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…until you’ve checked that features you depend upon haven’t been removed. Apple’s done its software thing again: it’s released what’s supposed to be a brand new version of an existing program, but really it’s a brand new program using a familiar name. As this support discussion shows, upgrading to Pages 5.0 means losing a lot… [more]
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I’ve been pretty quiet about my fiction writing lately, and there’s been a good reason for that: I haven’t been doing any fiction writing. The sequel to Coffin Dodgers has stalled because the central crime I came up with was too horrible for a fairly light-hearted read, and the other, more serious book I was… [more]
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I have a weakness for odd guitars I can’t play very well, and while I can’t really indulge it like I used to – purchases such as my much-missed 12-string Fender Strat were in the days of carefree credit card abuse, and I’m more responsible / have less available credit now – I’ll still find… [more]
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Last one, I promise. It’s just to let you know that the album is now available for free streaming on Soundcloud, free download / pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp, and paid-for downloads on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and CD Baby. According to CD Baby, which distributes the music for us, the list of sites and services includes Spotify,… [more]
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I wrote this one at the same time as Don’t Let Me Lose Tonight, fully expecting to finish it in 2007. I missed that deadline a little bit, but the version you can hear now isn’t dramatically different from the version I had then: the mix is better, but I found that I couldn’t better… [more]
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This is the second of the two Kasino songs we’ve rebooted. The original dates back to 2000, 2001, and it sounded awfully like Snow Patrol’s Run; Snow Patrol hadn’t actually written Run back then, and their singer saw us play this one live several times before they did. Ho hum. That’s not just me being… [more]
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The lyric seems pretty obvious to me but maybe it isn’t all that obvious to anybody else: the two fingers in the lyric mean two shots of alcohol. It’s about someone getting drunk quickly and looking for a fight, something you’ll see in pubs every weekend. Musically this one’s had a bit of a journey.… [more]
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In the last song I was trying to be Michael Stipe. In this one, I’m Rihanna. I’ll pause a moment to let you get over the horror of that mental image. David wrote this one, his riff really reminding me of the Rihanna/Calvin Harris collaboration We Found Love. It doesn’t sound anything like it, but… [more]
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Oh, this one’s fuuuuuuuuun. Let It Go started off as a spectacularly cheesy 70s keyboard thing that David concocted, and we’ve tried to keep its fundamental cheesiness throughout the song. That explains the brass section stabs in the chorus. Musically we’ve kept it really simple – one bass, one lazy guitar, some drum loops and… [more]
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The clouds here are metaphorical, of course. The lyric’s about the constant internal critic that we all have, and which really ought to shut the fuck up. I read an interview a long time ago that suggested songs just float through the air and you have to catch them “before some bastard like Mick Hucknall… [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.
