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I went to see Marmozets last week, and they were fantastic. Â The tour’s nearly finished – they’re in Exeter tonight, Bridgend on Friday and Brighton on Saturday – but they’re doing some of the summer festivals. Definitely worth seeing. [more]
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There’s an interesting post on EDM.com about Outkast’s disappointing performance at the Coachella festival. The short version: people don’t have patience for stuff they can’t get into immediately. The bar for energy and excitement has been set too high, and the mainstream interest at attending music festivals, driven by the proliferation of EDM mega-fests, has… [more]
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Via No Rock’n’Roll Fun, what appears to be a very plausible demolition of the “vinyl is better” argument. This bit makes a lot of sense: Early digital to analogue and analogue to digital converters were pretty terrible. I think a lot of the myths about digital were formed in the 80s, when the tech was… [more]
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This is Beloved, by Say Lou Lou. It’s a fantastic pop song that makes me think of ABBA, Robyn and the best bits of Girls Aloud. Unfortunately, it’s a B-side. The A-side is this, which is perfectly nice, but it’s hardly in the same league. They’re pushing the wrong song! Record companies are weird. [more]
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A superb post by Baldur Bjarnason: There’s this tendency among advocates to compare the absolute worst of the enemy with the perfect, best case scenario on your own side… [but] In terms of marketing, quality, distribution and design the difference between a competently published book and a competently self-published one is now less than you think. [more]
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Poptastic pop blog The Pop Cop wants to talk about Rachel Sermanni. This week it emerged that Carrbridge singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni was fronting a Royal Bank of Scotland advertising campaign on YouTube, which sees her talk about the services she uses as well as play a new tune called Everything Is Ok. As a business, RBS have committed some disreputable deeds in the… [more]
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I thought the new year would be a good time to post a wee update on book sales: to date, I’ve shifted 35,284 ebooks. That’s mainly Coffin Dodgers, which has sold 14,679 copies against 18,461 promotional giveaways. Looking at the figures there’s a definite downwards trend when it comes to the effectiveness of freebies: in… [more]
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Walt Mossberg, one of the world’s best known tech writers, has written about platforms and their defenders. While comparing tech firms’ fans to religious devotees is one of the oldest cliches in the book, he’s right about the behaviour of people who believe their choice of computer, smartphone or games console is superior to others’… [more]
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This post is sponsored by Grammarly, the free online plagiarism checker. I’m a big fan of crime series. There’s something particularly enjoyable about opening the pages of a brand new book and encountering a familiar face, a familiar world, a familiar cast of characters. Take John Rebus, for example: while Ian Rankin’s non-Rebus thrillers are… [more]
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I wrote a wee piece about impostor syndrome for .net, and it’s made its way online. The satirical website The Daily Mash has a great slogan on one of its T-shirts. “I’m brilliant,” it says, “and everyone else is an arse.” It’s the perfect motto for anyone working in a creative industry, because there’s a very good… [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.
