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  1. No, it’s not the latest farewell tour by the Who… it’s the final (perhaps) book by 80s/90s national music press warrior Stuart Bailie.

    Stuart – one of my pavement café pals in Belfast, and a fellow scribbler and carer about music, though our areas of interest may only intersect once in a while (like, say, enthusiasm for local troubadour Joshua Burnside) – has finally selected a representative sample of his adventures in covering popular music and created a superb anthology.

    It is perhaps a wider range than you might think, from a brilliant previously unpublished piece on Liam Clancy to a tetchy encounter with John Lee Hooker to Britpop in its pomp and the various rabble-rousing paths out of punk and into the modern era. I was delighted to play a small part in the process (proofreading, soundboarding) and our mutual neighbour Norman Boyd, another muso, has done the interior design. Stuart’s daughter Betsy has created a terrific cover design, in my view.

    It’s a patchwork insight into the lost world of the weekly music press in Britain, when the lives, works and opinions of people who made music seemed to matter a great deal to a significant number of people. What would Morrissey say next, a world wondered? Sometimes, Stuart Bailie was there to find out. Other times, he might be asking gangly men in cowboy hats from Scotland who were peddling fairies at the bottom of the garden if they were really serious. He didn’t pull punches! In short prefaces to some of these retrospective delights, Stuart will sometimes reflect that maybe he was a bit too brusque, that he eventually ‘got’ the fairy-tales after a bit more listening and reading; other times, he’ll tell us that he was too lenient by half.

    Reflecting on this world and on his own path into it in London and then his phase two back in Belfast in the twenty-first century, where he founded music resource centre the Oh Yeah Centre and more recently published ten issues of a classy, fearlessly independent music magazine (plus a series of books), Stuart’s 17,000-word Introduction to this volume is among the best things he’s written, I reckon. A portrait of the artist as a young man without hubris but with compassion and insight. After the fire, the fire still burns…

    This is the fourth in Stuart’s series of entirely self-published books in recent years, since the popular ‘Trouble Songs’ in 2018 – the others being ’75 Van Songs’ (about the famous local pasties and pastries buff) and ’75 Revolutions’ (about The Godfather). It is, I believe, the last in that series – and the one that crowns a life’s work, in a way.

    As before, Stuart is relying entirely on advance sales via crowdfunding to make printing possible. It’s Year Zero spirit in action, maybe one last time, decades after whenever that was… I’m familiar with that nerve-wracking process myself (albeit less familiar with Year Zero). So let me commend Stuart’s book to you. We’re all chipping away at our own little corners of the far-from-gold-paved arts world; we can only keep doing stuff if people support it – the glory days of huge money washing around music in the late twentieth century are long gone, and if that ever applied to the books world, I never saw it, even back then. I saw just about enough to get the job done on a wing and a prayer. We all want to ‘make a contribution’. Stuart has definitely ticked that box – and here’s the evidence in one rollicking read! 🙂 Yours for only 16 quid, guv.

    Kickstarter link here:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digwithit1/the-song-is-nearly-over-music-stories-1985-2025/checkouts/216978453/thanks

  2. Kicked. Thanks for the heads-up. Looking forward to reading this.

    By the way, the url in the OP needs shortening to lose the “/checkouts/……….” part at the end, otherwise you get a 404! I’m guessing what you posted was the url when you’d submitted your pledge @Colin-h!

    Maybe the @Mods could lop the end off the link?

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