of What You Need’ by entering the album charts in the top ten. Reviews have been mixed. Unfairly, for it’s as good an album of country tinged pop-rock as you can hope to hear. It gets a good airing tonight, as does the last album and his second, ‘Separate Ways’, the title track of which takes on the air of a classic.…