When the Everly Brothers had their first hits in the late 50s they were both barely more than boys, and the sound of those two late adolescents harmonising about sorrow, pain and the hurts of teenage love, was imprinted on the memories of a generation. So when I finally met them after a London concert I… Continue reading…
They looked like a couple of teenage Mississippi riverboat gamblers, thin as blades with their white shirts, black waistcoats and luxuriant hair. But when they picked up those black guitars, stood head to head close to the microphone and sang, a generation of budding schoolboy musicians pricked up its collective ears and listened. They were… Continue reading…
If John Lennon hadn’t become a rock star he might instead have made a very good stand-up comic. Get him talking and off he would go into a funny, self-knocking soliloquy, in which he was often the butt of his own jokes. ‘I’m either a performing flea or a crutch for the world’s social lepers,’… Continue reading…
What Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Lord Hailsham, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Roger Vadim, Michael Caine, Leonard Cheshire, Paul Raymond, Eric Morecambe, Mick Jagger, Terry Wogan, Elvis Presley, Dennis Hopper, David Attenborough, Tony Benn, Charlie Watts, Enoch Powell, Marc Bolan and Jimmy Savile (and many more) told me… There are many good and honourable reasons for… Continue reading…
There is a huge void in my memory that stretches from the middle of last April until the end of July. Sometimes it feels as though I was dead during that time. I was, in fact, in a coma, lying for over a hundred days in an intensive care unit in a London hospital. I… Continue reading…
What about that! A guy who stammers is the most powerful man in America – where, of course, they call such an impediment a stutter. Yes, Joe Biden is a stammerer. You may not have noticed it so successful has Joe become at avoiding words he finds difficult to say. But he knows he stammers,… Continue reading…
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…
(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…
