I’m delighted to discover that Laura Cantrell, who hasn’t put out a new album since 2005, is doing a short tour later this year. In Nottingham, the excellent Cosmic American Music are putting her on at Glee. I’m not sure what she’s been up to for those six years. She used to work as a Wall Street banker and do music at weekends, but I read somewhere that she’d quit that. I googled around to see if she has a new album coming out, to follow her career high Humming By The Flowered Vine and discovered that there’s a tribute album to Kitty Wells imminent. I initially wrote ‘the late, great Kitty Wells’, but turns out Kitty, born in 1919, is still alive. I also…
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…
1978 was my first full year in Nottingham, the city where I’ve lived ever since. Most Tuesday nights, I’d head down to The Imperial, on St James St, to see Nottingham band, Gaffa. The place was always packed, even before they had a record out. Gaffa were a Nottingham band for Nottingham people. Listen to the download of ‘O.A.P. Sightings’ below to find the most authentic example of a Nottingham accent on record. In lyricist and vocalist Wayne Evans, they had a real original, perfectly complemented by guitarist John Maslen who wrote the music. Clive (“Myph”) Smith on second guitar and Mick Barratt on drums completed the picture (occasionally with Brendan Kidulis on keyboards). Their handful of records never really represented how good they were…