There are star interviews – Ian McAskill, Patrick Moore, Nicholas Parsons… – and fanatical football anthems such as ‘The Robins Aren’t Bobbins’ for Altrincham FC, coupled with hostile taunts at opposition supporters (“you’re going home in an organized football coach”). Continue reading
Certain Irish people I know used to have little time for the Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem. Perhaps in the same way that some Scousers got pissed off with stereotypes of rum-voiced mop-top Beatles (and those Disney vultures in The … Continue reading
At bloody last, the deep joy of having a half-decent musical event on my own muddy doorstep!. It’s five years since I re-located to the god-forsaken East Midlands and, in that time, I’ve struggled manfully to get a handle on … Continue reading
Hold the fluffy pillows! Love him or hate him, there is no middle ground, The Salford Lad’s turned fifty and for once deserves your appreciation, if only for being provocative and original, the agent provocateur of pop, the patron saint of outsiders. Then, at dawn tomorrow, in the spirit of his recent track ‘It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore’, you can loudly crow: “Did you really think we meant, all of those syrupy, sentimental things, that we said yesterday?”
Weird being back in Manchester to see Howard Devoto and Magazine recently. If there is an odder, stranger or more unlikely front-person in the history of popular music then I’d gladly embrace them. He’s somewhere between Kinski as Nosferatu and … Continue reading
