Pound Lane, to be precise. A few weeks ago I found myself in Godalming, the local town of my latter schooldays. After lunch with my old friend David, my main adult conduit to the record business, I thought I’d go and see what now stood on the site of Record Corner, my main teenage conduit to the record business. Continue reading
Stories and reflections
In praise of anchovies
My recent blogs have been on weighty historical and politico-economic themes. Imminent blogs will offer more of the same, since the past few weeks have been consumed with reading weighty historical and politico-economic tomes. I will want to share my thoughts on all that before I forget what they are. All the more need, therefore, for a little light relief this week. So I will write in praise of the humble anchovy. Continue reading
Unintended consequences
I failed in my intention not to watch the royal wedding. I didn’t want to switch on the TV because I knew that, if I did, I would be glued to it throughout. My wife did want to switch it on because she knew that she could just dip in and out of it at will. Which she did, while I sat watching for hours on end. Continue reading
While pirates watched their dinosaurs by night
One of the many pleasures of having acquired two step-daughters is having acquired four grandchildren by proxy. And one of the joys of that, in a manner of speaking, is attending three nativity plays each year (not four: two of the little ones are twins). Continue reading
Tom Russell at the 100 Club
There’s a Mexican dead on a power line
He’s deader than yesterday’s communion wine
That’s a good opening for a song by any standards. It’s from Stealing Electricity by Tom Russell. He sang it last week at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, calling his audience ‘bastards’ many times over, as is his wont. Somewhere, I have a weird recital of the lyrics by the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They include one of my favourite couplets from any song: Continue reading
Plus ça change
Autumn has come early to the Tarn. Normally, the leaves are still green when we leave our house here at the end of October. We watch the gradation of colour as we drive back to England. But this year the colours started changing in late September, and the leaves started falling. The weather has still mostly been warm, but not in the mornings or evenings. The sun has seemed less able to recharge its batteries each day. [read more]
Doctor’s orders
For most of my life, health warnings, health advice, health anything, have been subjects to ignore. I recoil from faddishness and fussiness, and from people telling me what to eat and what not to eat. This is due not only to contrariness. To follow all the advice would be impossible, especially since much of it is contradictory, and to discriminate between different pieces of advice requires a level of competence that I do not possess. [read more]
Never mind the Truth, here are the Facts
In the early 1970s I was involved in some pilot shows for a radio programme. In the end, we did so many pilots that they practically amounted to a series. The first prototype was offered to LBC with a view to being broadcast to insomniacs at 3 a.m. The second and third were done for the BBC. The tape of the third show survives and it is pretty bad, not helped by being recorded in front of a live audience of three people and a cat. But the idea: the idea was good, way ahead of its time, and deserving better treatment than it got from us. [read more]
Richard Paniguian
My oldest friend, Sir Richard Paniguian, CBE, died suddenly on 25 June. This is my memoir of him, read at his funeral yesterday: [read more]
Teenage idols
Like any teenager, I had heroes. I’m not talking about pin-ups: that was something different. (Marianne Faithfull and Sandie Shaw, since you ask.) I mean proper male heroes: a sporting hero, a musical hero and a celluloid hero. One of the curiosities of my life is that – thanks to a series of staggering coincidences – by the time I was 20, I had met and talked to each of my teenage idols. [read more]
