Tales from The Boneyard: Our Anniversary, The Teenage Werewolves, and Dr Diablo & The Rodent Show

Last Sunday night found me in Camden Town with Gracie, standing in a cold queue outside The Underworld Club between a guy from Tottenham with Gene Vincent painted on the back of his leather, the oldest punk in the world, and some young bloke who’d just joined an indie band I now can’t remember the…

This Time It’s Personal LIVE – Something Like a Review

here are few things finer in the creative arts than a project that is totally unexpected but in hindsight makes perfect sense, like the end of a really good novel. The album This Time It’s Personal (Sony 2016) is one of those projects, a musical collaboration between the godfather of performance poetry, Dr. John Cooper Clarke, and legendary guitarist, singer/songwriter and author, Hugh Cornwell, the original Guildford Strangler, a cultural event as modest as it is huge.

Remembering Bowie

Aside from my Facebook page I didn’t really join in that publicly with the collective global grief expressed yesterday at the news of Bowie’s passing. This was largely because I couldn’t think of any tribute that didn’t sound in some way trite. The man was just too big. I can’t think of any cultural correlatives other than Elvis and John Lennon, and I hadn’t therefore really felt what I was feeling yesterday, I realized last night, since 1980 when news broke of John Lennon’s murder. A friend of mine expressed the feeling very well on Facebook in the morning: ‘F**king hell. Even though I wasn’t his greatest fan it’s not right that he’s no longer in the world. He’s always been around. David Bowie shouldn’t be dead, for f**k’s sake.’