As every songwriter knows, one of the basic requirements of the job is to get the hell out of the leafy suburb of Clichéville, where everything is familiar and has been done before. The trick is to make it new....
I first heard 'The Ballad of the Sad Young Men' in the mid-1960s, sung by Davy Graham on his astonishing second album Folk, Blues and Beyond, and it has stayed with me ever since. I've always loved its opening lines,...
Embarrassment is a tricky emotion to convey in a song. And when it is used (I think Madness once had a song called 'Embarrassment'), it tends to swamp everything else. It becomes shame. In Randy Newman's 'I Miss You', from...
I've had the idea of once a week celebrating a song which means a lot to me but which is perhaps less well-known than they should be. Like Chaim Tannenbaum's 'London, Longing For Home'. When I saw a rare solo...
It has been clear-out time. I have been off the booze, filing the accumulated correspondence of the past three years, tidying up anything within reach. I have become a crashing bore, in fact. And it will be worth it, this...
As I sat in Wellington Airport, waiting for my flight - the first of three long flights home - a small earthquake occurred. The terminal building shivered for about 30 seconds. I looked around me. People continued chatting and checking...
Tuner? Check. Spare strings? Check. Knockout pill for the flight? Check. It's the final countdown before my first tour of New Zealand. I'll be playing, and doing workshops, at the Wellington Folk Festival, and then travelling the North Island (with one...
One of the pleasures of watching a CD go out into the world is seeing which songs, if any, are noticed enough to strike a tiny, distant note in the prevailing noise of the world. Of the songs on Enough About...
Occasionally when I look at my dog Ruby, I remember a conversation I had in about 2005 with my friend, neighbour and fellow-author Roger Deakin. I told Roger that, after years of living with cats, I was thinking of getting...
To be any good, a song or story has to come from a personal place. It is, however well-disguised, a report from the tiny, little-known country of Me. That makes being reviewed an odd process. It's not just the work...