Last week my friend Giles asked how many albums I’d listened to this year and I guessed at a hundred. In putting together a list of albums that I’d listened to properly (as against tried and discarded) it came to almost exactly a hundred. Many (Kamasi Washington’s three disc opus The Epic, for instance) I haven’t had time to form a considered opinion of. The number keeps growing, even as last year’s releases are pushed aside by leaks of this year’s (Bowie’s Blackstar is very good in part). Anyway, usual drill, I cut off my list at the point where it feels like there’s serious competition to get in. The 41 is based on how much I enjoyed the album over the year, not seeking…
We didn’t think we’d done it. And we were OK with that. The eighteen months we spent working on our bid to become a UNESCO city of literature made so many things happen that, in a way, we’d already won. We encouraged so much creativity and civic pride, engineered numerous events and several publications. The process of putting together the bid in itself helped the city’s literature scene to become more joined up. And we made a start on the biggest task of all, using Nottingham literature to improve the city’s literacy. But UNESCO accreditation – a permanent honour – is a big ask. We knew from the start that the odds were against us. We were told that UNESCO wanted to reach into continents…
This year’s sleeve-notes are a little late, for reasons suggested by the post above, so I shall be posting the tracks slightly more frequently than once a day in order to catch up. For those of you new to this, my partner Sue and I have been making best of year CDs (or cassettes!) for our friends since 1988. In recent years, I’ve written about the songs chosen on this blog (MP3s are low bit-rate and only up for a while. They will be removed at copyright holder’s request). The title of this year’s CD, the cover of which (forced rhubarb in our allotment, by Sue) is above, may need explaining. ‘Bitter’, because a few weeks ago my closest friend, Mike Russell, died after a…
This is the first of two very busy weekends of literature. When we launched Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature bid, a year ago this month, it was impossible to imagine the amount of literary activity that the bid would help generate. Indeed, when we submitted the bid, in July, none of the things I’m going to this week were even mentioned in the vast array of activities we featured: this afternoon’s Asian Poetry Festival, with Kavya Rang, the first Nottingham Poetry Festival, Book Off at Rough Trade and yesterday’s fantastic event, organised by Andy Barrett’s Excavate company for the Being Human 15 festival, But I Know This City. All were organised after the bid went in. I have a big article about BS Johnson in…
A belated thanks to everybody who came to my book launch at Rough Trade last week. Great to see so many old (and new) friends, but it was a very sad night for me, as my oldest, dearest friend, Mike Russell, had died earlier in the day, after a long illness. We shared a passion – some would say obsession – with popular music and went to many, many gigs together. We were meant to be at two in the week before he died: this one and this one. Two days before the onset of his final decline, he stood throughout a raucous Libertines show at Rock City, which he enjoyed enormously. That was our last show together. The Saturday before last, at the Northern…