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There’s an honest piece about depression in this week’s Sunday Post by the very talented and exceptionally nice Chae Strathie, whose books make lots of children very happy. Â For Strathie the illness wasn’t so much about feeling down – it was about not feeling anything at all. As he puts it, it was more a… [more]
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While I’m on an old-article tip, I’ll republish this as part of my ongoing and Quixotic battle to stop Hunter S Thompson from being misquoted. It’s from .net back in 2008. Flies and death and stuff “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run… [more]
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This nice piece by my friend Craig Grannell on experiencing life through a smartphone screen reminded me of this, a column I did for .net in 2009. I was visiting the BBC recently, and I arrived just after a large delegation of Japanese visitors. As I waited to be ushered inside, I watched the group… [more]
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Me, on Techradar, writing about wearables. It’s often said that smartphones are driven by fashion, but that isn’t really true. There are trends, of course, such as the current vogue for gold. But ultimately if a phone’s good enough and doesn’t actually frighten small children you won’t care too much what it looks like, because you’re… [more]
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I’ve been letting my inner Bob Mould out a lot recently (his new album, Beauty and Ruin, is a cracker) and I just wanted to mention this guitar: It’s a Fender Modern Player Marauder, it’s dirt cheap and it’s fantastic fun. Especially if you like guitars that go GNNNNH or fancy something that can sound… [more]
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Australian Apple users are encountering a pretty nasty problem: someone has got into their iCloud accounts and is locking them out of their devices. The iCloud hack appears to be a case of people reusing the same passwords, and those passwords somehow falling into the bad guys’ hands – possibly because someone has broken into… [more]
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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]
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.
