For a few months a couple of years ago, when you googled the name Jim Bob, although you’d get a lot of information about me, Jim Bob, the lead singer from 1990s UK indie punk heroes Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, the main image would be a picture of Donald Trump. I never fully understood why. I think it had something to do with the name "Jim Bob" being a thesaurus entry for "redneck".Anyway, here’s a chapter from my new book Where Songs Come From – The Lyrics and Origin Stories of 150 Solo and Carter USM Songs. It’s my first ever book of lyrics. I like to think of it as a memoir or Read more ...

I tried, I really did. Took a shot at my best, and fell short, Yup, I couldn’t get beyond the opening chapters of Dolly Parton’s first novel, written with that veteran of popular page-turnin’, James Patterson. The best bit for me was on the first page, and it was pure Dolly, but in 22 little words, not 80,000. “Is it easy? No it ain’t. Can I fix it? No I cain’t. But I sure ain’t gonna take it lying down.”That, more or less, is the country zen koan that encapsulates the adventures of the young heroine singer, Ms AnnieLee Keyes, budding on the precipice of stardom and catastrophe that is the Read more ...

There’s something refreshing about fiction you can easily trace back to the question “what if?” What if this or that existed? What would happen? What could? That question doesn’t have to send you down memory lane, wondering about roads not taken, or into the future, into space. You can stay right here, more or less in the present, in charted territory. And arguably, to adventure there (here) takes as much, if not more of what you might need elsewhere: bravery, imagination, wit, honesty. Better yet, fidelity – to the way things are: not only what could happen but does. It requires a Read more ...

In June 2001 the London Festival of International Theatre brought Amir Nizar Zuabi’s Alive from Palestine to the Royal Court Theatre for one performance. The Guardian said, “How often do you see a piece of necessary theatre? These 'stories under occupation' fall precisely into that category. We are used to the idea of theatre as a diversion. Here it is fulfilling a more important function of bringing us the news.”I didn’t see it and I couldn’t get hold of a full script – perhaps there wasn’t one – but by reading a print-out of the English surtitles I felt I’d got enough of a sense of its Read more ...

Almost alone among my friends, I liked and admired Ed Miliband, renewing my on-off relationship with the Labour Party having watched his first speech to conference live on TV. I had always considered him decent, thoughtful, intelligent – and, on the couple of occasions I met him, personable and (dare I say it) attractive. But the media decided long before the bacon sandwich incident that he was a nerdy no-good and the view widely prevails that “the wrong Miliband” got the gig – that David would have been electable in 2015 and therefore saved us from even more unnecessary austerity and the Read more ...

It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage doors of perception, this round-up of recent, new and forthcoming music books surveys an artist roster disparate enough to grace the finest of festival bills.First up is Sam Lee’s Nightingale, a beautifully made hardback, packed with illustrations, facts, stories, lore, and more. While the focus here is avian song and the projective wonders of the Read more ...

For the last couple of years, until we were so rudely interrupted, I’d been spending chunks of the year in New York, a city I’ve come to know well these past 25 years. I’d once found the idea of it intimidating, scary even. A migraine-inducing sensory overload. Once there I came to understand it as a collection of neighbourhoods, villages, some a little intimidating perhaps, and as a basically friendly city where people looked out for one another as they do (or do not) in London. Yes, there are people with whom you avoid eye contact but there are many more strangers with whom you chat, on the Read more ...

Blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) had much more than an astonishingly powerful voice. It may already be almost a hundred years since she made her most significant recordings – she is from an era before amplification –  and yet her unfailing capacity to hold the listener’s attention, to tell stories that sound deeply rooted in her own personal experience still hits home every time.In this time when grieving is all around us, we can sometimes lose any sense of what is real and what is dreamt, and the immediacy of a song like “Graveyard Dream Blues” in which Bessie Smith imagines she is Read more ...

One of the finer episodes in Raven Leilani’s startling debut (which contains an embarrassment of fine episodes) comes about halfway through, when Edie, our young, struggling black narrator, starts working as a rider for a “popular in-app delivery service”. The gig gives her tantalisingly brief contact with a spectrum of outlandish New Yorkers and their equally peculiar needs. Here is a snippet of her survey of this garden of late capitalist delights:A vial of rosewater for a customer in Greenwich Village whose labradoodle humps me down the stairs. Band-Aids and cigarillos for a customer who Read more ...

When in June 2019 the BBC announced plans to restrict free TV licences to households with at least one person aged over 75 in receipt of Pension Credit, there was of course, an outcry – naturally, the BBC itself copped the blame. Just as Chancellor George Osborne knew it would when, flushed and arrogant with unexpected election success, he strong-armed it into accepting responsibility for funding the scheme Gordon Brown had introduced.Osborne’s move, behind closed doors, was “easily the most damaging example of the government raiding the BBC’s income to fund a welfare benefit that should be Read more ...

Like the novel, painting and God, the city has long been pronounced dead – along with a few other things, like civil politics, society and the art of conversation that were said to have thrived there. As with all the above, historian Ben Wilson suggests in this omnivorous, adventurous and generous history of the city, the death knell of “humankind’s greatest invention” has been tolled since time immemorial – and always too soon.Cities have a habit of reviving, reimagining and reorganising themselves, much to the chagrin of the warlords, emperors, dictators and modernist city planners (a Read more ...