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Rock music is a young person’s game. With a few exceptions – scene lynchpins with modest but faithful followings; him or her from That Band, now solo; utterly deluded Oasis-a-likes still waiting for Alan McGee to sign them, because what the world really needs now is Fat Oasis – if you haven’t carved out a… [more]
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There’s been a big stramash about online publications asking journalists to work for free, and Paul Carr’s post is probably the only one you need to read on the topic: Advertising-supported sites like the Atlantic are trapped in a nightmare of their own making: reliant on delivering millions of page views to shift huge amounts… [more]
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My iPhone 5 is much quieter than previous iPhones, and that’s a problem: a lot of the music I listen to is quiet, or unmixed and uncompressed, and that means it isn’t loud enough when I’m on the bus. If you’re suffering from the same problem, there is an easy and free way to solve… [more]
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I wrote a wee piece in MacFormat about the scourge of videos shot in portrait mode, and Glen Mulcahy let me know about this superb public service announcement. [more]
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The answer, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is lots. MWC 2013Â really reminded us of Girls Aloud, the pop phenomenon that’s reunited for one last tour: while the girls are officially equals, Cheryl Cole is a much bigger star than all the others combined. MWC’s Cheryl was Samsung. Samsung might not have turned up in a… [more]
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I’ve written a few times about the downside of uploading to online services: sometimes it can be hard to get your stuff back out again if you want to move to a different service or just want a backup. As a result of my moaning I’ve been emailed by the people behind SocialSafe, and they… [more]
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I’ve been spending a lot of time in Logic Pro, Apple’s music production software, recently. It’s a wonderful, powerful program with some odd ways of doing things, and one of those odd things is driving me bloody insane. If anybody knows the solution I’d be delighted to hear it. It’s a drag and drop thing.… [more]
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Me, in .net: I would say that 98 per cent of my time using the mobile web is spent swearing at websites, hurling expletives at interstitials, unleashing angry utterances at URL shorteners and firing f-bombs at Facebook. The single most fundamental principle of the World Wide Web – the mechanism by which you click on… [more]
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It’s been a while since I shared figures about Coffin Dodgers, so here’s an update for anyone interested in the ins and outs of self-publishing. Total sales of Coffin Dodgers are sitting at 30,360. That breaks down as 13,660 paid copies and 16,700 freebies; as more and more authors (and publishers) use free copies as… [more]
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I’m finishing off my last few commissions for 2012 – I thought I’d finished yesterday, but Freelance Santa dropped off some last-minute work, a present that’s very much appreciated – and I can honestly say this has been one of the weirdest years I’ve had, work-wise. There’s a famously sarcastic curse: “may you live in… [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.
