Daily Mail, March 10, 2016 On the face of it he seemed the most unlikely musical collaborator for the Beatles. There were they, four cheeky, idiosyncratic, exuberantly ambitious boys from Liverpool, obsessed with rock music. And there was George Martin, already 36, classically trained and with the voice, discipline and demeanour of a middle ranking civil… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 21.1.16 Nothing freezes time as well as music. It carries us back. Hearing just a few lines of Hotel California on the radio and TV news yesterday took millions of us to a place in our minds where we were younger, the world more romantic and the future an exciting mystery still to… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 12.1.16 Cometh the moment, cometh the man, and David Bowie encapsulated the Seventies like no-one else in rock music. Who, other than someone so outside the norm, do different, could have hit upon the idea of turning the first space voyages into the most unconventional of hit songs? That Bowie did with Space… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, January 2, 2016 In myth it has become a fabled age – a time of pretty girls in mini-skirts driving zippy little mini-cars, of the young Michael Caine being happily promiscuous as Alfie at the cinema, of Ready, Steady, Go starting the weekend on television, and of British bands dominating the world of… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, December 21.12.15 His leaving of the field he loved was not as dignified as Jimmy Hill might have wished. Shrouded in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease, he was fortunate, perhaps, to have lain unaware as some of his five children from two earlier marriages squabbled publicly with his third wife, Bryony Hill, following… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 7.11.15 We take our childhood with us when we grow up. It’s impossible to leave it behind. And then, for better or worse, we carry it with us for the rest of our lives, a constant reminder of who and what made us the person we became. For Colin Welland, the actor and… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 6.11.15 The body of Elvis Presley was lying on view in an open coffin at his home Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, in August 1977, when a man in his late fifties stepped forward. With long wavy hair and a beard, and looking not unlike a general from the American Civil War, he bent… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, August 7, 2015 You would never have called it glamorous. Based in a couple of stifling, barrel arched cellars beneath a fruit and vegetable warehouse, eighteen steps down from a cobbled alleyway just four blocks from the River Mersey, it didn’t have a single pretence to sophistication. But to a teenage Cilla Black, by… Continue reading…
Daily Mail (13.6.15) Bob Dylan was getting angry. The trailer he’d been given as a changing room didn’t have a loo. His pregnant wife, Sara, had mentioned it first, and now, as he waited a two full hours while a problem with the sound on stage was fixed, pre-show nerves were making him uncomfortable. He… Continue reading…
The worst thing about getting older, isn’t the getting older part. It’s the watching everybody else getting younger. The London Underground is unforgiving for that. When I take a look down the carriage, I see that, not only am I alone in having white hair, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who can whistle… Continue reading…
