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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]
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This is Pianothing, a song whose working title suited it so well we didn’t want to change it. It started life as a little electric piano riff and turned into something that’s musically poppy and lyrically bleak. It’s about the helplessness I often feel reading the news, the horrors large and small that dominate social… [more]
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I wrote this song about an extraordinary man, Yukio Shige. He’s a retired policeman who patrols Japan’s “suicide cliffs” every day, and who has talked more than 600 people back from the edge. One line in the LA Times story about him (which I can’t link to; its publisher currently blocks EU visitors) really stood out:… [more]
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Molly Mulready is a mum-of-three, and one of her kids is trans. She writes in The Guardian: My son, in his distress, helped me realise that there is something even worse than being abused in the street, and that’s being told by strangers you’re not who you know you are, that the truth of you… [more]
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Let’s have some new music from David and I. I can hear echoes of Elbow and Talk Talk in this song: I usually throw everything including the kitchen sink into recordings, so this is exceptionally sparse by my usual standards. That’s something you’ll find runs through a lot of our new stuff. Lyrically this one… [more]
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I don’t usually travel for gigs, but I made an exception for The The’s Comeback Special: this is a band whose songs I’d long given up on ever hearing live. So off I went to the Royal Albert Hall. It was worth the trip. The sound was exceptional, the performance magical, and me and the… [more]
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I can’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but Rolling Stone’s piece on how the religious right decided to target trans people  as a proxy for everybody they don’t like is a superb piece of journalism. a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform 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.
