A slightly extended version of my review from the Nottingham Post. Richard Thompson’s ‘power trio’ is a distillation of what has been his core band of the last ten years, last seen here on the Dream Attic tour. That time, perhaps unwisely, he devoted the first 75 minutes to his new album. I bought eight tickets for that show, and none of the people I went with chose to come this time. Nuff said. Tonight, the band start with three songs from Electric (a stronger album) but play just three more new songs during the rest of the set, which blends the new with an astute selection of classics and interesting choices. The set list is clearly aimed at long time fans, some of whom…

I’d waited thirty-three years to see a Keith Jarrett solo show and forked out forty quid of xmas present money in order to join the South Bank Centre and get priority booking. This worked out well, as we arrived in time to check out the sold out Light Show at the Hayward Gallery, a stunning array of illuminated pieces and installations, that Southbank members get in to for free. There are notices everywhere about photography not being allowed, but these were frequently flouted. Before leaving, I took my partner for a return visit to Olafur Eliasson’s incredible night garden of 27 strobe lit (hence you couldn’t stay for long) water sculptures just before the gallery closed and we would have had the room to ourselves…

I was in two minds about whether to go and see the new movie of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, probably the novel that’s excited me most in the last decade. Recently, I made it the one set book on NTU’s second year Art of Writing course, and I’d promised to organise a trip for the students. But then the movie was put back until after the course had finished. Their portfolios, returned on Friday, demonstrated that the novel (a Russian doll structure in eleven parts – six stories that are each interrupted by another, perhaps linked, story, then resumed on the other side: what do you mean you haven’t read it?) had gone down well, inspired the students to be ambitious and explore multiple genres.…

Last year, we were listening to ‘Sounds of the Sixties’ while reading The Guardian in bed on a Saturday morning, as we are wont to do, when a song came on that Sue recognised. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, and I explained that it was the number that had opened the terrific play about the legacy of the sixties, ‘Last of the Haussmans’, that we had seen two nights before. ‘It’s a band called Family’, I said. ‘Fantastic group. They split up just after I saw them, in 1973.” She held out The Guardian guide. ‘You mean this group?’ There it was. ‘For one night only: an evening with Family at Shepherds Bush Empire.’ I got up and did what had to be done. I rang…

  Every year since 1988, we’ve given out twenty-odd best of year CDs (formerly cassettes, but a Spotify playlist wouldn’t cut it) to our music loving friends and, for the last few years, I’ve put all the songs on this blog, together with sleeve notes for each song. So if you’re here to find out about my books, scroll down or check out the Beat novels currently coming out as eBooks, with all new afterwords. If you’re an unhappy copyright holder, just contact me, but the point of these downloads and the cds is to persuade people to investigate the new music that I love. And if you’re a recipient of these CDs, you might like to look away until yours arrives (the first ones…