My favourite Joni Mitchell song (though, thankfully, no-one’s forcing me to choose) is from the 80s. ‘Two Grey Rooms’ is about a narrator who rents a flat so that they can watch somebody walking to work, someone who used to be their lover, though he or she looks to be too young. You look so youthful/time has been untruthful/heaven knows, I loved you thirty years ago. Joni once told the LA Times the song was inspired by a story from the youth of the German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. ‘It’s a story of obsession… about this German aristocrat who had a lover in his youth that he never got over. He later finds this man working on a dock and notices the path that…
Extended, more considered (ie less tactful) take on the show at the Royal Centre last weekend, the original of which appeared in yesterday’s Post. Dylan Moran has lost weight and gained a better haircut since he was last here, four years ago. He’s sharper in other regards, too, and starts with something he never does: audience participation. However, he warns ‘If you join in, I will judge you.’ It’s 22 years since the Irish comic, now 47, won a Perrier award, 14 since the glorious bookshop comedy, Black Books, opened the door for more TV and film. Yet his work in neither area has fully taken off and he remains primarily a stand-up, with a new tour every three or four years. Last time round,…
Slightly expanded version of my review in yesterday’s Post. Tomorrow, news of my next book. This Canadian mockumentary has run to twelve seasons (the first eleven recently went up on Netflix), but has always felt like a secret. Indeed, the only person I know who watches it, and is going to this tour, is the internet buddy who introduced me to them ten years ago. Yet the Concert Hall is crowded with, thirty-somethings. How did they hear about it? Some have taken the cast’s advice: come drunk and this docu-soap, about a pair of ne’er do well dope growers living in a Canadian Trailer Park and their neighbours, is best watched while well oiled. Julien (master mind/all day drinker) and the indefatigably dumb yet arrogant…
Not only has the Post stopped reviewing ‘minor’ gigs (ie anything smaller than Rock City) but most of the old reviews have gone from their website, so, in the summer doldrums, I’m going to post a few of the older reviews that I didn’t get round to posting at the time, unaltered (bar the odd corrected typo). Call it vanity, if you like, but this website (one of the UK’s first author blogs) is collected by the British Library’s UK Web Archive which means that the posts won’t disappear, and some may, in future, be of interest to fans of the artists reviewed. They’re not in any particular order. What happens when jazz meets folk? It’s not a common crossover. Last time I saw jazz guitarist…
A week’s break on a Greek island (escaping a kitchen refit) followed by a bank holiday weekend has meant that I could catch up on my reading, albeit with a stringent weight limit. And, unlike many of these blogs, where I read books I’ve saved up, most of the reading I did on Skiathos was guided by serendipity. One of my Children’s Literature student lent me The Hate You Give, which recently shared the Children’s Book Award at the Nibbies with The Lost Words. This longish YA novel, inspired by Black Lives Matter (& Tupac’s THUGLIFE tattoo) has won numerous other awards. I was a hundred pages in and polished off the rest of it on the flight and the following morning by the pool. This…