If Tony McCarroll can share a stage with Oasis then surely Hooky and New Order can make up for the day.

For anyone who *is* interested in his personal troubles, this interview from the Independent is a real eye-opener and offered him the chance to tell his side of the story.

The Mail, and other titles’ grievance with the BBC is down to its size and its guaranteed budget from public funding. They feel it shouldn’t be in local radio, mass-market TV, promoting the Proms etc, because […]

Correction. Rather than pressing Sort after Edit, you press something called Smart Reorder. And I lied: you cannot then revert to your original track order without reordering it manually. Glad that the […]

Welcome to the machine.

Quite

Looks like I’ll need to add a few more to this. My favourite long ‘uns are Ordinary People (above), Creedence’s version of Heard it on the Grapevine, and, oddly, two versions of Walk on By, Isaac Hayes’s and the […]

Other artists need to take some responsibility for this as well. I know live is where they make most of their money these days, but Paul Heaton has shown you can do an arena or stadium show and still only charge […]

Re Robert Smith. It was a principled stand, but the ticket companies found a way to make their booking costs almost equal the price he wanted to charge for tickets. But there is fault on both sides. Some venues […]

So let me get this straight: they promote the gigs, have an interest in the venues, and control the ticketing. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for profiteering, does it?

That’s great to hear, thanks. I enjoyed putting it together and occasionally slide a new discovery in there.

Pulp’s reunion has been very productive. Three tours including parts of the world that never saw them the first time, one superb album, two books, and this year two cover versions and a new song for War Child. T […]

I’ve seen “liquid, gaseous, evanescent” used to describe Bryan Ferry. But to bring things up to date, I wonder whether both descriptions are of … the 1975.

Aside from the ethical considerations (date rape drugs available, perhaps in pubs, really?), there are immense practical problems with this policy. Can we really imaging the business secretary taking trips to […]

You’re at the perfect start and end point. In other words: don’t bother.

Someone you don’t hear referred to often is Alexander Barron. His The Lowlife (1963) is fairly slight, the tale of an inveterate East End gambler who can’t escape his environment. Historical novel King Dido […]

Along with London singer-songwriter Jason McNif, and an awful lot of ex-Q and NME journos.

I was unaware of her DJ rep but followed her on Facebook because her musical choices are always good. In my mind the character in High Fidelity was a Nanci Griffiths new country type. I arrived in London a couple […]