Author Archives: Paul

Roger Hodgson is a great songwriter and a huge star. Everyone knows his songs, everyone knows his band, Supertramp, yet far fewer people know his name. Until relatively recently, the same was true of the other R. Hodgson. Roy had enjoyed a stellar career in football, managing teams all over the world and yet in […]

And a law passed to ensure they retain their original features and that other artists are forbidden to tamper with them? I’ve often thought that Ronan Keating should have faced prosecution for his hideous cover of “Fairytale of New York” and I felt the same way about “Family Affair” – Sly Stone and nobody else. […]

I’ve known Vanessa Feltz for years. She has a First in English from Cambridge and is one of the brightest people I have ever met – so much sharper and more articulate than Jeremy Vine whenever she sits in for him on Radio 2. Perhaps she should be presenting Newsnight or Panorama and not prancing […]

….when it claims the lives of so many addicts? Obviously rock stars are often immensely rich and can check in for the very best treatment but it’s more than that. In Eric Clapton’s case, it’s the ferocious determination that made him a star in the first place. The will and tenacity that made him practise […]

He was a California hippie named Ivan Dryer and this is how he introduced the show. He invented laser light shows and the big one was Laserium at the Planeterium. It was a sensation – multi-coloured laser beams moving to music played through the most powerful sound system most people had ever heard and this […]

……and this track could have come from it. It was late 90s but could easily have been the 60s, 70s, 80s or even today. Not because it’s “timeless” but because everything about it is so childishly simple. Even people who can’t play the guitar or bass could probably play the guitar or bass on this. […]

Paul means ‘small” and if you call someone a “berk”, it’s Cockney rhyming slang for Berkshire Hunt, so I wasn’t blessed with the best of monikers. I didn’t get too much stick at school – not with Colin Looney in the year below. Over caffeine the other day with my friend James Ballantyne (now that’s […]

Britain’s first commercial radio station is 40 years old this week. It’s a talk station and most of its programmes are phone ins. Yet back in the 80s it had a completely incongruous hip-hop show on Sunday afternoons. Even weirder, it was hosted by Mike Allen, a smooth, urbane middle-aged man whose tastes when he […]

The BBC are currently celebrating this man’s distinguished 40 year career but I simply don’t understand how he’s still going. He is of course a very knowledgeable, wise and articulate authority on popular music but a strangely soulless broadcaster. He seems to deliver his carefully considered links from a lectern without warmth, humour or enthusiasm. […]

Yesterday would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary. They’re no longer around to celebrate it but my mum always insisted that the day they got married in London NW2 it was a “beautiful sunny day”. Anyone who knew her will recall that she was, shall we say, prone to exaggeration – especially if it made […]