Thurston Moore relives the early days of Sonic Youth
Reminiscing about his many friends and colleagues in the 1970s, Moore even finds good things to say about the Dead Boys and Sid Vicious
Bob Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort
Most of the 66 songs he discusses in a collection of meditative essays date from the late 1940s to the advent of punk – a movement that evidently passed him by
Folk music is still very much alive and kicking
As a writer who obsesses over the right title to grab a target audience, seeing a book subtitled ‘Song Collectors…
A tender portrait of Leonora Carrington, painter, writer — and a mother who was not always there
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
Robert Thompson’s memoir is worth reading for the ‘Fairport years’ alone
One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I…
‘There were no rules then’: Dana Gillespie’s 1960s childhood
Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the…
When the King of the Delta Blues came home — the family life of Robert Johnson
Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was…
Joy Division was an all too short-lived joy
Once upon a time there was the arche-typal Manchester band — half of which came from Macclesfield, in leafy Cheshire,…
The sound of silence that echoes round Paul Simon
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble choosing the jacket cover of Robert Hilburn’s authorised biography of Paul Simon…
The vibrant tradition of English folk song
After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s…
