music
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Brighton Folk Choir live session on Mid Sussex Radio
Last night I went to Burgess Hill with the Brighton Folk Choir to sing a live session on Mid Sussex Radio. Burgess Hill is only ten minutes on the train but feels a generation away. The shops are largely gone – Amazon waits for no one – but it was good to see a board… Read more
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Musical Comedy Awards 2023 – The Final, Bloomsbury Theatre
There are two comedy finals in a row this weekend. I can’t make the Sketch Off final at the Leicester Square Theatre – good luck Charlie Vero-Martin et al – but popped along to this. I love musical comedy, and thought this would be a good opportunity to find fresh talent to book for my… Read more
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Do You Remember The First Time?
“I knew Jarvis a bit because me and a friend of mine, Ian (we were in a band together) used to get stoned every Friday night and we’d try to find Jarvis. We were only about twenty and he used to tell us stories – him and Russell used to have this vast collection of… Read more
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Oh I am come to the low country
It is Burns Night tonight, and so at folk club on Monday we sang some Rabbie Burns, specifically 1794’s The Highland Widow’s Lament. Full lyric is published below – he’s long dead, so I suspect he can’t sue me. Oh, I am come to the low Countrie, Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie! Without a penny in my… Read more
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Half Man Half Biscuit, Electric Ballroom, 20/1/2023
Note – this review first appeared in the Morning Star newspaper. Web version here. In Camden Town on a cold January night, a man down the front is crying and bellowing along to the closing track of a band’s sixteenth studio album: Oblong of Dreams, a paean to place and belonging worthy of Wordsworth. Up… Read more
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Walthamstow Wassail 2023
“Are you looking for the the wassail? Head up the lane until you find a shed with a light on”. We all need traditions and celebrations, to bind us to pasts real or imagined, and to remind of us the cyclical nature of time. The wassail is a folk tradition based on the important twin… Read more
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The Last of the Great Indie Discos: an interview with Chris from Offbeat
Hidden away in the corner of Sheffield University’s student bar lies the Raynor Lounge, home of Offbeat, the ultimate indie disco. It has now been running for 25 years, founded as a splinter event from Warwick’s own indie society [1]. While The West Midland Offbeat is run as a generational oligarchy, passed from clique to… Read more
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Miss Modular
It’s so strange to me how close music is to time travel. When I started to fall out of love with new music ten years ago, I worried how I would even form new memories. Life is the bone, songs are the marrow. While I write these words I’m listening to the claustrophobic French lounge… Read more
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