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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]
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I wrote the lyric to this a few years ago about a friend of a friend who was acting like a complete arse, apparently convinced that he was getting away with it. He wasn’t. Where Do You Go? is one of those songs that has a difficult evolution. It began as an angry, retro guitar… [more]
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PinkNews has discovered the latest incarnation of the sinister transgender agenda: we’re turning alligators into gal-igators. That’s the claim from the anti-trans We Need To Talk group, whose meetings are conducted in great secrecy for fear the wider world would discover how deranged they are. As PN reports: Elizabeth spoke to the audience about “synthetic… [more]
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This, a collaboration between Netflix and GLAAD, is wonderful and joyous. It’s various trans people – Laura Jane Grace, Jazz Jennings, Jamie Clayton, Tiq Milan and many others – talking about the first time they saw people like them represented on screen. If you’re straight, white and cisgender (it means “not trans”; I loved the… [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.
