Music

I started my writing career proper at university. I’d always written little bits – you can’t be surrounded by books all your life and not have your imagination fired – but I’d never thought of being published. These things didn’t happen, not to normal people like me. Writers all lived somewhere else in a big block of flats and had been writing all their lives.

The reason I got into writing was because I was going to a gig. Now, I went to loads of gigs at university, but I seem to recall I was going to see the Manics on my own dime and wanted to know if the university paper, the Ripple, wanted a review. Nobody I knew read the university paper. They seemed to pile them up outside the union bar (the Redfearn), where they stood ignored for about a month before being binned. I didn’t even know where the Ripple offices were when I went to make an offer, and had to get one of the cleaners to point it out.

The office was organised chaos. I was directed to a very tall blonde girl called Lucy who, if she wasn’t part of Great Britain’s Olympic hockey team in 2012 I’ll be amazed, and who turned out to be the co-editor of the music section. She heard my offer, and then shot back with her own – did I fancy being interviewed for her position?

It was one of those sliding doors moments: we get to recognise few of them in life. So I said yes, and her, Allie and the newspaper’s editor Liz took me up to the bar to interview me then and there. I babbled incoherently (I recall strongly responding to one of their queries with a long-winded stream of nothing and then ‘So, to answer your question, I don’t know). I left the Redfearn, in a daze, and took a call that my best friend had fallen down a flight of stairs and was in hospital. About an hour later, I took another call from Lucy offering me the editor’s gig.


So that’s how I became a writer, and it was bloody ace. Well, writing about music should be, shouldn’t it? Hence why I did it on and off for about a decade, before being paid in CDs wasn’t as good at age thirty as it was at age twenty-one. So here are some links to things I’ve done – not everything, because some of it is crap (the Ripple stuff is largely execrable) and you won’t recognise stuff from the turn of the Millennium anyway – but enough to show you what I was about.

SINGLE REVIEWS (first two for Ripple, the rest for various websites)

Muse - 'Feeling Good'
Serafin - 'Serafin EP1'
The Brent Flood - 'The Autumn 2007 EP'
The Domino State - 'What's The Question'
The Heart Strings - 'Jose Fernandez'
Heat From A Dead Star - 'The Lighthouse EP'

ALBUM REVIEWS (first three for Ripple, restfor websites)

 The Charlatans - Wonderland
Devics - My Beautiful Sinking Ship
The Strokes - Is This It
Alex Cornish - Until The Traffic Stops
The Juice - Blood For Water
Reuben's Thread feat. Rachael Rachael - Colour Me Blue
Von Sudenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions
ZallaNayver - Searching For Random

LIVE REVIEWS (first two appeared in Ripple, the rest for various print media in the Midlands)

 Carling Leeds Weekend 2001
Stereophonics (Birmingham NIA 20/11/01)
Kraftwerk (Carlong Apollo Manchester, 17/03/04)
The Open (Walsall Wharf 03/04/04)
James Dean Bradfield (Birmingham Barfly 11/10/06)
Manic Street Preachers (Wolverhampton Civic 21/05/07)

MISC ARTICLES (The Message all appeared in Ripple, the other article either appeared on or was unused for a regular site I was published on called Tasty Fanzine. If you're reading Shane, hello!)

 The Message 1
The Message 3
The Message 7
Ten Reasons I Love Kraftwerk

FANZINES

Leathered/Shot Down on the Pavement

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"We Don't Want to Give Anybody Sleepless Nights": Revisiting 'Ghostwatch'

Image
Lights explode and the studio is plunged into demonic darkness. The souls manning the telephone lines have long since vanished, leaving only  Mike Smith ’s panicked requests after his wife's welfare. Papers whip across the screen, caught in a maelstrom of malevolence. Watches attached to wrists hundreds of miles away have come to a dead stop, and there have been multiple reports of inanimate objects tearing themselves from surfaces and throwing themselves across rooms all across the land. The people of Great Britain watch entranced as Michael Parkinson , controlled by some force that earlier in the evening he’d foolishly dismissed, sleepwalks beyond the camera’s lens, muttering a nursery rhyme. Yes, the BBC has paid heavily for messing with the supernatural alright, and on Hallowe’en , of all nights. Samhain ; the night the divide between the living and the dead is gossamer thin. Sarah Greene has passed through a doorway of her own, until this night just a cupboard beneath the sta...
Read more

World Cup Mascots - Which is Best?

Image
There are a lot of things that the modern World Cup has killed off: embarrassing team songs ; clearly carved-up group games between sides ; any sense of sodding perspective about England's progress . But oddly, the existence of a tournament mascot goes from strength to strength. This is for two reasons. Firstly, it's so the organisers can sell a load of old tat to kids, and secondly, it's because it's a representative shorthand for the host nation, like that dull overlong bit they put on while you're voting in Eurovision . But there's no denying that the marketing of the mascot has become both slicker and in some ways, slightly sadder for it. I decided to run the rule over every football World Cup mascot since the concept began, having a ponder on the who, why and what the hell. At the end I'll have a bash at the one I think I like the most, so if you've got any thoughts, drop me a line in the comments below: 1966 - World Cup Willie The trailblazer by wh...
Read more

Mad As Hell

Image
So, welcome back to my world. It’s debatable whether or not it’s better than the real world, but trust me, I wouldn’t have voted for him, so there’s that. People use the phrase “in a perfect world”, but it seems like 2016 was fuckin’ Nirvana compared to the shitshow this year is looking to be. Naturally, I’m back online to spread a little sunshine on proceedings, because my Smiths blog went really well (sample review: ‘you’re talking shit’). There are people better qualified and give a toss more than me about international politics. The Falklands Conflict was memorably described by Jorge Luis Borges as being “like two bald men fighting over a comb”, and the world has become a more spiteful and petulant place since the chilliest days of the Cold War. All I can say is that historically you don’t know you’ve lived through a crisis until you see it on a documentary. I watched some Channel 5 thing about 1990 the other day; turns out it was full of barricades, resignations and civil d...
Read more