The legends of my youth are in their sixties or seventies now. Happily, I’ve seen most of them, often more than once. As regular readers of this blog will know, I go to a lot of gigs. But there are still a few soul giants I’ve never had the chance to see. According to our Scouse taxi driver this morning, Al Green’s voice is shot, so I’ve left that too late. I’ll probably never get to see Aretha Franklin either. Marvin Gaye died too young. Did get to see Millie Jackson twice in her hey day. Diana Ross. Tick. Smokey Robinson was an unexpected delight. After his recent bout of cancer and talk of Alzheimers, though, I thought there was no chance of seeing…
Every year since 1988, we’ve made a best of year music compilation for our friends, and this year is no exception. In recent years, I’ve put the songs up on here for readers to enjoy. Our cd is intended to promote the artists featured and the songs will only remain on this site for a short time, but if copyright holders are concerned, just email me on the link above and the relevant song will be removed. This post will be updated once a day or thereabouts, until New Year’s Eve. Those of you lucky enough to receive a copy in the post may want to look away until yours arrives. I haven’t actually started burning them yet, but once this big pile of…
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…
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…
Every year since 1988, we’ve given out twenty-odd best of year CDs (formerly cassettes, but a Spotify playlist wouldn’t cut it) to our music loving friends and, for the last few years, I’ve put all the songs on this blog, together with sleeve notes for each song. So if you’re here to find out about my books, scroll down or check out the Beat novels currently coming out as eBooks, with all new afterwords. If you’re an unhappy copyright holder, just contact me, but the point of these downloads and the cds is to persuade people to investigate the new music that I love. And if you’re a recipient of these CDs, you might like to look away until yours arrives (the first ones…