“A tormented beat-boom Eeyore.” Ray Davies (2012)
A biblical downpour is making its way through Highgate Village, but Ray Davies’s beetroot barnet is safe beneath the awning of his local Cafe Rouge. Your correspondent hasn’t been quite so lucky....
View Article“The trouble with record companies is that there’s always trouble with record...
As befits a man who arrived in the UK just two hours ago, Terry Reid’s dress mode is Californian; the tan, expat orange. Crumpled white shorts, red t-shirt and – because it was the first thing he found...
View Article“A disingenuous blend of tyranny and cowardice.” On Ginger Baker (2013)
Hats off to Michael Hann of The Guardian for uploading his painful Q&A with Ginger Baker at the screening of Beware Of Mr Baker. I’m not sure if I would have been so brave. That said, Michael...
View ArticleCome on, really, that’s a little harsh. I wouldn’t compare my 31 year career...
Outside the swish Connaught Hotel, London is bathed in sunshine, but very little of it finds its way into the conference room where Michael Stipe is thoroughly examining the small box of mints that...
View Article“It’s not actually a disco album per se.” On Daft Punk (2013)
1. Just because it’s not the record you were expecting, it doesn’t make it a bad record. 2. Streaming Random Access Memories on iTunes probably wasn’t the best way to unveil it to the world. It meant...
View Article“If I would have to take a dump, I would need to take off everything.” Lordi...
A few weeks ahead of the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, I heard that Finland were to be represented by a “horror rock band” singing a song called Hard Rock Hallelujah. When I saw the video to the song,...
View Article“Europop’s equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”...
This was written the morning after the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest – the one which saw a disconsolate Terry Wogan declaring that he couldn’t go through with another Eurovision Song Contest. “Let’s not...
View Article“We have turned into one of those countries we used to laugh at.” 10...
“Do you curse where you come from?” sang Nick Drake in 1970. It’s highly likely that he wasn’t singing about Britain’s inability to field a winner in the Eurovision song contest. After all, back then,...
View Article“There was definitely a point at which, for me, Shalamar usurped Pere Ubu.”...
“Oh God. Do I want to see this?” In an empty North London pub, Green Gartside looks on in trepidation as he registers the item I’m pulling out of my bag. On Page 27 of the 1985 Smash Hits sticker …...
View Article“A thrill beyond speed or volume.” Butcher Boy: React Or Die (2008)
I first heard Butcher Boy’s second album on my wife’s birthday when – at her request, I took the car to a garden centre in Enfield and filled it up with a shopping list of plants that she had...
View Article“His breakfast of choice is a bowl of Golden Nuggets.” Cat Stevens/Yusuf...
These days, getting any sort of audience with the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens is a procedure of almost military complexity. Questions have to be submitted for prior examination. Any deemed...
View Article“I’d love to live out in a place where we’re borrowing sugar from one another...
Midlake’s Tim Smith is hunched over the small sink beside his Bristol dressing room. Possibly because an overnight trip from Belgium has left him bereft of sleep, the task at hand is causing him more...
View Article“I’m competitive when it comes to Scrabble and charades, and perhaps that...
The buzz on the intercom unlocks the door. From thereon in, it’s just a matter of following the noise at the top of the building and, indeed, your nose. With glass of white wine in one hand and a...
View Article“Was it like The Monkees? It was more like The Shining. I don’t think a band...
One of the pitfalls of playing a show at a 414 year-old German fortress is that, back in Renaissance times, no-one could have foreseen what this building would eventually go on to be used for. As a...
View Article“A thorough index of little epiphanies” Ralfe Band: Son Be Wise (2013)
Perhaps because the musical landscape shifts so relentlessly, it feels like an awfully long time since John Peel died. In a post-Peel era, The Arctic Monkeys have been twice asked to headline the...
View ArticleLost Albums (2007, 2008)
Between 2007 and 2008, I made six programmes for Radio 4 as part of the Lost Albums strand. The three featured below look at Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day, Lal & Mike Waterson’s Bright...
View Article“You start off thinking you’re the author of your story, but you’re merely...
In 1993, as a young Melody Maker writer, I accompanied Radiohead to Los Angeles. The influential KROQ station was playing the group’s second single Creep on constant rotation. It was, apparently, only...
View Article“His mum went ballistic. She told him he was probably going to start having...
It’s touch and go whether Tom Chaplin will make it in time for the end of our Wednesday rendez-vous. Currently, Tim Rice-Oxley is checking his emails on the fourth floor of a private members club in...
View Article“You’d want to catch it before the DJ started talking.” On cassettes (2009)
“A dying format? I’m not sure there’s any such thing,” says Richard Goldsmith from upscale hi-fi geeksters’ paradise Audio Gold. Cast your eye around his North London shop, and you can see why he might...
View Article“I’ve always been furtive.” Jarvis Cocker (2006)
The sleeve of his debut solo album, reads just “Jarvis” – no surname. If only for the fact that it instantly serves to remind us that we’ve long been on first-name terms with the sometime Pulp...
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