I go to gigs most weeks. Every year there tends to be a week where I have several. This week, it was five (nearly six, as I originally planned to see Nadia Reid at The Bodega on Monday). That’ll seem like overkill to some, but last year I was at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, where I would sometimes see five acts in a day, and I’m a regular at Green Man festival, where I’m likely to see even more. The week was bookended by shows from two bands whose front-men are 58, a few years younger than me: Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donohue at the Rescue Rooms and saxophonist/band leader Tony Kofi at Peggy’s Skylight. I’ve seen both many times before. Each band…

Every year from 1987 to 2022 my partner Sue and I put together a best of year cassette or CD, chronicling our favourite music from the year just ending. This year, after skipping a year because I was mourning the loss of Sue, I’ve decided to continue the tradition, but with a Spotify playlist. In 2022 it became clear that only a handful of people were still using CDs. This way saves me a lot of postage and time spent burning CDs. I’ve donated the money I’ve saved on CDs and Christmas cards I used to post to Oxfam’s Gaza appeal. My love of music helped me get through the tough months after losing my life partner and, in particular, my long delayed trip to…

When I wrote about Bob Dylan back in April I had no idea that the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour would return to the UK, where it finishes this weekend at The Royal Albert Hall, and Bob would once again include a Nottingham show. Since the tour had already visited the Motorpoint Arena I thought that tickets would be easier to come by, but no, the front blocks weren’t in the presale (and when they came on sale the price had doubled – to £210 – a fortune, even for Dylan). And demand was even higher than before. There are loads of people who’ve cottoned on the fact that this might be their last chance to see him. Easy to identify them as they made…

‘I see some folk enjoyed South By so much they decided to stick around,’ James McMurtry said from the stage, spotting me in my baseball cap near the front of Austin’s Continental Club, the best music venue I’ve come to know. I was watching saw him perform for the second time in eight days. Indeed, I enjoyed myself so much that I went back a third time on my last Wednesday night out in Austin, to see a double bill of his solo show at the club’s upstairs gallery, followed by a raucous show by Jon Dee Graham and his band downstairs. I wrote about Graham a few months ago (scroll down) and now feels like a good time to write about McMurtry. There’s a big catalogue…

At the end of August I took voluntary redundancy from my Creative Writing lectureship at Nottingham Trent. Lack of teaching commitments meant that I was able to attend the annual Graham Greene festival from the very beginning (last year I dropped in for an afternoon, and heard Greene’s nephew Nick Dennys discuss Greene as a book collector and seller). As longtime readers will know, I have a deep interest in Greene, stretching back to my first term of doing a literature degree, back in 1977, when I read just about all of Greene’s novels during the space of ten weeks. My novel The Pretender features Greene on the cover. I invented a scene where, just before his death, Greene mischievously validates a forgery by my…