Author / Paul
-
![Image: Jack Taylor/Getty Images]()
Why I’m No Longer Talking to Brexiters About Brexit
I did something unusual this week. I saw something wrong, stupid and annoying online and didn’t get into a fight with the person who said it. It’s something I’ve found myself doing more and more lately, and it becomes a little easier each time, although it never feels completely natural. Wanting to correct misinformation or…
-
![]()
Neither Am I
For years, I was the living embodiment of that classic Private Eye cartoon by (I think) Barry Fantoni: Two men. One says: ‘I’m writing a book’. The other replies: ‘Neither am I.’ The Book lived in my head as a fantastic possibility. I could do it any time, and it would be amazing. Any time.…
-
![]()
The sting
MOST of what’s gone wrong in British social and political life can be summed up with a fairly simple example using Jameela Jamil, a fruit-filled banquet and some bees. It’s about belief, fact-picking, tribalism and self-deception. But first, the bees. The story is fairly simple. The activist, actress, presenter and occasional model Jameela Jamil ran…
-
The pick of the bunch
There’s something indefinably magical about the intricate, chiming sounds of a finger-picked acoustic guitar. It’s something I’d always longed to learn and yearned to do well, but it always seemed too far out of reach – both figuratively and, as far as my permanently tangled sausage-fingers are concerned, literally. I’ll never be in the Tommy…
-
![]()
A Name For What You Lose
‘Vote Corbyn, lose Scotland.’ That was the big scary warning from clodhopping would-be provocateur Toby Young on Twitter this week. While it might play well with the Tobester’s target audience of enthusiastically gullible bullshit-swallowers, it brought something else to mind for me: The music of Scritti Politti. More specifically, this pungent lyrical nugget from ‘The…
-
![]()
Kristin Hersh in conversation, 1998
From the archives comes this 1998 interview with singer, songwriter, Throwing Muses founder and. latterly, author Kristin Hersh, as she prepared for the release of her second solo album, “Strange Angels”. KRISTIN Hersh, as all the music papers regularly delight in telling us, is a tortured soul – a troubled genius for whom music-making…
-
![]()
‘Chekov was just pressing buttons…’
(Interview originally conducted in 1998, to coincide with the release by Titan Books of ‘Warped Factors’) WITH ‘Warped Factors’, ‘Star Trek’ legend Walter Koenig has released as hilariously, unforgettably honest an autobiography as we’re likely to see from a bona fide TV icon. Koenig, alias the perenially put-upun Pavel Chekov, delivers a wealth of Trek-titbits, certainly,…
-
![]()
Take your pick
Mark Hanson’s ‘The Art of Contemporary Travis Picking’ is one of the guitar tuition books I’ve returned to most often over the years. If you love players like Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, Scotty Moore or John Renbourn, Travis picking is a style of playing you’ll really want to add to your guitar skillset. I certainly…
-
![]()
From No to Yes
In 2014, I voted No to Scottish Independence. Given a chance at IndyRef2, I’d vote Yes in a heartbeat. I wasn’t a unionist then, and I’m not a nationalist now. My basic beliefs – in fairness, decency and community – haven’t changed, so what did? Basically … Brexit. Scotland has repeatedly said no to leaving…
-
![]()
Britflop
I recently rediscovered a batch of old files from my first PC, dating back to the mid-to-late nineties, crammed full of old music reviews, interviews and oddities. It’s an interesting time capsule of how I felt at the time about music many of us have been living with (sometimes unwillingly) for decades now. FROM…
