Embarrassment is a tricky emotion to convey in a song. And when it is used (I think Madness once had a song called ‘Embarrassment’), it tends to swamp everything else. It becomes shame. In Randy Newman’s ‘I Miss You’, from his 1999 CD Bad Love, embarrassment is there, but so is regret, love, humour, guilt… Continue reading The Friday Song – Randy Newman’s ‘I Miss You’
Read more
I’ve had the idea of once a week celebrating a song which means a lot to me but which is perhaps less well-known than they should be. Like Chaim Tannenbaum’s ‘London, Longing For Home’. When I saw a rare solo performance by Tannenbaum at the London Palladium in 2016, have been introduced to his music… Continue reading The Friday Song: Chaim Tannenbaum’s ‘London, Longing For Home’
Read more
It has been clear-out time. I have been off the booze, filing the accumulated correspondence of the past three years, tidying up anything within reach. I have become a crashing bore, in fact. And it will be worth it, this great purge of the house with a January enema (anyone who thinks this metaphor is… Continue reading How many books really ‘spark joy’? Damned few….
Read more
When I first started writing songs, about ten years ago, I took them around to folk clubs. One, I discovered too late, took a hard-line, faintly Stalinist, approach to any music that did not belong to what is reverently described as ‘the Tradition’. The song I sang was mildly rude and, apparently, not part of… Continue reading ‘Twas in the merry month of May, I went to a folk club down m’way…’
Read more
When I’m feeling disheartened by the fiction I’ve been reading (it happens), I reach for something by Philip Roth. He never lets me down. It’s not that his books are all masterpieces of the order of Sabbath’s Theater or The Counterlife, but that, even when he misfired (Our Gang, the Nixon satire, or the disastrous… Continue reading Philip Roth: ‘It was my good luck that happiness didn’t matter to me….’
Read more
It was when the Independent lost its best columnist Christina Patterson that I knew I no longer felt at home at the paper. By ‘lost’, I mean ‘fired’. Christina had been there for ten years and at the time was writing two columns a week plus an interview or profile. For me, a freelance Independent columnist… Continue reading Falling apart again, never wanted to…
Read more
The question was where to play Will Self. He would be a dominant presence in central defence, of course, but what we needed was a goal-scorer. As player-manager, I saw him in the role of the traditional centre-forward – a big lad in the number 9 shirt who could wind up the opposition and knew… Continue reading When Will Met Matthew
Read moreSoon after the death of Fidel Castro, I pointed out somewhere online that, for all its brave resistance to the crude might of the United States, the Cuban regime did have the unpleasant habit of locking up those who disagreed with it. Kangaroo courts had sentenced writers, academics, teachers and librarians for up to 28… Continue reading We’re with stupid – the seductive lure of idiocy on the left and the right
Read moreI recently came across a literary quotation by Hugh Grant. Asked by an interviewer about whether he wanted to write, he came up with an impressively honest answer. ‘It’s actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can’t,’ he said. That spoke to me, as I go… Continue reading The art of not writing – some practical guidance
Read more
First, an apology. This is a small story. It is about a village, its school, some houses and a white line. It would not be out of place in one of the quieter episodes of The Archers. To some, the fact that I want to write about it may seem like the final, irrefutable evidence… Continue reading Crossing the line: when local politicians go bonkers
Read more
