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I was at the Royal Concert Hall tonight for my daughter’s latest on-stage adventure, this time being in the East Dunbartonshire Children’s Choir as part of the Glasgow schools’ Christmas concert. As you’d expect, it was too long. There were too many people being thanked. The supposed finale was — surprise! — false hope, [more]
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Dig, if you will, the picture. It’s 1987. You’re fifteen, trans — although you don’t know that’s what it’s called yet — and you live in Scotland, home of anodyne pop singers such as Sheena Easton. You turn on the TV, and there’s bona fide musical genius Prince. And there’s… Sheena Easton? But it’s Sheena [more]
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Gendered language is weird sometimes. The comedian Frankie Boyle does a hilarious and uncharacteristically safe routine about the early French deciding which gender various inanimate objects were, so for example a lemon was clearly maleâ 1 because a lemon is a little yellow man. And some language is unnecessarily gendered, such as “firemen†when “firefighters†would [more]
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I’ve belatedly realised that the time when the media really wants to talk to trans people – the “baby trans” phase when they’ve just come out – is both the easiest and the worst possible time to talk to them. That’s certainly true in my own case. I was interviewed by a few different [more]
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I wrote about male friendships for Metro with a little help from my friends. Even when we do have friends, we’re loath to tell them our troubles. Some 84 per cent of men admit to bottling up their emotions. That’s not doing anybody any good. [more]
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This week is both anti-bullying week and transgender awareness week, so some newspapers have chosen to celebrate both by, er, bullying transgender people (see my previous post). I’m not going to get into the arguments or unpick the bullshit — Alex Sharpe does a superb job of that here. I’m just going to share a trans [more]
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It’s nearly a year since I came out as trans/NB, and about three years since I was diagnosed with depression. I’m much happier these days. Sometimes clichés are clichés because they’re true: it really does get better. To mark world mental health day, which is today, I thought I’d scribble a quick piece about the [more]
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Battle Bruised and Broken Hearted by DMGM It’s taken ages, I know, but David and I have finished some more songs: Â they’re tracks 7, 8 and 9 on our ever-expanding second album, Battle Bruised and Broken Hearted. They are: One Brick Musically this one’s where my love of REM shows through – I wanted a [more]
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I went to see AC/DC this weekend in Hampden Park, Glasgow – seeing them is on my bucket list and I doubt they’ll be touring for much longer, so I overcame my hatred of Hampden (whose motto should be “Where sound goes to die”) on the grounds that it can’t be that hard to amplify two [more]
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Here’s another song with an unnaturally long gestation period: it started off as a sci-fi riff in the SoundPrism app, took a detour into PIL-style punk metal, and now we’re claiming there’s always been a G-Funk element to our music. It’s about online friends, who we suspect are all bots. Battle Bruised and Broken Hearted [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.
