Category: Music

  • The f*ggot debate

    It’s that time of year again: straight people demanding the right to sing and play the uncensored version of Fairytale of New York, which contains a homophobic slur. Huw Lemmey did an excellent piece about it last year: Well, this is it, from now on. Like the War on Christmas, the faggot debate is set…

  • Never boring

    I think Pet Shop Boys are one of the greatest singles bands of all time, and I’ve long been drawn to their mix of melancholy and euphoria. Their 1987 chart-topper It’s A Sin remains one of the strangest, most rewarding pop songs ever to reach number one in the UK chart. It’s also a hell…

  • Dele Fadele RIP

    There’s a lovely and very sad obituary of the late NME writer Dele Fadele in The Guardian. Fadele was an extraordinary writer and the obituary demonstrates how much of an impact he had on people. He certainly had an impact on me: in the 80s and 90s the music press was a lifeline for me,…

  • The ego has landed

    I’ve always considered myself to be terribly shy. That probably seems weird given that for most of my adult life I’ve been the singer in bands, but performing in front of people was always something I felt forced to do, not something I wanted to do. That’s because I had terrible stage fright, stage fright…

  • Come to the fringe

    I’ll be joining the line-up of this excellent online music, spoken word and visual arts event on Sunday. I don’t know all the other performers but the ones I do know are brilliant. This Sunday… @LGBTHealthy and @SomewhereEDI present Queer Fringe – Supporting and celebrating LGBTQ+ artists in Scotland in 2020 and beyond. 15 featured…

  • Lessons learnt

    I volunteer with SWIM, a charity dedicated to equality in music, and their latest wheeze is called Swimspire: members are asked to share any key lessons they’ve learnt, and I’m one of the members they asked. My four aren’t specifically for music, as I think they apply to work generally: The smartest, most talented people…

  • Songs from lockdown

    One of the things that helped keep me sane during lockdown was writing and performing music, and the Songs From Lockdown project was a big part of that: each week, songwriters would give the group a challenge and we’d go and write songs based on that challenge. You can listen to all the tracks here,…

  • Why some people can’t sing

    I’m a great believer that almost anybody can sing: it’s more of a craft than an art and the more you do it, the better you get. I stumbled across this 2011 piece, which suggests I’m wrong about 5% of people. NBC News: Why some of us are terrible singers [A] study found that anywhere…

  • An American icon

    Billboard has published an interesting profile of Dolly Parton, who Wikipedia describes as “an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, actress, author, businesswoman, and humanitarian”. That’s selling her short. She’s an incredible talent, incredibly generous and quite clearly the smartest person in any room. NME profiled her in 2017: A ferocious talent who grew up in…

  • “You’re a superhero but some days are Kryptonite”

    The final track on our new Messengers EP is called Time Will Put Your Enemies In The Ground. I swithered about releasing a song with that title in the current climate, where body counts are so awful we don’t talk about them any more, but I think people are intelligent enough to understand that the…