I was watching 'This Week' on Thursday night, a kind of semi-satirical political programme presented by Andrew Neil, the former Sunday Times editor and consumer of three shredded wheat a day (he eats two and puts the other one on his head).
Along with his weekly guests that feature Alan Johnson, Michael Portillo and his pet dog, they also have a weekly special guest offering their take on politics and the week that has just passed in parlia...
I went to see The Jam exhibition with my youngest son today at Somerset House in London, which, if you don't know, is just over Waterloo Bridge and a few hundred yards eastbound on the edge of the River Thames.
I was very young when I first heard The Jam, courtesy of my elder brother Graham, who had bought their début album In the City in 1977, an album that immediately impressed me as on the track Time for Truth, lead singer Paul Weller ...
When I occasionally drop Harry into college during the week, we make a compromise between Radio 4 (me) and Heart FM (him) and listen to Chris Evans on Radio 2.
At just after 8:30 he (Chris Evans) does a thing where he plays an old song, followed by another and you are invited to have a guess as to whether the release of the latter song is a higher or lower year than the first.
Being a fountain of any knowledge that is effectively ...
When I received a Facebook message from my friend Jenny Syrad asking what the film, 'Northern Soul' was like, I didn't really no know how to respond.
You see if I had responded "not bad" or "pretty good" the assumption would have been that the film was a load of crap. This is because we have got used to saying everything we like is "awesome" or "spectacular" on social networks pages. "Very good" and "not bad" are now pretty much obsolete on ...
Out of my several thousand tracks on my iPod, few have survived my personal test of time like London 0 Hull 4, the début album in the short career of The Housemartins, that was released in 1986.
What is so striking and indeed depressing about it, is that so many of the tracks are as relevant in 2014 as they were in the summer of 1986. Mixing the anger of The Clash, the soulful voice of Paul Heaton and some catchy, almost poppy sounding ...
