Laura Cantrell should have been the next Nanci Griffith. She has a better, sweeter voice and writes songs of a similar, yet less sentimental calibre.However, she’s had the misfortune to peak at a time when there’s a glut of great female singer/songwriters. So many that it’s hard to keep track of: although the Cosmic American Music Club does a great job of bringing the best to the city.New album, No Way There From Here,  is as good as anything Laura’s done. Yet I suspect this brief tour takes place in time snatched from her day job as a banker. Fine guitarist and backing singer Mark Spencer finished touring with Jay Farrar on Sunday and joined Laura the next day. On this opening night, it…

  Today marks the end of the first stage of eBook publishing by East Lane Books, a digital imprint named after the location of our allotment. It’s designed to bring some of my Young Adult novels back into print and open them up to a new audience, who missed them because they were marketed for teenagers. While the one-off Point Crimes and some of the other novels that I’m not currently bringing out are primarily for teenagers, books like The Beat series and Festival seem to work just as well for most adults, and have distinctly adult themes. Indeed, Love Lessons often found itself in the adult fiction sections when it was first a bestseller, back in 1998. It took until the mass market edition in 2001 for…

Bill Bailey sells out arenas, but prefers to play theatres. Lucky for us. This sold-out show at the Royal Concert Hall might be on the last leg of a long tour (the DVD comes out in November) but still feels fresh. There’s no arrogance about Bailey, who introduces himself as being from the West Country. “I didn’t keep the accent because I wanted to get on in life.” He’s very clever, but never makes his audience feel stupid. His running gags work whether or not you know who Alberti or Chantelle is. The latter provided some of his best running jokes, like the question about the name of the upper part of the foot. I wonder if the guy who immediately shouts out the answer was at the…

We’ve just had a full two weeks away in Croatia. I took a pile of books plus a Kindle with me, planning to leave several of the books behind. How many could I bring myself to dump? Wait and see. On the plane, I read Loren D Estleman’s nine year old Amos Walker novel Retro. This was the first Estleman I’d read in twenty years, picked up for 20p in my local library, and I don’t know why I’ve been denying myself the pleasure of his hard boiled, tightly plotted, satisfying novels. I’ll be back for more. On our first full day in Babin Kuk, I donated it to the hotel library, where I couldn’t resist picking up a much fatter volume, the much discussed…