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I was very pleased with this column I wrote for .net about boredom. I spent most of last night glued to a screen watching a Twitter stream, refreshing my RSS feeds, clicking on various interesting links and using recommendation engines to find writing worth reading. After a while, I’d read the entire internet, so I… [more]
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This one’s a good example of why musicians need to collaborate with one another: I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, and it’s a perfectly decent acoustic guitar song – but it’s a much, much better song if you put the guitars away and get the keyboards out. The lyric is about casual cruelties, the… [more]
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This is our Elbow song. Elbow have been a big influence on me: their Seldom Seen Kid is a tremendous record. It’s music for grown-ups that isn’t a pale imitation of former glories, that isn’t trying to be down with the kids, that isn’t ashamed to be about grown-up subjects. It’s music that’s lived a… [more]
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This is Fall From Grace, a song we did when we were in the band Kasino, although back then it was a U2-esque bit of stadium rock. Now it’s been retooled with some deliberate nods to some of my guilty pleasures: the bass nods to Happy Mondays’ Wrote For Luck, and the heavily compressed electric… [more]
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There’s a fascinating discussion on The New Yorker about the future for musicians in a world of widespread piracy and tiny payments from streaming music services. The working question is not about the life of a band like Wilco but of smaller outfits, where making a living is sometimes not even a question, when a… [more]
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This was the first song we actually finished, and we treated it rather like an expensive ornament made from the finest china, terrified to go near it in case we broke it and couldn’t fix it again. Finishing songs is often a bit like Father Ted trying to get a little dent out of a… [more]
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, allow me to introduce DMGM: poppy rock music and rocky pop music from Scotland. Yep, it’s me and David, and we’ve been working on this stuff for ages. I mean it: some of the vocals are older than my daughter. The embedded audio in this post is from Bandcamp,… [more]
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Hacked web-based email accounts are nothing new, but I hadn’t encountered this particular trick before: on discovering that his email had been hacked, the victim changed all the passwords but still couldn’t get any email. Emails sent to his address didn’t bounce; they just disappeared. Turns out that whoever compromised his email account added a… [more]
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Regular readers will know that I used to be in a band, and that I’ve been meaning to upload all the old stuff for ages. I’ve finally got round to it, and (most) of the Kasino stuff is now on Bandcamp. If you’re not aware of my occasionally shameful past, Kasino were a Glaswegian rock… [more]
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This week’s news that a Twitter abuser suddenly saw the light when it was suggested that his tweets be sent to his mum reminded me of this, a column I wrote for .net back in 2008. Britain may not have an empire any more, but we still rule the world of bad driving. Sure, 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.
