We spent Easter week in Deia, Majorca, where my friend Alan Sillitoe used to visit Robert Graves (whose house we went to) and one of my old musical heroes, Kevin Ayers, spent much of the 80’s and some of the 90’s. His ashes were buried there last year and there’s a plaque for him in the church cemetery, directly above that for his old mate and fine guitarist Ollie Halsall, who OD’ed in Deia in 1992. The place also has connections with Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen and Gong, who used to hang out with Graves’ son, Tomas. We weren’t allowed into Graves’ orchard area where Wyatt built a small ampitheatre, though my brother Paul checked it out a couple of years ago. Spent a…
Two years ago, when my partner had a new collection of poetry coming out, I took the publisher, John Lucas to The Guitar Bar (part of Bar Deux, near The Forest) and suggested that we had the launch there. The night was a roaring success and led to the Jazz and Poetry series that runs for ten months of the year, on the second Wednesday of every month, from 8 until late. Admission is currently free, with donations for the poets’ travelling expenses, and the evening always features at least an hour of classic jazz from Four In The Bar (with John Lucas on trumpet; Tony Elwell on clarinet; Ian Wheatley on guitar and Ken Eatch on bass). Here they are: The first season featured…
If Jenny Diski has got it right (and she usually does), the ban on UK prisoners being sent books in the post actually happened back in November 13, but has only gone viral this month. That was because of an article by Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League For Penal Reform, to which I belong. Good for her. The Howard League are taking legal action (donate), with Geoffrey Robertson QC, to challenge the government’s perverse decision to treat books as some kind of luxury to be denied to prisoners as part of their ongoing commitment to retribution rather than rehabilitation. There were a bunch of very good letters about this in last Thursday’s Guardian (including an excellent one at the top by…
This is the full version of my Wayne Evans interview, most of which appeared in last Friday’s Post. Last time I interviewed Wayne Evans, Gaffa’s songwriter, singer and bass player, was for my student newspaper in 1978. That was at The Imperial in James St, where Gaffa had a residency that pulled in hundreds of punters from every part of Nottingham, every Tuesday night. They deserved to be huge. We thought they would be. Gaffa have been going for 40 years, if you ignore a 30 year hiatus between 1981 and 2011, when they reformed for a storming gig at Nottingham Contemporary, where they return on March 1st. The next gig marks the launch of the first CD appearance of their only LP and a…
If you’ve been waiting for a cheaper, mass market edition of the second Bone & Cane novel, What You Don’t Know, you’ll have had a long wait. Sadly, its publisher, Tindal St Press, went under 15 months ago. If you want a paper copy, I’d get a move on, as the book sold out its print run, but there are still a few around. In the meantime, the ebook edition has remained at an artificially high price, nearly eight quid. And there’s been nothing I could do about it. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, as of last week, I have the rights back to both Bone & Cane novels and they’re available again at bargain prices – for a limited…