First published in the Daily Mail 13.10.2020. From the very beginning I was afraid of Covid 19. That was in January when I first began to read reports of deaths in China. If that ever reaches the UK I’ll do everything I can to avoid catching it, I told myself. So, when it did inevitably… Continue reading…
‘Probably the best novel about movie making ever written’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=shaDOWS+ON+A+WALL+RAY+CONNOLLY&ref=nb_sb_noss A limousine is discovered at the bottom of a river. Inside are the bodies of two world famous Hollywood stars, a young film director and a famous rock musician. Meanwhile not far away a movie about Napoleon is massively over-budget and the producer has gone… Continue reading…
(Renee Zellweger’s performance as Judy Garland is so good and believable that it drove me back to my cuttings book to find my Evening Standard review of Garland’s opening night at the Talk of the Town in London on December 30, 1968. A few small cuts for length had needed to be made by the… Continue reading…
Will you be wrapping up in a scarf, coat and woolly hat and going on a Boxing Day walk this year? Hundreds of thousands of us will be. Maybe a million. It’s a British tradition, and, if you’re really into it, there are now published routes for all parts of the nation, from the Cairngorms… Continue reading…
We see his face on the sides of buses, in magazines and on billboards as he helps sell cars, jeans, beer and Pepsi Cola. While in the souvenir shops we find his image on T-shirts, posters, calendars and postcards, even on US Mail stamps. Always he’s the epitome of cool, the perfect marketing image for… Continue reading…
‘Show me a boy who never wanted to be a rock star and I’ll show you a liar…’ was a line I wrote decades ago that was used on the poster for the film Stardust. It caught on as a saying at the time and is now being quoted back at me as Stardust, and… Continue reading…
When I was 18 the only opportunity I had of foreign travel was to stand at the side of the road with my thumb out, and that was how I first saw the Mediterranean. I’d just sat my A-levels and my travelling companion was Malcolm, my sister’s boyfriend. He was a medical student. I’ve no… Continue reading…
Studio Canal will be issuing new DVDs of both That’ll Be the Day and Stardust later this month, launching them both with special showings of both films at London cinemas. If you would like to book tickets, here are the links. (I’ll be doing a Q & A with producer David Puttnam at That’ll Be… Continue reading…
Beatles fans love anniversaries, but few have been celebrated as much as the one this week when it was fifty years since the release of the group’s last album, Abbey Road. As expected, there is a remixed version of that swansong LP (that being what we still called albums in those days), complete with the… Continue reading…
I will be appearing at the Henley Literary Festival at 6.30 pm on Friday, October 4, talking about my biography – John Lennon: A Restless Life and, I suspect, other Beatles subjects. Continue reading…
