I don’t hear much about Nerina Pallot on here but she’s got a lovely run of “playing everything” videos on YouTube which I thought I’d mention. She’s great fun on F*cebook and does a beautifully written regular newsletter. I first discovered her on a BBC Live at Abbey Road and I was smitten by “Driving through Idaho” . Her albums are always top quality grown up pop. More below,..
Nerina
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Here’s a recent YouTube clip of an AW favourite.
Love that. It’s my favourite Weller song too – Paul channeling Traffic, I always think. Nice to see she has what looks like the sister of one of my Jack Russells too – top girl!
Here’s the accompanying newsletter…
Hello Dear Reader
Residents of this parish may remember a recent instalment in which I extolled the virtues of Wokingham, specifically mid-week meal deal offers in one of the many fine dining establishments of the town. When I first started writing to you in some form or another, some – lets’s see now – twenty four odd years ago, meal deals in dormitory towns were not on my bingo card. Dormitory towns, the Home Counties, provincial cites and above all, suburbia, filled my veins with the same kind of icy dread as being forced to go to a Toploader gig.
I laboured for many years under the misapprehension that Woking and Wokingham were in fact one in the same, the former just being the lazy person’s version of the place in the same way that nobody has bothered to say Kingston upon Hull since the 1970s. Even though I had been to both places during my childhood somehow they merged into one until my early forties.
‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’ said Samuel Johnson in the way only someone who wasn’t born in London might say.
It is an incredible city, capable of many transformative effects, but perhaps its most insidious is an ability to infect certain of its inhabitants with a corrosive disdain for anything outside of Zone 6, never mind the M25. The worst offenders by far are those who were never born in the city, fought like hell to get there and become terrified of falling off its precipitous housing ladder the moment they have a child and hear those dreaded words: school catchment.
Londoners don’t, as a rule, mind other cities. Bath and Edinburgh are perfectly acceptable; they tolerate Manchester because that’s – inexplicably – where their favourite football teams are. But the good people of Stoke Newington or Dulwich will lie awake at night in a cold sweat imagining everything turning to shit and being forced to move to Bedford. Or Woking. They hate towns. Towns, they maintain, are where dreams go to die.
Even though I once travelled to Woking for a boy only for the boy in question to break up with me, I bear it no ill will. It’s really very pretty in parts – Chobham, I’m looking at you – and it was from his study window in the Maybury Hill area of the town that H.G. Wells penned his magnum opus, The War of the Worlds which (if you haven’t read it) imagines the Martians landing on Horsell Common before they wend their not-so-merry way to the capital.
If you are fond of old school British sci-fi writing as I am, you may have noticed this juxtaposition of the intergalactic extreme and provincial slumber. Poor old sleepy Sussex is overrun with triffids by John Wyndham; while Douglas Adams gave us the gift of Ford Prefect, the interplanetary adventurer who thinks the best way to pass himself off as an ordinary English human is to pretend to be from Guildford.
I don’t know when or why the word provincial became a pejorative. It’s so patronising. We talk a lot about cultural capital these days, a term no doubt conjured in the austere corridors of an expensive publicly funded think tank somewhere in the actual capital where irony is always lost on its supposed thinkers. Every now and then, some sensible person attempts to move a sliver of culture out of London and invested parties are simply horrified. Almost two decades on, overpaid BBC presenters are still moaning about the indignity of having to broadcast from Salford, as if it were Outer Mongolia. The three people in the UK who genuinely like opera are still upset that the ENO will be moving an art form that only has about two good songs permanently to the North. Perhaps if they spent less time listening to the unlistenable, they might realise that it is possible to live in Knutsford and be a fan of Der Rosenkavalier.
It’s astonishing really if you consider that the UK population has grown considerably in the last twenty years – a cool seven million – and yet we have never struggled so much to sustain our grassroots venues around the country. According to the Music Venue Trust 2024 Annual Report, in 1994 the average length of a tour was 21 dates – today it is 11, and the majority of these tour dates now take place in the same well-served cities, while every few weeks another small regional venue closes or seeks emergency funding. Almost 50% of these venues are running at a loss, and those that are staying afloat are run on a not-for-profit basis, staffed by volunteers and depending on the sheer goodwill of their local communities.
