Jackie Leven died on Monday night. I wrote at length about Jackie last year, on his sixtieth birthday, and the song link there is still live. I met him several times over the years. It was hard to reconcile the affable bloke with the fantastic humour and amazing songs with the intense guy I first saw perform. That was with Doll by Doll at Nottingham’s Garage in 1979. Man, he was scary. ‘One of the few good shows we played’, he told me twenty years later. DBD were a great post-punk group with a handful of really strong numbers (including ballads like Janis & Strip Show that pointed the way to some of the later solo work) but they weren’t his first venture. I have…
Dead Money by Ray Banks from Blasted Heath on Vimeo. Blasted Heath is a new epublisher co-run by my agent, Allan Guthrie, which launched this week. Al is a great agent and knows more about eBooks than anybody else I know. So I figure it’s going to be a huge success, but I’m going to wish them luck anyway. Blasted Heath are publishing an interesting range of authors including Gerard Brennan and Douglas Lindsay. I’ve already downloaded two novels from the site. For those of you who are quick off the mark, today they’re GIVING AWAY the new book from the wonderful Ray Banks. I like Ray’s tight, northern noir so much that he’s the only author to get two novelettes in the Crime Express series…
Two years ago, The Arctic Monkeys hit Nottingham on their first arena tour and most fans felt they didn’t pull it off. The well-worked sardonic wit that worked so brilliantly in a smaller space became a hard rock dominated set which only satisfied hard core fans at the front. Two years on, the Ice Stadium has sold out again. The Arctics have become used to playing big gigs in the last two years, and their fourth album, ‘Suck It And See’, is their best since the first, full of glorious, pithy pop songs. This summer, in the weekend of its release, they played two huge Sheffield shows that were staggeringly good. Can they keep it up? The Vaccines come on to ‘Rock’n’Roll Radio’…
Literature happens in the provinces. In a week when the metropolitan literati fall over themselves to boast that they’ve never heard of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the great Tomas Tranströmer, Sue and I recalled seeing him read in Huddersfield, twenty odd years ago (Did she read with him? The mists of time won’t part). And I found myself on a panel at a new literary festival, entirely about independent presses, chaired by Simon Thirsk, founder of Bloodaxe Books, who publish Tranströmer in this country and will have all of his books reprinted by Tuesday. This was the first States of Independence West, after two very successful SoI East days in Leicester over the last two years, and it was good to see so many…
We booked our ‘Othello’ tickets the hour they went on sale: two for ourselves and one each as birthday presents for my sister and oldest friend. My youngest brother and his partner, who also live in Sheffield, decided to join us. We’re all huge fans of ‘The Wire’ and go to a lot of theatre at The Crucible, one of the UK’s best theatres, where productions cost half what they do in the West End. It’s the first week of term, so we decided to go for the matinee, rather than evening show, so as to leave more weekend free for preparation. On a good day, it’s a fifty minute drive but we allowed an hour and a half for traffic. We’d been on the…