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Imagine I started a petition claiming that the government was going to ban bees and demanding that it didn’t. “We’re not going to ban bees,” the government would respond. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” How would you report that? Would you: (a) Conclude that ‘arseholes create petition about imaginary problem’ wasn’t newsworthy in… [more]
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Same Star is another of David’s compositions and another vocal where I appear to be channelling E from Eels, which of course is never a bad thing. It’s a musical version of the Scots phrase “we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns”: we have much more in common than what divides us, and we’re all busking it.… [more]
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A Hollow Victory was one of the first songs David and I wrote for the current crop of music, but it took a while to get right: the superbly retro electro stomp was there from the outset but it took a bit of fiddling to find a version we both liked. It’s a companion piece… [more]
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This is Pushing Air, a song about sound and fury signifying nothing. Ironically, it started off as sound and fury: I love noisy guitar rock and that tends to be my go-to for songwriting, but sometimes you need a stiletto, not a blunderbuss. This is a stiletto, written during a time when I really needed… [more]
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There’s a good piece in The Pool by Yomi Adegoke about Alan Sugar’s racist tweet, or rather the reaction to it from media types such as the odious Piers Morgan. As Adegoke points out, there does appear to be a double standard here. When a black presenter says something that appears to be racist, they’re gone. White… [more]
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This is another one for which David wrote pretty much all the music (the quiet strings from the second verse are mine). There’s something really dysfunctional about it, deliberately so: the timing of the main keyboard part has a great tension to it, which really makes the song. It’s another really close-miked vocal, and again… [more]
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David wrote all the music for this one. It’s great, and very claustrophobic. I love the way some of the keyboards sound like breathing lungs. The vocal is really close-miked to give it an almost uncomfortably intimate presence. Barren Ground is about somebody breaking things that can’t be put back together again. [more]
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For many decades, homosexuality was believed to be a mental illness. Gay and lesbian people were given electro-shock therapy, aversion therapy and various chemical or psychiatric “cures”, many of them horrific. We’re all groovy and tolerant these days, of course, but homosexuality wasn’t removed from the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) until… [more]
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It’s Pride Month, when firms go out of their way to show how cool and groovy they are about LGBT* people. But beyond the posters and window displays, the picture is a lot less positive. According to a survey of 1,000 employers, nearly half of employers would “probably” discriminate against trans job applicants. That’s illegal.… [more]
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Earlier today I was on the radio talking about the moral panic over kids playing Fortnite, a video game. Ten years ago I was on the radio talking about the moral panic over kids playing Grand Theft Auto 4, a video game. The games are different but the panic is the same: parents are letting… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
