Here’s an extended version of my review from today’s Nottingham Post. It’s been a long wait. Six years since her last album of new songs, ‘Humming By The Flowered Vine’ and a wonderful Rescue Rooms show, Laura Cantrell is back, elegantly dressed in black.  Her ‘Kitty Wells’ Dresses’ tribute album has only one new song (the title track, a demo of which can be found here) but is a welcome reminder of the 92 year old Queen of Country’s career, which stretches back more than 70 years.  Laura takes to the stage with a lovely ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’, then explains the delay. During the 2005 tour, she was, unknowingly, pregnant. Daughter Bella celebrates her fifth birthday later this month. Tonight, the hour and…

  Short post this week, as the sun is shining and I have a huge pile of dissertations to mark, while I wait to Skype my partner in New Zealand. For her, it’ll be bedtime, while I’ll be heading out for a friend’s birthday lunch. We shall be discussing how I use her proxy vote on Thursday, in particular, on the AV referendum. I’m going to vote yes, because it’s fairer, and a small step towards more proportional representation. All of the arguments against aren’t about fairness but about results, and, in particular, punishing the Lib Dems. But if, as seems likely, the ‘no’s prevail, the surest winners will be the Tories, who’ve already gerrymandered boundary changes to ensure it’ll be much easier for them…

I first saw The Fiery Furnaces on an NME tour with Franz Ferdinand. I’d gone for the latter but the Furnaces blew them away, with their thrilling, mash-up songs, reminiscent of the Who’s A Quick One but utterly  original. I’ve seen them two or three times since, including one time at on a tiny stage in a club where they played all new material to a small late show crowd and were equally good. Martin Stannard and I bumped into Eleanor Friedberger (the band consists of her and her brother, Matthew) on our way out and I told her how much we liked her music. It could have felt strange, shaking the hand of this petite woman twenty years my junior but, hey, when it…

I trooped into town earlier for Record Store Day, the great independent shops celebration taking place all over the world. I was just too late to get one of the two Ryan Adams double 7″s that Nottingham’s Music Exchange had received, but am hopeful that my friend Mike has picked me up a copy of the expensive REM 7″ pack at Sheffield’s Record Collector. I treated myself to a 7″ of Lambchop doing two covers, one of them the fine Emitt Rhodes song ‘Time Will Show The Wiser’, which I know from Fairport Convention’s first album. On the way home, I stopped in at FOPP and couldn’t resist paying three quid (half the price of the 7″!) they were asking for a reissue of Hatfield…