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…
I’ll be back to plugging eBooks next month but, before that, and as a prequel to my annual summer reading diary (the Easter review is here), a brief nod to the fantastic summer of gigs I’ve enjoyed. Generally the gigs I like most are the small ones, at venues like The Maze (where the great Slaid Cleaves returns in September) or The Jam Cafe, where I watched two Nottingham acts, Gallery 47 and Georgie Rose last week (bit chatty, mind). For more on Nottingham’s great music scene, visit the excellent new Music Nottingham news blog that my old mate Mike runs. But the big gigs of the summer have all been in arenas. First, there was Neil Young and Crazy Horse playing what may their…
Over the last few months, I’ve been quietly publishing some of my Young Adult novels onto Kindle. The most popular so far has been the reissue of my 2001 novel about the Glastonbury Festival, but the time has come to go further back, to the early 90’s, with my Nottingham based series about young police officers, The Beat. The Beat mysteries, while ostensibly a YA series, was aimed rather older and always had an adult audience. While there’s alway a teenage point of view character, the majority of the protagonists are in their twenties or older. Over the course of eleven novels, it follows the central character, Clare Coppola, from her first day on the beat to just after her twenty-first birthday and the…
I’m not much given to reading memoirs, unless they’re by writers I already like a great deal, but this book’s subject matter appealed to me (and it’s still only 99p on Kindle) as it covers territory that I’ve written about in two of my novels, Denial and Love Lessons (eBook edition coming soon). In each, an underage girl sleeps with an older man: 23 in one case, nearer forty in the other, and the man’s exploitative behaviour is demonstrated, then skewered. There’s a moral element, of course, in that YA fiction is for emerging adults and the novel acts as a warning to young people tempted to have sex with an unscrupulous teacher (or, for that matter, university lecturer). Not long after I wrote Love Lessons, the law…