1 “Empathise with the maelstrom,” he would cry through the tenement windows, flying down concrete steps five at a time, hammering on doors, howling through keyholes, careering through grim corridors…

Nick Lowe is a songwriter pure and simple. He’s been a pop star too and a record producer, in fact if you were to put together a flow chart of…

‘A salute to a vanished world.’  This is a fitting, if poetic, description of the meaning of that often bounded around Latin prefix, retro. Whether one can be truly retro and…

The silvery spires of Canary Wharf, the spotless thoroughfares and perfectly kept squares, sit upon the buried foundations of the West India Import Dock. From its early days when the…

1 The balloon was nothing more than an experiment to me. A ribald joke on the inhabitants of a town I never liked, nor trusted, nor felt a part of.…

British history is certainly a dashing pageant, with its cavaliers and roundheads, its renaissance men and new romantics and its garter sashes dipped in kingfisher blue, thrown over countless brave,…

There is a very obscure Scott Walker track, long forgotten now, except by the scant few who have fallen in love with it, called Time Operator, from the singer’s 1970…

I must admit, I arrived at the Royal Opera House on Friday night for Cocteau Voices as a disciple of Scott Walker, and left with Jean Cocteau and Francis Poulenc…

Plastic Fairy Liquid bottles and Django Reinhardt’s finger tips are things unlikely to be associated with the birth of Heavy Metal, that brashly grinding, cherished Brummie drone which has afflicted,…

6th of July, 1952 Smokey London’s hapless night time feel and me were never one. Forty eight minutes to ten, Guinness time. Hold me up or hold me back, I’ll…