The Fiery Bird in Woking is one such venue. So many of the places I’m playing on the All Roads Lead To… tour are. They are a vital part of our cultural fabric, and where we nurture our future talent and allow them to hone connection in a way no amount of TikTok live streams will ever do. We must use these little venues local to us or lose them forever.
Returning to the charms of much overlooked Woking and one of its most famous sons, it was always going to be one of two choices for me: Genesis or Paul Weller. In the end I plumped for the latter and his gorgeous song, Wild Wood.
When it came out, I was surprised by how much I loved it because at that point in my life I had Weller down as a casualty of the 1980s and while I had quite liked the Style Council – primarily because I thought D C Lee was super cool and couldn’t work out why she was stuck in a band with those blokes – I had long ago decided Weller was only marginally cooler than Status Quo. Also he was dead old and practically a heritage act by this point.
Weller was thirty five when Wild Wood was released.
Two years later he released Stanley Road (named after the street in Woking he grew up on) and I was starting to think he was as cool as God. (God being Paul McCartney, natch.)
Six years after Stanley Road came out and after I’d finally mastered the riff from Changing Man but was too shy to tell him, I got to open for Weller when he played The Royal Albert Hall, AKA the greatest venue in the whole known universe. I was really scared. I felt monumentally out of my depth and moments before I strode out on to that stage with just my old faithful Martin acoustic for company, I thought I was going to vom in a corner.
Weller’s fans were wonderful though. Kind and welcoming and not at all scary. Backstage afterwards, Paul said, ‘that was beautiful, like a young Joni Mitchell.’ I went home that night beaming from ear to ear.
I’ve covered Paul Weller before – You Do Something To Me (another truly beautiful song) for a Radio 2 show but Wild Wood is my favourite of his songs. I think it’s one of my favourites of anybody’s songs to tell the truth. In it, I hear echoes of Nick Drake and Cole Porter – Weller has always been as great a lyricist as he is a melody writer. It has this melancholy shot through it and yet I’ve always heard it as a song of immense hope and optimism.
Anyway, I hope you like it, and that this newsletter finds you well and deep into whatever your summer is turning out to be.
With love as ever,
Nerina xxxx
P.S. Quite a few shows are now perilously close to selling out – if you are still pondering tickets for the autumn tour, go to nerinapallot.com/live for all the ticket links you could ever need.
Terrrific! Thanks for opening my ears to another new – to me – artist. I’ve subscribed.
She’s playing Corsham a few miles south of me in a month or two, but sadly it’s not only pretty much sold out but also on my birthday, when I’m already committed to light aircraft flying activities (pressie from Ms. Foxy) in the entirely opposite direction. Next time!
She has a way with words & very cool tastes. Subscribing!
Here’s Idaho…
Fires is available on half-speed mastered vinyl. I have the CD and have yet to take the plunge.
Oooh, that sounds like another good one that I need to get. That’s an excellent album, a bit overlooked for some reason.
She is great.I have followed her for the last 20 years or so. I first saw her at the Cornbury festival in the mid 2000s.
I saw her last year at the London Palladium when she was celebrating Fires again and she was excellent.
I have tickets for her gig at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford in October and looking forward to seeing her in a smaller venue.
I don’t know why, but I always think of her as the discerning listeners Paloma Faith.
I adore this song – shades of Tom Waits in his Asylum years…
That’s great.
New to me but will dive in I think.
And she’s playing the Poly in Falmouth in October!
Listening to Nerina live is a constant joy. Right from the start in 2001 her songwriting has managed to move me, and each time on each album and each tour in a surprising and different way.
Whether she’s playing with her band, with strings, on her own, in a small club, or in a big theatre, she never fails to put on a terrific show, and if she’s stopping off near you on this next tour I urge you to go along.
She’s an absolute treasure, and the huge body of work she has created is so diverse: I suggest it would be impossible for anyone who loves music not to find something in her back catalogue that pushes at least one of their buttons.
As just one small anecdotal measure of why she should be cherished as one of our country’s finest: when he was doing an album release thing at Rough Trade for his last solo effort last year, Bernard Butler was happier to spend more time reminiscing about how much he had loved working with Nerina on her “Year Of The Wolf” record than he was talking about his own new release.
I could post so many of her songs as recommendations, but this one will do for today: