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…
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…
Daily Mail 14.10.16 You’ve got to give it to him. Even at the age of seventy five Bob Dylan can still really get up people’s noses. Back in the Sixties it was the establishment of politicians and big business he irritated when his first hits were anti-war and anti-prejudice songs of youthful protest. Today it’s… Continue reading…
It isn’t every day that you spot a multi-millionaire travelling on the London Underground. That isn’t usually the style for men who are famous all around the world, who have swanky houses, dozens of gold records, and a long list of the phone numbers of beautiful blondes in their old address books. But that’s what… Continue reading…
For a writer some of life’s experiences are just too vivid and life changing not to find their way into print – and often into fiction, too. And so it was with the filming of one of my early novels, Trick Or Treat? For everyone involved, that movie was a disaster, with less than 30… Continue reading…
Professional footballers up and down the country did what they are paid to do over the weekend. They tried to score goals, and when some of them succeeded their various team mates rushed to engulf them in euphoric tangles of arms, legs and kisses. Why such passion? They play twice a week. A goal isn’t… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, April 7, 2016 Do you have a favourite year in music? Most of us do. We tell ourselves that songs and records were better at a certain time in our lives, and that their lyrics spoke to us in a way that other songs at other moments failed to do. And they probably… Continue reading…
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…
