Hawkwind & Lemmy - January 2007 The Independent - January 11th, 2007

On a silent Sunday afternoon, fourteen years ago, I was waiting for a bus on Kings Avenue, Brixton, South London. In the bus shelter, a shaking man with a Special Brew can met my eye. I’ve always been someone strangers feel entitled to talk to, but few of my long conversations with racist pensioners in…

Political Correctness Gone Mad - January 2007 The Guardian - January 1st, 2007

As usual, this year’s British Comedy awards were not a hugely useful barometer of where comedy is at, based as they are on public polls of magazine readers largely unaware of how the art form may be flourishing beyond their TV sets, or influenced by the lobbying of industry insiders anxious to increase the market…

I’m Into CB. The Fall - January 2007 Going For A Song - January 1st, 2007

Choose a song which has, at sometime, seemed like a soundtrack to your life, they said. This choice, I am afraid, is largely about the act of listening itself. There were no other people involved. It does not trigger a memory of some vast social shift, or conjure a golden era. I did not emerge…

Fascination: Derek Bailey - January 2007 January 1st, 2007

I have about 150 albums by Derek Bailey. I first heard of him in 1995. I think, quietly, his music changed my life. By 1966, the 36 year old one-time session musician had abandoned tunes altogether to invent a totally new language for the guitar. Derek’s music was based entirely on improvisation and operated outside…

Sunny Murray - December 2006 The Wire Magazine - December 1st, 2006

It was hard to say exactly when the veteran free-jazz drummer Sunny Murray’s performance in the back room of this outwardly unassuming Finsbury Park Working Men’s club began. Murray’s current collaborators, the British duo of bassist John Edwards and saxophonist Tony Bevan, were nowhere to be seen when he sauntered on stage to make final…

Lucinda Williams, Live - November 2006 The Sunday Times - November 12th, 2006

Lucinda Williams is one of the finest living exponents of the well made song, making sceptics into country rock apologists, and her uncommonly lean and literate lyrics inevitably inspire speculation on the influence of her father, the poet Miller Williams. Now in her mid-50’s, Williams is a sand-blasted frontierswomen, her voice coarsened into richer colours.…