The great guitarist and singer/songwriter Michael Chapman has been gone for the best part of a year now. I’ve written about him a few times on here, but just realised that I never posted this review. I wrote it for the Nottingham Post back in the day, when he performed at The Running Horse on Alfreton Road with Steve Tilston. The review below is exactly as it appeared in The Post but is no longer on their website. I didn’t take any photos at the gig, so I nicked the great photo above from Michael’s website. With Michael is Bridget St John, who was performing with Michael the first time I saw him. I first met Bridget in 1976 but that’s a story for another…
Not posted here for a while, partly because I’ve been writing: about music, mainly, which is what I mostly post about on here. But my regular gig review posts are no longer appearing because the Nottingham Post no longer does gig reviews. The entertainments editor took redundancy during the pandemic and, even before that, found it hard to justify reviews that wouldn’t provide plentiful clickbait. The hassle of sorting free tickets and uploading the reviews wasn’t worth it unless engagement was really high. So, while I’ve been to some great shows in the last few months – by The Delines, Gaffa, Elvis Costello, Nick Mason, Billy No-Mates and Lonelady, amongst others, I haven’t had to write about any of them. In the early days of…
In the summer of 1976, just before I started university, I worked for the council, cutting lawns. Summer jobs were scarce in Colne but this was better than the paid work I’d had before: a warehouseman at ASDA and running the conveyor belt for Findel’s, a packing firm in Nelson. I was waiting to see if I got good enough A level results to take me to Nottingham, where I had a place on a Law degree, provided I got at least two Bs. After four weeks, I was made redundant at short notice, but the other student they’d taken on had a dad who worked at the council. He insisted that we had to have a minimum two weeks’ notice, so we were taken…
Ages ago I promised to explain the title of my ebook publishing imprint, which I’ve used for several years to publish eBook versions of my out of print titles, along with eBooks of the work I publish with Nottingham’s Shoestring Press, which avidly resists publishing digitally (while Shoestring does have a website you can order physical books from, it doesn’t sell on Amazon and the publisher doesn’t use the internet himself or have an email address). My set up is simple. I only publish books that I’ve written and the recent ones have been digitised by The Book Typesetters an excellent team who also handle all of Shoestring’s typesetting and more. I chose the name East Lane Books because it’s the name of the lane…