Daily Mail August 19, 2017 Elvis Presley died forty years ago this week, but as, over the decades, so many fans have continued to insist that he is still alive, it’s become a commonplace joke that he’s been spotted on a ranch in Arizona, or on the checkout at Lidl in Nottingham, or even, as… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 11.08.2017 If Elvis Presley had never existed, the film Love Me Tender would still have been made. But it wouldn’t have been called Love Me Tender, and wouldn’t have had that song in it – or, for that matter, any other songs. That being so, in all probability, neither you nor I would… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 10.8.17 Glen Campbell was a brave man. You have to be brave to set off on a vast nationwide tour of the US fully aware that you have Alzheimer’s Disease, that you may not always know where you are, who is on stage with you or the order of the famous songs that… Continue reading…
24.6.17 Never one for roughing it, not even Bob Dylan was going to get me under canvas, when, in August 1969, a couple of brothers called Foulk managed to tempt the great man to their Isle of Wight Festival of Music. Does Dylan have any idea where the Isle of Wight is, I remember thinking… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 27.5.17 You can hardly fail to have noticed that a rather special anniversary is to be celebrated next Thursday. With a festival in Liverpool, a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, several new documentary films on television, and, on the radio, a blizzard of nationwide reverence, earnest discussion and music it will be… Continue reading…
Leaning forward into his BBC microphone, headphones clamped to his ears, finger on the fader and a walking stick alongside, Brian Matthew at work looks more like a cricket commentator than the oldest disc jockey in the country – and, possibly, the world. He’s 83 and the congregation who turn to his Sounds of The… Continue reading…
Barry Norman was one of those people who always seemed wryly amused by life – so much so that on TV he came across as an agreeable friend who had just been to see some films he thought we might like to know about. Film criticism wasn’t a life and death matter, he seemed to… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 13.1.2017 There’s no substitute for talent. There really isn’t. If you doubt that, take a look at Ed Sheeran. With that thatch of red hair, and those muscular arms decorated with multitudinous tattoos, at first glance you might mistake him for a farm labourer who has just left his tractor in a field.… Continue reading…
Mail On Sunday. 27.11.16 Some couples celebrate their golden wedding anniversary by holding a feast for friends and family to show how successfully they’ve made it through the steeplechase of marriage. But that wasn’t for us. Instead, Plum, my wife, decided that we would join others of the Third Age and that she would educate… Continue reading…
12.11. 2016 Daily Mail Leonard Cohen was a poet, a singer, a novelist, a gypsy, a Jewish Zen-Buddhist and an unashamed ladies’ man. And what a ladies’ man! When the news of his death in Los Angeles was announced yesterday by his son, Adam, a little piece of romance went out of the world. At… Continue reading…
